According to Ronald Numbers book The Creationists The Seventh Day Adventists founded young earth creationism though Ellen G White, the founder of the Seventh Day religion, who claims to have seen a vision from God allegedly telling her how God made the universe in a 6-24 hour fashion, 6000 years ago, just as creationists would like everyone to believe. But as we know, this is false thanks to the numerous scientific evidence that points to the fact that our world and the universe is billions of years old - far older than what Archbishop James Usher have thought when he attempted to determine the age of the earth though biblical dates and some other historical events. But that doesn't stop some people from believing that the fictional 6,000 year old earth is fact because the Bible allegedly tell them so.
From the local library's website, I ordered and checked out this dinosaur book written by a SDA member named Elaine Graham-Kennedy who published Dinosaurs: Where did they come from… and where did they go? in 2006. Here she's not really telling the reader what to believe about dinosaurs, she's just presenting only two different points of views about the dinosaurs and allows the reader to decide which side to believe in and which side to reject. But knowing the creationists' habit of distorting and ignoring evidence for scientific reality pointing to the world billions of years old as well as display all sorts of hate and fear mongering, it would be better to side with the scientists who correctly teach that the earth is billions of years old and that dinosaurs lived long before humans came to earth.
Because this book presents only different points of views and it's not made to brainwash readers into the author's point of view, I'm not going to do a page by page rebuttal to this book, but a short review of it instead.
Like any YECreationist and the SDA which spawned this form of creationism, she's an anti-evolutionist who believes everything the Bible says about the Creation Story and gives out the usual creationist canards throughout the book along with plenty of photos of dinosaur skeletons taken from various museums throughout the western areas of the united states, including this terribly inaccurate skeleton of a dromaeosaur build in a 4-legged pose reminiscent of the various toy dinosaurs that portrayed dromaeosaurs like Velociraptor as a four legged dinosaur. This is taken from the Geoscience Research Institute, a Seventh Day Adventist organization founded to address the conflict between scientific reality and creationist fairy tales as believed by the SDA which founded the young earth cult.
You can easily tell they don't know a real Velociraptor skeleton from the fictional movie raptor made for Jurassic Park. Here's the real skeleton of the Velociraptor, a small 80 million year old dromaeosaur from Mongolia!
This book is very informative about dinosaurs but that doesn't stop the author from making all sorts of creationist-style remarks like.
"Did you know that most of the people who read and write about dinosaurs know more about dinosaurs than they know about God? That's terrible! If we're going to talk with those people about dinosaurs, we need to know the basic facts. When they see that we know about dinosaurs too, they might listen when we talk about the God who created them."
Lady, there are most people who know lots about both God and dinosaurs together, including myself. Apparently you bought into the biblically-unfounded canard that anyone who disagree with you and your SDA beliefs is not a Christian. In fact you are no different than all cult-groups out there including young earth creationists who claim that anyone who disagrees with their idiot views is not a Christian, let alone a true one.
She mentions lot of creationist canards (i.e. fossils formed by Noah's Flood, dinosaurs died out after the Flood, etc.) in the book to which she rightfully says they cannot be proven, they're only made up based on faith— faith no different than having faith in believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, gnomes, etc. I suppose.
Other canards mentioned in the book include the Ecological zonation fallacy which claims the Triassic, Jurassic, and the Cretaceous layers were formed as a result of animals fleeing to higher ground to escape the Flood. Dinosaurs found in the Triassic layers is claimed to to the first ones to die in the Flood while others in the Cretaceous layers were the last ones to go. Never mind the absolute flaws behind the claim such as how did these animals find themselves pile up on top of each other and how did a terrestial ecology came to be transported on top of a marine ecology, such that fine details such as footprints, burrows, and paleosols were undisturbed and such that the layer extends over hundreds of square miles (as discussed here)? And the all-dinosaurs-including-theropods-were-herbivores-before-the-Fall-of-Man canard were all made up by the way the Bible is interpreted out of ignorance of no mentioning of any references of animal death in passages where only human death and salvation from sin is referenced and discussed in, such as the oft-used, out-of-context Romans 8 passage where only human death and salvation though Jesus Christ is mentioned for example.
She flat out denies that birds are living dinosaurs. She thinks dromaeosaurs cannot be the ancestors of birds because bird fossils have been found in rock layers below the rock layers where the dromaeosaurs have been found. Have she ever heard of common ancestry and the fact that the birds that are found below the Cretaceous strata look more of theropods than modern birds? Does she know that Dromaeosaurs have hips that resemble the hips of modern birds and that they have feathers? Does she know about the abelisaurs, such as Majungasaurus, processing the ability to breathe like a bird? Apparently not.
She also acknowledge that there are no human remains found alongside dinosaur remains (including footprints), but this doesn't stop her and the likes of her from believing that one day, real evidence for humans and dinosaurs together will be found. Chances of finding such real evidence is nil. It's a pipe dream made up by people who wanted such a scenario to be real despite the odds of such things happening being slim to none.
Though this book is written by a YECreationist, this book is extremely rare. A one of a kind creationist dinosaur book that displays no fear or hate mongering, no proselytizing, no threats of Hell or slandering non-creationists. It is only made to present two different points of view about dinosaurs in a non-threatening, non-intimidating way. She created this book to allow readers the freewill to decide what they wish to believe about dinosaurs after presenting different point of views about them both from a "Christian" and a "non-Christian" perspective.
And so, since she has given us the freewill to decide, it'll be no problem for us to decide on embracing the so-called "non-Christian" point of view that says the earth is billions of years old and that dinosaurs lived and died long before humans came along. And that's nothing based on faith, but actual scientific evidence pointing to such facts.
