What do Dinosaurs, Those Terrible Lizards and Dinosaurs by Design have in common? They're both Gish Garbage! Two Books made by Duane Gish, a young earth extremist (YEE) who published, Dinosaurs by Design (DBD) in 1992 by Master Books. This book is really a rehash of Dinosaurs, Those Terrible Lizards (DTTL) published in 1977 by Creation-Life Publishers. And that's about 15 years apart from each other. Still the theme is quite the same— all ignorance, lies, distortions, exploitations, and falsehoods. It's in there.
Cover Differences
The former is out of print. The latter is still in print. However, the covers of DBD have changed. The original cover have a red shading all over it with 2 framed forested backgrounds, one on each side. In front are 4 dinosaurs frolicking towards the right side of the book, an inaccurately drawn Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops is found on the front cover while on the back cover, there is a naked scaly skinned Deinonychus with a wrongful toe arrangement and Apatosaurus with his long neck and head extending the front cover. Both the title and the names of people who made the book are in aachen-bold type font.
The newer cover has scenes also shown inside the book. The Front cover shows a Tyrannosaur being clubbed by a Euoplocephalus with the word "dinosaurs" decorated with a reptilian pattern on the very top and "by design," with a small Pteranodon flying upwards, shown in a normal plain font at the bottom. On the back, there is an <i>Apatosaurus</i> browsing alongside of an elephant. Both versions have a paragraph summary at the back cover that goes like this, with responses of mine in parentheses…
"Everyone wants to know about dinosaurs! Dinosaurs By Design takes you into the exciting world (That never was.) of dinosaurs to find out what they were really like. Discover how fossils are formed (the young earth way that's not how fossils are formed.), dug up, and assembled for museums. Travel with the dinosaurs as they board Noah's Ark (they never did, other than birds.) and then enter the strange new world after the Flood (and get died off afterwords. Leaving one to wonder what's the point of ever rescuing them from the Flood if their fate afterwords points to death. ). Find out what happened to the dinosaurs (A meteorite killed them.) and are there any alive today (Other than birds, no.). Join us on an exciting adventure to learn more about these magnificent creatures that God designed and created (and changed with modification)."
The paragraph is very misleading. What the paragraph didn't tell you is that no one knows what dinosaurs really look like because no one, not even cavemen, has ever saw them alive enough to know what do they really look like inside and out. These 2 books flat-out denies the physical evidence that clearly confirms the world to be much older than 10,000 years and that evolution did occurred and that birds are the only dinosaur group alive today while all the rest died out 65 million years ago. What Gish states in the latter book is not what scientists had in mind when they talked about uniformitarianism and mutations.
Gish only makes up strawman statements of what evolution, mutations, and uniformitarianism is all about and proceeds to attack it. He never have the brains enough to stop repeating the same mistake about the bombardier beetle and endorses the fire-breathing dinosaur myth, which he made it all up himself, to help justify his beetle fallacy. Plus, Answers in Genesis, the worst of the YE crackpots made a boast about this book, claiming falsely that this book is…..
"The Christian answer to Jurassic Park! Not! Not just a children's book to brainwashed children with; this is unimportant garbage for the entire family. As you journey into the exciting world (that never was) of dinosaurs, this book will provide you with inaccurate information to help combat and lose to the evolutionary theories and facts surrounding these incredible creatures. A great resource for neither Christian and Home Schools!" (My responses in bold.)
The book is really anything BUT accurate and "The Christian answer to Jurassic Park" and they know it! Using it to vainly combat evolutionary facts and theories made to explain things based on physical evidence is a losing battle. It's nothing but a wasteful pseudo-Christian literature falsely called a science book, filled with distortions, lies, half-truths, strawman arguments, and hypocrisy.
The Cover To DTTL
To start the rebuttal off, Gish published DTTL, which is the very first YEE dinosaur book ever made, in 1977. On the front cover, there is a large orange mountain wall with the title embedded on it nestled next to a small lake surrounded by foliage with words to who wrote and illustrated the book on it. There are 2 Tyrannosaurs shown on the left, facing the objects in the right direction. Coming down onto the scene on the upper right hand corner is a Pteranodon swooping down from a yellow sky. On the back cover, there is a Dimetrodon, a pelycosaur from the Permian Period, facing away into the blank part of the back cover. On the bottom there is this brief inscription of what's in the book:
"No one living in the world today has ever seen a real live dinosaur - but did people in earlier times live with dinosaurs? Were dragons of ancient legends really dinosaurs? Does the Bible speak about dinosaurs? The answers are in this book!"
Here are the true answers to these question right here:
- No.
- No.
- No, except birds.
Unfortunately, the book stupidly claims "yes" to all three.
The first intro page shows this inscription:
"No one living in the world today has ever seen a dinosaur-a live one, that is. A few folks even doubt that anything like a dinosaur really every lived at all; but they did-long, long ago."
Dinosaurs did lived long, long ago. No one in the world today and yesterday ever saw a living dinosaur other than birds. And finally dinosaurs did exist long ago. We have unearthed their remains that clearly confirmed their existence. But as the book tells the truth that dinosaurs did exist, it also lie about when did they lived, where did they come from, and how did they die. This book totally denies evidence for evolution and transitional forms and the planet being billions of years old. So does the latter. In fact both books are exactly the same, yet have many differences between them.
The Similarities Between DTTL and DBD.
One similar example is that of a battle between Allosaurus and Apatosaurus on pages 46-47 on DBD and pages 33-35 in DTTL. It's exactly the same, but the sauropod's name is changed in the latter. In DTTL, he is called Brontosaurus, but in DBD, he is called Apatosaurus. Both text claimed the Apatosaurus had no claws to fight back against Allosaurus and Allosaurus to be afraid of deep water. None of the statements are true. Apatosaurus does have claws, one on each front leg and three on each back leg and Allosaurus did swim even in deep water like what it is illustrated in one of Gregory Paul's illustrations in his book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (1988). Scientists have found evidence those Theropods like Allosaurus do swim in deeper water in Rocky Hill, Connecticut at the Dinosaur State Park (COOMBS JR. W.P. (1980): Swimming Ability of Carnivorous Dinosaurs. Science 207: 1198-1200).
Finding evidence like these in Connecticut and in Spain, too clearly disproves the myth about dinosaur carnivores being afraid of water. And no doubt Apatosaurus do have claws. Look closely at any skeleton of an Apatosaurus and you'll see them up close and personal.
Gish Garbage about a Pseudo Dinosaur
The second similarity is the fire breathing dinosaur howler where Gish states that in DTTL's chapter, on pages 51-55 entitled "Dragons and Bombardier Beetles," Gish invokes the Bombardier Beetle fallacy to help justify his imaginary concept of a fire-breathing dinosaur. Gish says that the crests of Lambeosaurines, like Parasaurolophus, functions the same way as the special glands inside the posterior of the Bombardier beetle— to help them breathe out hot gases and fire. In other words: if the beetle has hot liquid glands inside its abdomen which it uses to spray hot liquids to drive enemies away, then it's feasible to believe that Lambeosaurines must have had hot liquid glands inside their crests that helps them to breathe gas and fire as well— or so Gish asserts.
The claim is, hands down, unfounded, all made up, and worth a million laughs! There is in fact no such thing as liquid fiery glands inside crested dinosaurs. Not even at one time. This is all the imagination of the creationists; Gish entirely made it all up, using his imagination and pretending that there was special gas or liquid fiery glands inside the crests that helps the dinosaurs to breathe fire, while none has ever existed.
As for Gish's beetle fallacy, the 2 certain chemicals, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones found inside of the beetle when mixed together without an chemical inhibitor only turned brown. No explosion.
Such a laughable concept is his and others' own way of distorting the Leviathan passage of Job 41, where he and others like him thinks that the passage totally refers to a dinosaur while, in reality, there is not a single dinosaur out there, not even Parasaurolophus, nor any Mesozoic marine reptile match the description of Leviathan in Job 41. Leviathan is a supernatural serpentine monster of Jewish Folklore whose fiery breath can bring waters to a boil when it gets hungry and has illuminating eyes and impenetrable scales. So many times people have pointed out the beetle mistake to Gish. Yet he's too stubborn to abandon it. Just like in the former, DBD still has the Bombardier Beetle and the imaginary fire breathing dinosaur fallacies. They're located in the Dinosaurs, Dragons, and Beetles chapter of his DBD book on pages 82-83 and still continues to repeat his claims about the beetle and fire breathing dinosaur fallacy over and over again in his seminars as well as in his books to this very day. To help refute the beetle myth and learn the real functions of the Lambeosaurine's crests, see these references.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB310.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB310_1.html
http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/gish.html
http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/misc/parasing.html
http://museums.state.nm.us/nmmnh/sci_parasaur.html
http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN12-19-97/dinosaur_story.html
These are the only 2 major similarities between the 2 books I can think of. Other similarities include certain dinosaur descriptions that are all outdated by 5, 10, 20, 30, even 50 years or more such as the descriptions of the Duck-billed dinosaurs and Iguanodon with only a few changes made within the text, paintings of dinosaurs that are anatomically incorrect, denials of transitional forms, straw man attacks on evolution, and the myth about Behemoth and Leviathan of Job 40:15 and Job 41 being dinosaurs.
And here's where the similarities ends.
The Difference Between DTTL and DBD
DBD has no intro, unlike DTTL somewhat, which starts like: “The name dinosaur means terrible lizard (Dino = terrible, Saur = lizard).”
DBD has very high quality illustrations, made by Earl and Bonnie Snellenberger who impersonate the style and art of Giuliano Fornari Sergio who made incredible dinosaur artwork for 2 incredibility awesome dinosaur books, The Great Dinosaur Atlas: The Pictorial Guide to the Prehistoric World (1991), retitled as DK Great Dinosaur Atlas in 1999 and Dinosaurs and How They Lived (1991). Apparently the Snellenbergers wanted to imitate Fornari's design since they noticed how eye-popping and popular the 2 books are. So they made the illustrations that impersonate Fornari's artwork for personal gain.
I, myself couldn't resist getting my hands on DBD even though it contains young earth idiocy and made up dragon fairy tales. For years, I had to put up a struggle with whether or not to get the book, but I had very strong feelings about getting my hands on the book. I tried to resist getting it because the book is filled with young earth lies on every page of the book, but, eventually, I gave in and got the book. I didn't get it once. I got copies of it about 3 times, wasting money along the way. Each time I get it, I would tear it up, post images on construction paper, hang them up on the wall, even scan them to the PC, burn them on a CD, get disgusted with them, and throw them all away.
Eventually, I ordered the book from the library and scan up all of the images I want from the book. Then took the book back to the library. I edited the scanned images and finally burn them on one of my CDs. I still have those images on my disk. I'll keep the images and put them to good use much better than what the images are being used for.
DTTL, however, has only much low quality artwork that were drawn and painted by Marvin Ross.
As a matter of fact, one of the first dinosaur books I ever got was DTTL. That was back when I was in first gradel starting to love dinosaurs. I remembered myself being so enthralled by the dinosaur images covering nearly every page in the book. Back then, thankfully, I paid no attention to the text part and the book didn't belong to me either. I only focus on the dinosaur images and was captivated by them. I even exclaimed, when I saw the image of the imaginary Parasaurolophus breathing fire on a tyrannosaur, that the dinosaur breathed fire like Godzilla, who was in fact the monster as seen on the Hanna Barbera TV show Godzilla that really got me into liking dinosaurs, not the book. As far as I can remember, that was the first time I got my hands on a young earth idiot book, even though it wasn't mine and have paid no attention to what the book was really all about. Afterwords, I completely forgot all about it until the Summer of 1992 when that book came back into my life again, only for it to be a subject of contempt, hatred, and a thorn on my side rather than a subject of fascination. Today, I'm doing a walkthrough and a rebuttal to the book along with its rehash so you guys won't have to go through all the pains of getting the book like I did.
Continued next post…
