I’ve been to Jurassic Park. I don’t mean I’ve seen the movie; I mean that I have been to a place where you can see living dinosaurs in simulated habitats. The sign outside says National Aviary, but that’s just to keep the crowds to a manageable size. Birds are the closest living relatives to Tyrannosaurus rex, and you can even think of them as the dinosaurs that survived extinction by going small.
The notion that birds and dinosaurs are related is only meaningful within a framework of common descent. Otherwise, the similarities are nothing more than that. Thanks to Tom Ingebritsen’s recently concluded series, we’ve seen that accepting the proposition of common descent needn’t require abandoning a Biblically informed faith. So that makes me wonder, what lessons can we learn from evolutionary science? If it is a reliable model of the means by which God created the world, then perhaps God did so partly to illustrate principles that would be beneficial for us to emulate.
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