The purpose of dinosaurs: Extinction and the goodness of God
I recently took a friend’s three-year-old son to the Natural History Museum in London. We stood together in awe in the hall of dinosaurs, wondering at the beauty, strength and majesty of the long-departed creatures. I questioned how a good God could let such magnificent creatures as the iguanodon or the allosaurus simply fade from the earth.
My question could extend well beyond dinosaurs: about 99 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. Though increasingly extinction is now the result of humans’ impact on the environment, extinction has always been an intrinsic part of the evolutionary process.
If God is both the author and lover of creation, why would God use a process to develop complex beings that necessitates species extinction?
