If you grew up fascinated by dinosaurs and now maintain an intellectual curiosity about their origins, this may be for you. Did dinosaurs evolve from other reptiles? Did Noah’s ark carry dinosaurs, or were they destroyed in the Flood? Does the fossil record support Darwinism? In his new book, Dinosaurs: An Adventist View, practicing lawyer David C. Read eloquently addresses these questions and much more. Ever wonder whether Ellen White’s “amalgamation” statements could have been referring to the dinosaurs?

Originally from Keene, Texas, Read is a graduate of Southwestern Adventist University and The University of Texas School of Law. He has practiced law in Paris, Texas, and Los Angeles, California.

And if you're wondering what in the world qualifies a lawyer to write so scholarly about dinosaurs and science in general, at the risk of scrutiny and criticism from the scientific community, then read on. 

For several years Read has been working on this labor of love. It was finally published last month through Clarion Call Books, and is already being hailed as "a must for any Christian science teacher."

I got a chance to speak to Read about the book and his motivation for writing it. 

Q. Why a book on dinosaurs?

1. As an Adventist creationist and a trained controversialist, I couldn't help being interested in the controversy surrounding origins, the struggle between Darwinism and creationism that has now been raging for 150 years.  I began to read books on the topic, and other aspects of ancient history and archeology.  When I finally decided to write a book on origins, I decided to make it dinosaur-centric for several reasons, including the fact that anything featuring dinosaurs seems to be very marketable.  (In this connection, I once remarked to a group of my friends that "dinosaurs are sexy," which occasioned quite a bit of derisive laughter and ridicule.)  

Q.  You are a lawyer, not a scientist.  How are you qualified to write this book? 

1. As part of our job, trial lawyers have to become expert on the science and technology of whatever topic our latest case is about, whether medical malpractice, toxic torts, products liability, complex business disputes, oil and gas exploration, or what have you.  The diversity of areas into which litigation intrudes is as wide as the world itself.  As a result, lawyers become quick studies.  They learn to penetrate to the heart of a controversy, ascertaining which facts are in dispute, and which are not; which facts are important or relevant to the outcome, and which are not.  That same skill set is useful in approaching any controversy, including the controversy over origins.  Of course, as lawyers well know, there is no way to avoid the homework.  During the course of writing this book, I did several hundred hours of library research.  I checked and re-checked the facts, and also had trained scientists review the manuscript.  

Q.    What topics does the book cover? 

1.  I conceived of the book as answering a set of questions about dinosaurs:  What are dinosaurs?  When did they live?  Where did they come from?  Did birds evolve from dinosaurs?  Why did dinosaurs become extinct?  In fact, in the first draft of the book, each of these questions was the title of a chapter, but this structure led to too few chapters that were each too long, so I changed it.  But the book is still designed to answer people's questions about dinosaurs.  

Q.   I assume that you are writing from the creationist perspective? 

1. Absolutely.  Darwinism has plenty of defenders; it is the dominant point of view in academia, media, the museums, foundations, government, entertainment, business, etc.  Darwinism has no need of additional advocates.  

Q.  But there are also many books by creationists.  What makes yours special? 

1. Several things, but primarily that there has never been a full-length book for adults specifically exploring the Seventh-day Adventist angle on dinosaurs.  As far as I know, this is the first such book.  

Q.  Is this book only for Seventh-day Adventists? 

1. No.  In fact, it could have been much shorter had it been intended only for Adventists, because Adventists already understand and take for granted the "young earth creationist" paradigm, which eight of the 26 chapters are devoted to explaining.  But I wanted anyone to be able to pick up the book and follow the chain of reasoning, regardless whether they had an Adventist or Christian background, which meant that I had to explain why we reject not only Darwinism but also long ages geology; I had to explain the damage that those two scientific philosophies do to the structure of Christian doctrine. 

Q.  Do you bring any new insights into explaining the young earth creationist model and the critique of Darwinism? 

1. Maybe not, but I think I have presented the material in a fresh and interesting way.  One example is my discussion of the theory of evolution:  When our DNA copies itself, it does so flawlessly 99.99% of the time, but occasionally there is a copying error.  The modern theory of evolution posits that those copying errors accumulate to create new biochemical mechanisms, new organs, and eventually change species into different, new species.  That is the theory of evolution in a nutshell.  But our real-world experience with DNA copying errors is that they cause all kinds of problems, including thousands of diseases.  The notion that DNA copying errors are responsible for all of the diversity of plant and animal life that we see around us is an idea that I don't find at all credible, and I marvel that it has become scientific dogma.  But it has, and to remind readers what the theory is, I refer to it throughout the book as "the copying error theory of evolution."

Q.  Can you give another example of your unique approach to the material? 

1. I think a scientist writing this book would not have spent as many pages on the history.  (Scientists seem to want to believe that their work is unaffected by the hand of history; a lawyer can have no such illusions about his profession.)  The history is crucial, because it is impossible to evaluate contemporary science without knowing how and when it picked up its biases.  For example, I wrote extensively on the history of geologic interpretation, because opponents of biblical creationism rely much more on geology than on biology.  But the geological doctrines that conflict with creationism are not facts, but conclusions flowing from interpretations of the facts.  Recently, I was reading a blog written by a critic of young earth creationism who argued that geological field research dictated the conclusion that the earth's fossiliferous layers are millions of years old.  This is a key argument against creationism, but it is false.  The decision to interpret the strata as the residue of long ages was a philosophical decision.  An Englishman named Charles Lyell-who, perhaps not coincidentally, was also a lawyer-argued that past sedimentation must have occurred at the same rate as it occurs today.  He argued that it was bad science to posit that geological processes worked at different rates in the past than they do in the present.  This principle became known as "uniformitarianism," which sounds like the name of a denomination, and it is very much a faith-based dogma.  Under this assumption, the fossiliferous strata must be millions of years old, because it would have taken millions of years to accumulate the sedimentary strata at current rates of sedimentation.  But this conclusion is not dictated by geological field research.  I quote two capable scientists, including the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, stating that the "catastrophists" (those who argued that the sedimentary strata were deposited rapidly) were actually better field researchers than the uniformitarians.      

Q.  Many other Christian denominations and individuals embrace "young earth creationism."  Adventists are far from unique in holding this view.  For example, in May, 2007, a ministry called "Answers in Genesis" opened a Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati.  The Creation Museum has already had over half a million visitors.  What can Adventists add to the conversation? 

1. The question makes it sound as though Adventists are latecomers to this debate, when the opposite is true.  Historians of science who have studied the topic-chief among them former Adventist Ronald L. Numbers-will tell you that Adventists have been very influential in creationism from the beginning.  But, to answer your question, I think Adventists have a unique emphasis to add, which is that the Darwinian model is not only wrong, but backward.  All creationists reject the idea that humans evolved from lower animals, but most Christians seem to have bought into the Darwinian meta-narrative, which is that the human race began in a primitive condition and has been continually advancing.  By contrast, Adventists believe that mankind has dramatically fallen-physically, mentally, and spiritually-from where we were when God created us.  Instead of evolution, there has been a profound devolution from our original condition.  For example, Ellen White wrote that early mankind needed no written language, because people were able to grasp and perfectly retain what they were told.  That kind mental strength is difficult to comprehend.  Any scholar who has read and studied over the course of a life as short as my 44 years soon realizes that he has already forgotten far more than he currently knows.  That's why we write things down.  It is why we write books.  

Q.   Do Ellen White's writings figure into the content of your book? 

1. Absolutely.  The book's central thesis revolves around a cryptic statement by Ellen White concerning "amalgamation."  She stated that the worst sin of the people who lived before the Genesis Flood was the sin of amalgamation, which produced species that God did not create, and that one of the most urgent reasons for the Flood was to destroy the amalgamated species.  For many years, the most knowledgeable, doctrinally well-grounded Adventists have seen a connection between extinct pre-historic animals, such as dinosaurs, and Ellen White's "amalgamation" statements.  My book explores the thesis that dinosaurs were the products of amalgamation-now understood as genetic engineering-by people who lived before the Genesis Flood.  While this theory, like any theory about origins, has its problems, it turns out to be a very defensible thesis.  Moreover, it explains much about the fossil record that cannot otherwise be explained within the "young earth creationist" paradigm.  This theory has been discussed by and among Seventh-day Adventists for more than three decades, but there has never been a book-length exploration of it.  An appellate court justice I worked for back in Texarkana, Texas, once told me, in the context of legal appeals, "You don't really know what you've got until you write the opinion."  In other words, you do not know how strong your position is until you write it down on paper, and explain and argue it in a logical, step-by-step manner.  That's what I've tried to do in this book.  I hope everyone who reads it will find it interesting, and receive a blessing from it.       

Note: Clifford Goldstein and Ervin Taylor will each be providing a review of this book from two very differing perspectives. It will be available next week.