Live Pterosaur

Do pterosaurs live only in scientific theories? How does a religious doctrine or a church belief relate to extant pterosaurs? There may be no church position or religious doctrine that specifically deals with the concept of extant pterosuars, but it relates indirectly. The model of Noah's Ark and the Flood--they give hope that some supposedly extinct creatures, some dinosaurs and pterosaurs, may have survived into modern times; after all, the purpose of Noah's Ark was to prevent species extinctions. Extant pterosaurs, only rarely seen in the wild, are never seen in church, but they glow in the hearts of some of the religious.

In the nonfiction book "Searching for Ropens," the author, Jonathan Whitcomb, weaves belief in God into an expedition in search of live pterosaurs. The first edition got scathing reviews from a few readers who wanted only an account of the ropen: no sermon. The second edition quickly followed, receiving far fewer scathing reviews. But in the second edition no religious elements were taken out (recent expeditions and sighting reports, after the first edition, were added to the second). Why the drop in negative reviews? The revised edition was clearly marketed as both a spiritual and cryptozoological book. Regardless of one's personal feelings about interweaving religion and science, most living- pterosaur investigators, from 1994 through 2007, have been creationists; there is no way to fully understand those cryptozoological investigations without knowing why those men have searched jungles for extant pterosaurs.

To put it simply, extant pterosaurs (perfectly consistent with the preservation of species on the Ark of Noah) show the dogmatism of standard models, for those widely promoted models of evolution and old extinctions have been doggedly indoctrinating Western children, adolescents, and adults into believing all those proclamations as "facts." But those supposed "facts" have been used to promote Naturalism as if "science," castigating literal interpretations of scriptures.