19. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21. You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.
"Noah and his boys" wouldn't have to wrest them from their parents. Even, in this day and age we see animals behaving strangely just prior to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis. So it is not entirely inconceivable that they would've acted similarly in those days. Most folks concept of of God is way too small, even folks that consider themselves to be Christians. We tend to put God in a box, and place the same physical, spiritual, and mental limitations on Him that we ourselves experience, and in some cases we think we know better. If God is God, then He can work outside of our limitations, even the perceived limitations that we place on Him. If sovereign God wanted the dinosaurs on the ark, they would have been there, regardless of what our "superior intellect" tells us.
I see. "God did it". Are you familiar with the expression, deus ex machina?
You're telling me that juvenile dinosaurs swam almost 6K miles to arrive near the place Noah was building his Ark?
It's tough to have a critical examination of this story, or any story when questions about the physical impossibility of a certain element of that story is met with, "God did it".
I was in public schools for grades 4-12. Approx. 9 years after my brain come on-line (which happened a few years after my regeneration. I'd "bought into" the irrational pietistic variety of Christian experience), I found myself able to agree with God that He did, indeed, as he said, take six days to create the world. It took me about a year of serious Christian thinking to undo each year of publicly funded indoctrination.
New Agers profess awe and adoration towards an evolving deity inside an evolving universe. Gods are a subset of man's evolving experience.[1] Serious Christians view us as a subset of God's created universe. These are two irreconcilable perspectives, despite what Teilhard de Chardin might assert. Parents who think it safe to raise their children in both religions simultaneously are gambling with the eternal destinies, and the temporal capabilities, of their children.
(parenthetically -- many dispensationalists are comfortable with vast eons behind us -- perhaps explained by the "gap" between Gen. 1:1 and 1:2 -- but assume a rigidly constrained future. Orthodox post-mil Christians tend to find themselves comfortable with a brief historic past, and look forward to thousands of years ahead.)
[1] I need to quote G K Chesterton again!
Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.