My brother was the giant in our family at 5’10” tall.  Me?  I’m 5’7” on a good day, so I’m certainly no expert on height.  But I do know a little about the Bible, and I once spent four years under Dr. Hartman, Dr. Graff and Dr. Johnson learning physics, electromagnetics and chemistry, respectively, enough to turn my tassel at least, so let me wade into the shallow end of the “What happened to the giants?” debate for a moment.  It’s a sister topic to the “What happened to the dinosaurs?” question, for as you’ve probably noticed, there aren’t many giants or dinosaurs roaming the roads near where you live.

   Even so, I do believe that giants did once walk this earth.  In previous posts I’ve shared specific passages from the Bible that describe them, but since the Bible doesn’t take any time to explain what happened to them, we’ll need to speculate a bit.

   Here’s where I’m thankful for my engineering training though one degree received decades ago doesn’t make me an expert on the science that swirls around this question.  Even so, here’s what I know. 

   Right now, unless you’re reading this from inside an absolute vacuum, you are being pummeled by diatomic nitrogen and diatomic oxygen (you can throw in a dash of argon and a pinch of carbon dioxide too).  You can’t feel these molecules striking you, nonetheless you’re surrounded by a bazillion air molecules composed of roughly 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen.  It would be fair to say that these percentages have remained largely unchanged for millennia, but past or future factors could certainly alter these percentages, and even evolutionary scientists acknowledge that ancient oxygen-rich ecosystems were once a thing.  It’s just that they don’t think they were ever a major thing.  But what if they are wrong?  After all, they don’t exactly have a perfect track record within science, and their evolutionary assumptions do often prevent them from even entertaining theories like the one I’m about to throw at you. 

   So what if oxygen levels were once much higher than they are at present?  What if some global catastrophe caused a tremendous disruption of the earth’s biosphere, a major change in oceanic chemistry, or a massive decay of organic matter, which together contributed to a major drop in the partial pressure of oxygen.  Of course, the Bible describes just such an event in Genesis 7-9 that could explain these or similar global changes.  If oxygen levels once measured significantly higher than they do now, then that could certainly account for larger beings and longer lives than what we experience today.  In fact, scientists have discovered ancient fossils that are several times larger than their modern counterparts.  What if background radiation was also much lower in a pre-flood atmosphere, thus reducing the number of somatic and hereditary mutations, which would allow for more robust organic growth?

   I don’t personally think it unreasonable to suggest that a global flood caused a dramatic transformation of our climate and that giants and dinosaurs could have been affected by reduced oxygen levels that impacted their subsequent size, their longevity and their quality of life. 

   Do I know this to be true from the science?  Of course not.  No one can know with absolute certainty. But is it reasonable?  I say, “Yes.”

   Daniel McCabe