@roger,
The old deceiving reptile in the Garden of Eden, was the evolving godhead in the spiritual dimension, of the Most-High earthly species on the ladder of evolution, before Mankind.
That spiritual godhead, was evolving from the information gathered by his earthly body, which species had ruled the earth for some 140 million Years, and which species became extinct around 66 million years ago.
He was the evolving mind/spirit of the great upright walking reptiles, whose earthly body was later cursed and made to crawl on its belly in the dust of the earth, because he had deceived Eve in paradise, before she and her Lord ‘Adam’ were clothed with animal skin, nerves, muscles etc, and cast down to the earth.
No species can exist for that length of time, without achieving a high degree of intelligence. Step into a fire, remember the pain and you will never repeat that mistake, it is through Pain and suffering that intelligence begins. We learn through the pain and sufferings that we endure, which pain and suffering is caused by the sins and mistakes that we make in Life. Spare the rod says the Lord, and you will spoil the child.
The extinction of the reptilian dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, was a blessing to mankind, as they would have been the greatest threat to the continued evolution of mankind from our ancestors ‘The Mammals,’ of which our oldest known primate-like mammal ancestors, were the Plesiadapis, which came from North America; or the Archicebus, which came from China, or any of the other similar basal primates, which were widespread in Eurasia and Africa during the tropical conditions of the Paleocene and Eocene geological Epochs. And the evolutionary history of those primates can be traced back 65 million years, shortly after the time when the dinosaurs became extinct.