Adam Names the Animals

Genesis 2:19-20

19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

Commentary

Here God created some additional animals in front of Adam so he could see God do it. God then has Adam name each kind of animal. This naturally raises the question of  “Could Adam have named all these animals in one day?”

Before this question can be answered it is necessary to know the number of different kinds of animals Adam had to count.  First of all Adam did not have to name millions of species of animals, since “kind” in these verses does not equate to specie, but ether genus or family. Second these were land animals so Adam did not have to name fish and other aquatic animals.

It has been estimated that  Adam would probably have only needed to name some 2,500 kinds of animals. However to allow for some unknown kinds lets make it 3,000 kinds of animals. At one every five seconds Adam could have finished the task in 4 hours and 10 minutes.

The Science of Life Called Biology

Biology is the science that studies life and living organisms. Life is that which undergo metabolism, grows and reproduce. A living cell is the basic functional unit of life. An organism is a contiguous living system.

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the information storage device of living cells. Amazingly DNA is actually a digitally encoded information storage system and the compact encoded information storage system known to exist. There is no known place of higher information density than in DNA.

Living cell are the most basic functional unit of life and but despite this they are still highly complex organized systems of information, structure, molecular machines and much more. Each cell has a level of complexity similar to a city but possesses more organization making even the simplest living cell more complex and organized than any man made machine.  

Single-cell life includes organisms that are made of only one cell. Examples include bacteria, single cell animals and single celled plants such as blue green algae. Multi-cellular life includes organisms consisting of multiple cells usually billions such as plants animals and people.

No mater how the process is described there is essentially only two possible origins for life: A naturalistic origin called abiogenesis or a supernaturally intelligently designed origin. Other suggestions don’t actually solve the problem but merely move it some place else in the Universe.

Abiogenesis has the problem of overcoming the overwhelming gap in organized complexity between a living cell and the chemical constituents that make up a cell. Furthermore no natural process actually demonstrated to exist can accomplish the task but known natural processes indicate that it can not happen. Going from non living chemicals to a living cell requires reducing entropy by an immense amount and statistical thermodynamics shows that natural processes tend to go towards increased entropy; which is the opposite direction of that needed for abiogenesis. Now adding energy can decrease entropy it only does so if applied in a sufficiently organized manner and no known natural process can apply energy in a sufficiently organized manner to achieve abiogenesis suggesting that abiogenesis is impossible. 

A supernaturally intelligently designed origin of life does not have these problems.  First of all it is known that intelligents can create complex organized systems because humans do so. Second it is known that intelligents can encode a functioning genome because human scientists have done so. Intelligents does have a sufficient degree of organized complexity to create a living cell. Furthermore the intelligents that started life in the universe would have to be from out side it and thus would be supernatural.

Evolutionists will often claim that evolution is just change over time in the inherited traits found in a population. If this were really all that was meant by evolution there would be no issue since creationists agree that there is change over time in the inherited traits of a population.

The real dispute is with the idea that observed variations can start with one cell and produce all life found on earth including man. Going from microbe to man requires adding a lot of information by nothing but than mutations and natural selection. The Evolutionist argument is that given enough time mutations and natural selection can produce any thing, however such large degrees of change has never actually been observed. They are however a necessary assumption for a totally naturalistic origin of current living systems.