Creation Science Rebuttals -

Adam Naming the Animals

First Published 2006

In an article on the Creation, Dinosaurs and the Flood website, young earth creation science advocate Charlie Liebert claims that Adam could have named the animals as God instructed him, within the short time frame of the sixth day.¹
To back up his claim, Liebert says Adam did not name all the animals...he just named specific groups of them. The naming of the animals is in Genesis 2:19-20:

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. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field...

     Liebert says Adam named cattle, birds, and beasts of the field. It did not include insects, or sea creatures. I have no problems with this interpretation, as we cannot know how many species this is. It would appear that Adam named all the mammals (with the exception of sea mammals). There are currently about 5,500 mammal species. That is quite a few names, and it does not include those that are extinct now, which probably would easily triple this number, if not more. That is quite a few mammals to name!
     To aid in his argument, he breaks it down into "kinds," which is the argument creationists use to fit the animals on the ark. For instance, Noah did not take two poodles, two wolves, etc, on the ark. He only took two dog-kinds. Again, I have no problem here, as this really doesn't help him much. Why? If you look at Noah's Ark, and the study done by the author John Woodmorappe, he claims that Noah took one pair from each genera, living and fossil. He lists 7428 mammals, 4602 birds and 3724 reptiles on the ark. This totals to 15,754 animals on the ark. Since Liebert is using the same "kind" argument as Woodmorappe, that means that Adam must have named this many animals, which fit the categories of "cattle, birds, and beasts of the field."
     Adam would have been hard-pressed to name them all in a 24-hour day. And, since God created the animals the same day, and created man, he probably only had 12 hours to do the task. That's 2.7 seconds per animal.
However, the old earth explanation, that Day Six was millions of years long, leaves plenty of time for Adam to name the animals. The end of Day Six, after Adam was created, may have been many years long.

¹ Adam Names the Animals, originally published on the web at sixdaycreation.com/facts/creation/biology/july2004.html

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