Nomenclature means simply devising or choosing names for things. God gives general names to things as He creates them as shown in the first verses of the bible. Day and night. Light and dark. Matter and antimatter (waters/expanse/waters). Earth and seas. Grass and trees. Sun and moon. Swarmers in the sea and air. Cattle and creepers on the earth. Man and woman.
He then makes Adam a steward over all the earth and the creatures in it, and Adam is given the responsibility for giving each creation its name: Out of the ground the Lord GOD formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called every living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field…~Genesis 2:19-20
Adam may have given general names to animals, but through observation and study, Carolus Linnaeus in the mid-1700s refined these into a naming system called ‘binomial nomenclature’ based on a creature’s physical characteristics. This works by giving an animal a latin name based on a general category (genus) followed by a more specific characteristic (species) of it. Linnaeus was Christian who believed that God created everything. This term to identify animals and plants is still used today!
An example of binomial nomenclature is the name Tyrannosaurus rex. Tyrannosaurids were bipedal carnivores with massive skulls filled with large teeth. Despite their large size, their legs were long and proportioned for fast movement. In contrast, their arms were very small, bearing only two functional digits. This is the general category of its kind. Rex means king. That specifies that this creature was the largest of the tyrannosaurs.
We believe that this system works well for animals, but not for man, such as in Homo sapiens, etcetera, because ‘Homo’ is a genus of great apes, and the bible is clear that man is created on the last day by God, in His image. This is where science starts turning into atheistic philosophy and guesswork with the use of phytological trees and untenable links for presumed evolution between species.
And GOD called, “Make man in Our image and all in Our likeness; and may he have dominion over fish in the sea, and over birds in the heavens, and over cattle over all the earth, and over all creepers creeping on the earth.
And created GOD the holy man in His image. Male and female He created them and GOD blessed them.
A great, brief article on the subject is written by Roger Patterson where he teaches us a new concept of creation called the ‘created kind’. “Created Kind (Baramin): the original organisms (and their descendants) created supernaturally by God as described in Genesis 1; these organisms reproduce only their own kind within the limits of preprogrammed information, but with great variation. A group of creation scientists called the Biology Study Group is currently attempting to classify animals within created kinds, or baramins (from the Hebrew bara—create and min—kind).”
Illustration from Dr. Kurt Wise and Creation Science Fellowship of Pittsburgh from the 1990 ICC Proceedings, Bob Walsh editor, vol. 2, p. 358.
As modern Christians, we must appreciate that we have been raised in an era of atheistic science and textbooks influencing our school curriculum since the 1950’s. As such, we need to rethink what we have been taught and assumed to be true. We do this by going back to the bible and lining out scientific understanding with scripture. If science fits scripture, we keep it, if not, we throw it out. The burden of proof is on those making their various hypotheses and theories, and so far, the bible has never been proved wrong.
~Song of Mary~ 