The Scientific Sequence of the Animal Kingdom

Science is a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made.

The first scientist was Adam, the first man. In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam the privilege of naming all of the animals on Earth.

Speech is also, fittingly, mankind’s first act in the pages of Scripture. We are the image of a God who speaks a world into being and who asks us to speak so that we might draw that world into right relation and into rest. No matter that Adam, in that first moment of speaking, doesn’t find a helpmate among all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals (Gen 2:20). By naming them, he sets all things in right relation; he “orders all things well” (Wis 8:1) and so exercises that dominion which is nothing other than an extension of the divine work of naming things into existence. We are talking beasts, and our speech is not just a making audible of our intellect, not just a transmission in some medium or other. Speech is what renders truth in the service of love, is what allows us to exercise our unique role of tending and keeping (cf. Gen 1:26, 28; 2:8). The communion of this world, like the Trinitarian communion it images, is begotten and pre-served in speech, in the Word.

Adam's naming of all of the animals constituted the world's first 'catalogue.' The root word log, comes from the Greek word logos, meaning word. God's Word, the Logos, is the second person of the Trinity, whose intelligiblity is the core of every living thing.

As future scientists contemplated on God's creation, a taxonomy was made to classify the great order of God's immense biological creations.