To be or not to be creative
You are right, when you say that what you see in this picture is the same flower just a little „reformed“ with the excellent free online tool picnik.com. It does not need much creativity to recognize the similarity between the two. However, imagine you had never before seen a rose. How would you have named the red dot in the dark picture on the right?
Even more challenging was God’s task for Adam. In Genesis 2:19 it says:
Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
That was quite a challenge for Adam: You name all the animals. Adam had never before seen any of these strange things. How could he invent names for them without having any connection to something which he had already seen before? That is how our thinking usually works, but this would have led Adam nowhere.
Adam must have been a creative genius, or God had given him the amount of creativity to do fulfill this task. It might have been to Adams advantage that he was still very young at that time. As we know people tend to grow out of creative thinking when they grow up. Part of this undesirable tendency is due to our educational system, in which we learn that there is only one right answer, which we find through logical thinking.
Adam was different. He was creative. Thanks to him, until today we can enjoy beautiful names for animals – instead of naming them just animal 1, animal 2, animal 3, bird 1, bird 2 …, like it would be the case if I - with my mathematically trained mind - had been in Adams shoes 