Short answer: no.
Long answer: nooooooooo.
Genesis is the first book of the Bible and it lays down much of the groundwork for the Hebrew and Christian faiths. It explains the origin of man’s sinful nature, man’s various original languages, and multiple and varied pictures of the Messiah to come. But perhaps the most common concept that people think of when the book of Genesis is mentioned is the creation of the universe.
Genesis 1:1 famously begins, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. Chapter one then gives the order of events in which God created everything. It is as follows:
- Creation of light and its separation from the darkness.
- Creation of the sky and it separating the waters above from the waters below.
- Creation of the dry land and vegetation.
- Creation of sun, moon, and stars.
- Creation of flying animals and water animals.
- Creation of land animals and man.
Genesis chapter 2 appears to have a slightly different order in that man was created before the vegetation and animals (man in 2:7, vegetation in 2:9, and animals in 2:19). So was man created before or after the vegetation and the animals? Let’s take a look at the text overall.
Genesis chapter 1 lays out creation is a very step-by-step fashion: God said “X”, X was created, it was good, that was day number one; rinse and repeat for each of the following days. When you get to chapter 2 Genesis changes the perspective for the reader. In chapter 2 the focus is the creation of man and the Garden of Eden, and the mandate of not eating of the forbidden fruit. In the midst of these details the author supplementally mentions that other things were created also, but NOT specifically in the order it reads in. How do we know? Because no creation order is being presented in chapter 2.
When the author of Genesis mentions the creation of the animals and His bringing them to Adam for naming in 2:19-20, the language used tells us that “out of the ground Yahweh God had formed [the animals]”; in other words, it was something God had already done by the time the writer gets to this point in chapter 2. Another way to word it would be, “By the way, God had already made these animals previously and brought them to the man that he more recently made.” So then why doesn’t the text read that way if that’s what’s attempted to be communicated? Chapter 2 was not written as a step-by-step, ordered account of creation. It was written to more detail the creation of man and simply mentioned the creation of other things in passing.
The second chapter isn’t even trying to attempt an ordered creation account. Then why do people read it incorrectly? Because they’re trying to read their own understanding into the text instead of taking the text as it is written. It’s a pretty simple understanding but people routinely over complicate things they read. More often than not, opponents of the faith try to make up issues that don’t really exist, then people hear these false claims and buy into them without actually reading the source material.