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What came first, the chicken or the egg?
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God created animals at the beginning of the world

At the beginning of the world, God created animals, not eggs. Eggs were simply one way for those animals to reproduce, but the animals were what God created first.

The Argument

According to Genesis in the Old Testament, God made all the living creatures on the fifth day of creation, including “every winged fowl after his kind”.[1] Chicken or at least whatever the predecessor is to the modern chicken is a winged fowl, so God must have created it on the fifth day. God then instructed them to “be fruitful and multiply”.[1] This clearly shows that, in terms of the chicken and egg dilemma, the chicken must have been created first, in its full form as a living creature, and then, upon being instructed to multiply, eventually lay an egg in order to reproduce. He gave the first batch of chickens the capacity to reproduce, but all this was contingent on the formation of life occurring first and foremost. Therefore, life must come first. No matter what, creation and birth will always occur before continuation and multiplication because birth and new beginnings are the most sacred part of life.[2]

Counter arguments

Not every word in the Bible must be taken literally. We already know that homo sapiens as they exist today are not the same as the original homo habilis and homo Erectus that roamed the Earth. There is direct scientific proof that these types of humans existed before us and were drastically different from us in terms of genetic traits. God creating winged fowls on the fifth day of creation could be a symbol for something else, such as God's power to create and imagine worlds far beyond what humans are capable of ever conceiving. It is not meant to actually allude to the creation of all winged fowls that we see today being created immediately on the fifth day of the universe existing. Or, the winged fowls that were initially created could have been a predecessor to the chicken that the first egg eventually genetically mutated off of, but that doesn’t mean the domesticated chicken we commonly see today must have been part of that pack of winged fowls.

Proponents

Premises

[P1] God created all life on the fifth day, including winged fowls, and then asked those creatures to multiply.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The words in the Bible could have been an allegory or a metaphor, not something meant to be taken literally.

References

  1. https://www.biblica.com/bible/
  2. https://www.christianityeveryday.com/the-history-of-the-chicken-and-the-egg/
This page was last edited on Monday, 12 Oct 2020 at 22:04 UTC