Chicken or the Egg?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while, and I’ve thought of a couple ideas for posts, things like What Do I Think of My Own Stories and Writing Is Like Painting and How Violence Solves Everything, et cetera, et cetera, but, seeing how this is my first blog post, I obviously haven’t actually written any of those. Yet.

Since Kelly has been encouraging me to do this, and I’m currently stuck and unable to make myself finish rewriting my latest story, I asked her what my first blog post should be. She likes when I explain things, and so she asked me which came first, the chicken or the egg. We were in the car driving home, and the rest of that trip consisted of me explaining some thoughts about that question and then looking up whether it was ever explicitly stated that Adam and Eve were adults.

What follows is an approximation (adjusted from speech to written word) of my thoughts on which came first:

First, it depends on how specifically you frame the question. Is it, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” or is it, “Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?” That’s not the best thing to say though, because the answer to both is the same (with one exception): the egg. We’ll start by also specifying that when the question says chicken, it means a grown adult chicken capable of laying an egg, otherwise the egg counts as a chicken and the question doesn’t even matter. Moving past that, any adult chicken, barring any weird science experiments, hatched from an egg, and thus the egg came first.

Now, if there is a particular individual that was the first chicken, say its mother was a protochicken, the egg that individual hatched from was a protochicken egg, not a chicken egg, and so the chicken came first, but I say that’s wrong. If someone were to implant a chicken egg into, say, a turkey, and the turkey laid that egg, it would not be a turkey egg. It would still be a chicken egg, because what would hatch from that egg is a chicken. Therefore, again, the egg came first.

All of that, however, is based off of the theory of evolution. If, however, you ask the question in terms of creationism, then, yeah, I’m not sure why you’re asking that question since there’s no way of really knowing, but we’ll go ahead and try to answer it anyway. Also we’re assuming evolution didn’t happen (since some views of creationism are not really mutually exclusive with evolution) and that the first chicken and modern chickens are of the same species.

If God created an adult chicken, then the chicken came first.

If God created an egg that hatched into a chicken, then the egg came first.

So that answers that, but it’s kind of cheap to be so short about it. I personally think the egg would have been created. Not sure why, but that’s just how I feel. You could ask, “Why would God create an egg without having a mother hen to lay on it and keep it warm?” but to that, I would reply that I think it’s within God’s power to keep an egg warm and incubated, and that wouldn’t really be a problem.

But why would God create an egg from scratch and then have it grow into a chicken, when it created Adam and Eve as fully-grown adults? I don’t know, did he? When Adam and Eve were created, they were innocent and unashamed of their nakedness, everything was provided for them in the garden, they didn’t know good from evil (right from wrong), and in essence they were childlike. And then they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and suddenly they were ashamed to be naked, they knew right from wrong, Adam would have to start to farm the land and provide for him and Eve, Eve would have painful childbirth, etc., and essentially they grew up. And as far as I know, apart from them being referred to as man and woman, there is nothing that states that they were created as fully formed adults and not as babies or children who then grew up in the garden and were forced to leave once they had grown (or the other way around: they grew into adults as a result of eating the fruit and being forced to leave, and would otherwise have stayed young forever in the garden of Eden).

Oh, and I forgot to mention the one exception I’d mentioned to the egg being first. The chicken would have come first in the weird circumstances that the protochicken who gave birth to the first chicken did so through a live birth, and that chicken then started to lay eggs once it grew up. That’s not really a thing though, I just felt like mentioning it.

So this is most likely my first blog post, unless I decide I don’t like it and either delete it or write something else to post first instead, but I hope it’s been somewhat enjoyable to read. Whether it was or not, I sincerely appreciate you reading it all the way through. Unless you skipped to the end, in which case shame on you. Not really though, no shame. Some people like to do that for some reason. Goodbye.