Chicken or the egg?
When someone asks, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” it’s usually posed as a rhetorical question. However, this is not just a common or entertaining question; it has real significance.
From a biblical standpoint, the obvious answer is “the chicken.” That’s because God created land creatures on day 6, fully formed and fully functional. From an evolutionary standpoint, however, the answer is quite elusive. You can’t truly have a chicken egg unless it comes from a chicken. But you can’t have a chicken unless it comes from a chicken egg. This dilemma is not exactly “breaking news.” The primary focus of this article isn’t really chickens and eggs but the “chicken and egg” scenario in general, of which there are many. We’ll take a look at a few. Let’s start big. Which came first, matter and energy or the laws of science that guide them? Even though there’s no rational answer to how matter and energy could come into existence from nothing, it wouldn’t make any sense to imagine those entities without the constraints that guide them (i.e., the laws of science). However, it is equally strange to imagine laws of science coming into existence out of nothing but lacking anything to apply themselves to (i.e., matter and energy). In fact, you cannot even describe these laws without reference to matter and energy (and time and space, while we’re at it). I’ve addressed this issue in greater detail in previous articles, videos, and podcasts, so I’ll leave it at that. Here's another “chicken and egg” scenario. As far as we can tell, only about 2% of our DNA directly codes to construct proteins, which are responsible for carrying out most of the functions in our bodies. Evolutionists have long considered the remaining 98% to be useless “junk” because it was thought to have no function. They now know better. The 98% they called “junk” is actually more complex than the 2%! It’s what we call “meta-information.” That means information about information. It is instructions telling the 2% what to do. It’s incredibly complex. “…the failure to recognize the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology.” - John Mattick (Molecular biologist) So, here’s the “chicken and the egg” scenario. Which came first, the 2% used to make the incredibly essential proteins, or the meta-information portion (98%) that directs the use of the 2%? You can’t just have one or the other. You need both at the same time. Oh, but wait. It gets more challenging than that!
There’s a significant amount of information outside of the DNA itself, housed in the cell membrane. Far from being some simplistic container used to house the cell’s internal components, the cell membrane is extremely complex. Those details will have to be addressed elsewhere, maybe in a future article. For now, just know that you can’t have a living cell without a membrane. But you also need the internal DNA that the membrane works with. You need both, fully developed and fully co-functional at the same time! Explain that from a slow, gradual evolutionary process. How about one more? Well, you’re getting one whether you like it or not. 🤣 For life to be possible, you need a DNA correction system. When cells reproduce or create proteins, they read and copy portions or all of the DNA. Mistakes happen. Also, DNA is subject to breaking down over time, (i.e., regular “wear and tear” on a daily basis). In fact, in a human cell, on a good day, about 1,000,000 bases (i.e., rungs on the ladder, or “letters”) are damaged. Fortunately, we have an amazing DNA repair system that does a great job. If we didn’t, we’d be dead. Here’s the kicker. The repair system is coded on the DNA! That means you need DNA to give you the necessary instructions to build the repair system. However, you can’t have functional DNA without a complex, pre-existing repair system but you can’t have this repair system without functional DNA to build it! You need both of them to be fully functional right from the beginning. That’s a massive problem for evolutionists. The overall conclusion is that from an evolutionary standpoint, all we’d have are scrambled eggs and dead chickens! What does that mean? I have no idea, it just popped into my head and sounded funny. Welcome to my world! My main point is pretty obvious. Naturalistic explanations cannot provide logically coherent answers to these “chicken and egg” scenarios but the Christian worldview can. I’ve mentioned it before but it’s a crucial point. Christians don’t run into complex challenges and simply make up an all-powerful “god” as an “easy out” in order to solve the seemingly insurmountable problems. On the contrary, we START with the belief that God exists, then study His inerrant, inspired Word and use it to make sense of the world around us. And guess what? That approach works amazingly well! If you start with an atheistic worldview and attempt to use that to make sense of the world, you’ll have no end of irreconcilable challenges. Everyone has a choice to make. You can either choose to believe in the miracle that nothing created everything or the miracle that something created everything! My money is on the “something” choice, and I also believe we have a special message from that “something” telling us who He is, why we’re here, and what happens to us when we die—the Bible! |
