After being a true believer of the Bible and Jesus Christ for over thirty years it has finally come to me. I know the answer. I not only know the answer, the right answer, which I already have professed and espoused for many years, but I know why it is the answer, the right answer. I am often asked if I believe that God did this or that. Sometimes the question comes in reverse, “Why does God allow …”, “Why didn’t God…”, “Could God have…”.
Yes, He could have done it in a way you would prefer but as Isaiah reports “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” Ninety nine times out of one hundred, the way the question is asked invalidates the question. Simple scientific logic dictates that an orderly God would create an orderly universe with logical explanations for the things we do not understand. We are able to discover many by just having to search them out.
“So which came first the chicken or the egg?” That is the question. This is both an important question and although often raised by naysayers and the argumentative type, seemingly a valid one. Some will say that within the egg of whatever was before there was a chicken, a change took place. And in the same manner it is necessary that a change took place in an egg before that. Evolutionary theories dictate this must happens over an imaginary period of time. Maybe it was many many changes over many many generations of whatever was before there was a chicken.
For the unbeliever the egg must have come first. For the Christian the chicken is mandated first. Observation in an orderly universe allows us to clearly identify the distinctive which drives the answer. Farmers, like my son, who raise chickens can make certain observations which science calls validating. Among them are observing a chicken egg left to itself with no hen to set it and warm it and protect. It will die and rot in very short order in any barnyard or field. Therefore there had to be a nurturer to protect and grow the egg to birth. There must have been a chicken to nurture the egg. If the egg came first, then what nurtured and protected it? Was it whatever was before there was a chicken? And where did the nurturer come from?
If as I know to be true, the chicken came first, then the first egg was produce within the natural well ordered reproductive cycle of the properly designed chicken. Turning the egg and maintaining required climatic conditions were pre-loaded into the cognitive resources of the hen. The chicken egg has always been and will always be a chicken egg. There is one element of proof which has not been mentioned. We can know the chicken came first by observation, by common sense and finally by faith. Although many would argue contrawise because they believe it would force them (logically) to accept and acknowledge their own sin and responsibility, faith is a proof placed within us by our creator. God desires for us to know the truth. He not only made it plainly observable, He not only gave us a reasoning sense but He also gave us faith to accept the things we could not prove beyond our doubt.
The Bible says “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. It establishes that even though we cannot explain a thing we can accept a thing as true. Without going into a great deal of observable, common sense examples, we can know a chicken came first because God said so. The Bible is true; one hundred percent accurate and true without exception. We do not have observable examples to concur with each item it declares. But because we accept it by faith we can trust its entirety. So when God says in Genesis that He created the fowl of the air, including chickens, we can know by faith that it is so. Then they had eggs and produced more chickens.
And so it is that beyond ourselves, beyond observable science, beyond what is instinctively and naturally known to be true, that we know. We know by faith in the written Word of God that the chicken came before the egg and not the other way around. And before you scoff at the notion of faith. Think of how very many things in the world about you which are accepted by faith rather than knowing them to be so before you accept them. It is normal for us to question what we observe. It is just as normal for us to believe by faith because God said so.