If we read the biblical account it starts with the chicken, And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. Genesis 1:20-23
Every bird reproduced after its own kind, which is still true today. Only same kinds can interbreed.
When God creates, the matter doesn’t need any further explanation or dialogue, it simply ends there. God created the chicken [and birds, fish and reptiles] with the innate ability to reproduce through egg-bearing or laying. God designed and created a finished, closed system of reproduction with all necessary components in place.
It almost seems a copout to simply leave it there, but there it is. In math, we know indisputably that two plus two equals four. It’s a simple statement of fact. So it is with Creation… God created. It’s a simple statement of fact that needs no further embellishment. How He created no one knows. He just did.
From an evolutionary perspective, the question of the chicken or egg coming first is very much more complicated. As I scoured the internet I found many articles and commentaries with varied opinions, but, I could not find one, single article on how the first egg came to be.
The dilemma for evolutionists is that egg-laying is a very complicated and closed process.
1. First, you need a male and female chicken with functioning reproductive systems; the female chicken to produce the unfertilized ‘egg’ and the male chicken with the sperm necessary to fertilize the ‘egg’. This means that before the first egg ever appeared on the scene someone, or something must have considered the end result – the egg. Once the rooster deposits sperm in the hen, she keeps it in a little internal pouch. As a new egg passes by, still without a shell, it is fertilized by that sperm. This now fertilized ‘egg’ is the entity that will eventually be encapsulated in the outer shell.
2. Next you need an egg-producing system. A system that will envelop the fertilized egg, a single cell, in the yolk and sequentially wrap the yolk in a membrane. This is followed by the creation of the albumen, the ‘egg white’ that surrounds the yolk. In turn, the albumen is enveloped in a second membrane which is then enveloped by the shell, a mineralization and calcification process. The chalazae are the two opaque strands of egg white that keep the yolk suspended in the middle of the egg. Astoundingly, this whole process takes approximately 24-hours. The chicken lays the egg.
3. The complexity doesn’t stop there. The whole system needs to carry the highly complex DNA, not only encoded with all the information for the chicken to grow but also carries the process information, the blueprint, for the cycle to carry on infinitely from generation to generation.
4. During the course of the next 20-days an even more impressive process takes place as the young chicken is formed. Of course, the process includes a temperature control system (the brooding chicken), ventilation (porosity of the shell and membrane), etc.
5. Take any single element out of the process and you don’t have an egg or the life cycle it produces. The entire system must be in place from the very beginning for the very first egg to be produced. This limitation is known as irreducible complexity.
Evolutionists have long taken issue with the idea of irreducible complexity. In his 2008 book Only A Theory, biologist Kenneth R. Miller challenges the claim that a mousetrap is irreducibly complex. Miller observes that various subsets of the five components can be devised to form cooperative units, ones that have different functions from the mousetrap and so, in biological terms, could form functional spandrels before being adapted to the new function of catching mice. In an example taken from his high school experience, Miller recalls that one of his classmates struck upon the brilliant idea of using an old, broken mousetrap as a spitball catapult, and it worked brilliantly….It had worked perfectly as something other than a mousetrap….my rowdy friend had pulled a couple of parts –probably the hold-down bar and catch– off the trap to make it easier to conceal and more effective as a catapult…[leaving] the base, the spring, and the hammer. Not much of a mousetrap, but a helluva spitball launcher….I realized why [Behe’s] mousetrap analogy had bothered me. It was wrong. The mousetrap is not irreducibly complex after all.
Other systems identified by Miller that include mousetrap components include the following:
The point of the reduction is that – in biology – most or all of the components were already at hand, by the time it became necessary to build a mousetrap. As such, it required far fewer steps to develop a mousetrap than to design all the components from scratch.
Thus the development of the mousetrap, said to consist of five different parts which had no function on their own, has been reduced to one step: the assembly from parts that are already present, performing other functions.
The Intelligent Design argument focuses on the functionality to catch mice. It skips over the case that many, if not all, parts are already available in their own right, at the time that the need for a mousetrap arises. From Wikipedia.
The Achilles’ Heels of Keneth Miller’s argument, that the irreducibly complex mousetrap had been reduced to a “single step”, are twelve-fold:
This is also where evolutionists (and atheists by default) run into the dilemma of concurrency. If you take an absolutely minimalist view of a mousetrap’s construction, the 26 design features, 8 component parts, and the first 10 of the listed criteria, all must be concurrently available (perfect timing). Not a single element can be missing and there still be a functioning mousetrap. When one considers the laws of very large numbers, the odds of a mousetrap coming into unguided existence (based on the absurd assumption that all the pre-designed parts are in fact immediately available) are greater than 1 in 244, one in almost eighteen trillion (1:17,592,186,044,416). As we know, that is not how things typically work!
For Miller to argue that the individual components can be reutilized for other purposes, or other gadgets can be assembled from the parts, is simply a red herring fallacy[2] of the worst kind.
Besides, chickens, eggs, and life are all exceedingly more complicated than a simple mousetrap.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy
[2] A ‘red herring’ falls into a broad class of relevance fallacies. Unlike the straw man, which involves a distortion of the other party’s position, the red herring is a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant, diversionary tactic.
David Harrison © 2014
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