Chicken or the Egg? Only Life Begets Life

Psalm 139:13-16

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. ¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. ¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, ¹⁶ your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

This morning (3/20) my girlfriend called me on her way to work to wish me a happy birthday. Thirty-eight years old…wow how time flies. On this day of contemplating and celebrating the gift of life, my girlfriend also raised another origins of life topic: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? While the two topics—my birthday and the chicken/egg debate—might seem to be related to one another on the origins of life spectrum, the actual reason she brought it up had nothing to do with my birthday and everything to do with today being National Agriculture Day. I had no clue, but then again I am a city-boy at my roots.

As a part of National Agriculture Day, the radio channel she was listening to was discussing the chicken/egg question. From what she shared with me, there is now scientific proof that the chicken came first. This confirmation, though, really only affirms what we know by instinct and by the Word of God—only life begets life, something scientists call the Law of Biogenesis. Even the existence of the question itself—Which came first, the chicken or the egg?—reveals that we know this principle on an instinctual level: Only life begets life.

And yet, there are those, who because of their bias, rejection of God, and predisposition toward evolution and millions/billions of years, who think that somehow life can come from nonlife.

According to the theory of evolution, at some point in the distant past, millions of years ago, there was a pool of molecules that was charged by an electric current, most likely lightning, which gave rise to the first living cells. But there are a number of problems with this theory.

1. As Dr. Andrew Fabich, Associate Professor of Microbiology states, the statistical possibility of this happening is 1 in 2×10⁴⁷⁶. That number would be 2 followed by 476 zeros. That’s the odds for the first cell to come into existence. (Genesis: Paradise Lost)
2. We have never witnessed/observed life coming from nonlife. Never, ever, ever. Out of the trillions of life forms to have existed, they all came from parents. If, as evolutionists claim, this happened once, it should be naturally reoccurring. But it’s not. In fact, it’s not even reproducible in a lab, which leads us to…
3. According to Dr. Charles Jackson, Professor of Creation Science, “The best [origin of life] experiments yielded only 80% L Amino Acids and 20% D Amino Acids. That would mean that every fifth amino acid in a protein series would be fatal to all forms of life on our planet.” (Genesis: Paradise Lost)

Also, when we consider these origins of life experiments, the fact that many scientists are attempting to reproduce through human intelligence and manipulation a process they claimed happened naturally (i.e. apart from ‘intelligent design’ and ‘life’) really only betrays the very theory they so blindly cling to and are trying to prove—that life can come from nonlife. By their experiment, they are, in a way, conceding to be true what the Bible has always taught: That life comes from life; that life—even the most basic lifeforms we discover in the fossil records—shows incredible complexity, begging for intelligent design.

Think of it this way: For a computer to work, all the parts need to be there and they all need to be organized in the proper way with proper programming. If a computer were just a monitor, it wouldn’t work. If a computer were just a hard drive, it wouldn’t work. How much more so with the parts of a human body! The slow, gradual development of human body parts (or body parts of any animal, for that matter!) over the course of millions of years and millions of life forms could not happen. They all need to be there from the start, they all need to be fully developed in order for the life-form to exist.

When we consider all these things, what a miracle life is! What an incredible gift from God, “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” (Col. 1:16) All lifeforms do not share a common ancestor as evolution claims. But we all do share a common Creator.

Believing in the Law of Biogenesis—that life only begets life—is believing what the Bible says about God, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” (Jn. 1:3-4) “Jesus answered, “I am…the life.” (Jn. 14:6)

So as I contemplate my birthday and you do the same on whatever day you claim as yours, stop for a moment and marvel at the complexity of human DNA, the body’s ability to create specialized proteins to remove toxins, the wonder of a developing mind and how quickly and naturally a child picks up on a spoken language with no frame of reference, and all the gifts and talents and personalities that have been endowed by our Creator. Marvel at the intelligence in our design. We are not cosmic accidents; we were specially created by him and for him, specially known by him before we came to be. So special, in fact, that he sent his Son into the world to be our eternal Savior.