God created animals at the beginning of the world

The argument

This position takes its answer from the order of events set out in Genesis. According to that book of the Old Testament, God made all the living creatures on the fifth day of creation, including "every winged fowl after his kind". A chicken — or at least whatever the predecessor is to the modern chicken — is a winged fowl, so on this reading it falls within that category and God must have created it on the fifth day, as a finished creature rather than as an egg. The sequence in the text is what carries the argument. Only after those creatures existed did God instruct them to "be fruitful and multiply". The instruction presupposes its audience: it is addressed to living animals capable of receiving it and acting on it, which means the chicken had to be there in its full form before any egg could follow. Proponents read the passage as settling the dilemma directly — the chicken must have been created first, in its full form as a living creature, and then, upon being instructed to multiply, eventually laid an egg in order to reproduce. The wider principle drawn from this concerns the relationship between creation and reproduction. God gave the first batch of chickens the capacity to reproduce, but all this was contingent on the formation of life occurring first and foremost; the capacity is a property of something already alive, not the means by which it came to be alive. Therefore life must come first. On this account the point generalises well beyond chickens: no matter what, creation and birth will always occur before continuation and multiplication, because birth and new beginnings are the most sacred part of life. An egg is a mechanism of continuation, and continuation cannot precede the thing it continues.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Not every word in the Bible must be taken literally. We already know that homo sapiens as they exist today are not the same as the original homo habilis and homo Erectus that roamed the Earth. There is direct scientific proof that these types of humans existed before us and were drastically different from us in terms of genetic traits. God creating winged fowls on the fifth day of creation could be a symbol for something else, such as God's power to create and imagine worlds far beyond what humans are capable of ever conceiving. It is not meant to actually allude to the creation of all winged fowls that we see today being created immediately on the fifth day of the universe existing. Or, the winged fowls that were initially created could have been a predecessor to the chicken that the first egg eventually genetically mutated off of, but that doesn’t mean the domesticated chicken we commonly see today must have been part of that pack of winged fowls.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The words in the Bible could have been an allegory or a metaphor, not something meant to be taken literally.