Eggs

Eggs have certainly been in the news lately. Prices have flown the coop due to the bird flu and the euthanizing of some fifty million chickens, but the good news for egg connoisseurs is that the free-range brown eggs, with richer yolks, now cost less than the regular supermarket white eggs.

The price increase may have kept some from making it to breakfast tables, but it didn’t keep 30,000 hard-boiled eggs from making it to the White House lawn for the Easter Egg Roll. Those who won the lottery, and were invited to attend, were given the opportunity to decorate 4,500 of the eggs before the roll began, but no religious symbols were allowed. Maybe they should just call it an egg roll.

So how did the egg come to be associated with Easter anyway? In many ancient cultures eggs were seen as symbols of new life, fertility, and the arrival of spring, and the church saw in eggs a picture of the resurrection. The shell could be seen as a tomb, and a chick coming out of an egg could represent Jesus emerging from the tomb.

That may answer how the egg came to be connected with Easter, but there’s an even bigger question about the egg that needs to be answered. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

This is not a new question, but a philosophical conundrum that Aristotle first wrestled with in the 4th century BC. The Australian Academy of Science, however, claims to have finally solved it.

“It’s that old riddle that’s sparked many arguments through the ages: was it the chicken or the egg that came first? It’s such a tricky question because you need a chicken to lay an egg, but chickens come from eggs, leaving us with an intractable circle of clucky, feathery life that apparently has no clear starting point.”

Their answer is found in the supposed evolution of eggs. But as is coming more clear in scientific circles every day, evolution simply raises more questions than it answers.

The correct answer is that neither came first. God did.

God Bless, Rick