Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Solving the chicken and the egg problem

Chicken and egg problems are the result of faulty thinking; i.e. the fallacy of Monism. The Monist will never solve these problems. (e.g. in a Monistic universe there is no creator to create the chicken.) What came first? the chicken... that's the answer of the creationist. The Monist can't ever come up with an answer.

- In Monism every reduces to One. (Hence Reductionism.) This means that nothing exists outside this one. It means that all is basically one, made of one thing. (This leads to the chain of Being idea.) The famous riddle of the chicken and the egg (which I can still remember musing over as a lad of 6 or 7, on long rides in the school bus) stems from a rejection of biblical creation, and the adoption of a Monistic world view. Monism has created (pardon the pun) a great many problems that need not exist. There is no answer to man's deepest questions from within this restricted mindset.

- since we're chirping away here about eggs; imagine you're inside an egg... could you understand reality? i.e. if you had no idea of what existed outside the egg, all your ideas about reality would be wrong.

Notes;
1. 'The chicken or the egg causality dilemma arises from the expression "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Chickens hatch from eggs, but eggs are laid by chickens, making it difficult to say which originally gave rise to the other. To ancient philosophers, the question about the first chicken or egg also evoked the questions of how life and the universe in general began.[1] Cultural references to the chicken and egg intend to point out the futility of identifying the first case of a circular cause and consequence. - Wikipedia
Aristotle (384-322 BC) was puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed:
2. "If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother – which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg." The same he held good for all species, believing, with Plato, that everything before it appeared on earth had first its being in spirit." Wiki
3. Another example of the chicken and egg problem is, 'what came first, language or intelligence?'