The Paradox of Beginnings

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Etymologically, it may’ve been the chicken—at least in France, Hungary, and Germany, where the clucking sound made by hens is thought to have inspired the nursery language equivalent for “egg,” as in coco, kukó, gaggele, and gagkelein. Biologically, of course, the egg was first, as egg-laying reptiles preceded birds on the evolutionary chain. Granted, these answers merely evade the question. Even in terms of biology, to say an egg precedes a mature life form is not entirely accurate. Before she hatches from her particular shell, a hen fetus already contains within her ovaries many eggs—maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions, but at any rate, all the eggs she’ll ever have. And while the first generation of bird that was legitimately “chicken” must have hatched from an egg, that first chicken-containing egg wasn’t lain by a chicken, was it? In which case, the first chicken must have preceded the first chicken egg. Not that the first chicken is even a legitimate entity, in itself. Species distinctions are a bit like causal explanations—they entail the sorites paradox, otherwise known as the paradox of the heap, otherwise known as getting something from nothing, otherwise known as the rhetorical sleight by which our brains run our lives, by fancy, that is. Sōros means “heap” in Greek, and it’s probably worth mentioning that the chicken-egg question traces back at least as far as ancient times, which makes the etymological explanation above more or less moot. The sorites paradox should not be confused with the causality dilemma—in logical terms, chicken versus egg means, lf X is contingent on Y and Y is contingent on X, which came first? Sorites has more to do with vagueness in language, which is not to say it’s “just” a semantic problem. See here: if Y is some indefinite quantity (n) of X, like a million billion grains of sand (nX) that comprise a mound (Y), and I remove one grain, I am still dealing with a mound (nX = Y and (n-1)X = Y). So at what point, then, during my grain-by-grain raid is the mound no longer a mound? There must be one grain of sand that makes the difference between some number of X and a Y, but if there were, then we would necessarily define a heap as a particular quantity of something, which of course we don’t and we won’t, because that kind of precision would defeat the point of having a word like heap in the first place. Similarly, though more disturbingly, if l remove and replace a small part of a ship, presumably it is still the same ship. But if l remove and replace every part of the ship, is it still the same ship? If not, at what point did it become some other entity? Now, at what point did the offspring of what ever bird or birds that were breeding prior to the origin of chickens proper propagate the first chicken, proper—that is, at what point was there a first chicken? What difference finally made the difference from one generation to the next? Is there even any such thing as a chicken? A ship? A heap? Or is it the case that nothing defined in terms of its physical composition exists, as such? That is the only logical conclusion. In a backdoor way, all of this has something to do with the paradox of beginnings, which is that the concept of a beginning of beginnings, much like the concept of “nothing,” and even a little like the concept of “something,” is impossible to understand and/or to represent precisely in language, as in mathematics. If the infinite regress of causation in the universe is not infinite, if it ends instead at some singularity—a big bang—before which is nothing, not even a before