This is an age old and classic question which puzzles everyone even today. I read a recent article about this on a major news website. It had a long list of debate questions and interesting answers and finally concluded that Egg came first. The reason being….even though logically we might think chicken must lay egg for egg to come into existence, the scientific debate concluded that since life starts in basic embedded form and since egg is more basic than its evolved complicated version called chicken, egg must have come first. An egg has everything embedded with basic ingredients but which has a all the complicated DNA stored in it already. So scientists think, it’s easy for egg to show up with ingredients from nature instead of chicken showing up magically without an egg.
Even though this answer caught my attention, I still want to keep an open mind and search for more intelligent answers since it keeps your mind healthy by thinking about all the rational possibilities. I also want to share another thought. This might sound crazy but…I think single celled organisms might have evolved without egg just by using the right amount of ingredients like carbon, sunlight, water and minerals. The evolved organisms might have gone through several mutations and eventually might have grown into multi-cellular organisms over the period of time. After the evolution of complex organisms, may be those organisms started laying eggs to replicate itself or multiple itself. This will leave the conclusion that chicken came from an ancestral single celled organism and not from another chicken or egg. Well…whatever the true answer might be, these are all big questions that still interest us.
Besides, I read an article on NASA several years ago about how sexual reproduction might have taken place after significant period of evolutionary time. Till then, organisms would multiple themselves like Hydra or Potatoes. Interesting theory.
Of course….theologically speaking, we can say…god created chicken and close this question. But that will not leave room for rational constructive debate. I am a believer in higher entity that we may call God or energy or supreme soul or whatever we want. But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore theory of evolution. We all have brains not to keep it idle but to utilize it to think about a subject, ponder upon it, debate and try to understand it rationally and still keep an open mind. May be I am right. May be I am not. Or may be I am wrong in my whole analysis and assumptions. Doesn’t matter whether its right or wrong, but just the fact that we are discussing about this topic in itself makes it worthwhile to think about it. J