How did gods survive before mortals?

[Dr.Zero]

Suppose the criteria is “a chicken is any animal that can mate with any of the population of existing live chickens and have viable offspring more than 5% of the time.”

If that were the criteria we chose, then I’d imagine there were many many generations where a lot of chickens had non-chicken offspring, and a lot of non-chickens had chicken offspring.

Probably.
But I can't see your point.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's not that the chicken is an abstract concept or that we can't -more or less arbitrarily- set some parameters (even regarding DNA) to call a living being a "chicken".
It's that we enter in the paradox of the heap territory, so we have a difficult time to accept even the idea to set such parameters.

If it walks like a chicken, flies like a chicken, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, what is it?

[Schroeswald]

If it walks like a chicken, flies like a chicken, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, what is it?

Charles Dickens, duh

[KorvinStarmast]

Charles Dickens, duh

Charles Duckins?

[Dr.Zero]

If it walks like a chicken, flies like a chicken, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, what is it?

An ingredient for a new recipe.

[Emmit Svenson]

Once upon a time, a race of alien wizards coalesced out of the astral plane.

Like other mortals to come, many of these alien wizards wanted to become immortal. They came up with a way to crowdsource their magic, and created a world full of mortals who would believe in them and worship them, thereby fueling their immortality. There was just one snarl...

Over time, the beliefs of created mortals about these alien wizards affected them in diverse ways, transforming their personalities and even their memories.

[KorvinStarmast]

Either that, or the Xel'Naga created them in a petri dish and they are yet another failed experiment run amok.

[RatElemental]

Suppose the criteria is “a chicken is any animal that can mate with any of the population of existing live chickens and have viable offspring more than 5% of the time.”

If that were the criteria we chose, then I’d imagine there were many many generations where a lot of chickens had non-chicken offspring, and a lot of non-chickens had chicken offspring.

This definition has a pretty glaring flaw, in that it uses the word it's defining in the definition. It's akin to defining an anvil as a thing that is shaped like an anvil.

This is a pretty fundamental problem to categorizing life forms, it's hard to define things.

But I’m certainly not some sort of evolutionary biologist. I’m just some guy thinking “Huh, Here’s a wacky hypothesis. I wonder if it’s true? Oh, no matter. I’ll type it into the internet and let someone else do the work of proving it wrong. That seems like a good use of everyone’s time!”

And as someone whose hobby is being pedantic on the internet, I salute you for generating content to be pedantic about.

[Goblin_Priest]

It's not that the chicken is an abstract concept or that we can't -more or less arbitrarily- set some parameters (even regarding DNA) to call a living being a "chicken".
It's that we enter in the paradox of the heap territory, so we have a difficult time to accept even the idea to set such parameters.

Well, those two are essentially the same. The paradox of the heap comes from the fact that a "heap" is an abstract concept that is poorly defined. Which is what I said "species" were. Which is both applicable to the species' evolution through time (when did it stop being something else and then become a chicken?) and at any specific time (which individuals are chickeny enough to be considered chicken?).

Suppose the criteria is “a chicken is any animal that can mate with any of the population of existing live chickens and have viable offspring more than 5% of the time.”

If that were the criteria we chose, then I’d imagine there were many many generations where a lot of chickens had non-chicken offspring, and a lot of non-chickens had chicken offspring.

But I’m certainly not some sort of evolutionary biologist. I’m just some guy thinking “Huh, Here’s a wacky hypothesis. I wonder if it’s true? Oh, no matter. I’ll type it into the internet and let someone else do the work of proving it wrong. That seems like a good use of everyone’s time!”

Also, maybe gods can also get their energy from the radioactive decay of unobtanium, but the multiverse ran out of unobtanium a billion billion years ago.

As another said, needing the term in the definition of said term is problematic. Furthermore, many species can crossbreed, and produce viable offspring. Many species can't or can barely produce viable offspring. And do you only consider natural breeding, or artificial breeding? Because humans can toy with chromosomes to make novel fertile hybrids, in plants at least. And animal breeding has resulted in animals (like broad breasted white turkeys) that have difficulty breeding naturally.

Either that, or the Xel'Naga created them in a petri dish and they are yet another failed experiment run amok.

Obviously, the Xel'Naga made the egg-laying dinosaurs, and Amon's taint turned them into chickens.

[GreatWyrmGold]

First off, having that kind of ontological paradox (where gods couldn't have existed without mortals, and mortals only exist because of gods) is fairly mild as far as mythology is concerned. Taking Greek mythology as an example, I can think of two bigger ontological paradoxes off the top of my head. First, the Gigantomachy seems to have taken place before humanity existed, but was won by Heracles, who was born of a human mother. Second and clearer, Hephaestus built a golden dog to protect baby Zeus, who is Hephaestus's father.

Second...if I had to make up a semi-specific "Gods were X before they fed on mortals" possibility, I'd draw on the mythological motif of creating the world from the dead body of a great (usually serpentine) monster representing primordial chaos. The gods drew sustenance from that monster somehow, perhaps being its servants who it willingly gave some of its power. But the monster abused its power over the gods, as so often happens, and they came together to overthrow the monster and make a world like the one we know.
I assume most of the gods in the modern pantheons weren't alive then—partly because that was a lot of worlds ago and that's plenty of time for gods to starve and be replaced, but mostly because it would be super weird for Tiamat specifically to participate in that kind of thing.


EDIT:

Suppose the criteria is “a chicken is any animal that can mate with any of the population of existing live chickens and have viable offspring more than 5% of the time.”

If that were the criteria we chose, then I’d imagine there were many many generations where a lot of chickens had non-chicken offspring, and a lot of non-chickens had chicken offspring.

But I’m certainly not some sort of evolutionary biologist. I’m just some guy thinking “Huh, Here’s a wacky hypothesis. I wonder if it’s true? Oh, no matter. I’ll type it into the internet and let someone else do the work of proving it wrong. That seems like a good use of everyone’s time!”

Might as well weigh in on this, since evolutionary biology is the closest thing I have to a specialty.
For strict definitions of "chicken," you're basically right. In fact, this very issue is the source of a lot of confusion around specifically human evolution. Some anti-evolutionists (which apparently is a word) point to how scientists classify and reclassify hominid specimens, not realizing that this is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was true.

If we had fossils of every ancestor of humankind over the past, say, three million years and tried to classify every single one into a specific species, it would be a nightmare. Let's say we organized the specimens into a great family tree. Well, at one end we'd have Homo sapiens, at the other end we'd have australopithecines, and somewhere in the middle we'd need to figure out where Australopithecus turns to Homo—and, for that matter, where Homo habilis turns to erectus to heidelbergensis to neanderthalis and sapiens. (Also, there are multiple species of Australopithecus, but there's no consensus on which evolved into Homo, so the chain stops back there.)

Right away we've got a problem, because as we now know, H. neanderthalis and H. sapiens interbred occasionally. Even if we ignore that, if we classified every specimen, there mathematically must have been at least two Australopithecus whose children were Homo, and the same for each species transition. But this is ludicrous; in any population, an individual will resemble its immediate ancestors and descendants more closely than it resembles other members of the population, because that's what heredity means. So by necessity, because species change into other species over time, there would necessarily need to be H. sapiens which resemble some H. heidelbergensis more closely than they resemble other H. sapiens. Combine that with how small the physical differences between different hominid species are, and it's no surprise that scientists would argue over the taxonomic designation of individual hominid specimens!

...wait, what were we talking about? Oh, right, chickens. If "chicken" was defined in evolutionary terms, the first chicken would need to be hatched from an egg laid by non-chickens. But the egg would still count as an egg, so it came first.

[rbetieh]

Guys, this was all solved in the other thread "The Hammer"

The outer planes are powered by souls (aka Ethereal Commoners). There is a fixed amount and those replenish always to their fixed amount. The "gods" were very powerful wizards that figured out how to generate new souls and thus expand their planes. First you grow a commoner, and when it's ripe, you convert it to an Ethereal Commoner and move it to another plane.

So the "gods" got together, took a portion of their Ethereal Commoner power and created a Commoner Garden, to grow more power.

For some reason, they allow the Commoners to apportion themselves based on their own life experiences instead of sharing the total equally, which is why the "gods" are always fighting each other....

[ijuinkun]

Thor established in his exposition dump that the Outer Planes are collections of ideas, and thus souls gravitate towards whichever one most closely resembles themselves, barring specific effort from Outsiders or Gods to redirect them--an example of such redirection being the auto-assigning of Dwarves to Hel if they die without honor.