A Virgin Birth? Is That Even Possible?

Do You Believe in Miracles?

Years ago I interviewed an ordained church minister and was startled when he allowed that he "didn't believe in the virgin birth and all that miracle stuff." That kicked off a crisis of faith for me. If the ordained ministry didn't believe in "all that stuff," what was I doing there?

I reached out to God in despair, as if to say, "Are you really there?" And I actually received an answer in the form of a vision. A few weeks later I was confirmed in the Episcopal (Anglican) church and was pleased to meet a bishop who very much believed in the Bible and "all that miracle stuff."

More recently I listened to a sermon by an Anglican priest, who declared that the Christian faith depended on miracles. In order to be a Christian, one must believe in miracles. Without miracles, the Christian faith becomes not just improbable, but thoroughly impossible. It would make no sense.

But What About the Truth of the Laws of Science?

Hold on to your seat: you may be amazed. Science does not teach truth (least of all, "Truth" with a capital "T").  The scientific method does not deal in truth, but theorems, such as the "law" of gravity. We had (past tense) this "law" due to the great mind of Sir Isaac Newton. From the observable facts, such as the movement of the planets (can an apple be a planet?), he deduced that substances which have "mass," i.e. weight, attract one another. The moon circles the earth because it is continually falling toward the earth in its orbit. Its speed keeps it in its orbit. He further theorized that, due to this "gravity," the earth would not be a sphere but rather an oblate spheroid--fancy words meaning the earth bulges at the equator due to the speed of its rotation. Long after his death, this was found to be an observable fact.

This "law" worked quite well for the next 300 years. But then enters Einstein and "relativity." Einstein theorized that mass distorts the space-time continuum, and that what Newton thought was bodies attracting one another was instead an object falling into the "gravity well" in space-time created by a massive body. Within a few decades, with more precise measurements, it was found that Einstein's theory was a better fit to the observable fact than Newton's theory.

New "law," right? Nope. Along comes astronomer Vera Rubin, who just died this Christmas Day. She discovered the "galaxy rotation problem" which, from the facts that she observed in the 1980's proved that the "law" of gravity did not work. Basically, there were not enough stars in the galaxies with enough mass to explain the rapid orbital speeds of the outermost stars. At their observed speeds, they would simply fly apart. Gravity didn't work.

Other scientists are trying to put the Humpty-Dumpty-Gravity-Law back together again by using Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn's 1922 theory for "dark matter." If you inject enough massive "dark matter" into a galaxy (perhaps ten times as much mass as the observable stars) then you can get the Newton/Einstein view of gravity to work again. Vera Rubin was disappointed. She would rather have seen Newton's Laws modified to fit the observable facts. Dark Matter may be the correct answer, but it has not yet been demonstrates that it actually exists.

Such are the "laws" of science. They are theories that can never by proven, although the buildup of observable facts may give us high confidence in them. But if a single fact should contradict the theorem, it must be tossed out the window and another theorem proposed which explains the new fact(s).

But What About a Virgin Birth?

The technical term for a virgin birth, that is, conception without a male, is parthenogenesis. Many lower life-forms use asexual propagation of life. Some lizards and snakes are known to reproduce using females only. An then there are snakes, Komodo dragons, and some sharks that normally reproduce sexually, but have exceptions known as accidental parthenogenesis. This is what we would be looking for scientifically, but instances of this accidental process in mammals and especially humans is unknown to modern science.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, there are about 107 billion people who were ever born. If the birth of Jesus were accepted as parthenogenetic by modern science, that would give the statistical chance of a virgin birth as one in a hundred billion. I said modern science. There are a number of cases known to doctors of the middle ages in which a nun who supposedly had no access to a male gave birth to a child. In the best-documented of these cases (less than a handful) the child was a female who grew up to look exactly like her mother. This is what we would expect, for the mother lacks the male Y-chromosome.

But some women (one out of 80,000) do have a Y-chromosome, and to outwards appearance are completely normal women. However, these women lack ovaries, and generally lack a uterus. (A handful of these women have given birth from a donated egg.) No women with a Y-chromosome plus ovaries are known to science--but of course, without the genetic tools of modern science, if there were one and she gave birth to a male, no one would notice anything unusual. With all these required conditions, the odds against a virgin birth for a male child are multiplied--to perhaps one in a hundred trillion?

But wait--there's more required conditions. Biblical scholars who have studied the leap of Christianity from its Semitic-society infancy to its Greek-society exponential growth maintain that Jesus could have come at no other time than he did. Ten years earlier, or ten years later, and the societal conditions that enabled a handoff of Christianity from a Semitic monotheistic religion to a pagan-dominated society would have been impossible.

My rough guess for the odds are that such an event should occur about once per life-time of the universe. In other words, a miracle. That's my input for the sixth day of Christmas, 2016.

(This was an easy one. Try figuring the odds against turning water into wine.)

Madonna and Child