Atheists believe in the Virgin Birth

I often hear an argument from unbelievers that “Christianity is wrong because the virgin birth is scientifically impossible.” I wish to provide a quick response.

In 1999, Dr. Scott Todd of Kansas State University wrote in Nature magazine that “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.” To quote Richard Lewontin (Professor of Zoology and Biology at Harvard University), “we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. … we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations … Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. ” Atheism is a naturalistic (scientific laws account for everything) and a materialistic (the only fundamental reality is physical matter) system of belief.

Christianity is not a naturalistic religion – I have zero interest in defending a naturalistic religion where it is believed that scientific laws can sufficiently account for all phenomena. This century, I will die; next century, the last person who ever meets me will die; eventually, the entire human race will die out. If Christ has not been raised from the dead – life is meaningless, utterly meaningless.

Very God of very God Who is begotten not made came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary and was made man – this is not something I can repeat with the correct chemical elements in even the worlds most advanced science laboratory. A Christian will confess “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”, not “Everything God can do man can do.” Christians and unbelievers agree that the virgin birth is impossible in a godless and naturalistic universe – and we should also agree that Christians don’t claim otherwise!

Therefore, the flipside of that the virgin birth presupposes the existence of God is that denying the virgin birth is actually a proxy argument for denying the existence of God. In the same manner that denying that Jesus made the blind see and the lame walk, turned water into wine and multiplied five loaves of bread into enough bread to feed five thousand people, and rose again from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God the Father are proxy arguments for denying the existence of God. God the Father sent God the Son and Jesus was conceived by the agency of the Holy Spirit.

Don’t believe the preceding sentence? I say “virgin birth”; you want to respond “do you even science?”

If you consider yourself an atheist or an agnostic, you do actually believe in the virgin birth! Actually you believe in several virgin births, just without the virgins. Like a virgin birth without a virgin Mary. Just lots of them. Even if you think the nineteen paragraphs in this sentence are absurd (I know what I just wrote), please contain your disagreement until you finish the next three paragraphs.

If naturalism is true, you would have no basis to believe in naturalism – in fact it would be entirely unjustifiable to be a naturalist. In a materialistic or naturalistic world, the occurrence of thinking would merely be the occurrence of chemical responses or processes that are entirely subject to the laws of chemistry and physics. Every thought you have would be predetermined by factors in the physical world and the physical brain. In fact, human thinking would be part of the physical world and its operation according to the laws of nature.

To think or to say would always be the functioning of the laws of nature, in which the laws of physics and chemistry necessitated your brain think as it did – thinking would be as mechanical as the laws of solubility or Boyle’s law. Accordingly, the same laws of nature that made you believe as you do made me believe and say the opposite. The naturalist cannot account for why or that we disagree, or even prove that we disagree. In a naturalistic universe, saying “I disagree, I think you are wrong” would be identical to saying “I disagree with perspiration” or “I think circulation is wrong.” Can you disagree with sodium chloride or think silver nitrate is wrong? You cannot justifiably disagree with me, while believing my reasoning is merely a chemical process. Either of us could believe anything and justify it as a chemical process (in the same category as capillaries transferring nutrients) that cannot be false (two plus three equals nine would be false).

You cannot justifiably disagree with Jesus either; you and I must listen to He who said “I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life?

This brings me to the “virgin births” of atheism:

Firstly, the virgin birth of the immaterial generally. In his lecture “The Beginning of Time”, Stephen Hawking wrote “At this time, the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe, would have been on top of itself. The density would have been infinite. It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang.”

Materialists believe that the universe is material and all existence was once contained in one singularity. Such a cosmology cannot account the existence of anything immaterial. Moreover, if human beings eventually evolved from the materials contained in this singularity, disagreeing with me is as sensible as disagreeing with “the matter in the universe”. Tell me when I get to an element that can hold a belief that is “incorrect”. Hydrogen? Helium? Lithium? … Thorium? Protactinium? Uranium? Did I miss the answer? The immaterial cannot exist in a materialistic or naturalistic universe – in practise, you cannot even justifiably be in disagreement while maintaining a mutable or materialist cosmology.

Secondly, the virgin birth of the soul particularly. Do trees have spirits? A similar question would be “what was the immaterial part of the primordial soup?” In 2006, Carl Zimmer opined in the New York Times that “Evolutionary biologists generally agree that humans and other living species are descended from bacterialike ancestors.” What is the immaterial part of bacteria? Can bacteria be in error in intellectual debate?

The very occurrence of thinking precludes naturalism. The only way that any belief can be right where another belief is wrong is if there is an immaterial part to man – the immaterial part of man is what Christians call the human soul. Human thinking cannot exist in a purely materialistic universe, for such presupposes the immaterial, which cannot exist upon a materialistic cosmology. In atheism, human thinking popped into existence from nowhere.

Thirdly, the virgin birth of a human being. I believe my atheistic friends exist, and I sincerely hope that they believe they exist too. If you think that the Christian belief in the virgin birth is crazy, how crazy must it be to believe that a human being came into existence not only without a biological father but also without a biological mother and apart from the supernatural intervention of God? Or, imagine if I started a new religion and taught that there is no God but once upon a time a person emerged from the grains of sand on the sea shore.

Yet, this is comparatively what atheists believe: random emergence from sand is as scientific as the evolutionary view of human origin. The Christian and the atheist both believe that Richard Dawkins exists. It happens that the Christian among us believes he naturally descended from only human ancestors, while the atheist among us believes that he naturally descended from countless virgin ancestors – they believe mankind evolved from less complex lifeforms, and non-living life before that.

Now apply this virgin origination to every human being. As human beings are not chemical oneisms like a slab of lead, or as simple as a still complex unicellular bacteria, but the information in human deoxyribonucleic acid requires enzymes to be read but the instructions to build the enzymes are on the deoxyribonucleic acid, wow does materialism require some implausible and concurrent virgin births of living materials. Remember, we already agreed that “Christians and unbelievers agree that the virgin birth is impossible in a godless and naturalistic universe.”

Fourthly, the virgin birth of the universe out of nothing. Human beings aren’t the only organisms in existence. In fact, I’ve been informed by many misguided atheists that there are so many different animals that they couldn’t even fit on Noah’s ark! This amounts to numerous not only animals but also plants and the various supposed biological origins and evolutions of each coming into existence out of nothing. This sounds more like a scene from Gremlins or a page from the Princess and the Frog than an exhibit of credible science.

Brian Koberlein is an astrophysicist and a Physics Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. Commenting on the origin of the universe, Koberlein wrote that “It is also possible that asking what came before the big bang is much like asking what is north of the North Pole. What looks like a beginning in need of a cause may just be due to our own perspective. We like to think of effects always having a cause, but the Universe might be an exception. The Universe might simply be. Because.”

Does God exist, which means that God is omnipotent and did graciously bring the Virgin Birth to pass? Or does the immaterial not exist and you want to disagree with my chemical processes? Perhaps, “because” saying the virgin birth is scientifically impossible is a convenient way of saying “Because I don’t want God to exist.”