Jesus according to sources outside the Bible. Unreasonable Faith: A reasonable blog on atheism, religion, science, and skepticism. Is it possible for a virgin to give birth? - By Melinda Wenner. During the holidays, Christians celebrate the birth of a human baby to his virginal mother. We know that female wasps, fish, birds, and lizards can produce healthy offspring without having sex, but what about people? Are natural human virgin births possible? Yes, in theory. However, a number of rare events would have to occur in close succession, and the chances of these all happening in real life are virtually zero. For a virgin to get pregnant, one of her eggs would have to produce, on its own, the biochemical changes indicative of fertilization, and then divide abnormally to compensate for the lack of sperm DNA.
That's the easy part: These two events occur in the eggs or egg precursor cells of one out of every few thousand women. An egg will only start dividing once it senses a spike in cellular calcium. Both of these events—the calcium spike and the division mistake—could occur as the result of random dysfunctions or genetic defects. There's a way around this problem, too. The Improbability of God. The Improbability of God by Richard Dawkins from Free Inquiry, Volume 18, Number 3. Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name.
Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his name. Why do people believe in God? So ran Paley's argument, and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful and sensitive people discover for themselves at some stage in their childhood. What do all objects that look as if they must have had a designer have in common? This is not a circular argument, by the way. Of all the trillions of different ways of putting together the atoms of a telescope, only a minority would actually work in some useful way. We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too complicated -- too statistically improbable -- to have come into being by sheer chance. Eyes and wings cannot spring into existence in a single step. Frequently Asked Questions about the Catholic Church. Brought to you by The Augustine Club at Columbia University Up to the Apologetics Toolkit THE CATHOLIC CHURCH is the world's largest, and Christianity's oldest, religious body.
Her 860 million members inhabit the width and breadth of the earth, comprising almost one-fifth of the total human population. She is far and away the most popular religious concept the world has ever known. Paradoxically, however, the Catholic Church is also the world's most controversial religious concept. Catholic belief is different, too different to be orthodox, say Protestants and Christian cultists. The right place to go for information about Catholic belief--in fact the only place to go for complete and authoritative information--is the Catholic Church herself. Contents God Why do Catholics believe that the universe and all life in it was created by, and is governed by, an all-powerful Spirit Being called God? The Catholic Church The Pope Sacraments Scripture and Tradition Salvation Mary Purgatory Confession Priests. Online Parallel Bible.