Many would argue this already occurred with Jesus, born from the virgin Mary.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29068477.
Most non-Christians, even if they believe Jesus was a true historical figure, do not believe that his mother was a virgin.
My only point was exactly that it's not a great idea to take a religious experience and analyze it as an example of a basic biological phenomenon.
One would think that YNews would be the most appropriate place for questioning blind faith in absurd claims.
Do you have any sort of statistics to back this up? A survey of some kind? From my own experience, most people who are Christian subscribe to the lifestyle and teachings, but do not accept 100% of the bible as truth.
[EDIT] It's part of the Nicene Creed, even. I think it's fair to say that if most church-goers at most Christian churches told a priest or pastor that they didn't believe that God miracle'd a baby into the Virgin Mary, it would, at the very least, give the priest or pastor a frowny face and/or evoke a "wait... what exactly do you think we're up to, here?" reaction.
[0] https://www.pewforum.org/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-...
The virgin birth of Jesus is an article of faith and dogma for Catholicism, itself a major branch of Christianity.
Tbh that whole argument is always kinda weird: If those people don't believe in the whole thing, why are they members in a church about it? That's pretty much the only statistic you need.
Usually they inherit the religion from their parents. They grow up with the church as family so even if they don't believe in the tenets/beliefs they still participate.
Most Christians that have spent the time to consider what it means for God to manifest a miracle fairly explicitly accept that that necessarily involves some physical sequence of events, potentially leveraging underlying capacities which in time and space predate the event which God, being all-knowing and existing outside of time and space, may have created for the express purpose of that specific miracle.
And most of the rest of Christians would probably dismiss the mechanical question as irrelevant for miracles, preferring to ask “why” rather than “how”.
That hasn't been my experience. I don't know about "most" Christians -- I wouldn't dare presume to speak for anyone in the US, for example -- but every Catholic I've spoken with (I live in a majorly Catholic country) believes in the entirely miraculous virgin birth of Jesus.
I think the phrasing "most Christians that have spent the time to consider [...]" is unfortunate; it reads like "every Christian which believes [this thing] believes [this thing]". Or it makes Christians who do believe in the miraculous birth without a prior physical setup to be somehow less thinking Christians.
Do note I'm an atheist myself so I certainly don't believe in miracles, either direct or indirect; I've no dog in this race.
Sure. I’m a Catholic and I believe that.
It’s also a non-explanation that doesn't actually rule out any particular physical process occurring as part of the manifestation of the miracle.
Other than things like the routine transubstantiation of the elements of the eucharist, where a defined part of the miracle is the absence of any physical manifestation of it occurring [0], that's pretty typical of miracles.
[0] Why doesn't the bread and wine that miraculously becomes the body and blood of Christ taste like flesh and blood? Well, because it miraculously also retains all the physical properties of bread and wine...
I'm not a Catholic, but I figured that most people interpreted the bread and wine as symbolic.
(It isn't totally unknown for XX people to be phenotypically male, and it'd fit with him having no kids, but really this seems like a needlessly complicated backstory for Jesus.)
Now with Horace and Isis it's quite different. Isis was a virgin and Horace was a falcon, so I'm really not sure how that worked.
Paul's Letter to the Internetans: Chapter 1, Verse 1.