One of the best selling books at the moment is The God Delusion by the geneticist Richard Dawkins. Leaving aside that many have been disappointed by it, some describing it as being more of a rant than a reasoned critique of faith, his central premise is that belief in God is a delusion. In that sense the book does what it says on the tin. We therefore gather tonight because we are deluded and if we applied true scientific methodology we would enjoy the starlight and emotional atmosphere but forget all the greeting of the maker of the universe nonsense.

If we want to we can muster another book about God, called The Story of God, by another world leading scientist, appropriately at Christmas the fertility expert Robert Winston. This scientist is a devout Jew and his book is extremely well researched. In it he charts the religious quest and joins the shepherds in bowing down in awe and wonder at the mystery at the heart of the universe. So any shallow claims that science and religion are necessarily at odds with each other are shot to pieces by merely placing these two books side by side. Some scientists are devout believers and some clear disbelievers.

That noted the Christmas story does pose some brain teasers. Right up there at the top is how we square the corners of Jesus’ conception when we know that conception normally involves the coming together of two parts, from male and female. We know that women are not just the oven to cook male seed, though that is how the ancient world viewed conception. With this in mind, does Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary make any sense today? Parthenogenesis, where a female gives birth without a male being involved, always produces a female offspring because of the absence of the Y chromosome.

Well, that is what I thought until I read about the komodo dragons at Chester Zoo. Two female komodo dragons have become pregnant without a male being involved. One of them is due to give birth around now and a spokesperson for the zoo said “We will be on the look out for shepherds, wise men and an unusually bright star”. These are not the first, others have produced male offspring. Female komodo dragons carry within them the two chromosomes required and so can produce male offspring without a male involved. It has an evolutionary advantage in being able to swim to a new island and start a fresh colony of the species.

Now it is quite a leap from komodo dragons to a young girl in a backwater of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. What these komodo dragons don’t do is tell us how the virgin birth could happen; the species differences are so great and involve a different scheme of chromosomes - the WZ scheme. But, that said, what appeared to be impossible science has opened up in a tantalising way. We don’t know everything that there is to know and these reptiles create a doubt in our otherwise sceptical certainties. Science can feed faith as well as challenge it.

In short the virgin birth either involves science we currently know nothing of or it is a powerful ancient myth, and of course people of devout faith go for both of those. Any miraculous activity, by definition, at the point when it becomes physical has to work through the manipulation of the science to actually work otherwise it just can’t happen because our world is physical.

Which way we jump, the virgin birth being a profound metaphor of something mystical at the heart of life or it being an actual manipulation of the chromosomes by a miraculous event depends on where we start from. If our starting point is that the world is completely and solely material, that God is completely outside it and ring fenced from it, then it makes no sense to talk of Jesus being divine and human. The gap to be travelled is just so great. The virgin birth is just a metaphor drawing on other ancient stories. If our starting point is the mystery of God, the mystery that is life rather than nothing, a mystery that infuses every aspect of our living, then God being focussed in a particular person, at a particular time and place, is a possibility our imagination can be open to. Jesus then is seen as a focussing, an expression of the reality at the heart of everything - he is as John says in our gospel reading the eternal Word that was in the beginning come among us full of grace and truth (John 1:1-14).

This traditional view requires science that we don’t know about yet, though developments in embryology are expanding our knowledge of the possibilities. The affirmation that Jesus was ‘born of the Virgin Mary’ expresses that there is something about him that touches the building blocks of life; that there is something about the building blocks of life that is touched by God. That there is anything at all, rather than nothing, let alone the intelligent, sentient life that we enjoy and share, is miraculous enough. Every birth is a wonder to behold.

For me much of this hinges on the resurrection and in its light we begin to wonder how he came to be. That is how the gospel writers approached it too; they came at the story through the experience of Easter, which set them off wondering. In truth we don’t know what happened because we weren’t there and there is no way of returning to find out. The meaning we attach to Jesus, though, has to touch reality at some point otherwise it is ultimately empty and just stands alongside fairy tales. This touching reality is where our two scientists profoundly disagree. To Richard Dawkins all God-talk is about fairy tales. To Robert Winston it is not and he marvels at the wonder of God’s world.

So we have two wise men this Christmas who fundamentally disagree about the place of God in the world. Perhaps the third brings a perspective we have yet to uncover and in the fullness of time when all shall be revealed we will find out for certain what it is we affirm in this Christmas faith and how it came to be. Until then, faith plays an important part. This festival affirms at its root that the God who made all that there is refuses to keep a distance. The world is alive with God, a wonder that we see in every birth and life. From that angle the mystery of the incarnation, of the Word made flesh and dwelling among us, is not only an open possibility it is a celebration of God being at the heart of every life including yours and mine. The child in the manger is truly a wonder to behold. Through him we gaze on the mystery that is anything rather than nothing, that is light rather than darkness and hope rather than despair. This child is the point of everything, however the science works out. No wonder angels sang in praise of his birth and tonight we join them.

“Glory to God in the highest
and peace to his people on earth.” Amen.

© Ian Black 2006

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