Dr Paul Allen

In his best-selling book God is Not Great, the late atheist Christopher Hitchens argues that a Virgin Birth is scientifically impossible: “In any case, parthenogenesis is not possible for human mammals.” According to many atheists, this point is enough to end the discussion. A virgin birth would violate science, and since science has more credibility than religion, we can simply dismiss the miraculous story. Case closed. And yet the case is not that simple. In one sense, this atheist criticism is correct: humans, like other mammals, are normally incapable of parthenogenesis (a word that derives from Greek words meaning “virgin” and “birth”). However, this normative observation in no way proves that God could not cause a woman to conceive a child in her womb without the involvement of a human father. A Modern Example In a 2013 peer-reviewed periodical, two scientists in India explain that parthenogenesis, which they define as the process where “growth and development of em