Reasoning the virgin birth

A very special person asked me about “how to believe that Jesus was born without coming from sex” and I didn’t have an answer. Actually, I realized that I never really thought about it.

I mean, he’s right, it doesn’t sound convincing not even to me.

So I messaged a friend who has been Christian for much longer to see if he had an answer. He said it's something that can't really be explained. It's a miracle, so you just have to believe it.

This answer is still not convincing.

So I tried to find an answer myself because this special person told me that the way I think resonates with him, and I really want him to feel touched by this book the same way I was.

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Imagine you are God. Imagine you want to write a book to show people what the perfect human life looks like.

How should this story start?

One possibility would be to begin the story the way every human story begins: through sex.

But the explanation that started making sense to me was this: if I'm trying to write about the perfect model for humanity, perhaps his story shouldn't begin like everyone else's. Giving Jesus a unique origin immediately signals that this isn't merely the biography of another person, but the story of the ideal human. Maybe his birth is presented this way to communicate, from the very beginning, that Jesus is meant to embody a kind of perfection unlike any other human being.

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Writing on a parallel reasoning, I think the main point to absorb is the abstraction of what the author of the Bible tried to convey.

It’s like mathematics, ironically:

You learn at school the idea of a circumference. Can someone ever draw a perfect circumference? No, because our physical world has imperfections, so the concept of circumference really only exists in our minds. But you still accept the idea of a circumference. You've never encountered one in the physical world, yet you still believe the concept exists.

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Another random parallel thought:

One way I started thinking about God was through the idea of an axiom in mathematics. You begin with an assumption, and everything else is derived from it.

What fascinates me about the Bible is that it tries to describe how to live while taking into account aspects of human existence that mathematics can't easily explain: emotions, desires, contradictions, and irrationality. Maybe that's why the book feels so unintuitive.

I tested living without believing in God for several years. My axiom was that He didn’t exist. I couldn't prove He didn't exist, but I lived for years as though He didn't. And I felt lonely, empty inside.

Then I changed my axiom and started trying to build the rest. I don't have all the answers and will probably never be able to prove He exists either, but with this axiom I've been feeling better, and the more I reflect on the Bible, the more it makes sense. Every worldview starts somewhere. To me, what Christians call faith started to resemble accepting an initial axiom and then exploring what follows from it.