logician said:
Read Bertrand Russell's classic "Why I Am Not a Christian" for further enlightenment into the conflicts between religion and science.
I certainly recommend that everyone read
Why I Am Not a Christian, an excellent book which was one of my favorites even when I was a Christian. However, it's mostly about the superfluity and harmful effects of religion (and especially Christianity) -- more of a philosophical critique than a scientific one.
But I can't help noticing that most of the posters here don't want to touch Katzpur's question with a ten-foot pole.
For one who believes in the Virgin Birth, and especially for one who holds that belief in the context of the New Testament, the idea that half of Jesus' genetic makeup comes from Joseph seems eminently sensible to me. It would explain how it is that Jesus manages to be completely human, and it would also explain why the two New Testament writers who insist on the Virgin Birth also insist in tracing Jesus' ancestry through Joseph. (I don't think we want to refer to this as IVF, though; it would be more a matter of artificial insemination.)
I think we have four propositions on the table:
1) Katzpur's suggestion that Jesus is genetically the son of God -- that half his genetic makeup comes from his divine Father, and
2) Nehustan's suggestion that Jesus is genetically the son of Joseph.
3) Jorylore's suggestion that God created half of Jesus' genetic makeup from previously existing matter.
4) The suggestion of several Christians that we don't know and it doesn't matter.
I can think of a fifth (actually, Jorylore's suggestion made me think of it):
5) God created half of Jesus' genetic makeup
ex nihilo.
The ancients didn't know about genetics, and some of them, at least, had the idea that it was the father's seed that produced the child. The mother was pretty much just the matrix in which the seed developed. So it's easy to imagine the ancients taking a view somewhat similar to Katzpur's.
On the other hand, if one accepts the Chalcedonian view of the two natures of Christ, Katzpur's view seems problematic in the light of what we know about genetics. It seems -- to me at least -- to make Jesus not so much fully human and fully divine as a sort of human-divine hybrid. Of course, Protestants don't always consider themselves bound by conciliar definitions, and most of the Evangelicals I know embrace a number of heresies from an orthodox point of view, so what's one more?
Nehustan's suggestion -- interestingly, since Nehustan obviously doesn't accept the Chalcedonian doctrine -- seems to me much more in line with Chalcedon than Katzpur's. The idea that God created the necessary genes, either
ex nihilo or from previously existing matter, also doesn't seem to pose a problem from a Chalcedonian point of view, but it kind of leaves you hanging on the question of just what it means for Jesus to be fully human.
James' suggestion that we don't know and we don't need to know is the only answer possible from James' perspective; an Orthodox Christian is on very shaky ground when he proposes dogmatic novelties. Yet it must be admitted that the answer is unsatisfying. The Holy Fathers concerned themselves with such questions as whether the Theotokos remained not just a technical virgin but physically intact and whether or not the holy gifts of the Eucharist were physically digested, and we can easily imagine that if they had known anything about genetics they would have produced a whole literature on just this question that Katzpur has raised.
I dislike two of the kinds of answers we've seen on this thread:
1) The suggestion of some Christians that it's an impudent question. It's not impudent at all; it's a perfectly reasonable question, and Christians ought to grant that it's a reasonable question even if they don't have a definitive answer to it. It's all very well to say it's a miracle, but what manner of miracle is it? If you don't know -- and you obviously don't -- wouldn't it be more becoming to say something along the lines of, "It hasn't pleased the Lord to reveal this to us" than to lash out at the question? Don't you kind of wonder, yourself, what the answer might be?
2) The suggestion of some non-Christians that the lack of a satisfying answer is an embarrassment to the Christian religion. Whatever the answer might be, it would be an answer about a miraculous event, and you know very well that you consider one miracle as absurd as the next, so what does it matter what the Christian answer, if any, is?
Neither am I at all certain that the idea of the Virgin Birth sprang from Christianity's unhealthy attitude toward sex. It easy to see how that doctrine could reinforce those unhealthy attitudes, but Christians may well have imagined a Virgin Birth before they imagined that virginity was preferable to marriage, and they certainly imagined a Virgin Birth long before Augustine imported his peculiar psychological baggage into Christian thought.
Personally, I don't believe in the Virgin Birth at all, but if I did, I'd find Nehustan's suggestion the most satisfying.
Even more satisfying would be a sensible admission that there's no more need to believe in a literal Virgin Birth than in a literal six-day Creation, but I understand that for most Christians that's too much to ask.