Babbling in the Face of Miracles

There is a miracle that strikes closer to home for us than plants and seeds--though it contains some of the same connotations.  This is the miracle of conception.

Of course conception involves a different set of notions than seed-germination, since the vegetal analog of human conception is plant fertilization, not sowing and/or growing of seeds.  Yet it scarcely need be said that the Bible speaks of offspring as the embodiment of a man's "seed"--a rather strained concept, in that half of that offspring's "seed" quality comes from the mother.  Add to this the sordid fact that the Bible holds sometimes to the notion that a man's "seed" is properly his to the extent that the woman is more or less suitable--think Ishmael and Isaac, or more tragically, think of the myriad children of Biblical males cast off because the mothers were pagan.

We cannot even begin to think of the arising of new human beings without, one, entertaining the notion of the miraculous and, two, lurching in the same moment into insupportable ideas about what would constitute a miracle, and what would not.  We can say that it is a miracle that new life begins with the joining of the sperm and the egg, but even in that instant we will slip into thinking that "new life" means "a new life"--a single organism, which indeed is what we must call a single fertilized ovum.  Give us a moment more and we might talk of a moment of instantaneous ensoulment--if we are theologically so inclined--yet that leaves us unprepared to answer about the instantaneous ensoulment that would be involved in one or the other halves of a conceptus splitting to become twins.

Of course it might always be said that God knows such a splitting will occur, and provides the two (or three or more) souls necessary within the ovum.  Of course, then, it might also be said that God provides souls in mystical habitation of as-yet-unjoined gametes (for surely that would not be beyond God) but then we can scarcely defend ourselves against the charge that we are doing little more than babbling.

On the other hand, babbling in the face of miracles does not really seem all that strange, now does it?