This has been making the rounds on Facebook:

I have a real problem having to hold my tongue when people talk about their god “creating life”, like having a baby is a genuine miracle. It’s not.  We know how it works, so it cannot be a “miracle”.

The idea that a god creates life is flawed at several points:

Life is not created at conception.  The egg is already alive; the sperm is already alive.  Together they combine to begin the cell division that will form a new human zygote, embro, fetus, person.  But that is not the creation of Life.  It is merely the start of a new human body, a human life.  Comprehensive sex ed would remove all the silly notions about this part of it.

Sure, making babies is “fun”, it is wonderful and awesome, and not everybody gets to do it. And that’s where the idea of “the miracle of birth” likely comes from — since not everybody gets pregnant it “must” be some god or goddess favoring a particular couple, “entrusting” them with the care of a new life.  That’s just nonsensical superstitious bullshit from a time when people didn’t know how babies are made.

First, there is no god or goddess involved.  Life IS.  Life doesn’t need to be created.  We haven’t unlocked all the answers for abiogenesis, but we are coming ever-closer to find out how life began on earth. Current speculation includes the possibility of a living organism travelling to earth on a meteor. this has merit since we know that all the necessary elements for sustaining life were formed by the death of other stars.  Life is passed from one living thing to its own offspring.  No ‘creation’ involved.

Second, crediting a god or goddess with creating this or that baby requires that there must also be a god or goddess blamed when couples cannot conceive.  It is simply cruel for those who can’t have a child to be forced to consider there is a god or goddess who doesn’t see them fit and worthy. No god worthy of the name, much less deserving of worship, would be so cruel as to pick and choose without rhyme or reason.

Third, considering the number of truly bad and undeserving parents, it is clear that no rational god would entrust a tiny child with such fucked up people, while turning a cruel and deaf ear to couples who very much want and deserve a child.

People who follow superstition and believe babies are a miracle are simply ignorant and superstitious. Or they don’t know that “miracle” means something that cannot be explained, something defying the laws of physics and the natural world in which we live, something from a supreme being that supposedly exists outside of time and space.  And people who say “well maybe science can explain it but I can’t so to me is IS a miracle” are doubly-wrong because when they say that sort of thing they not only admit they are ignorant about certain facts, but they prefer to remain ignorant in order to hang on to their superstition.