It is often claimed the birth of a newborn baby is a display of the miracle of life, but the real miracle of life is something so extraordinary that hardly anyone thinks about.
The real miracle of life concerns growth not birth.
The average 3 year old boy in the UK weighs just over 14kg, and the average weight for an adult male in the UK is over 85kg. Between the age of 3 and adulthood the average male will grow an additional 71kg of living tissue.
Why is that such a miracle?
Imagine a 3 year old boy, or a boy of any age for that matter. He takes air into his lungs when he breaths, and food and fluid into his stomach when he eats. The thing they all have in common is that they are dead. The air is dead, the fluid is dead, and the food is dead.
He takes all these things into his body, the air into his lungs and the food into his stomach, and they are broken down into their respective chemical components, but they are still dead. These dead chemicals are conveyed to various parts of his body, become absorbed into living cells, and become a living part of that living cell.
The living cell and sperm of his parents grows and divides to become a baby and that is miraculous, but the real miracle of life happens when that baby takes in dead food, that dead food is converted into living flesh.
Exactly how dead chemicals can become living cells remains one of the great outstanding challenges to science. The real miracle of life is the creation of new life which occurs somewhere between placing ‘dead’ food into our mouths, and that food becoming living cells within us.
