Yes, It's a Miracle

Warning: I'm going to wax philosophical with this post. If you don't care for that stuff, go back to watching 'American Idol' with the rest of the cattle.
   Last time I counted, I knew seven pregnant women. Some are due soon - like next week - and others not for months. But it got me to thinking how you always hear the phrase 'the miracle of birth.' A cynical man might say 'people are born every day, we have billions of people alive on Earth right now, how is it a miracle?' I would respond by saying that in an infinite universe, even the most improbable thing happens an infinite number of times, but that doesn't make that thing any less remarkable.
   Let's think about how unlikely it is that you were born. Yes, you, reading this right now. We'll ignore the improbability of you surviving to adulthood, you crazy kid. Just stick with how unlikely was it that you emerged into the world, squirming and wet, screaming at the injustice of it all. You had to survive almost ten months in your mother's womb, growing and developing, you had to pass all the proper stages of your little fetal development, you had to cling to the uterus when you were the size of a pinhead. Very unlikely. Like the Cubs winning the World Series.
   But let's take that as a given. Assume that if you - the you that was only hundreds of cells big - were absolutely going to born once you existed, let's think about how unlikely your genesis was. How unlikely was it that the one particular egg from your mother and that one particular sperm from your father met on that one particular day at that one particular time? The odds are, literally, millions to one, even assuming that conditions were right for fertilization. You have better odds playing the lottery, and nobody wins that. What if your mother 'had a headache' or your father had to work late that day? Or what if they had played that Marvin Gaye album four hours earlier or four hours later? No you. Not now, not ever. Even the idea of you would have vanished like a soap bubble in a tornado. The chances that you exist, specifically you and not some variation on you, are astronomically against.
   So let's extrapolate further. Let's take it as a given that you were destined to be conceived and then to make it all the way to being born. How unlikely was it that your parents met, fell in love, and decided to have children? Anything could have happened to keep them from meeting, a left turn down a street instead of a right turn, a missed phone call, a bad piece of fish, a jealous ex-lover. And if they did meet, how unlikely was it that they would go on a date and fall in love? Your father might have said the wrong thing, or your mother might have laughed like a hyena, anything could have extinguished the spark. That your parents even crossed paths in the first place is such a remote possibility it might as well be called impossible.
   That string of events - parents meeting, coming together, 'doing it' on that one particular day, creating a little person, and that person surviving to be born - is such an unlikely confluence of improbabilities that if I had $1 bet on you being alive right now I'd be a trillionnaire, probably even richer. And that string of improbabilities came together for each of your parents, and each of their parents, and each of their parents on back for tens of thousands of years. When you take that unbroken chain of beating the odds that produced you - and only you - to be alive to read this skeptically, there's nothing else you can call it but a miracle.
   The same goes for everyone on the planet. Every one of us is a miracle, all six billion of us, saints and murderers alike. I think we should try to remember that.