This article was originally posted on RealClearScience.
The history of science is populated with three types of ideas.
First, there are the great ideas. Peter Atkins counts ten of them, in his book Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science. Evolution by natural selection, the heritability of genetic information, the conservation of energy, and an expanding universe are among those ten ideas.
Second, there are the fascinating-but-wrong ideas, such as alchemy, phlogiston, and spontaneous generation. All of those ideas seemed reasonable in their day, but subsequent investigation proved they were incorrect.
And then there are the stone cold crazy ideas. This is a post about those.
At RealClearScience, we have had the immense pleasure of stumbling across a Turkish researcher named M. Kemal Irmak. It was he who proposed that schizophrenia is actually demonic possession. Looking through his other published papers, he also apparently believes that fluoride causes diabetes in Finland.
He has other ideas. And, bless him, he’s not afraid to tell us what they are.
The New Testament narrative of the virgin birth of Jesus has two widely believed explanations. On the one hand, most Christians (and Muslims) accept the biblical account as true but, due to its miraculous nature, is well beyond the reach of science. On the other hand, most skeptics and non-Christians insist the story is a myth, not unlike the Greco-Roman tales of the semi-divine birth of demigods, such as Hercules.
Dr. Irmak has his own hypothesis: The Virgin Mary was a hermaphrodite, and her pregnancy was the result of self-fertilization. He explains:
“Virgin Mary is a chimera of 46,XX/46,XY type resulting from the fusion of two embryos of different sex types and both ovarian and testicular tissues develop in Her body as seen in a beautiful plant.”
In other words, the mother of the Virgin Mary was going to give birth to twins. Instead, the twins — one male, one female — fused together, forming a hermaphroditic Virgin Mary. After reaching adulthood, she accidentally self-fertilized. As crazy as this sounds, Dr. Irmak actually found an obscure 1990 paper in the journal The Veterinary Record that documents the curious case of a hermaphroditic rabbit that apparently became pregnant after living in isolation.
But, there are (at least) two very big problems with the “hermaphroditic Virgin Mary” hypothesis: (1) Mary’s husband, Joseph, probably would have noticed; and (2) While human hermaphrodites certainly do exist, it is very unlikely that they would develop two sets of functioning genitals.
For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that the hypothesis is correct. Are there any milestones we should be looking for in the developing fetus? Dr. Irmak does not address the embryological development of Jesus, specifically, but he does have something rather unique to contribute to the field of embryology: It involves dark matter.
The allocortical birth theory, apparently coined by the esoteric Dr. Irmak, claims that a fetus receives a soul during the 13th week of development. This is predicated upon Dr. Irmak properly understanding a brain structure called the allocortex. Granting him that, where does the soul come from? Dr. Irmak explains:
“The dark matter constitutes most of the mass in our universe, but its nature remains unknown. The soul is likely to work into man’s physical body directly via that dark matter.”
Aha! Dark matter, that mysterious substance that makes up 26.8% of the mass-energy of the universe, is actually soulstuff. And it enters the fetal brain during the 13th week of development… through its nose, via a vestigial structure called the vomeronasal organ.
If you’ve made it this far, you are probably thinking, I’m not terribly convinced by his argument. After all, can he make a testable prediction? I would strongly argue yes.
People who do not have noses would not have souls. People who don’t have souls are evil. Can you think of any malevolent humans lacking a proboscis? Of course you can. His name is Lord Voldemort.
Q.E.D.
Source: Irmak MK. “Embryological basis of the virgin birth of Jesus.” J Exp Integr Med 4(2): 143-146. (2014) doi: 10.5455/jeim.060113.hp.011
Source: Irmak MK. “Cosmological dark matter and ensoulment.” J Exp Integr Med 3(4): 343-346. (2013) doi: 10.5455/jeim.110813.hp.006