“Belief in the Virgin Birth is belief in a miracle, and therefore makes the mind hospitable to belief in the miraculous. Let us see what are the marks of a miracle as we learn them from this miracle.

A miracle is not a violation of the laws of nature or a suspension of them. It may be a law of nature that under given conditions a virgin will have a child, and that these conditions met in the case of Mary. There may be millions of events falling out according to the laws of nature; and there may be only one event falling out according to that law. Whether an event takes place is a question of evidence; and if an event takes place which we thought before would be in contravention to a law of nature, we would immediately amend our law of nature so as to allow that event. A miracle is contrary to the ordinary, but not to the necessary. Miracles are not impossible events, though they are wonderful events.

A miracle takes place in nature, takes its place in nature, and accords with nature. It is an extraordinary phenomenon in the midst of ordinary phenomena, and becomes a harmonious element in the stream of phenomena. At least, such is this miracle. A child is conceived in a woman’s womb; it passes through the ordinary stages of pregnancy; it is born in the ordinary way; it is nourished in the ordinary way; it subject to the ordinary dangers and receives ordinary protection; it has the ordinary growth. Just one thing in the whole process is extraordinary: the original conception.

A Bible miracle is a wonder; but it is a minimum of the wonderful. If a child is to be born of God and not the child of a man, what could have been omitted that was not omitted in this case?

A miracle is the certification of a revelation. So this miracle certified the revelations given to Mary and Joseph.

A miracle is itself a revelation. It is a wonder that takes place in such circumstances and connections that the witnesses of it are by it given adequate evidence that God is himself then and there at work on purpose.

No miracle ever comes without a reason for it. It comes when needed in the course of revelation to certify to the revelation.

Such are Biblical miracles.” — F.P. Ramsay, The Virgin Birth: A Study of the Argument, For and Against (1926), pp. 75-76