101 Reasons Why We Left Islam – Chapter 3: Islam and Science – Reason 28
When scientists published the suggestion that the first living thing may have been developed within clay, the Islamic Dawah movement went into a massive overdrive online, screaming, “SEE! This proves the Quran is true when it said Allah created man from clay,” to the millions who commented and shared this as evidence that the Quran is true – here comes the debunk.
First of all, the Quran made many claims about the creation of humans, which you are welcome to check:
– Man is created from “Dust” – Quran 3:59 https://quran.com/ali-imran/59
– Man is created from “Black Mud” – Quran 15:26 https://quran.com/al-hijr/26
– Man is created from “Water” – Quran 21:30 https://quran.com/al-anbya/21-30
– Man is created from “Sperm” – Quran 16:4 https://quran.com/16/4
– Man is created from “Clinging Clot” – Quran 96:2 https://quran.com/al-alaq/2
– Man is created from “Sounding clay like pottery” – Quran 55:14 https://quran.com/55/14
– Man is created from “Nothing” – Quran 19:67 https://quran.com/maryam/67
You can see how the Quran is all over the place. But also how Islamists can come up with any explanation. One Explanation is creating a sequence here: So first there was “nothing”, then “dust”, and “dust” got mixed with “water” to make “black mud”. The “mud” turned into “clay”, from which Allah made humans into “sperm” and sperm into “clinging clot”. You have to stretch your imagination here. Because even if we did try this- there remains a poking verse in Quran 55:14 that categorically says:
He created humankind from ˹sounding˺ clay like pottery,
What do you notice here? First, the Quran did not just say ‘clay’ as the Islamic Dawah rushed to say but hid the next part that says ‘like pottery’. The claim that humans are made of pottery clay is completely unscientific. Let us clarify. First of all, scientists NEVER said humans were created from clay. They said the first animal organism is likely to have evolved from clay through random chemical reactions that happened some 800 million years ago. Through evolution, that organism developed all the way up the chain to humans. For Muslims to celebrate these studies, they have to admit that humans are animals and have evolved from animals.
https://news.yale.edu/2023/06/27/clues-clay-scientists-narrow-search-first-animals
I am sorry to break this news to you, but the reaction that created the first organism was recreated in a lab successfully, whereby scientists were able to create an organism from scratch!
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07289-x
And if that is not enough to convince you. Any claim that ‘no one knew this before’ can be easily debunked as no one was surprised in the Prophet’s days when the verse appeared not once but 16 times in Quran: 3:49, 5:110, 6:2, 7:12, 15:26, 15:28, 15:33, 15:74, 17:61, 23:12, 28:38, 32:7, 37:11, 38:71, 38:75, and 55:14. Why people around the Prophet were not surprised or challenged him on this claim? Because humans created from clay and pottery were known mythology taken from Egyptian and Greek pagans’ at the time:
- Egyptian god Khnum: “The ancient Egyptians believed Khnum had the power to create humans. He formed them from clay using his potter’s wheel and imbued them with spirit and good health. The Egyptians believed Khnum could improve fertility and prevent famine.” https://study.com/learn/lesson/ancient-egyptian-god-khnum-facts-temple-symbol.htm
- Greek god Titan’s son, Prometheus, supposedly has the power to create humans: “Prometheus shaped man out of mud, and Athena breathed life into the clay figure.” https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/big-history-project/what-is-big-history/origin-stories/a/origin-story-greek
- Another Greek God – Pandora was the first mortal woman who was created from clay by the gods. https://www.theoi.com/Heroine/Pandora.html
And there are many other stories like this. They are not miracles or signs of divine power but the evidence of the working minds of ancient peoples who looked for the “god of gaps” and tried to fill that knowledge with some rational reasoning by saying, “Our god(s) created us from clay/mud/pottery…etc.” It does not take too much imagination to come up with this explanation, seeing when humans die, they decompose to clay-like dust. So, it was a somewhat simple-minded way of explaining what they were made of in the first place.
The answer to how humans were created is much more complicated. We are complex organic matter that evolved over at least 200,000 years from our common primate. Before that, we were not classified as humans. So, to say humans were created from any of these elements was just the guessing of ancient people.
Issue 28.1. The Quran exposed its human origin and lack of knowledge when it made a number of random claims, all of which were ancient mythological guesses. None of which surprised contemporaries of the Prophet.
Issue 28.2. Quran 55:14 and 15:26 both suggest that human is made of ‘sounding’ pottery. Both verses specifically use the word pottery. We are not pottery at all, and you are not made from pottery. Nothing in the human process, be that from evolution or otherwise, can suggest pottery being part of the human creation. This blatant circle of mistakes in the Quran are too ridiculous that Islamic scholars could not and would not be able to square it!
Islamic Excuses:
Issue 28.1: We remind you that the Quran is not a book of science but a book of signs. The Quran did not come to explain the ‘step by step’ of how humans were created. That knowledge would have been very disturbing to share at that early stage of humanity. Also, the Quran states that Allah has sent messengers to every nation before Islam came about to be the final message. The knowledge that Allah had installed in other nations may have seeped into their mythologies. You rightly presented a sequence that could have been clues to the first human creation. First, there was nothing, then dust, then with water came mud, then clay, with Allah’s powers, first cell, eventually first sperm, from which clinging clot and human was developed. Not a single step here is wrong.
>> Our response: The Quran did challenge humans to find a mistake and the fact it made multiple claims and was not consistent in its message is by itself inaccurate. The sequence you made up there is never presented like this in any way or format in the Quran or Hadith – especially since this is NOT how humans were created. Mud does not become clay. There is a specific material for that. The first process can only create an organism that is an animal. A long evolutionary process takes millions of years to get to the sperm! Islam categorically does not believe in evolution. You seem to forget that the Quran suggests Allah created Adam by gathering some ‘dust’ and saying ‘Be’, and it was he! Quran 3:59: “… He created Him from dust; then He said to him, “Be,” and he was.” – Where is the process here?
Issue 28.2: The term pottery should not be interpreted literally as such. This is a symbolic and metaphorical description of a human being, a complex structure that has come from simple ingredients, but the key to that is the clay from which we do pottery. Clearly, the Prophet and people around him did not take it literally as ‘pottery’ but rather the symbolic meaning of it.
>>Our Response: The Quran’s suggestion that humans came from nothing, dust, water, mud, clay, sperm, and clinging clots are not symbolic or metaphorical, but the one thing you cannot explain – pottery – that becomes the symbolic and metaphorical bit in the process! It sounds like a failed attempt to explain something clearly copied from ancient mythological tails from which the Prophet was regularly accused in the Quran 25:5 and 16:103-104. People of the time knew all this and the mythological sources that were behind it.
Final Thought:
A person needs a level of IQ to understand science and the process of evolution. Furthermore, they need critical thinking to realise that there is a significant difference between the claim the first man (Adam) was created from what seems to be an ‘abracadabra’ moment to what science actually shows by fossils of humans from across the globe that we have evolved as humans over the last 200,000 years. Early humanoids are vast with variations, which means we are only one species called Homo-Sapiens. Scientists identified at least 21 species, including famous names such as Homo Erectus, Homo Floresiensis, Homo Habilis, Homo Heidelbergensis, Homo Luzonensis, Homo Naledi, and Homo Neanderthalensis. Most humans carry between 1% and 3.7% Neanderthal genes, a species of humans we outlived and may have contributed to eliminating. The knowledge gap between the Quran and science is so vast that most Islamic scholars rightly discourage you from exploring it as infidel science that would lead you to lose faith.