101 Reasons Why We Left Islam – Chapter 3: Islam and Science – Reason 37
There is no dispute that ants are clever insects. They excel in collaboration and adapting to variety of challenging environments. But they are not capable of many skills we humans are able to do. With that in mind, read the following verse:
Quran 27:18
And when they came across a valley of ants, an ant she said*, “O ants! Go quickly into your homes so Solomon and his armies do not crush you, unknowingly.”
Other translations are here: https://myislam.org/surah-naml/ayat-18/
In the olden days, it was fair to assume all insects and animals could communicate, maybe even in the same way we humans talk, as this was the source of many fairytale stories. As our understanding of zoology and entomology grew, we realised the complexity but also the limitations of such communication skills for each species. Research into ants shows that ants do actually communicate in three ways: chemical, touch, and vibration. However, if you review the verse carefully, you realise this is a human-like conversation that mentions a name, indicates brain (cerebral) memory, and processes that conclude self-consciousness. The idea that an ant can have the cerebral ability to remember individual humans by name visually or otherwise, identify the type of army, and its leader means a single ant has the brain functions of at least a child human. However, it also indicates that ants have regular conversations that are gossip-like- which we know is a human-like self-consciousness linked to what Islam describes as a ‘soul’. There is no evidence that any of this is possible at all. Finally, all the research shows that ants do not have vocals to talk and do not have the ears to hear a conversation that the Quran is describing. Ants can sense vibration the same way deaf people do but cannot hear a conversation.
Issue 37.1: Ants do not have the vocals to talk and specifically to say something like “Solomon and his armies do not crush you…” And it gets more interesting when you realise that ants do not even have ears. Examination of all three ways an ant can communicate, it is evident that the purpose of communication is limited to identifying food sources, danger, and social status. It is not about a normal everyday conversation that we humans do. The communication at best would be chemical signals that indicates ‘Danger, go home’. The author of the Quran is projecting fairytale human attributes onto ants that science shows are not possible given the anatomy and scale of an insect like ant. And despite extensive research done on ants, none of these skills have been proven.
Islamic Excuses:
Issue 37.1: This furthers our point that the Quran is a book of signs and not science. We know ants do communicate danger, and this scenario demonstrates that an ant saw the danger and communicated it to its fellow ants. We also do not know if the combination of chemicals, touching, and vibrations could develop into a complex language that science has not learned about ants. There is a lot we do not know about ants. Finally, there are two considerations here. First, the Quran was trying to narrate the story and used human-like characteristics to make it easier for the reader to understand the story does not invalidate the message. Second, we do not know the full extent of ants’ skills, which may still surprise us in the future.
Our response: Had the verse simply stated:
“And when they came across a valley of ants, an ant communicated danger to its fellow ants to go home quickly as it sensed the vibrations of a large army that would unknowingly crush it…”
That is when you would have had an accurate verse consistent with the cerebral abilities of ants. This version will always be accurate regardless of time. A verse that does not change the meaning of the narration, and one you would claim to be a miracle 1400 years later! Here, we have a desert dweller making up a fairytale, which is inconsistent with what one would call the perfect message from a perfect god.
Final Thoughts
This turned out to be a very challenging topic for Western Dawah to defend. Western Dawah had to use deflection here, whereby they focus on the fact that the Quran describes the ant in female as ‘she,’ arguing how a book from the 1400s century knows that all worker ants are females. This is yet another lie. Before Islam and the Prophet, Arabic always had a grammatical gender for verbs and adjectives that English does not do. In Arabic, nearly all insects are grammatically gendered as female. Most things in Arabic are grammatically gendered as females, like cars or airplanes, are gendered as female, whereas a house is male. Other languages that use the grammatical gendering are Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Hindi, and Portuguese. It is not a miracle that the Quran called ants using the grammatical female gender, as this is just how the language works. That is why Arab Dawah does not call this a miracle at all.