Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the mis­sion­ary, an under­stand­ing can be reached if a lit­tle more thought can be put into their argu­ment. The mis­sion­ary has tak­en the under­stand­ing of these vers­es out of its intend­ed con­text and is con­fus­ing Mary’s nature (since she is only human, and hence pro­cre­ates) as a cre­ation of the Almighty, with God Him­self who is the Uncre­at­ed. Cer­tain­ly, God Almighty could have tak­en a ​“wife” and have ​“chil­dren” or have ​“chil­dren” with­out any con­sort what­so­ev­er (nau’zu­bil­lahi min zaa­lik).

Is it wis­dom or fol­ly ? Has the Qur’an com­mit­ted an anachro­nism or does it reflect com­pre­hen­sive understanding ?

In one of his recent arti­cles, Sam Shamoun con­tends that because the Qur’an cites the response of the Israelites to Yah­we­h’s covenant as ​“We hear and we dis­obey” (2:93 ; 4:46) where­as the Bible quotes the same as ​“We will do every­thing the LORD has said ; we will obey” (Exo­dus 24:7) and ​“We will serve the LORD our God and obey him.” (Joshua 24:24), there­fore, the Qur’an, and I quote Shamoun, ​“is in error, a point which can­not be debat­ed on his­tor­i­cal or log­i­cal grounds.” This hubris­tic remark results from shut­ting one’s eyes from the con­text of the cit­ed Qur’an­ic remark in verse 2:93, as well as the com­ple­men­tary nature of 4:46 in its elab­o­ra­tion. The issue dis­cussed in the con­text of 2:93 was the mali­cious tongue-twist­ing of the Israelites, which, in prac­tice, was reflec­tive of their dis­re­spect­ful and defi­ant atti­tude vis-a-vis the impli­ca­tions of Yah­we­h’s covenant.

Basi­cal­ly, the gist of the mis­sion­ary claim is :

Why does the Qur’an say that ants talk (27:18 – 19)? Every­one knows that ants com­mu­ni­cate by chem­i­cals detect­ed by scent and nev­er sound ! Is this not a sci­en­tif­ic error in the Qur’an ? 

This style of argu­ment is quite sopho­moric in that it is entire­ly based on some­one who does not even have a rudi­men­ta­ry lev­el under­stand­ing of zool­o­gy or ento­mol­o­gy (I believe this is cov­ered in 9th-Grade Biol­o­gy in the USA). Its sad­ly typ­i­cal of this genre of anti-Islam­ic qua­si-polemi­cists. You seri­ous­ly could­n’t go to the library or even do a web search for infor­ma­tion on acoustic com­mu­ni­ca­tion by ants ? What does this say about your cred­i­bil­i­ty as a genre collectively ?

Strong drink and … are only an infamy of Satan’s hand­i­work. [5:90, also 2:219]. Yet on the oth­er hand in Par­adise are rivers of wine [47:15, also 83:22,25]. How does Satan’s hand­i­work get into Paradise ?