By DAVID EPPS
Pastor

This is mainly for the high school students out there who want to make a good impression during the first few weeks of the new school year.

Science was never my strong suit, but a few years ago I learned some fascinating things about ants. It's likely that you have never heard this before, and you can share something totally new with your class (of course, adults can impress their friends with this as well).

Here's a condensed version of some basic information about ants, taken from a Web site at the University of Arizona, entitled "Adult Males and Females."

When ant colonies reproduce, the new queens and males may be found in the colony. These are "flying ants" and have two pairs of wings.

Males generally have small heads, large eyes, large thoraces, and a pair of claspers at the end of the gaster. Once they fly (and mate), males do not live very long.

After mating, new queens break off their wings and never fly again. Without wings, they can generally be distinguished from workers by their larger body size, larger thorax and larger abdomen.

All workers are females.

That last sentence is the most important one. Most of us who have had the most basic science classes in high school and college (that would definitely include me) have heard about the dominance of female ants over males. I don't know exactly when this first became accepted as fact by the scientific community, but given the size of an ant, it makes sense that it has been since the advent of the microscope, which has been within the past 300 or so years.

Now go back about 3,000 years, to the book of Proverbs, the sixth chapter, verses 6-8:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:

Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,

Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

At first glance, some people might say, "So? There are verses about ants in the Bible. Big deal." But look at how the ants in these verses are identified.

There has been a bit of controversy in recent months over a new translation of the Bible which removes virtually every reference to gender. It has been well-received in some circles and highly criticized in others.

Part of the motivation for creating this new translation was the long-standing allegation that the Bible has always been sexist. Of course, that is a pile of garbage, but a look at the use of gender-specific language in the King James Version, which I have quoted here, is relevant to our discussion.

The pronouns she and her are used 2,442 times in the entire Bible, according to a search engine at bible.com. The pronouns he, him and his are used 21,182 times. That's a huge difference, which some might say fuels the gender discrimination argument.

But if you believe that every word in the Bible is important, or even if you don't, you can easily gather from these numbers that whenever a female pronoun is used in the Bible, it is used intentionally. That brings us back to our ants.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise ...

The ant cited in Proverbs is a female ant. If the Bible were sexist, wouldn't it assume the important ants were male? Perhaps, unless the writer, Solomon, knew for a fact that the females were the ones he was talking about.

How did he know? He didn't have a microscope back then. There was absolutely no way humanly possible to find out. So he either took a wild guess, or he found out from God.

Whoa! That changes everything. If he found out from God, then that means there actually is a God, and if He knows, then it's very possible that He created the ants to begin with. We're getting way beyond science now. According to evolutionists and nearly everybody else who determines what passes for science in schools, we're dabbling dangerously close to religion. Better stop that right now.

On second thought, forget about mentioning this in class, especially in a public school. There's no telling what the reaction would be.

[Monroe Roark can be reached at mroark@TheCitizenNews.com.]

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