The Unholy Trinity – Atheism, Feminism and Darwinism – Saboor Ahmed

Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala rasulillah salam alaikum.

Today we're going to be speaking about atheism, feminism and Darwinism.

I'm not actually going to be speaking about why atheism is wrong, or why Darwinism is wrong, or why feminism is wrong. I'm actually going to be covering how there is a conflict between these three ideological worldviews. So I'd like to start off with an example.

Rebecca Watson is a well known feminist. She runs this organization called skeptic. And their motto, their whole philosophy is science, skepticism, and feminism. Right? That's very standard popular narrative of feminists. So, you know, they believe in science and what science says they're skeptics to atheist if free thinkers, and also of course, they subscribe to some form of feminism. And they I cropped a picture of her when she was promoting during the 2008 elections. You know, this campaign called Darwin for president, you know, so clearly someone that thinks they can wear shirt like that they can subscribe to a worldview, like feminism, and also be an atheist and everything is fine.

However, there's an interesting incident that happened in Ireland in 2011 2011. in Dublin, there was a world atheist convention, something like this some atheist convention, but all these atheists from across the world. And in the convention, you had

Richard Dawkins, Rebecca, was the name again, Rebecca Watson, and Aaron Ross sitting down to and others as well speaking about communicating atheism. Anyway, an incident happened, which started off like a storm in a teacup, but then just blew completely out of proportion. So what happened was,

Rebecca Watson was going back to our hotel room after spending time drinking and you know, at the conferences, you wanted to go to a hotel, and someone stopped in the elevator from amongst the atheist crowd. And obviously, this is the atheist conference, and they were hanging out. And he said, you know, don't take this wrong way.

But I find you very interesting. And would you mind having coffee

at my apartments, hotel, or whatever it was? So anyway, she got really creeped out. And then she obviously refused. And then she made a video in which she said, this is really creepy, and you know, stuff like that. And then that took off. And that's, like, a pivotal moment. You know, I found this funny meme. Never forget June 4 2011 skeptic.org. This created a rift in the atheist community, you had people on both camps, you had people saying, she was right to call out that sort of behavior. Other people are saying, No, that was really, you know, uncalled for. Certainly,

Richard Dawkins decided to get involved. It's such a petty thing, but he decided to get involved. And he wrote this very derogatory

message to her, you know, he addressed as dear Muslim, and then speaking about how she needs to grow a thicker skin and this is so pathetic and whatnot. Anyway, she got super upset, and she was a Dawkins fan before this, but anyway, she said this afterwards.

Richard Dawkins will no longer be awarded rewarded with my money, my praise, my intent, my attention, I will no longer recommend his books to others, by them as presence or buy them for my own library. I will not attend his lectures or recommend that others do the same. So clearly, she was very upset.

However, what's interesting is

that was something so small,

and she was so offended, and so other feminists was so offended, and

they had this sort of very negative reaction. However, as you started to go through, you know, the videos and the reputations that the atheist feminist versus the new atheist, and they're going back and forth, other people started to get involved. And then you started seeing, okay, the, the, the smoke is moving away, and now we're starting to see two distinct camps. So the prominent feminist doctor, I can't say that name is blurred out slowly. Dr. Marcio Bianco.

Yeah, Marcy Bianco what she said about this is very interesting, right. So she said, there are two predominant reasons that can explain why sexism sexism exists in the

atheist movement, right? So she's speaking about the new atheist movement. And you had these prominent feminists who are basically calling out this atheism, the new, the sexism with the new atheism, right. So

what's interesting is that this whole this small incident, which they they call it elevator gate to whatever, it showed a fracture. And as you started to actually delve deeper, you start to realize actually there there's there's a very clear demarcation between these two camps. So she gives two reasons why the new atheist movement spearheaded by Richard Dawkins, his sexist social Darwinism and the religious structure that new atheism has, which is obviously something that new atheists won't be very happy to hear that they have a religious structure, venerate. That's what she said. So firstly, we need to go over what is social Darwinism, right? Social Darwinism is

if it's like the application of Darwinism to society, right? And that's why people say social Darwinism is is going from a supposed fact to a value. Therefore, they say this is a fallacy known as the naturalistic fallacy many ways, social social Darwinism took off after Darwin. And what it basically says is this social Darwinist held that social inequalities between the sexes or between classes, or ethnic groups represent the operation of natural selection, and therefore should not be tampered with, since this would impede the progress of the species. So anyway, this idea is not really purely Darwin's idea. It's actually Herbert Spencer, who's a contemporary of Darwin, however,

to call the new atheist movement, as something that's based upon social Darwinism is actually a very derogatory thing to actually say. So she goes further, right? She says, In the atheist movement, social Darwinism has played out as the justifiable assault of women by naturally aggressive men.

And that, obviously, is something that when you start to study the new atheist movement, you start to actually realize, hang on. She's walaikum salam, she definitely has a point. She definitely has a point. And one of the points that she clearly has is that they all seem to be men who are at the top of this supposedly to movement.

Go back one slide, please.

Now about the religious structure.

She says this, the mirroring of religion is the parent in the movement, structural hierarchy. White men at the top serving as featured speakers at events and figureheads of the movement. Everyone else remains in the pews in the balconies, right? So she, she clearly is pointing out some some serious

allegations she's she's, she's making some very serious allegations against the new atheist movement. And this isn't somebody who's just like a, a

average feminist. She's actually an academic. Next slide, please. And you, when this whole elevator gate thing was taking off, you start to see other feminists and in fact, important feminist philosophers started to chime in and start to give their views as well. So the feminist philosopher Elizabeth gross, cannot pronounce that. She said, God is dead Long live man Nietzsche said it all referring to Frederick Nietzsche here. And Dawkins and the male leaders of the movement have resurrected man as God. So you can start you're starting to see that actually, they're taking this really, really personally right so they, it wasn't just a case of a thing at the elevator, there was

something simmering before and this was like the the straw that broke the camel's back.

I put that image in there too. Just to basically say, look, there's a lot of sensitivity. Yeah. Feminists have very, very sensitive about issues to do with sexism issues to do with, you know,

patriarchy and these types of things. However,

this directing their their sort of anger towards new atheism, which really started off with Richard Dawkins maybe 1520 years ago. However, shouldn't they

really be going for Darwin? Because as we're gonna see, if they were upset elevator gate if they were upset at something, so

Small, they should be going, literally ape on what we're about to

explain about Darwin. So here's one of the things that Darwin said about women.

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes, is shown by man's attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up, then can woman whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of senses, and hands. So, if le Vega if elevator gate got them riled up, then you can imagine what sort of things

you know what sort of emotions are going to come out when they start reading stuff like this? If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music inclusive, both have composition and performance, history, science and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would bear would not bear comparison. Yeah. So he's just giving a store experiment saying, look, you make up two lists. And even if we did it today, even after Darwin died, if we look at the history of the world, he's trying to point out, look, men are superior to women. Next slide, please.

It is generally admitted that with women the power of intuition, by the way, intuition is not a good thing, in this context, right? for anybody who's aware of what he means of rapid perception, and perhaps imitation are more strongly marked than in man. But some, at least of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore have a past and lower state of civilization. So again, saying, you know, women, they basically like, more like the savages, and the men, the the woman, the woman, they have these types of features

of imitation and these types of things which are quiet,

which may puts them quite down.

Man is powerful in body and mind than woman. And in the savage state, he keeps in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal. The female, however, ultimately assumes certain distinctive characters, and in the formation of her skull, is said to be intermediate between the child and the man. Ouch. Yeah. So if that elevator gate, if that small comment about, oh, would you like to go to my hotel room with me at four o'clock in the morning? Is that upset Darwinists? I mean, if that upset feminists, right, you can imagine a feminist reading this type of thing. And

what we have, what we actually going to see is there's a fight, there's a fight, and the fight is between feminism, and the feministic values, and science, current understanding of biology, and especially evolutionary psychology. So we have some values, right? We have some values and feminists of feminism, and you know, feminists, they, they challenge certain things, and they want to promote other things. So of course, they're not happy with patriarchy, they definitely not happy with gender roles. And they're not happy with toxic masculinity, they're not happy with that. They're like, you know, we don't we don't like that they want men to act in a certain way. They don't like gender

roles, gender roles, and they definitely don't want a male centric structure anything. However,

Darwin described exactly raw that you had ancient man who was the hunter and the woman was actually the gatherer I mean, that's what Darwinism is all about Darwinism. It gives clear gender roles, it explains that there was patriarchy in the past, and our men were actually more aggressive. Now, again, like I mentioned before, we're not saying that somebody can use that to therefore say, therefore men should act like that, because that would be the naturalistic fallacy. However, they're basically pointing out is biological is not some social construct right. Now, Darwin wrote the descent of man in 1870 something right? I think 72

Elaine Morgan, who was not

an evolutionary academic at all, 100 years later, in the 1970s, she to counter the descent of man in from which we got all those previous quotations. She actually wrote the descent of woman

and this descent of woman was a complete

Alternatively evolutionary history in which the man and the woman they're playing like this sort of equal role. However, even though feminists across the world, they lay they love this book, this book was, you know, a manual for them. It wasn't a scientific book, it was just a feminist lashing out and saying, We don't agree. But again, this is just values feministic values against evolutionary psychology or Darwinism.

Now, it's not just the case that feministic values totally contradict what Darwinism says about the nature of man, is also that what Darwinism says about the nature of man contradicts what feminists value what feminists actually want, consider some things. So the feminist Betty Friedan, she said, the house is a comfortable concentration camp, she wanted women to work, she wanted women to do interesting things, not just be at home and just take care of the kids. Another prominent feminist, shoeless Sheila Smith, Firestone, I can only say the last name properly, she said, women would never truly be free of patriarchy, until they were freed from the yoke of reproduction. Now, that's a big

problem, because that's what Darwinism is about survival and reproduction, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, he says, the highest rationale of life is survival and reproduction. So how does that make any sense from a Darwinian point of view that you have this group of people who are like, you know, we want to be free from the yoke of reproduction, and we don't want to have children, we don't want gender roles, and we don't want to be mothers, when? How does that fit with the Selfish Gene idea? So you can see, it's not just one side contradicts the other is the other side.

The

the imperative of Darwinism the idea, the main core of Darwinism, the rationale of life, the preservation of genes, totally contradicts what these feminists are actually saying. And there's actually some

there's a interesting implication of feministic values being prevalent in our society.

Here, here are the statistics from 1920, all the way to 1990. You can see the age of women 3025 2014. And you can see live births per 1000 women, right? So you're starting to see a pattern. So we have 1000 births per sorry, we have live births per 1000 women, and we have the year, the the actual year of birth these women, right, so we have 1920, all the way to 1990. And you can start to see there's actually a decline, they're actually going down continuously, they're going down. What's interesting is what happened between 1940 and 1950.

World War Two,

World War Two, you would expect people to have less children during a war than you would during peacetime like 1980s to 1990s. However, you you're seeing a pattern where people are totally dropping off, they actually not having children. So feminism is like kryptonite. feministic values is like kryptonite to the Darwinian understanding of life. If a society accepts values, that feminism promotes, that society is not actually going to be a very good

model to actually explain The Selfish Gene view.

So look,

why like is that

some feminists, some have realized it's completely ridiculous, is completely ridiculous, to try and fight off science to try and just challenge it to try and just say, look, you know, we're not going to follow

a whim, we're not going to accept the standard evolutionary story. We're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. We're going to say there's a Maya, there's a male bias. We're going to challenge patriarchy and science. We're going to do this. We're going to do that.

This particular philosopher Her name is great. Vander Mohsen, you can tell she is German.

She wrote this paper will sexual selection, a tale of male bias and feministic denial. And she said something very interesting. And for anyone that's interested, I highly recommend you read this paper.

The history of male bias in Darwinian theory.

should not be used by feminists as an excuse to reject evolutionary premises that have now been established as scientifically sound.

She's basically trying to tell the feminist Look, guys, stop fighting science here, right now, just as a thought experiment.

If I come across a feminist and I say something, and the feminist doesn't like that, and they say, I am offended, right? By saying, I am offended, you can change someone's behavior. Yeah, you can do that. And to a large extent, that does actually happen. Someone says, Look, I'm offended, I'm offended. I don't like this. I don't like that. However, you can't really change reality. If you say, I'm offended, that it was sunrise 655 this morning, not 4am that you being offended doesn't change the reality. Not not saying that Darwinism is reality. But the reality that these are conclusions that are being made within science, you can't change the mind of a scientist by saying,

Oh, you know, I understand that you've done the experiment. You've done this, you've done that. But I don't agree with it. But the thing is, that scientist is going to turn around and say to you, look, it doesn't really matter if you agree or not. However, she does point out some interesting things that they there was, of course, a male bias in evolutionary thought, which is fine. But that doesn't even if you strip away that bias, you still get down to the, to some ideas which are non which don't fit with feminism. So the idea that

men and women are biologically different, they're genetically different, right? And they have different predispositions. You can't really challenge that type of thing purely by saying I'm offended. Right?

There was another philosopher. She herself was a feminist, but she actually challenged a idea of a another, another theorist about the theory of moral development, how do morals actually develop? And what she basically did is she challenged that theory, because she said it was sexist. And then she came up with this particular idea, based upon interviews, and based upon her research, that women have a morality of care. And men have a morality of justice and duty and rights. So they approach from different perspectives. So it's like different voices that you actually hear. And a prominent feminist was criticizing her and saying, No, those are just societal expectations, those on actually

anything else other than that, but then the problem is, you can't keep doing that you can't keep Okay, there are some values which are being promoted. And those values contradict certain things that scientists are saying, you don't actually like those values. So you're going to turn around and say, not going to have that. So you can't actually have it that way.

Mr. Thompson, she is a famous feminist. She calls herself a radical feminist. And she said this very interesting statement. She said, I am an atheist, because religions oppress many women.

I regard religion with fear and suspicion

is not enough to say, I don't believe in God. I actually regard the system as distressing. I am offended by some of the things said in the Bible, and the Quran, and I refute them. And this is a standard understanding of feminists, right? I don't like what you're saying. So I disagree with it, and I'm going to spend my life refuting it. And look, I am an atheist, because religions oppress women.

I mean, what, what? That even if he even if you actually think about that statement, right? Firstly, oppress

is are based upon the actual scripture is that based upon people's interpretations, by the way, being an atheist because you don't like certain things and look, you can actually find this in the Koran. In the Quran. I mentioned certain things which some feminists may not like, but that doesn't mean it's you turn around and say, I'm actually an atheist now.

Emma Thompson, although she calls herself a radical feminist, and by the way, there's many different types of radical Marxist.

liberal Yes, fantastic liberal feminist. You also have first wave second wave third wave God knows mama the job recently. His book fifth wave

Feminism, right?

We,

the problem is that the average feminist that you see on the street, they have no idea, no idea about what Darwin said about women about. And remember, Darwin is not just reflecting Victorian values, you can make the argument. But in the descent of man, he's basically arguing, using his theory that women are inferior, physically, mentally, psychologically, and in other ways. So anyway, let's take the statement of hers. And let's see her reaction if she wants to be consistent, if Mr. Thompson actually read the descent of man, as opposed to the Quran, and the Bible and felt

insulted, so I'm going to flip this statement.

I am a creationist, because Darwinism makes women inferior. I regard Darwinism with fear and suspicion. It's not enough to say I don't believe in evolution, I actually regard the system as distressing. I am offended by some of the things said in Darwinism, and I refute them I at the bottom, they are not mr. Thompson because I have this

at this distance tendency to attract militant atheists who are always trying to say you misquoted someone's, I just put it down there. That's not mr. Thompson, who says that, but if she is to be consistent, and she read the descent of man, she would recognize that's actually what she needs to say. Right? She actually needs to say something along those lines.

Next slide, please. So where are we? Right? It's a dead end for feminists. Because if they are going to be like, Oh, well, we're going to do is we are actually going to go ahead and

challenge religion challenge the Koran challenge the Bible, because they say things we don't like, we're going to do that.

Or they're going to say, Okay, what we're going to do is that we're just going to have a scientific worldview. However, contemporary science, evolutionary psychology

is, it says many, many things which do not fit with feministic values. So they can't go down and follow religion, they can't go down and really follow Darwinism. Although there, there are some who are trying to fix that they really are different. Now, one of the things that they're trying to do

is they're trying to promote this new idea of buy, buy new, I mean, maybe

a few decades old, right. And it's the idea of

female epistemology, female theory of knowledge, right? And they want to infuse

feminine values as feministic values within science, they actually want to infuse it within science. And they have different

different types of epistemologies. So they have post modernism, they have

feministic. empiricism, right. And there was another one that they actually have. So post modernism, oh, yeah.

Standard standpoint or something, right? viewpoint standpoint, something like this. So they had these three different ways of of looking at the problem. So

they want to infuse feministic values within evolutionary science.

However, there's a counter, and there's a resistance to that problem. And the resistance is this. So you want to infuse these values within actually, science.

And you want to do them because there is a male bias, which you're saying is, is affecting the scientific method.

But then the obvious thing that some philosophers can say is Hang on a second.

If you want to challenge male bias, shouldn't you just be using the scientific method itself? Because the scientific method, All that matters is the relationship between evidence and your theory and the logical relationship between the two. And science is supposed to be a system that is supposed to filter out biases, whether they are sexist, racist, or,

you know,

whatever type of biases they are. So that's the first issue. The second issue is if you want to challenge male bias, how are you going to challenge it? How are you going to challenge it using female bias? Right? So if you want to challenge the fact that there may be implicit male centric androcentric values within science, how you're going to get rid of the problem by chucking in more bias, you're just adding fuel to the fire, it actually gets worse. And there's a third response. We

is

there's a difference between in philosophy of science, the

discovery justification. So in the context of discovery, and the justification of the actual theory. So the way that you actually discover the theory, the origin of the theory is different to the justification of the theory.

For example, a scientist, they may see a problem that they were trying to solve, and they couldn't really solve it. And this actually has happened in the past. They went to sleep at night, and they saw a dream. And in the dream, they actually saw the solution to the problem, right? And then they went out, they tested it, and they discovered it was right. If somebody turns around and says, right, that's totally false. How can you see in a dream that this came, or you did something else, and you came across the solution, which happened to be correct. The origin of the

the origin, the discovery of the actual hypothesis, and then the testing of and the justification of it, these two things are linked.

That would be a type of genetic fallacy, genetic fallacy, right? So I may discover, I may be a child, I may discover the existence of Big Bang Theory as a valid scientific model. By reading a comic, I can do that. But that doesn't mean that therefore I kind of believe in it, because I happen to read it in a magazine. So the justification that discovery origin and the justification are two different things. So even if Darwin happened to be born in Victorian times, and those times were times that were male centric, it doesn't mean that the hypotheses which are now accepted within evolutionary psychology, about the fact that you had a male centric structure, with men being the

hunters, and you had this type of patriarchy, and you had gender roles and men were aggressive. It doesn't mean that that is false, simply because Darwin may have been shaped by his his actual time. And that's why if you just go back, back once more, once more, once more.

That's why this particular feminist who is a philosopher, and she's challenging the other feminists, her paper, sexual selection at him, a tale of male bias and feministic denial, she actually challenges both sides, she actually strips evolutionary psychology or tries to explain about male bias and get it tries to challenge that, and then also female denial. But you still, even if you get rid of male bias, you still may be left, and you are left with certain things that don't fit feministic values all the way yet, just so the

the failed coup of female epistemology is not something that's going to work. It's not going to work, because

there's very good reasons why we shouldn't infuse feministic values within science. Imagine if we actually started doing that. If we actually started accepting this worldview, where we said, you know, what, if they are values, which are accepted, then we are going to take these values, and then we're going to start sticking them within science. This is actually something that happened with the Soviet Union, right? The Soviet Union, they held on to a communist worldview, right. And that communist worldview, that made them accept and reject certain scientific hypotheses, right, and that shaped, and that's just human values, value does actually play a role. Within science, even though

we we want it to be a perspective list perspective, they still do. Now, if you openly and while we're trying to neutralize science, which is very difficult to do almost impossible. While they're trying to neutralize science. If we accept the feministic idea of let's just chuck in some values, then some Muslims can turn around and say, I want some Islamic values in science, a Christian can turn around and say I want some Christian values. In fact, here's the funny thing. meme anism, which you guys might have heard of, which is the opposite of feminism, right? mehman is they believe that the opposite feminism, they believe that throughout history, women have been oppressing men. Right.

And women are basically, you know, when when the Titanic is sinking, they say women and children first, when the war happens, the men go out and die while the women are home. So you know, they have this argument. So mechanist may say well, we want to infuse

Our values within evolutionary science because we think it's, you know, female centric. So once you open that door, it's just, it's just chaos. It's like a royal rumble. It's like a Hobbesian wall. And we can't really do that.

But here's a beautiful thing. Here's a beautiful thing. We don't need, we don't need a war between the sexes.

We don't need this idea that a female says, okay, a man is doing this. So I want to do that, or a man looks at a female says she's doing this, I want to do that. And you have this constant. Weighing, okay, he's better than her. And she's better than him. And this and this, and this, the Quran breaks that paradigm.

You know, Allah breaks that paradigm, how, because a laws version of success is not the version of success that you get in a capitalistic society. Oh, she's better than her. And he's better than him because she has more money, she has a bigger following on Instagram or this and that. No, Allah says something beautiful in the Quran,

whoever does good, whether male or female, and is a believer, we will surely blessed them with a good life. And we will certainly reward them according to the best of their deeds. So the previous slide, it was nowhere to go for feminists from that perspective, right? It The road was blocked from either way. And, you know, rather than rejecting science, rather than rejecting these things, they could just accept those things as working models, but just, they would not have to feel inferior.

All that they would need to recognize is that the purpose of life with no degree, I mean, even even some of the feminists would agree is not surviving and reproduction, which is, you know, the Darwinian sort of rationale of life. And it's not, okay, I want to be better than that person, because they have a bigger house, a better looking husband or whatever, right? No, it's actually got to do with something greater. It's got to do with spirituality. A spiritual woman is a woman who has value. And it's not just a case of, Oh, she doesn't have a job, she doesn't have this, she doesn't have that. Therefore, she has no particular value. And the beautiful thing about the Quranic

paradigm, is that the Quran,

it doesn't accept the paradigms of society. It actually challenges paradigms, and it tries to show that this particular paradigm is actually going to make you happy. And what's powerful about this particular paradigm of the Quran, is the Quran doesn't want this battle, right between men and women. The Quran explains a symbiotic, symbiotic, beautiful synergy, dovetailing between the male and the female is no longer a wall. Yeah, and if there is a race, if there is a race, that race is in who can gain the most good deeds. That's the competition. The competition isn't for these material, worldly things. So that's what I wanted to say is our color hair for listening. Everything

good. I have said this from Allah, every mistake is from myself. jsoc locker