The Incoherence of Modernity

The modern man considers himself to have achieved a sense of reasoning unafforded to the men of past millennia. As Allah SWT says in the Qur’an, the unbelievers consider Islam to be nothing more than “tales of the ancients” [6:25]. Indeed, not only does the modern man consider himself more knowledgeable than his forefathers, but he considers himself to be a better person altogether, one who is more morally upright. Yet, how reasonable are the sensibilities of modernity? Has the civilized modern man achieved a higher plane of morality? Liberalism, democracy, sexual liberation are seen as the markers of the modern moral society and the signs of social progress in general. However, before assessing how moral these markers really are, we must go right back to the beginning. The very beginning. The beginning of the universe, time, and everything in it.

If you were to ask Einstein, or indeed the scientific consensus of Einstein’s lifetime and for a while afterwards, they would tell you that the universe has no beginning. This is wonderful news for the atheist. The universe requiring no beginning means that the universe did not need to be created as the universe was eternal. Sadly for the atheist community, however, reality hit. The universe turned out to be expanding as discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, just as stated in the Qur’an [51:4] “And the heaven, We built it with craftsmanship and We are still expanding”. This expansion of the universe meant that the universe must have a beginning. But if the universe has a beginning, then the atheist faces a problem. As simple as it is, one cannot say that something came from nothing. It simply does not make sense. The universe is finite, and therefore needs an infinite cause. To say that creation has no creator, to say that the material world sprung into existence out of nothing, is nonsensical. Something must have existed before the Big Bang. God, as the only being not bound by the laws of space and time, is a necessary being. If you would like to learn more about this topic, inquire about Al-Ghazali, and his work on the Kalam cosmological argument, which has now been appropriated by many Christian theologians. In any case, even if we were to assume that somehow something came out of nothing, which is a ridiculous notion in and of itself, we must further assume that the minuscule chance that you would come into existence occurred. The chance of you being you is literally much much less than one in one trillion. The atheist is betting his eternity on the assertion that something came from nothing along with the chance less than in trillion occurance occured. It is an entirely ludicrous proposition.

But my issue in this article specifically is not with the atheist, or with convincing anyone of the truth of Islam. Much more knowledgeable people than me have already written and lectured on why Islam is the only rational conclusion. My issue is with the modernist assertion that his morality is the superior one, when in fact the modernist has no morality to speak of in the first place. In fact, the modernist’s morality is all based upon the assumptions and whims a few dead European men have had a few hundred years ago. Be that as it may, as I have stated that this article is not about convincing anyone of Islam, it is also not about recounting the history of philosophy and modernist thought in general; rather it is about establishing the incoherence of modernist morality.

I’ll demonstrate the incoherence of the morality of the modern man and how arbitrary it actually is. For example, in recent years, there has been a normalization of the sodomite or the “LGBT community.” To the modern man’s sensibilities, individual liberty takes precedence over all. He thinks to himself: why should it matter to me what two individuals do in the privacy of their own room? As long as they’re not harming me, it doesn’t matter what other individuals do, as long as they’re both two legally consenting adults! Yet, what does the modern man say when a brother and sister want to engage in intercourse? He says, that is terrible, because there might be an inbred baby! But what if they use contraceptives? They are, after all, legally consenting adults! And what if there is an adult son with his mother? Shouldn’t it be okay as long as they’re two legally consenting adults? Incest does occur in nature after all. You could go even one step further. You could say that, according to the materialist worldview, a corpse has no inherent sacredness to it. There is no reason, based on the principle of materialist individual liberty, that a person should not have sex with a corpse. And there are many more examples one could give, and many more perversions I am either too innocent to conceptualize or too disgusted to write down even for the sake of the argument. They would speak about the right of individuals to have premarital and extramarital sex, but they would not speak of the right for children to know their fathers and to grow up in happy homes. They would speak of the right for women to work and mix with men in the workplace, but they would not speak of the right to for all women to be protected from rape, which would more often occur in a mixed-gender environment than an environment with gender-segregation. They would speak of the right for a woman to work alongside her husband in place of employment, but not speak of the right of a child to be raised by her or his own mother. They would speak of the right of women to be sexualized, objectified, and commodified by the male gaze but they wouldn’t speak of her right to be treated as something more than her sexual appeal.

All these things are undoubtedly immoral, but the private institutions and the systems of knowledge which control the world have a vested interest in making the immoral appear moral. Studies show (and please look up all the claims I’m making, don’t just blindly trust me) that those who have more premarital romantic partners are much more likely to divorce than those who do not. Work environments which have gender-mixing are much more likely to have sexual harassment and rape, just look at the #metoo movement! And a mother working, which means she must entrust the child to an institution filled with caretakers of complete strangers, severs the bond between a mother and her own child, a child and her or his own family. Studies, as well as reason, would show that the woman when sexualized is not treated with the humanity that she deserves.

Firstly, it causes women to have image issues as they are held to an unreasonable sexual standard by the media. Secondly, it causes both men and women to be less attracted to their partners, as hypersexuality permeates every corner of society, and they understandably become desensitized to the beauty of their partners. Thirdly, it facilitates the harassment of women. I know some might protest this claim by stating that rapists rape regardless of how someone dresses, which is true to some extent. Who is more likely to harassed and whistled at? A woman who is completely naked or a woman who is completely covered up? The answer is obvious. Fourthly, it encourages adultery and extramarital sex, as demonstrated by more socially liberal countries having more cases of adultery than more socially conservative countries do.

Long-term happiness is derived from having long-lasting relationships with kin and other human beings in general, as demonstrated in studies from secular and liberal institutions such as Berkeley. But if the modernist model is not conducive to creating long-lasting connections with family and other loved ones, why is it being promoted in the first place? Obviously, there’s a lot of money to be made by normalizing the hyper-sexualization of women and commodifying their bodies in order to sell products and advertise. But more than that, it’s because it’s a lot easier to exploit someone who is an individual, rather than someone who is working within a family unit. Would the elite rather negotiate with an atomized individual, or with a large group of people who love each other and work together? The former is much easier to negotiate with than the latter. But even all that I’ve said is completely besides the point. The point is much, much, much simpler than I’ve made it out to be. I just wanted to compound and reinforce how incoherent the modernist liberal ideology is at every level. The point is as follows: if the world is nothing more than physical, then the modernist cannot assert any morality at all. If Darwinian evolution is true, and we truly have evolved over time, then murder being wrong is as completely as arbitrary as us having ten toes instead of eleven. Our consciousness, according to the modernist, is nothing more than an illusion. Our brains have not evolved to be moral, but rather to survive. There exists no real concept of morality, and there exists no inherent “good or evil.” To the modernist there is no meaning. The modernist asserts that his morality is superior while at the same time asserting that morality is completely arbitrary. It is a nonsensical, idiotic proposition. Try as he may, the modernist can never escape from the clutches of nihilism, basing their morality based on assumptions inherited from the dominant culture. As Allah SWT states in the Qur’an, “and most of them follow not except assumption. Indeed, assumption avails not against the truth at all” [10:36].