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SPEAKER_05That's very likes of the Catholic doctrine that by a priest blessing bread and wine, it becomes the body and blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_04In the space where you write your religion, 2,883 people declared themselves to be believers in biology. And J.K. Rebeling tweeted, I was one of them.
SPEAKER_01Take a human, cut him open, look inside. You find their blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don't find them any rights.
SPEAKER_04Do you believe in human rights? Then you are not a believer purely in biology. You're not a believer purely in nature. You are a believer in super nature.
SPEAKER_02It's all derived from Christianity, isn't it, in the end, isn't it? I mean, this is the thing with with with with so much um secular ethics and politics and you know everything everything in the end comes um comes back to Christianity, even if it's not explicitly so.
SPEAKER_04Some of the things that are often kind of said to me, especially by humanist friends, they will they will say, even without Jesus Christ, we we would have gotten to where we've gotten to. Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We'd like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. Are you a believer in biology? Uh that is the fastest growing religion in the UK right now after the 2022 census in Scotland, which was delayed by a year because of COVID. In the space where you write your religion, 2,883 people declared themselves to be believers in biology. I first came across this yesterday when J.K. Rowling tweeted, I was one of them. One of who? Well, I did a little bit of digging. And first of all, I went to the Scottish Daily Express and I read this. Scotland might now be a predominantly atheist country these days. That's not actually true, by the way. Only 689 people declare themselves to be atheists on the census. That's a vanishingly small proportion of Scotland declare themselves to be atheists. The great majority of Scots now declare themselves to be no religion. And while that is very concerning for the church, it is a very different thing to saying that you are an atheist. And even when on censuses people describe themselves as atheists, usually the next question comes, do you believe in a higher power? And the majority of those who declare themselves to be atheists actually believe in a higher power, or they believe in prayer, or they believe in an afterlife. Things not usually associated with philosophical naturalism. When somebody says atheist, they don't even mean atheist in that sort of philosophical sense. But only six hundred and eighty-nine people in Scotland declare themselves to be atheist. Millions are now declaring themselves to have no religion, but 2,883 people say that they are a believer in biology. And the Scottish Daily Express explains. One religion is bucking the trend, believers in biology. Thousands of respondents used the national census to protest against the Scottish government allowing people to self-identify their sex in the survey. J.K. Rowling is among them. There's not a trace of doubt in her mind she is a believer, a believer in biology. The Daily Mail explains campaigners had criticized official guidance for the survey, which allowed people to self-select their sex and insisted that biological sex should be used instead. Women's groups called for a mass campaign of coordinated response amid the row, which they feared would result in a loss of vital statistics about biological sex used for planning services. Biology actually matters, and if you want to plan for the funding of the NHS in Scotland, you need to know how many biological females there are, because biological females have different needs in the health service to biological males and things like that. Or you might think of the provision of certain services in which sex really matters. And of course, often the conversation around trans revolves around sex-dedicated spaces. Spaces like rape crisis centers and prisons and sports and bathrooms. There are spaces in which your biological sex matters, you cannot alter your biological sex, and you cannot simply self-identify your way into a space that is reserved for the opposite sex. Those seem to be some pretty basic facts that often get overturned or overlooked or undermined by trans ideology. Sex matters, sex is non-interchangeable, and you cannot define yourself into a space, nor can you redefine a space in order to include you without you destroying that particular space. Those might seem to be uh quite obvious convictions to hold, but obvious convictions are in short supply nowadays. Now, this is interesting because for the last few years, it's usually been the so-called woke who are described as the religious ones. Uh, I've got an atheist friend who um doesn't really understand about trans ideology because he's an atheist. He he just says, it sounds so Christian to me, says my friend. He said, it sounds like you look at your biological reality, but you actually privilege something that is above nature, this supernatural identity that you can't you cannot discover by like investigating the genome of a person. Um, but it's it's just something you believe in, like a soul, right? It's it's a supernatural belief to believe that your gender identity is more important than your biological sex. So actually, uh a lot of uh materialist feminists, for instance, um, are very much against gender ideology because they look into matter and they don't discover a gendered soul. What they discover is biological sex. And let me show you a podcast in which uh somebody puts to Richard Dawkins that gender ideology is religion-like. And uh Richard Dawkins absolutely sees that the so-called woke are the ones who he feels are quite religious.
SPEAKER_00Is that something that should be put in the sort of beliefs box alongside belief in a deity?
SPEAKER_05Well, you'd have to specify what exactly what you mean, but I'm inclined to think yes. Um I don't mean it is a religion in all respects, um, but there are similarities. It it it's not supernatural.
SPEAKER_04It's not supernatural, and yet there is something that is super the natural that is taking precedence and priority. And and and that is where the accusation that the woke are like a religion really comes from.
SPEAKER_05The belief that you can become a woman by saying you're a woman. And so even even if you have the anatomy of a man, even if you have a penis and a scrotum and things, you by simply standing up and saying, I am a woman, you become a woman, that's very like s uh the Catholic doctrine that by a priest blessing bread and wine, it becomes the body and blood of Christ.
SPEAKER_04Right. Trans ideology, transubstantiation, it's kind of a similar thing. And and therefore, what's been most common in the last ten years or so with the rise of gender ideology is that a lot of people call that religious. And of course, when when somebody like Richard Dawkins calls it religious, that is a neg negative, right? That is a pejorative epithet. To say that wokery is religion-like is to say that it is superstitious, it is backwards, it is anti-scientific, and all the rest of it. So what's been happening for the last 10 years is that people have considered wokery to be religious, but what I was very interested in yesterday is discovering that believers in biology are now a religion. It seems like not just the woke are religious, it seems like the anti-woke are religious too. Or at the very least, the pushback against woke ideology is uh a battle that is being fought on religious terrain. Such that you go to the religion section of the census and you make your claim and you say, no, enough of trans ideology. Biology matters, I'm a believer in biology. But here's where I'm going to perhaps take a different route to my fellow co-travelers in gender critical movements. Um I don't think any gender-critical feminist, I don't think J.K. Rowling herself, purely believes in biology. Because once you have found out how many biological females there are in Scotland or in certain parts of Scotland, your work is all ahead of you in terms of policy decisions. Pure biology does not tell you to make specific provisions for those biological females. Something else tells us to look after biological females. And that something else cannot be discovered by mapping a genome or discovering your chromosomes. If you think there should be separate spaces for female bathrooms, let's say, and I do, you're saying that because women are uniquely vulnerable in those situations, but it's not pure biology that tells you, therefore, you should protect those who are particularly vulnerable. If you have a female boxing competition, science will be able to tell you to some degree whether somebody has the chromosomes of a male and the chromosomes of a female. But what's going on with our aversion to seeing a biological man get into a ring and beat up on a woman, what's going on there is not a purely biological response. What's going on in us is an ethical intuition that it is wrong for men to treat women in that way. And pure biology doesn't teach you that. Gender critical feminism is absolutely right to point out the differences between men and women. But once you've pointed out those differences, what is it that's going to tell you that these two have the same moral worth and dignity? And what is it that's going to tell you that if somebody is weaker, they ought to have more provisions and more protections? You might believe in biology, but where does your belief in equality come from? And where does your belief in compassion come from? The idea that the strong should use their strength to serve the weak. And I put it to you that biology alone won't get you there. Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings? What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith? When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere. Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK. And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest. If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well? Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is. Visit Kingdom.bankslash speaklife. Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. These are the issues that I put to the wonderful Louise Perry when she came onto our channel and we were talking about the difference between the sexes, but also the all-important equality and where the idea for compassion comes from. Here's what I said to her, and her response is wonderful. One of your um chapter headings is Men and Women Are Different. And I guess, like coming from a Christian point of view, like first page of the Bible, you've got male and female in the image of God, both of them equally having dominion over the world. And I guess there's that dimension, there's that sort of vertical dimension of both equally in the image of God. If you've got a materialist kind of conception of male and female, um, I can understand why sort of a third-wave feminism would uh third wave feminist would say, ah, if you press in too much to the differences between men and women, you're going to lose the equality. Now, I I think if you've got a spiritual dimension, there's a little bit of a backstop there, in that men and women can be equal before the eyes of God and different in their sort of material reality. But if you're going to have a materialist feminism, how do you both uphold the equality of the sexes and the difference between them?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, I think you can still say, I mean, it's all derived from Christianity in the end, isn't it? I mean, this is the thing with so with with so much um secular ethics and politics, and you know, everything, everything in the end comes um comes back to Christianity, even if it's not explicitly so.
SPEAKER_04I think she's absolutely right. From our biology, we can get the sex differences. Also from Genesis chapter one, we can get our sex differences, but from biology you can discover a lot about our differences. Where do we get the sense of our equality? And where do we get the sense that we ought to have compassion? I mean, for instance, with the issue of female sports, where do we get the idea that um there ought to be female sports in the first place? I think there should be. I think there totally should be. Where do we get the idea from the fact that we ought to have a female boxing category and a male boxing category? We don't derive that purely from biology. I mean, if you just wanted to have a competition, you could it could be open to men and women, but we all know what would happen if it was open to men and women. A lot of men would beat up on a lot of women, and we know what the final would be. It would be two biological males slugging it out against each other, which is actually ironically what happened in Paris as well, even though we apparently believe in female sports. The category for female sports is to open something up, open up a space where women can compete with women in a fair fight. And that's wonderful. But it's not biology that tells you you ought to have only a female category, because you could categorize people all sorts of ways. It doesn't just have to be by gender. It's not biology that teaches you to have a female category for sports, it's something else. If you are purely a believer in biology, then just let everybody who has human DNA compete against one another, and away we go. But we know what that would mean. That would mean the erasure of female sports. Why do we want to have this dedicated space called female sports? It's because of beliefs that come from beyond biology. And Louise Perry, in her conversation with me, said it comes from some profoundly Christian intuitions. Centuries and centuries and centuries of Christianization has made us think in certain ways about the sexes, not just that they are different, but that they are equal and that there is something called compassion. And from those beliefs, from those Christian beliefs, has emerged things like feminism. Here she is on Jordan Peterson's podcast explaining the point.
SPEAKER_03I have a slightly um unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism. In general, um feminists, modern feminists set themselves up in opposition to Christianity, particularly on the issue of abortion, the handmaid's tale kind of neo-Puritan outfit being the uniform now of American feminists and so on. I am of the view, though, that actually feminism is an outgrowth of Christianity, and that the fundamental idea in Christianity, which is so different from other religious traditions, that weakness is strength, that the first shall be last, that there is something valuable about being small and vulnerable rather than something um despicable about it. I think that feminism completely relies on that idea, which is by no means shared by all cultures and certainly wasn't shared by the ancient Roman culture from which Christianity sprung.
SPEAKER_04And it's not something you derive from biology. If you just look at nature read in tooth and claw, you do not get the idea that the weak should be lifted up and protected. You get the idea that the weak should be sacrificed for the strong, and it's the strong that survive, right?
SPEAKER_03And so if you're operating in, say, an ancient Roman culture which doesn't see women as inherently vulnerable, which actually sees female um vulnerability as uh something to be despised potentially, and which sees prostituted slave women as entirely available for male sexual consumption, that cannot really conceptualize the idea of a slave woman having being able to be sexually violated. You know, it's just not kind of within the moral system, it's not it's not understandable. Into that comes the Christian idea of sexual equality, at least at the spiritual level. And the idea, therefore, that actually even a woman who doesn't have male kin available to defend her against sexual violation, which of course a slave doesn't, she is nevertheless worthy of that protection. It kind of socializes, is maybe the wrong word, but it it shares that beauty of protection among the community and among women. I think that's basically what feminism is, and says that actually we should we should be bestowing on these friendless women the same protection that a woman with high-connected male kin has. It's a very difficult system to enforce.
SPEAKER_04Beautifully put. Okay, the Roman Empire would look at sex differences and say, yes, women have particular needs and there are particular vulnerabilities that we need to uh attend to. Um, and they would despise those differences, right? And sure, you could tick the box marked female on the Roman census, but that wouldn't ensure that you get greater access to provision and protection. The right of the strong to dominate the weak is woven into nature, they thought, and therefore ought to be reflected in civil society. Now that's what ancients thought, it also seems to be what biology teaches, if it's just biology that's read in tooth and claw, right? Yval Noah Harari, the uh author of such bestsellers as Sapiens and Homidaeus, he has this famous TED Talk in which he talks about biology and what it is that biology teaches us, as compared to what the religious stories, in particular the biblical story, has taught us over the years. It is the biblical story that shapes our view of the rights of human beings to provision and protection. It is not biology that teaches us these things. Here's what Harari said.
SPEAKER_01Many, maybe most legal systems are based on this idea, this belief in human rights. But human rights are just like heaven and like God. It's just a fictional story that we've invented and spread around.
SPEAKER_04Notice the three supernatural elements he's referred to, like heaven, God, human rights. Okay? Human rights is as supernatural as God and heaven in the sense that you do not derive them from nature. They seem to sit above nature and judge nature and take precedence over nature at times. We don't just let nature run its course red in tooth and claw in human society. We protect people with these human rights that stand above nature, but it's not nature that teaches you the human rights. Don't believe me, listen to what Harari says.
SPEAKER_01It may be a very nice story, it may be a very attractive story, we want to believe it, but it's just a story. It's not a reality. It is not a biological reality. Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights also. Take a human, cut him open, look inside, you find their blood and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don't find their any rights. The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread around.
SPEAKER_04Do you believe in human rights? Then you are not a believer purely in biology. You're not a believer purely in nature, you are a believer in supernature, right? In the supernatural. So the most materialist gender critical feminist is themselves relying on beliefs that the atheist Yuval Noah Harari says are utterly biblical, right? These are the religious stories that have been passed around. And if you don't believe Yuval Noah Harari, then believe Louise Perry. Louise Perry says, our instinct to lift up and protect those that might not have the same upper body strength as men, right? Women have sort of half the upper body strength of men. To protect those who are weaker biologically has come to us not from nature. It has come to us from something supernatural, something from the Bible, actually. And if you don't believe Yval Noah Harari, if you don't believe Louise Perry, um, how about historian Tom Holland? Uh, here he is in conversation with me, uh, telling me where human rights have really come from. Because, as I put to him, a lot of my humanist friends just think that human rights are obvious. In the same way that you can just read off of the chromosomes what somebody's biological sex is. Surely you can just read off of nature, you can look around scientifically and discover this thing called human rights. And we didn't need Christianity to get there. We didn't need the Bible to get there. I put that to Tom and his response is just priceless. Some of the things that are often kind of um said to me, especially by by humanist friends, they will they will say, um, um, obviously Christianity has played a part in Western liberal values. Um, but uh even without Jesus Christ, we we would have gotten to where we've gotten to. I want to see that love again. We we would have gotten to where we've gotten to. Now, could we though have generated some kind of universal human rights and that that sort of stuff? And materials.
SPEAKER_06Why would you? I mean, the the idea of human rights, I mean, the idea that human rights kind of hangs in the ether waiting to be discovered is is as theological as believing that the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead and sits at the hand of God the Father. Yes. I mean it's it's it's it's it requires a leap of faith. Yes.
SPEAKER_04Such a great point. Okay. If you think that human rights exist and Christianity was incidental as a path towards human rights, then you haven't gotten rid of the supernatural, right? You you might if you think you can get rid of the supernatural by getting rid of Christian history, but you still think that via a different route humanity ascends to the same summit, then what do you think is on top of that mountain? What you think is is on top of that mountain is the inviolable worth and dignity of all humans and and their kind of moral equality in the eyes of God or in the eyes of the law. Um and you believe that this equality extends to the very fringes of the human family and no further, but that everybody on the inside of this bounded set called humanity is equally worthy of provision and protection and they have this spiritual equality. And you mouth all those beliefs without laughing. Because it could just be brute force that you just by feat arbitrarily say, Well, we are the top of the evolutionary tree, uh, we are the best, we did we declare ourselves to be the best. Like, what what is morally virtuous about that? That is just might makes right, isn't it? And the whole point of human rights is that it protects vulnerable individuals from those who just make arbitrary claims that might makes right. Human rights is meant to be non-arbitrary. It's meant to be endowed by our creator, as the Declaration of Independence says. We have been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. It is not that governments give their citizens rights. Governments can only recognize the rights that already exist. But as soon as you've said all that about human rights, you've said something so supernatural, so very Jesus-like. To believe that our history happened to climb Mount Wrights and get to the top of Mount Wrights and stick a flag in it. It happens to be a Christian flag, but somebody else traveling a different route might have gone up Mount Wright's and put a different flag in it. And that person might be a religious person or that person might be an atheist, right? To get rid of Christianity and to get rid of that expedition up Mount Wrights is not to get rid of the supernatural. The idea of rights at all is already profoundly theological, whichever route you think is going to get you there. And Tom Holland says it's as theological as saying that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of the Father. Um, those two beliefs, the exaltation of the man Christ Jesus to the highest place in the universe, that belief is of course parallel to the belief that the human has a unique and inviolable dignity. Of course, those two beliefs are parallel because the human rights belief is simply a secular articulation of the Christian belief. Because the human rights belief is that there is such a thing as humanity that unites us all, and that we are all equal sharers in this one thing called humanity, and to call us humanity is to give us a profound dignity. It is to make us unlike the natural world. We are not but a part of this world, as the Nazis taught, right? We are special, we are equal, we are exalted, and every member of that human family is to be protected against the power of the strong. To believe in human rights is a secular version of to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. It really is. And the reason why we have ascended this mount is because it is that Christian belief that undergirds rights. Take away that Christian belief, and you don't get rights. That's such an important point.
SPEAKER_06The difference is that Christians recognize that belief in the divinity of Christ requires belief.
SPEAKER_04Do you believe in rights? You don't simply believe in rights because you've looked at the biology. The biology will not teach you rights. Yval Noah Harari has taught us that. Tom Holland has taught us that. If you believe in rights, you have taken a leap of faith.
SPEAKER_06The difference is that Christians recognize that belief in the divinity of Christ requires belief. Whereas, you know, lots of people just assume that human rights are something that exist. Yes. But they're not. They're the result of specifically legal developments in medieval Christendom. The emergence of of um this theory by the canon rights lawyer, by the canon lawyers in from the 12th century onwards. It doesn't just spontaneously emerge.
SPEAKER_04Yes. But you hold dear to your heart those liberal values. You personally hold dear to your hearts that the wheat should not be cast off and that there's there's an equality or something.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, but I recognise now that they're not, you know, that they're Christian values. Yes, yes. And of course, the what it opens up is the is the recognition that that actually without Christian faith, then w ultimately what is the underpinning for that? Yes. And the the the kind of idea of that that humanists propagate that somehow science proves this, I mean, it seems to me grotesque.
SPEAKER_05Right.
SPEAKER_06You know, science, science is a mirror in which you see what you want to see reflected back. So the Nazis use science to justify racial genocide, and liberals use it to justify, you know, let's hug the world. Yes. But both of them reflect the cultural prejudices of the people who are looking in that mirror of science.
SPEAKER_04Wow. The idea that science proves rights is grotesque, okay? Not my words, the words of eminent historian Tom Holland. Um, the idea that you can simply believe in biology and get to your feminist convictions simply through your biology. Um, that is nonsense. Not gonna happen. And all it reveals is that there are some invisible foundations to your thinking that are unexamined. And I just think it's worth examining what some of those foundations are. They are foundations like equality, like compassion. Um, I've written uh about these Christian values that have come to be the air that we breathe, right? They've they've come to be natural and obvious and universal and self-evident, all these things, and the idea that we should have equality and progress and kindness and uh freedom and all these things, um, these have come to us through profoundly Christian convictions. Which means that the census in Scotland is actually pretty depressing reading, um, not just for Christians. I think for the UK, it's pretty depressing reading, that the great majority of Scots, 2,780,900 Scots, said they have uh no religion. Um, 5,409 of them were Jedi Knights. Only 1,863 say they're humanist, uh, only 1,530 say they're agnostic. So believers in biology uh seem to be outdoing humanists and agnostics in the census. My goodness, look at uh the Church of Scotland doing so poorly. 1,107,796. They have been haemorrhaging numbers. And now Scotland self-identifies as irreligious. Uh, but I want to make a plea that self-identification uh is not the final basis for how we should think about these things. Uh I know that so many Scots have voted with their feet and they have left church. The Scottish Daily Express has called Scotland a predominantly atheist country. Uh, that's wrong. It's absolutely wrong. That is not how um very many people at all have identified in Scotland. There are four times as many believers in biology as there are atheists in Scotland, if we just go by the census uh statistics. Scotland is not atheistic. It seems to be post-Christian, but it also seems to be post-secular as well, because we're all starting to realize that we do not navigate this world according to reason and evidence. We navigate this world according to moral intuitions and transcendent values, right? And I guarantee those 2883 people who wrote in believers in biology, they were motivated by beliefs that you cannot ground in biology. Beliefs that go beyond the natural, that go to the supernatural. And if you share some of those values, then I urge you to look into Christianity as the proper grounding for those convictions. One way you can do it is by going to 321course.com. You'll meet Jesus and he will give us a vision for God, the world, and yourself. It's an eight-session course. You can binge it in a couple of hours, or you can do it over a number of weeks. You can do it with friends, you can do it in churches, you can do it alone online. We would love you to get to know Jesus because he represents the kind of supernatural that we can all believe in. And uh, if you haven't subscribed already, why don't you subscribe, tap that bell, and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks so much.