What if atheism’s most celebrated arguments — Dawkins on complexity, Hitchens on morality, Harris on science — were never aimed at God at all, but at a caricature so philosophically crude that no serious theologian in history would recognise it? That is the central provocation of one of the most intellectually formidable theologians alive today.

Does Darwin's theory of evolution challenge Islam — or is that a myth we've been sold?

In this landmark episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Subboor Ahmad — public intellectual, debater, philosopher of science, and one of the most formidable Muslim voices engaging with New Atheism and Darwinism today.

Subboor holds a BSc in Engineering and both an MA and PgCert in Philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London, and is currently specializing in the philosophy of biology (Al Balagh Academy) — making him uniquely equipped to address this debate at its deepest level.

Together, we unpack:

🔬 What Darwin's theory actually claims — and what it doesn't

🧬 Does evolution disprove God? The philosophical case examined

📖 Islam's historical relationship with science — openness or conflict?

⚗️ The limits of science — why methodological naturalism can't touch the divine

🌍 The Islamic stance on Darwinian theory — where do scholars actually stand?

📚 Subboor's forthcoming book A Failed Hypothesis — a critical examination of Darwinism's philosophical foundations

The popular idea that evolution undermines the existence of God is simply wrong. Science only deals with observable phenomena — God, by definition, is unobservable. (Subboorahmad) But millions have been convinced otherwise. This conversation cuts through the noise with rigorous, respectful, evidence-based dialogue.

The Islamic tradition has historically not just been very open to scientific enquiry, but made significant contributions to the sciences and the scientific method itself. (Subboorahmad)

Whether you're a Muslim grappling with these questions, a skeptic curious about Islam's intellectual tradition, or simply a lover of ideas — this one is not to be missed.

🎙️ The Prometheans is a podcast and YouTube channel dedicated to interfaith dialogue, philosophy of religion, and the big questions that define our humanity.

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🌐 subboorahmad.com

In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore the profound psychological and spiritual insights of Carl Jung and ask a timeless question: Is the divine something we discover within ourselves?

Jung did not treat God merely as a theological concept, but as a living psychological reality—an inner experience emerging from the depths of the psyche. Through ideas like the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the process of individuation, Jung argued that the journey inward is simultaneously a journey toward the Divine.

We discuss Jung’s radical claim that religious experience is not inherited belief, but direct encounter—what he called the numinous: a powerful, transformative experience that connects us to something greater than the ego.

Is God an external being—or an inner reality we must awaken to?

Does modern secular life suppress our innate spiritual instinct?

And can reconnecting with the “inner life” heal the existential crisis of our time?

Drawing from psychology, philosophy, and theology, this episode invites you to rethink faith—not as blind belief, but as inner transformation and self-realization.

Friedrich Nietzsche declared God dead — and the modern world largely agreed. But what happens when neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science begin validating the very ideas Nietzsche used to challenge religion? And what does religious thought make of a man who, in trying to destroy it, may have understood it better than most believers?

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka sits down with Zachary Strong to explore the strange convergence of Nietzsche's philosophy with contemporary science — and what that convergence reveals about meaning, morality, the will, and the sacred. From the will to power as a precursor to modern theories of agency and motivation, to eternal recurrence as a psychological framework for resilience — Nietzsche keeps showing up where we least expect him.

But is scientific validation enough? Or does the very act of grounding Nietzsche in neuroscience strip him of his most radical edge? And can religious traditions — Islamic, Christian, or otherwise — offer something that neither Nietzsche nor the neuroscientist can?

This is a conversation about the madman who lit a lantern in the dark — and the question of whether anyone has yet found what he was looking for.

Topics covered:

The will to power and modern motivation science

Eternal recurrence as psychological resilience

Nietzsche's critique of religion vs. what religion actually says

Where neuroscience ends and meaning begins

The Übermensch — threat or invitation?

What does it mean to truly flourish as a human being? Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle wrote the most compelling answer ever put to paper — the Nicomachean Ethics. In this episode of The Prometheans, we sit down with Professor C.D.C. Reeve (UNC Chapel Hill) — one of the world's foremost Aristotle scholars and the translator of the Nicomachean Ethics (Hackett, 2nd ed.) — to unpack Aristotle's vision of the good life: happiness, virtue, practical wisdom, and what it means to live well.

From eudaimonia to phronēsis, from the golden mean to the contemplative life — we ask whether Aristotle's ancient framework still speaks to us today, across cultures, traditions, and faiths. Can a pagan philosopher from 4th-century Greece offer moral wisdom to Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the modern world?

🔥 In this episode:

What is eudaimonia — and why "happiness" doesn't quite capture it

Aristotle's doctrine of the virtuous mean

Practical wisdom (phronēsis) and how to act rightly in the real world

The contemplative life vs. the active life — which did Aristotle really prize?

Can Aristotle's ethics speak to Muslim, Jewish, and Christian moral traditions?

📚 Guest: Professor C.D.C. Reeve | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Translator, Nicomachean Ethics (Hackett, 2nd ed.)

🎙️ Host: Ali Zaka (AZD) | The Prometheans

Have you ever achieved something you desperately wanted — and felt empty almost immediately after? That restlessness isn't a flaw in your character. According to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, it is the very structure of being human.

In this episode of The Prometheans, host Ali sits down with Professor Todd McGowan — philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and author of over fifteen books including Capitalism and Desire, Embracing Alienation, and The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan — to explore one of the most radical and liberating ideas in modern thought: that satisfaction is not merely difficult to achieve. It is structurally impossible.

Together, they unpack why desire can never be finally satisfied, what the objet petit a actually is and why it functions as the cause of desire rather than its object, how jouissance (excessive enjoyment) operates in repetition rather than arrival, why capitalism is so powerful precisely because it exploits — rather than resolves — human dissatisfaction, the crucial distinction between desire and drive, why the pursuit of authenticity and wholeness may itself be a source of suffering, and what it genuinely means to live ethically in the face of an irreducible lack.

Along the way, the conversation draws unexpected bridges between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Islamic mystical tradition — from Ibn Arabi's restless qalb to the apophatic theology of the via negativa — revealing that the deepest traditions of human thought have long circled the same unanswerable question: What is it that we are really after?

This is not a conversation about giving up on desire. It is a conversation about finally understanding it — and, perhaps for the first time, making peace with the fact that the longing you carry is not a mistake. It is the most human thing about you.

🎙️ Guest: Professor Todd McGowan, Department of English, University of Vermont

📚 Books Referenced: Capitalism and Desire | Embracing Alienation | Enjoying What We Don't Have | Pure Excess | The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan

🎧 Also Recommended: Why Theory podcast (McGowan & Ryan Engley)

The Prometheans is a podcast dedicated to the deepest questions of philosophy, theology, literature, and the human condition. New episodes feature renowned scholars, authors, and thinkers from around the world.

In this episode of Let’s Discuss, host Ali Zaka sits down with Louay Fatoohi to explore a provocative and deeply historical question: Are the roots of American support for Israel theological rather than political?

Dr. Fatoohi argues that modern American identity is profoundly shaped by the worldview of the Hebrew Bible—particularly the idea of a “chosen nation.” From the Puritan vision of a “City on a Hill” to the rhetoric of leaders like Ronald Reagan, this episode examines how religious narratives have influenced American exceptionalism and foreign policy.

We also discuss:

The concept of American exceptionalism as a modern form of biblical “chosenness”

Historical support for Zionism from figures like John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Harry S. Truman

The intersection of theology, power, and geopolitics in shaping the Israel-Palestine conflict

Whether religious narratives are used to morally justify violence and expansion

This conversation challenges conventional explanations and invites viewers to rethink the ideological foundations behind global power dynamics.

⚠️ This discussion presents one perspective intended to encourage critical thinking and dialogue.

Can reason alone prove God exists? And did Descartes — the father of modern philosophy — actually build his entire system of knowledge on the existence of God?

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Professor John Cottingham — one of the world's most influential living philosophers, Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading, Honorary Fellow of St John's College Oxford, and the translator of the definitive three-volume Cambridge edition of Descartes's philosophical writings.

The topic: Descartes, God, and the Search for Certainty in a Doubtful World.

We live in an age of radical doubt — about truth, about meaning, about God. René Descartes (1596–1650) faced the same crisis in his own time. His response was audacious: he decided to doubt everything — and then, from that rubble of uncertainty, build an entirely new system of knowledge. But here is what most philosophy courses get wrong: Descartes could not complete that project without God. The existence of a good and non-deceptive God is not a footnote in the Meditations — it is the keystone of the entire edifice.

Professor Cottingham has spent a lifetime correcting this misreading. In this conversation, we explore what Descartes was truly attempting, why certainty requires more than reason alone, and what this 17th-century philosophical struggle means for those of us navigating doubt and faith in the 21st century.

Friedrich Nietzsche is perhaps the most weaponized philosopher in modern political discourse — and the most misunderstood. The right invokes him to diagnose civilizational decadence. The left borrows him to dismantle power structures. Both, argues today's guest, are projecting.

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Matt McManus — political scientist, author, and one of the most rigorous scholars working on the intersection of Nietzsche and contemporary politics — to untangle the real Nietzsche from the ideological caricature.

On the right, figures like Jordan Peterson and Dinesh D'Souza read Nietzsche as the great diagnostician of the decadence following the death of God, using his insights to frame the progressive left as driven by ressentiment toward the powerful. On the left, 20th-century thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze found in him powerful tools against societal power structures, embracing his emancipatory message. Both, McManus argues, get him fundamentally wrong.

So who was Nietzsche, really? Along with Marx, Nietzsche was the great 19th-century critic of modernity — a thinker whose influence ranged across philosophy, psychology, history, and theology with irreverent genius. He was not a systematic builder of doctrines but a diagnostician of the human condition after the collapse of religious certainty. His famous declaration that "God is dead" was not a sunny announcement of liberation — it was a warning that everything built upon Christian moral foundations, including the whole of European ethics, was destined for collapse.

Even the "will to power," one of his most abused concepts, is frequently misread. The confusion arises from overlooking Nietzsche's own distinction between raw force and power — the latter being closely tied to sublimation, self-mastery, and creative self-overcoming, not domination of others.

The Übermensch — Nietzsche's ultimate self-overcomer — is an abstract conceptualization of a self that is totally self-created, a self-legislator always in the process of becoming. It is a journey without end, internal rather than political, existential rather than ideological.

In this conversation, we ask: Can Nietzsche be rescued from his admirers? What does his philosophy actually demand of us in an age of nihilism and political tribalism? And what, if anything, can people of faith and moral conviction take from a thinker who called himself the Antichrist?

This is philosophy as it was meant to be done — rigorous, honest, and deeply relevant.

What would you do if you could act unjustly with zero consequences? Plato asked this question over 2,000 years ago — and his answer still cuts to the heart of what it means to be human.

In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with C.D.C. Reeve — Professor of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill and one of the world's leading translators and interpreters of Plato — to explore what the Republic really teaches us about justice, the soul, and the good life.

They discuss:

🔹 Thrasymachus' challenge: Is justice just the advantage of the stronger?

🔹 The Ring of Gyges — would you remain just if no one was watching?

🔹 Why the unjust tyrant is actually the most miserable person alive

🔹 The tripartite soul: appetitive, spirited, and rational desires

🔹 Philosopher Kings and the justification for epistemic authority

🔹 Why "helping friends and harming enemies" fails as a definition of justice

This isn't just ancient philosophy — it's a mirror held up to power, politics, and your own inner life.

📚 Recommended by Prof. Reeve: Five essential books for students of philosophy

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