Evolutionary Epistemology and the Deistic Turn: A Feminist Critique of Theistic Morality

The ongoing genocide in Gaza reveals not an aberration of Judeo-Christian morality but its structural fulfillment. Theistic frameworks create selves trapped in irresolvable double binds—divine command versus human reason, absolute truth versus provisional knowledge, chosen people versus universal humanity—that prevent evolutionary epistemological progress. Drawing on feminist philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and Marxist analysis, this essay demonstrates how theism's patriarchal architecture (exemplified in Genesis's portrayal of woman as derivative being) produces hierarchical, exclusionary selves incapable of rational moral evolution. Feminist epistemologists theorizing from positions of theological exclusion have articulated alternatives grounded in embodiment, relationality, and situated rationality. I argue that deistic frameworks—as partially instantiated by the American Founders and modeled in archaeological and anthropological evidence—enable selves capable of rational, creative, embodied freedom. Completing the deistic turn is prerequisite for addressing planetary crises from genocide to climate collapse.