In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson describes what it means for man to be created in the image of God, what the Bible can tell us about our capacity for both tremendous sacrifice and tremendous folly, and why he believes it is good enough to conduct ourselves as if God exists.
00:00:58.000Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner.
00:01:03.000God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space.
00:01:09.000And so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible.
00:01:15.000This week on the Sunday special, I'm excited to welcome back Dr. Jordan B. Peterson to discuss his latest book, We Who Wrestle with God.
00:01:21.000Jordan has lectured on biblical symbolism for years, including with us here at the Daily Wire in his groundbreaking seminars on Exodus and the Gospels.
00:01:28.000After the success of his previous bestsellers, Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, Jordan has at last put pen to paper to canvas the timeless lessons of the Old Testament.
00:01:37.000In today's episode, Jordan describes what it means for man to be created in the image of God, what the Bible can tell us about our capacity for both tremendous sacrifice and tremendous folly.
00:01:45.000He also reflects on his writing process and why he believes it is good enough to conduct himself as if God exists.
00:01:50.000In his book, Jordan works through some of the most profound questions of all time.
00:01:53.000We who wrestle with God is available everywhere on November 19th.
00:02:26.000Well, I don't know what people are going to make of it because, see, I tried to do two things in the book.
00:02:33.000I tried to make a case that was scientifically and theologically unassailable.
00:02:38.000And, you know, people might be skeptical about whether or not, let's say, psychology qualifies as a science, but it does if you triangulate with enough precision.
00:02:50.000So the arguments that I'm making, I think, are, what would you say?
00:02:55.000They're viable at a psychopharmacological basis.
00:02:59.000So with regards to brain chemistry and brain function and also with what we know about perception and clinical practice.
00:03:09.000And then they also make sense from a literary and religious scholarship perspective.
00:03:41.000Like I figured out, for example, that I make a very strong case that it is now an unassailable fact that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story.
00:03:57.000A story is actually a description of a weighting function.
00:04:00.000You know how in large language models, the relationship between words is specified statistically.
00:04:08.000There's weightings that define the relationship between letters and words and concepts and sentences and paragraphs.
00:04:17.000And a story is a description of the weighting function that someone applies to the facts.
00:04:23.000So, for example, when you go to a movie and you see the protagonist in action, you watch how he attends to things and you watch how he conducts himself, and you infer from that the manner in which he weights the facts that are presented to him.
00:04:39.000And in consequence, you can internalize the story, and then you can see the world that way.
00:04:45.000And that's why that also accounts, by the way, for why we're so interested in narratives, right?
00:04:51.000So, the problem with the empiricist perspective, technically, is that the empiricists essentially presume that all facts are to be weighted equally, right?
00:05:02.000And that's a value-free, that's a value-free consideration of the facts at hand.
00:05:08.000But that's not viable biologically, it's not viable psychologically.
00:05:13.000Some things have to be more important to you than other things because otherwise you drown in the complexity of all of those facts.
00:05:22.000So, I mean, just as a family man, you pay more attention to your child, for example, than someone else's child.
00:05:35.000I think, Ben, that's actually why we're in a culture war most fundamentally, because there has been converging evidence from about six disciplines, not least the literary theorists in France that dread postmodernists that have insisted that we see the world through a story.
00:05:53.000Now, where they went wrong is that the story that is being put forth as canonical is one of power.
00:06:02.000That's certainly the case for the mad Marxists and the French postmodernists fit into that category, or hedonic self-gratification, or nihilistic collapse.
00:07:16.000There's no difference between work and sacrifice, because work is the sacrifice of the future to, sorry, the sacrifice of the present to the future and the sacrifice of the narrow self to the community.
00:07:30.000And so you can imagine that for reality to unfold properly, and that would be the reality that is good or very good, as is portrayed, say, in Genesis 1, the appropriate sacrifice has to be made.
00:08:24.000Well, if it's all about me in the most narrow way, then there's no community, right?
00:08:31.000There's only the immediate gratification of my whims.
00:08:34.000So I devolve into a set of whims and I have to impose those whims on other people using power because they're not going to cooperate voluntarily if it's all about me.
00:08:44.000Now, to the degree that I establish a voluntarily chosen and reciprocal community around me, then I'm sacrificing my narrow aims to that higher end, obviously, right?
00:08:59.000I mean, it seems to me that once you understand these things, this is another thing that's very strange is once you understand these things, they become that much, they attain the much vaunted status of self-evident.
00:09:17.000I ran it by Jonathan Pajo, and he's terrified with regards to some of the things that I said theologically.
00:09:23.000And so I'm sure I misstepped, you know, in various places, but we'll see.
00:09:29.000I mean, the book certainly opens a bunch of these conversations.
00:09:32.000And certainly what you're talking about in terms of sacrifice and the story that we tell about our lives, that's true, because the place where you most obviously make your first sacrifice is in marriage, right?
00:09:43.000Where you sacrifice your interests to the interests of something larger.
00:09:45.000And then the place where you make your second sacrifice is when you start to have children.
00:09:48.000And the society that refuses to recognize it, it's not a giant surprise that a society that refuses to see the story of humanity as a story of sacrifice refuses to sacrifice themselves.
00:09:59.000So it makes a lot of sense that people aren't getting together, people aren't actually getting married, people aren't having babies, because the minute you start to live that sacrifice, it becomes impossible to unsee.
00:10:08.000We'll get to more with Jordan Peterson in a moment.
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00:11:08.000Text Ben to that number to get started.
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00:12:16.000And there's a variety of answers to that.
00:12:19.000The first answer is: what do you mean by your ends?
00:12:24.000Because actually, what you're really proposing is that your immediate fragmented whims become the ruler of the world, right?
00:12:33.000Because the my you're referring to is what you want now, and it's sort of what you want now, regardless of the consequences for your future self or for other people.
00:12:44.000I mean, the whole issue of what I want begs the question of what is meant by I. What is this sovereign, self-evident I that in principle is what would you say, is the highest possible source of value?
00:13:03.000You know, we're an internal war of competing motivations, and each of those motivations can emerge as dominant at any moment.
00:13:11.000That's what you see in the behavior of two-year-olds, for example.
00:13:14.000And to say that each emergent whim should be triumphant is to doom yourself to the same fate that a two-year-old who never grew up would be doomed to.
00:13:25.000So, the simplest explanation for why your own desire can't be paramount is that that isn't a playable game.
00:13:40.000And a society that facilitates that will become corrupt and unmanageable overnight.
00:13:46.000And I just don't see any way out of that.
00:13:48.000I mean, one of the things I've really come to understand, Ben, is that I think is that that I hate to get political, and I'll try to avoid that as much as possible.
00:13:59.000But I think part of the reason that a radical progressivism is eternal is because there's no difference between rule by whim and power and immaturity from a psychophysiological perspective.
00:14:43.000And the political voice, without a connection to the divine, let's say, without being subordinate to what's properly highest, reverts to a mirrored populism and just offers the Israelites, let's say, what they want.
00:15:00.000But that isn't what happens, is that what happens is the worst of the Israelites rise to the top and demand their immediate gratification.
00:15:09.000And the Israelites end up partying naked, partying naked in the desert in the midst of an orgy in a manner that makes them, you know, contemptible to their enemies.
00:15:20.000And if that doesn't echo and echo for you with regards to the modern situation, you're not really thinking very hard.
00:15:27.000And I think that's eternally the case, is that it makes perfect sense structurally and psychophysiologically, because if The form of order that unites us most thoroughly collapses.
00:15:42.000So that would be something equivalent to the disappearance or the death of God, then what happens is that a war between competing underlying motivational states emerges.
00:15:53.000And one of the things I've been thinking through, I'd like your opinion about this, is that, so what is to be expected in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God?
00:16:04.000What's to be expected psychologically?
00:16:06.000Well, the most dominant subordinate motivational forces will vie for supremacy, and that would be sexuality.
00:16:14.000So now we have Freud, or power, and that would give us, say, Nietzsche or even Alfred Adler to some degree, or the postmodernists or the Marxists.
00:16:24.000Hedonism and power go hand in hand because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power because you can't get people to cooperate voluntarily, or the collapse of everything into a nihilistic mess.
00:16:35.000And I also don't see any, like, how else could it possibly work?
00:16:39.000If you lose the highest uniting value, things could collapse utterly, and that's where you get a kind of nihilistic depression, or the next most powerful forces will emerge.
00:16:50.000And I think it's inevitable that those are something like hedonistic sexuality and power.
00:16:56.000What the hell else would rule when you remove, let's say, sovereign self-sacrifice as the highest order principle?
00:17:04.000You know, I mean, that's all what you're saying.
00:17:06.000And as you say in the book, a lot of these are encapsulated in biblical stories.
00:17:11.000I mean, that's sort of the story of the Tower of Babel versus the story of the society before Noah versus the family-centered society that God chooses with Noah.
00:17:19.000You basically have three competing stories.
00:17:20.000You have sort of the hedonistic individualism of the society of all against all, in which, you know, sexual impropriety and robbery are common, and God decides to blot that out, and then he decides to uplift Noah, or you have the Tower of Babel, which is power consolidated top down to build the great big thing.
00:17:41.000And so the only alternative to that has always been and will always be family structure, which, as we discussed at the very beginning, what you were saying, that's the most sacrificial thing that you do, is the stuff that you do for your family.
00:17:51.000It's where you make the biggest sacrifices.
00:17:52.000It's the place where you subsume your own personal interests in favor of other people.
00:17:57.000And God understands that, which is why the story of Genesis really is a family story more than any other type of story.
00:18:04.000Well, you also laid out a remarkable narrative accomplishment by the editors of the biblical story, because the story starts out, of course, with creation and the establishment of man and woman, and then the fall and the fall is a consequence of overweening pride and overreach, right?
00:18:24.000Adam and Eve bite off more than they can chew, and suffering enters the world.
00:18:28.000And that's very much worth contemplating because the degree to which suffering characterizes existence as a consequence of prideful overreach is an open question.
00:18:38.000You know, I mean, there does, because we're mortal and fragile, a certain degree of suffering seems built into the structure of existence.
00:18:45.000It's the finite against the infinite and that conundrum.
00:18:49.000But true suffering has this hellish aspect that you can only attain if you bring it on yourself.
00:18:55.000And the best way to do that is through pride.
00:18:58.000And I think the story of Adam and Eve, the fall of Adam and Eve, actually details out the particularities of the prideful sin that each sex is most prone to.
00:19:08.000So it's a kind of hyper-compassionate all-inclusion on the part of Eve, and it's a part of pathological attempt to impress the other on the part of Adam, cowardly, and then to blame.
00:19:21.000And that produces this collapse of paradise.
00:19:25.000Then you get the establishment of these two sacrificial patterns in the story of Cain and Abel, which is brilliant, brilliant, immediate follow-up from a narrative perspective.
00:19:34.000And then as you said, you get a story of the forms of society that are likely to prevail if prideful overreach is the name of the game.
00:19:45.000You get a collapse into chaos, and that's clearly the story of Noah.
00:19:49.000That's all of its symbolic associations.
00:19:52.000Or you get the rise of the all-seeing eye of Sauron, and that's the Tower of Babel.
00:19:57.000And the consequence of the rise of the totalitarian state is that words themselves lose their meaning.
00:20:03.000And we're certainly at that point in our society because we can't even agree on what constitutes a man and a woman, which is, I think, by the way, the most fundamental perceptual distinction.
00:20:14.000I think it might be the distinction upon which all other distinctions rest.
00:20:18.000It's certainly the case from the symbolic perspective.
00:20:20.000Well, then, in keeping with your analysis, the story of Abraham is presented as the alternative pathway to the flood and the Tower of Babel.
00:20:31.000And Abraham is a story of upwards spiraling sacrificial offering, right?
00:20:37.000And so you could say, well, at each stage of your life, you're in a new narrative.
00:22:31.000And at each stage of his development, he reaffirms his commitment to that spirit of adventure.
00:22:37.000And then he transforms himself through a process of sacrifice.
00:22:41.000And what that means is that, you know, every time your personality expands because you have a new opportunity, you have to leave things that aren't worthy behind in the dust, so to speak, right?
00:22:54.000He does it so thoroughly, he literally becomes a new person because he gets a new name.
00:22:59.000And then he's called upon to offer his son to God.
00:23:02.000And that's the stumbling point for, like, say, most skeptical atheist readers.
00:23:07.000But I also understand what that means, I think, because mostly because of thinking about Michelangelo's Paeta, you know, there's this tremendous statue in St. Peter's that Michelangelo carved when he was like 23.
00:23:21.000And it shows Mary holding the broken body of her adult son in her arms.
00:23:28.000And I would say offering him to the world or to God, offering him to the highest.
00:23:35.000And that is what you do if you have children, if you have any sense, right?
00:23:39.000Is you sacrifice your children, let's say their whims, their immediate desires, all of that, even your relationship with them, their dependency on you, you sacrifice that to the highest possible aim.
00:23:53.000And if you do that properly, you get them back.
00:23:57.000And that's also true, because if you encourage your children to go out into the world in this Abrahamic way, then they become competent and stable and they're appreciative of you.
00:24:09.000And once they're adults, they can establish a long-lasting friendship at that point.
00:24:15.000It's more than friendship, but it's at least that.
00:24:18.000And so Abraham, he's the archetypal individual and his pathway forward, him and Sarai, that's definitely offered as the alternative to the catastrophe of the flood and the all-seeing eye of the state.
00:24:35.000The coherence of the biblical story is so deep that it's spellbinding and absurd.
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00:26:52.000Now, with 12 Rules and Beyond Order, I was more explaining something than trying to figure it out, although there was some of the latter in it.
00:27:01.000With this book, it's sort of halfway between.
00:27:03.000You know, I was definitely entering new territory, much deeper analysis of many more biblical stories.
00:27:11.000And so there's a fair bit of investigation on my end there.
00:27:15.000And that tilts it more towards the academic direction.
00:27:19.000But I think that like 12 Rules or Beyond Order, the book is extremely practical.
00:27:26.000Like, if you understand the things that are in We Who Wrestle with God, it'll change your life.
00:27:31.000And I don't say that lightly, and I also say it knowing it's true, because hundreds and hundreds of students at Harvard and the University of Toronto told me year after year for 20 years, informally and formally in the course evaluations, that the Maps of Meaning course changed their entire life.
00:27:52.000It changed the way they looked at everything.
00:27:55.000And then I also know from the tourists and the thousands of people that I've spoken to, or even tens of thousands of people, that the 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order have had the same effect.
00:28:07.000And like, I think this is a, well, this is a deeper book in that it unites, as I said, it unites modern science with the deepest of our theological traditions.
00:28:19.000If that's true, like that's a preposterous claim, right?
00:28:23.000It's really, it's a preposterous claim.
00:28:25.000But I also think, Ben, like, I think we are on the cusp of something truly new because I think the Enlightenment has come to an end.
00:28:33.000I think in my wilder moments that that was signified in some ways by my discussion with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.
00:28:43.000And the reason that those discussions happened and the reason that they attracted a certain amount of attention was because there is something new under the sun.
00:28:53.000And it is that what's new is our understanding now, our emergent understanding that there's no escaping from the story.
00:29:05.000I mean, like, those debates were really fascinating because, again, what you hear from sort of the new atheist crowd is that when you talk about truth or when you talk about symbolism, that that's an attempt to avoid the questions that they're asking about the quote-unquote hard science.
00:29:21.000But that's not really the case that you're making.
00:29:23.000So why don't you explain for people who missed it?
00:29:26.000Well, first of all, there is now a hard science of symbolism.
00:29:30.000The large language models have mapped out the symbolic world.
00:29:34.000And what they have mapped out is the probability that ideas will co-occur.
00:29:39.000And what a symbol is, is like a central symbol would be the center point of a network of statistically associated ideas.
00:29:48.000And then I would say every perception is a network of that sort.
00:29:53.000So when you perceive an object, you perceive the object in relationship to its embodiment or incarnation of the ideal.
00:30:10.000You perceive every pillow, or there's a pillow in this room that I'm looking at.
00:30:15.000You perceive every pillow as a reflection of the ideal central form of pillow, which is something like an amalgam of its practical function and its objective qualities.
00:31:16.000It's not witch and glass enclosed high-rise penthouse apartment.
00:31:21.000Now, you could play with that, like you could play with the witch representation by having a witch who was witchy in all regards, except she lived in a penthouse, you know, and that would be an interesting twist.
00:31:32.000But you have to stay within the realm of the symbolic representations in order for the portrayal to make sense.
00:31:39.000And so, and I think I asked one of the world's top neuroscientists flat out.
00:31:46.000Can I remember his name off the top of my head?
00:31:58.000This is revolutionary because, of course, the atheist reductionist materialists like Dawkins assume that there is a self-evident fact level somewhere, and that you can reduce everything that's value-predicated to this level of incontrovertible, self-evident fact.
00:32:16.000That level doesn't exist, it's interpretation all the way down.
00:32:21.000Now, the weird thing about that is that in a sense, that's what the postmodernists have been claiming.
00:32:28.000But what they got wrong was that that interpretation level itself, the weighting level, also has a structure.
00:32:36.000And one of the things I tried to tell Dawkins was that that's the structure of the meme world.
00:32:43.000That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:32:45.000Like the world that we've abstracted up in linguistic representation and imagination, it has a structure.
00:32:51.000That's the Jungian collective unconscious.
00:32:53.000And that's the consequence of the competition between memes across hundreds of thousands of years.
00:33:02.000And so, one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins, and I had spoken with Brett Weinstein in some detail before that, was that Dawkins' meme idea is way more significant than he thinks.
00:33:14.000But he won't take that step because if he steps beyond, like he said, a meme is a backwards baseball cap.
00:33:24.000I mean, come on, give yourself some credit.
00:33:27.000You're talking about the manner in which abstract representations war for supremacy in the space defined by abstract human cognition.
00:33:35.000You can do better than backwards baseball cap.
00:33:38.000You know, I tried to let him know that Mircea Eliada, who's a great historian of religion, has mapped out something like the structure of the war between gods in heaven across multiple cultures.
00:33:51.000And it's a very common, it's a very stable pattern.
00:33:54.000You get a polytheistic interpretation of the world, which is something like the narrative embodiment of different value structures, and then they vie for supremacy.
00:34:04.000And that probably happens as isolated tribal groups come together in larger civilizations.
00:34:10.000You know, so there's actual war on the ground, but there's also conceptual war in the space of imagination.
00:34:17.000And then that tends towards the emergence of a monotheism across time, if the culture manages to unite itself.
00:34:24.000And then that monotheism has certain properties.
00:34:27.000You know, like in Mesopotamia, for example, a god named Marduk rose up out of the polytheistic, out of the realm of polytheistic combat.
00:34:38.000And Marduk was characterized by eyes all the way around his head, so attention, and by the capacity to speak magic words, the words that transform night into day, which is very similar to the conception of Yahweh at the beginning of time.
00:34:56.000It's that as these underlying value structures vie for supremacy, what emerges as superordinate and stable is structured.
00:35:05.000And I think the reason for that, Ben, is that imagine that you had to imagine that you took the set of all possible playable games and you extracted out what playable meant.
00:35:18.000Playable would mean something like infinitely iterable, improving as you played it, and voluntarily chosen.
00:35:26.000Well, that's a very tight set of constraints around what would constitute an acceptable game.
00:35:32.000And there's no reason to assume that wouldn't re-emerge continually as the world of playable games battled, what would you say, as battles raged in the world of potentially playable games.
00:35:49.000And no, Dawkins kind of got excited about that idea near the end of our discussion because we talked about how that might function biologically, right?
00:35:58.000So once you establish a story as supreme, then people can compete within that framework for reproductive supremacy.
00:36:10.000And that would mean that the reproductive victory would confer an advantage on the genes that matched that story.
00:36:20.000So that's how biological evolution can chase the structure of narrative.
00:36:27.000Well, geez, well, Dawkins, he figured that when we talked about that, this was only the last half an hour or so, he saw how that might work, which I thought was, well, I couldn't have asked for a better end to our discussion than now.
00:36:39.000It's like, that's also an explanation for the emergence of the Jungian collective unconscious, right at the genetic, from the genetic level all the way up to the conceptual.
00:36:48.000I think it's indisputable that these sorts of things have occurred.
00:36:57.000And I think it has to be the case biologically.
00:36:59.000Once human beings opened up the capacity for abstraction and we created worlds of representation in abstraction, then the fact of the existence of those worlds is going to start to have a determining effect on the course of biological evolution.
00:37:18.000The alternative hypothesis is that the fact that human beings can think is independent of their reproductive status and their biology.
00:38:47.000And you're seeing competing stories, as you say, being told in the political sphere that really are just happening at the top of the iceberg.
00:38:53.000There's a much bigger story that's happening much deeper.
00:38:55.000Jordan, one of the questions that you get asked a lot is about your own personal view of God, because you've talked about what you think of religion in terms of sort of useful truth or utilitarian truth or various types of truth.
00:39:09.000And once again, the accusation is, well, you're avoiding the question of like factual truth.
00:39:14.000You factually believe that God exists.
00:39:15.000Are you trying to end around that question?
00:39:17.000Obviously, we've seen a number of high-profile conversions in the recent pastor wife who became a recent convert to the Catholic Church.
00:39:52.000And it isn't, see, I think that's really a hangover in some ways from a Protestant view of belief.
00:40:00.000And I'm not trying to single the Protestants out here.
00:40:03.000The Protestants did more than anyone else, arguably, although you've got to give credit to the Jews on this front too, to bring literacy to the world, right?
00:40:12.000It was the combination of the printing press and the Protestant insistence that everyone could have direct contact with the word of God that made the whole world literate.
00:40:24.000But the problem with the Protestant approach, in some ways, because it's so hyperlinguistic, is that belief gets transformed into something like the willingness to mouth a set of propositions.
00:40:37.000And I just don't think, like, that's true in a way, but it's not fundamentally true.
00:40:43.000You know, and Christ himself says in the gospels that not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.
00:40:50.000Like the mere verbal assent to a statement of belief is not sufficient to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.
00:41:00.000It's a matter of commitment and action.
00:41:48.000And every time I interview a scientist, the Simpsons comic book guys come out of the bloody, out from underneath their rocks and whine about how the fact that they're smart hasn't made them king of the world in their bitter and resentful troll demon epithets.
00:42:08.000And the other ones are the Christian fundamentalists and like they're equally intolerable.
00:42:24.000Well, one of the things that I always say to these questions is really that, you know, when it comes to how people actually act in the world, that is the best, as you're saying, that is the best adjudication of what they actually believe, right?
00:42:35.000This is true in everything from psychology to survey data, that revealed preference is significantly more important than what you think of yourself.
00:42:44.000And so people spend people spend an awful lot of time thinking like, what do I think?
00:42:49.000But the truth is that the vast majority, and this is a point that's made by the philosopher Michael Okshot, the vast majority of what we do in the world has very little to do with a conscious belief system that directs us toward doing the thing.
00:43:00.000Much of it is taught to us by our family.
00:43:03.000Much of it is so deeply embedded that it becomes neuroinstinctive.
00:43:06.000But the thing that you do in the world, the choices that you make in the world, are the best characterization of the thing that you believe.
00:43:13.000This is why whenever people will say, like, do you believe in God?
00:43:17.000The idea that I believe in God the same way that I believe in a proposition like two plus two equals four, well, I mean, two plus two equals four doesn't actually demand anything of me, it doesn't demand any sort of action on my on my part.
00:43:30.000The belief in God demands action on my part, and that action is either taking place in the world or it's not taking place in the world.
00:43:37.000And if it's not taking place in the world, of what use is the belief system?
00:44:23.000It's even instantiated differently neurologically.
00:44:27.000And so, but there's, we also have to understand for the religious types that are listening, especially the more literal-minded religious types who are propositionalized beyond belief.
00:44:39.000The God in the Old Testament and the new, for that matter, is ineffable.
00:44:45.000And so to say, is God real in some ways isn't it?
00:44:49.000It isn't a genuine question because God doesn't have the same order of reality as the profane things that are littered about the landscape.
00:44:59.000God isn't real the same way a table is real, right?
00:45:03.000And this is this, I'm not inventing this up out of whole cloth.
00:45:09.000There's an insistence that's continual.
00:45:11.000And I think it's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is is beyond categorization, right?
00:45:23.000And this is why even Moses can only get a glimpse of God.
00:45:28.000So God is outside our category structures.
00:45:49.000Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner.
00:45:55.000God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space.
00:46:01.000And so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible.
00:46:08.000That's clearly, I mean, it's clearly in the Hebrew text.
00:46:10.000I mean, the text, you know, the name of God, which in Hebrew, you know, as a religious Jew, I'm not actually supposed to even spell it.
00:46:17.000The letters would be yud and then hey, and then bav and then hey.
00:46:21.000But what that encompasses in the Hebrew is hayyaho vebi yehiyah, meaning that in the Hebrew, that means what was, what is, and what will be, right?
00:46:31.000And then when the description that God gives to Moses at the burning bush is I will be what I will be, right?
00:46:38.000Like that, that's the best description that God can give to a human being is like, I am what I am, basically, and I will be what I will be.
00:46:44.000And, you know, you're just going to have to deal with that, which is the answer at the end of the book of Job as well, which is, you know, you can't understand me because we're of a different work of a completely different kind.
00:46:54.000And, you know, that insistence by God is also then baffled by the biblical text, in which God takes an active role in history, is talking to people.
00:47:04.000God is too mysterious for any of these categories that are attempted for God.
00:47:09.000It's why I think that some of the Neoplatonic arguments, they do some solid work in terms of establishing a logical predicate for believing in God, but they don't do all the work in the sense that a Christian or a Jew would want them to do, or even a Muslim, that God is active in the world, that God has perspectives, that God does things, that a sort of Neoplatonic God that floats above everything and doesn't have any intervening impact, that God is barren and doesn't have a lot to say about what humanity constitutes.
00:47:37.000And that's not the God that, according to the scriptures, built the world and maintains it.
00:47:42.000Well, so one of the issues that I wrestle with in this book is actually something I derived from Dawkins because Dawkins is at pains, not least in his new book, to establish the proposition that every organism is a microcosm of its environment.
00:48:01.000And I think that that's actually key to solving the mystery that you just described.
00:48:05.000He said that not only is that so, this is Dawkins, but it's necessarily so.
00:48:11.000So, for example, if an alien ever got a hold of a bird, an earthly, a terrestrial bird, it could derive a tremendous amount of knowledge about the constituent nature of the earth from analyzing the bird.
00:48:24.000The bird's DNA has encoded its entire evolutionary history, for example.
00:48:30.000And the ratio of bird wing span to body weight describes the atmosphere.
00:48:36.000And the fact that the blood is oxygen-dependent describes the chemical nature of the air through which it propels itself, etc., etc.
00:48:45.000Its eyes speak a certain language about the sun.
00:48:49.000So every organism is a reflection of the environment to which it is adapted.
00:48:55.000And there's an ancient medieval idea that the human soul is a microcosm.
00:49:00.000And I don't see that those ideas are different at all.
00:49:03.000And so, you know, the genesis insistence is that we're made in the image of God.
00:49:08.000And I don't see that that's any different whatsoever than Dawkins' claim that every organism is a microcosm of its environment.
00:49:15.000And what that would mean, Ben, is that possibly imagine that there's a layer of reality that's divine and it's outside the realm of human conception.
00:49:26.000And you don't believe in that the same way that you believe in the existence of an object.
00:49:31.000I mean, that's just an idiot-atheist game, anyways, because what the atheists want to do is they want you to say, Well, I believe in God like I believe in a table.
00:49:39.000And then the atheist says, Well, there's no material evidence for your God the way there is for a table.
00:49:46.000It's like, no, you're a fool because the game that you're playing is the game of a fool.
00:49:52.000So there's a divine level that's beyond human understanding.
00:49:56.000And I would also say that's potentially the realm, let's say, that people contact when they're under certain psychophysiological conditions that are replicable.
00:50:08.000All sorts of exercises can put people in touch with that strata of reality, not least prayer.
00:50:16.000And so, and above that, there's a material level, and then there's a social level and a psychological level.
00:50:22.000And those are all, what would you say?
00:50:25.000The divine patterning is reflected in the patterning at each of those emergent levels.
00:51:03.000We can walk through this very logically.
00:51:05.000So imagine that I'm having an argument with my wife and I allow myself to be possessed by the spirit of anger and I call on it for revelation of my pathway forward.
00:51:18.000Well, my head is going to fill with aggressive images and I'm going to strive for domination and victory, even over someone I love.
00:51:26.000And that's because I've called on the spirit of anger to reveal itself to me as I'm moving forward.
00:51:33.000Or I could call on the spirit of pride, or I could call on the spirit of immediate sexual gratification.
00:51:40.000We do this when we're plotting our pathway forward continually.
00:51:45.000So imagine instead that I oriented myself so that I was communing with the highest possible spirit.
00:52:05.000Well, I believe that our perceptual and cognitive systems are set up so that the spirit that that aim, the spirit that responds will be the spirit that your aim conjures, even conjures out of the void.
00:52:23.000And that's a very, I truly believe that's the case.
00:52:26.000I can't see how it could be otherwise because our perceptions and our conceptions do orient us toward our aim.
00:52:34.000Otherwise, what the hell good would they be?
00:52:36.000And so the spirit that responds to your inquiry is going to be the spirit of your aim.
00:52:41.000Jesus, man, once you understand that, the whole world changes.
00:52:46.000So then why wouldn't you aim for the highest possible good?
00:52:49.000Because then that's the spirit that's going to respond.
00:52:52.000See, in the Gospels, that's what Christ refers to as the pearl of great price, that the wealthy man would sell everything he owns to possess.
00:52:59.000It's like, if you had that, why would you want anything else?
00:53:03.000And the promise, the eternal promise in the biblical corpus is that pursuit of that highest aim is simultaneously the pursuit that brings life more abundant.
00:53:13.000And I also think that's incontrovertibly true in that the best long-term strategy is virtue.
00:53:22.000The best practical long-term strategy is virtue.
00:53:26.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:53:27.000First, the Dailywire shop's Black Friday deals.
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00:54:32.000Jordan, one of the things that you mentioned earlier, with regard to sort of the various layers of reality, I think that's the argument that's being made at the beginning of Genesis.
00:54:40.000So one of the weird things in the original sort of eating the apple story is that when you read just the text of it, one of the things that you see is that the snake actually doesn't lie.
00:54:52.000He actually tells a series of truths, right?
00:54:54.000He says, if you eat from this apple, then you'll be like God.
00:54:56.000You'll be able to distinguish good from evil, which is something that God later repeats, right?
00:55:00.000He says, if they've eaten from it, now we have to banish them from the tree of life because they'll be like us, distinguishing good from evil.
00:55:36.000Then the next thing that happens says, and then there is the snake.
00:55:38.000And the snake is a room, is the most a-room of all creatures, right?
00:55:42.000He's the most clever of all creatures.
00:55:44.000So why isn't what's the connection between nakedness and cleverness?
00:55:47.000So the argument the snake is actually making is you can discern from your own wants, needs, and desires what is appropriate for you.
00:55:55.000And because you can discern that, even if you have the explicit order of God, he's clearly lying to you.
00:56:00.000God is clearly not telling you the truth.
00:56:01.000If God says don't eat of that tree, but God's created a desire within you to eat from the tree, then clearly he wants you to follow your desire.
00:56:08.000He created you that way, that you can sort of make the Dawkins argument that looking inside your own soul, that you know better than God does, even if God explicitly gives you the rule not to eat from this thing.
00:56:18.000So in your own nakedness, in your own sort of material physical being, lies the root of cleverness.
00:56:25.000And so the first thing that happens, obviously, is they discover that they're naked, but not naked in the way that they thought they were, as in like all-powerful and that material reality can overcome what God wants of them.
00:56:34.000Naked in the sense that they're actually vulnerable, which is why the first thing that God does after he has this big conversation with them is he sews them a skin, right?
00:56:42.000He sews them a coat that is designed specifically to shield them from the element.
00:56:46.000So the story I think of the beginning is really about good parenting because God lets them suffer the natural consequences of their decisions.
00:56:53.000He says, you've made yourself vulnerable and naked.
00:56:56.000I'm going to help shield you from that by giving you a coat.
00:56:58.000But the reality of being vulnerable and naked in the world is that the environment is no longer your friend, right?
00:57:03.000If you thought that you could simply manipulate that your desire for what is good magically manifests, that's not true.
00:57:10.000You now work in a world in which the ground resists you, right?
00:57:13.000Where you work the ground, the ground resists you.
00:57:16.000You work in a world where childbirth does not come easily to you.
00:57:22.000And because you'd ignored the word of God and you instead decided that you were akin to God, now you have to live the animal part of your existence in a very real way, which is why you have to be banished from the Garden of Eden.
00:57:31.000You're now subject to all the rules of the animal.
00:57:34.000You see this relationship between cleverness, let's say, and nakedness manifest itself very directly in people's lives.
00:57:43.000So a common nightmare for people is to be naked on stage, right?
00:57:48.000And so that's to have all your vulnerabilities, your bare self exposed to the evaluative eye of the social community.
00:57:56.000Okay, so now imagine that you are on stage and you become self-conscious.
00:58:01.000And there's no difference between becoming self-conscious and becoming aware of your vulnerability.
00:58:07.000Then you might say, well, what's the preconditions for being self-conscious on stage?
00:58:12.000And the answer is, well, as soon as it's about you, when you're on stage, you're self-conscious, right?
00:58:30.000And the consequence of that query making itself manifest is self-consciousness.
00:58:35.000Now, if you're on stage and you're just trying to say what you believe to be the case, you know, and letting the cards fall where they will, then that self-consciousness disappears.
00:58:44.000And that I don't think there's any difference between that and walking with God in the eternal garden.
00:58:50.000And that's because you're allowing that deep reflection of the structure of reality within yourself to make it manifest in your words.
00:58:58.000And there's no reason for self-consciousness then because it's a sacrificial gesture.
00:59:05.000It's about wherever the truth will take you, let's say.
00:59:09.000And the biblical insistence, the voice of adventure that comes to Abraham is no different than the voice of truth that comes to Jonah, let's say.
00:59:50.000I mean, it was extremely, I had a better time writing this book than any book I've written.
00:59:55.000I mean, partly because my health is much better.
00:59:57.000I was very ill the last when I wrote the last book I wrote, and I'm much better now.
01:00:02.000But this was also almost entirely an exciting venture.
01:00:07.000When I wrote Maps of Meaning, I was really still dealing with the depths of malevolence and ignorance, let's say, you know, the darkness that characterizes human beings, because this question I was trying to answer in the final analysis was something like the origin of evil.
01:00:42.000That's a lot more joyful an endeavor, that's for sure.
01:00:45.000And it was a series of continual optimistic revelations as the structures of the texts revealed themselves because the news is so good.
01:00:57.000Well, the covenant, for example, that covenant that Abraham makes with God or that God makes with Abraham.
01:01:03.000Here's the cool thing about that, Ben, and because we can do a counterproposition.
01:01:09.000So imagine that the divine in the story of Abraham is conceptualized as the spirit of adventure that impels people forward into the world.
01:01:18.000So that would be the same spirit that makes your child exploratory and courageous, even on a playground when he has to meet new people or when he's mastering a new skill.
01:01:28.000And you're trying to foster that as a good father.
01:01:31.000Okay, so now imagine that that spirit of adventurous exploration leads to the is the best pathway forward to the expansion of the child's character.
01:01:47.000Okay, a genuine character in the most positive possible way.
01:01:50.000Well, then you'd say that the instinct for development is the same instinct that fleshes out possibility most thoroughly.
01:01:58.000Well, the counterproposition would be the spirit of adventure that drives a child to explore has no relationship with the psyche or society or the world.
01:02:11.000Okay, so now imagine that the world is structured so that if you followed the voice of adventure fully, which is the spirit you would encourage as a good father, and of course, Abraham is the archetypal father as well, then you would entice or invite people down the pathway that makes them a blessing to themselves, that helps them establish something permanent, that makes their name renowned among other people for good reason, and that does that in a way that brings benefit to everyone.
01:02:42.000Well, how could it be, given that we're social creatures, how could it be that our deepest instinct for developing ourselves and moving into the world, how could it be other than aligned with what brings the optimal social order?
01:02:58.000Because it would mean that we're maladapted to the social environment, right?
01:03:04.000Now, that doesn't mean there isn't a niche for psychopaths, for example.
01:03:08.000You know, I mean, once you establish a playable and productive game, people can take the role of parasite and scavenger, and they can eke out a pathetic, cane-like existence by doing that.
01:03:22.000They have to be wanderers in the land of nod, but you can do it.
01:03:27.000But that's the perversion of the postmodernists is that the path of cane is the only story that rules.
01:03:39.000And you know, I detailed that out quite radically in the book, too, not least from talking to people like Franz de Waal and knowing the work of people like Jak Panksep.
01:03:48.000Power doesn't even work to structure the social relations of chimpanzees.
01:03:54.000Even in chimps, you see the emergence of something like a reciprocal ethos.
01:03:59.000If at least you see that in the behavior of the chimps who establish relatively stable and peaceful reigns and troops, they're not power mad chest-thumping Hitlers.