The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.000 As a homeowner, some of the most tedious and easily forgotten maintenance tasks are often

00:00:04.340 the most important. Take gutter cleaning. It's one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind chores

00:00:08.940 that can lead to serious issues if neglected. LeafFilter offers an investment engineered to

00:00:14.440 protect your whole home. Clogged gutters aren't just a nuisance. They can cause extensive repairs,

00:00:19.740 costing thousands of dollars, and causing major headaches. LeafFilter's patented technology is

00:00:25.120 designed to take care of everything from start to finish, making the process hassle-free for

00:00:29.360 homeowners. Their professionals will clean out, realign, and seal your existing gutters before

00:00:34.600 installing the LeafFilter system, ensuring optimal performance from day one. Plus, every installation

00:00:40.120 comes with a free inspection, estimate, and lifetime guarantee. By choosing LeafFilter, you're not just

00:00:45.740 solving a maintenance problem. You're investing in your home's long-term health and your own peace of

00:00:49.980 mind. Protect your home and never clean out your gutters again with LeafFilter, America's number

00:00:55.140 one protection system. Schedule your free inspection and get up to 30% off your entire purchase at

00:01:00.580 LeafFilter.com slash build. That's a free inspection and up to 30% off at LeafFilter.com slash build.

00:01:08.440 See representative for warranty details. Promotion is 20% off plus a 10% senior or military discount.

00:01:13.960 One discount per household.

00:01:29.900 So I'm here today speaking with Alex O'Connor, who's flown in from London. I'm in LA.

00:01:35.180 He's known also as Cosmic Skeptic, and he runs a podcast within reason. And so you can

00:01:44.120 subscribe to and listen to that podcast, watch it on YouTube. Alex was recommended to me by a friend

00:01:52.920 of mine, John Verveke, who was a professor along with me at the University of Toronto. I've done a lot

00:01:58.080 of different public events with John, many conversations. And Alex has interviewed many

00:02:06.240 of the people that I'm interested in, including Richard Dawkins. And he is very interested in

00:02:12.280 religious matters, although he's not a Christian. And we believed jointly that it would be useful for

00:02:21.260 us to meet and to hash out our differences in viewpoint and similarities and see if we could

00:02:28.040 get together and move together somewhere valuable and enlightening. And so that's what we're trying

00:02:36.340 to do. That's what we try to do with the conversation. It focuses mostly on the nature of

00:02:44.560 belief, I suppose. That's probably the easiest way to sum it up. What it means to believe something,

00:02:48.920 what it means to have a religious belief, what it means to be committed to a belief.

00:02:54.380 We talked a fair bit about the distinction between, let's say,

00:03:00.380 the distinction between fact and fiction and the idea that fact reflects the real, but so does fiction.

00:03:09.940 And so welcome to the discussion of all that. So first of all, thank you for

00:03:18.840 coming here. It's a long way from London. We're in LA. And so that's a long ways. And so

00:03:23.300 and insofar as you're going to disagree with me, I'm pleased that you're exhausted from the flight

00:03:29.120 because that'll slow you down and that'll be helpful. So anyways, seriously, thank you for

00:03:33.840 coming. And so let's start with this cosmic skeptic. Right. Okay. So how do you come up with the name

00:03:40.980 and why the conjunction and what do you think the advantage is, if any, in relationship to the

00:03:50.060 emphasis on skepticism? I'll give you the official and the unofficial story. The official story is that

00:03:55.760 cosmic sort of implies universe, space, big thinking. And skeptic sort of situates me within a tradition of

00:04:06.160 people who are interested in interrogating their beliefs to their sort of fundamental grounding

00:04:13.340 insofar as that's possible. And skeptic is spelt with a K because most of my American, most of my

00:04:18.080 listeners are American. The unofficial answer is that when I was younger, I knew a guy who was a

00:04:24.660 musician and started a SoundCloud account with the word cosmic in it. And I thought, hey, that sounds

00:04:29.040 like a cool word. And I was starting a YouTube channel. I wanted something that sounded cool.

00:04:32.740 And I thought skeptic sounded cool next to it. And I spelled it with a K because I got it wrong.

00:04:36.960 I see. Okay. Okay. Well, who knows the actual derivation? And it's a good combination though,

00:04:43.320 because it, well, it's catchy. So that's nice from a marketing side, but it also has this,

00:04:51.140 it's an interesting allusion to the combination of revelation and critical thinking that actually

00:04:56.660 makes up actual thinking, right? Because the problem with being concerned with a vast plethora of ideas

00:05:04.600 is that many ideas are misleading and wrong. And so you have to learn how to combine that openness

00:05:12.480 and curiosity with the capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff. And that's the utility of

00:05:17.840 skepticism. I mean, it can degenerate into a kind of argumentative nihilism. That's the downside.

00:05:24.600 But properly applied, it separates the wheat from the chaff, right? And the purpose of that is to

00:05:33.280 keep the wheat. Well, skepticism can only ever be essentially destructive because you're being

00:05:38.580 skeptical of something. Somebody's putting something forward and you're sort of responding to that with

00:05:42.260 skepticism. And so for a lot of people, if skepticism is the thing that you do, then you sort of end up

00:05:48.380 chipping away and ending up with nothing. Whereas skepticism is really supposed to be a tool that you use.

00:05:52.440 It is destructive, but in the way that you might sort of carve a piece of marble, you're intending

00:05:57.380 to get a statue out of it. Yes, yes. Well, that's the thing to always keep in mind. It's

00:06:01.080 skepticism in the service of something. Exactly. Yeah, it's a tool. It's a methodological tool.

00:06:05.040 It's not a world... You mentioned too, and so I'm interested in your progression in your thinking

00:06:09.940 in relationship to that, because you mentioned just before we actually went on air that had you

00:06:15.960 come to see me a couple of years ago, you might have been more inclined to... I'm putting words

00:06:22.600 in your mouth to some degree, so correct me if I'm wrong, to strive for a victory or to make your

00:06:27.720 point, something like that. And you alluded to the fact that your thinking around that has changed to

00:06:33.160 some degree. I suspect that's probably a consequence of experience. So what's changed?

00:06:38.280 In part, it might have something to do with becoming a podcaster and speaking weekly to people,

00:06:42.220 and you can't keep up that energy. Well, you can, but it becomes totally unwatchable,

00:06:46.820 and nobody wants to engage in that all the time. I think there are times when it's worth doing,

00:06:51.340 and to be clear, you know, I still like to disagree and do so essentially unapologetically

00:06:57.280 and bluntly, and that can still come across as quite rude. But I think that the way that I would

00:07:01.640 think about a conversation is that, well, what are we about to do here? A debate. We're about to

00:07:06.400 debate an issue, and I'm going to try to win. And that's... And not even... I mean, maybe there's

00:07:12.020 sort of an element of pride in there. You want to win for that sake. But also, you really think,

00:07:15.380 well, I want to win because I think I'm right about this. And if I don't, then, you know,

00:07:20.340 I must have just not expressed myself properly. I think I, you know, what I probably meant when I

00:07:25.080 was saying that is that I would have had more of that cap on than now after having so many

00:07:29.820 conversations with so many people and realizing that not only is it more constructive for myself,

00:07:34.100 I've learned a lot more. You know, and now I'm here like, hey, I might, you know, I might learn

00:07:37.800 something today. That would be great. Even if I just learn something about what your worldview is.

00:07:42.460 But also people listening just unanimously say that they prefer it. It's a much...

00:07:46.920 Well, the skepticism. So one of the things you learn as a therapist, for example, is that

00:07:51.740 being right is not very helpful, especially when you're trying to help someone, because

00:07:56.540 whether you as the therapist is right has very little to do with the positive outcome for them.

00:08:04.100 You still want to maintain the skepticism. And one of the ways of doing that in the manner

00:08:08.860 that's helpful is that, like, if I'm talking to you and you say something I don't understand,

00:08:14.940 that's the right place to be skeptical. Because

00:08:17.380 if I don't understand what you said, well, it might be my ignorance, but it also might be

00:08:25.000 like lack of clarity and pointedness on your part.

00:08:29.220 And so one of the advantages of disagreeing with someone is to point out to them in a positive way

00:08:38.100 where they're lost in the fog. Because if you're sufficiently lost in the fog, you tend to run

00:08:42.860 into sharp objects, and that's not very pleasant. So, but the skepticism, and this is obviously what

00:08:49.700 you alluded to, I would say, as a consequence of learning from the podcast, is the skepticism should

00:08:54.980 be in service of rectifying your ignorance rather than in service of making your point or winning

00:09:01.940 the argument. The problem with winning a bloody argument is that the victory can seduce you into

00:09:08.340 thinking that you were correct, and you're never sufficiently correct, right?

00:09:13.980 Yes.

00:09:14.420 And so, I don't like debates, fundamentally. I've never really enjoyed them. Probably when I was

00:09:22.540 really young, before I was, I stopped doing this when I was about 23, I would take a certain amount

00:09:29.700 of pleasure in being able to obtain intellectual victory. It was also a way I defended myself when

00:09:36.960 I was young, and it was effective. But it's not the optimal way to conduct a conversation. This is one

00:09:46.100 of the reasons why people like Rogan are so successful. Because Joe, Joe will push his point,

00:09:52.460 but he always does it in the service of learning. He doesn't do it in the service of victory.

00:09:57.500 Yeah, yeah. I think you've probably put your finger on it there. But what you were saying a moment ago

00:10:02.820 about precision, about sort of thinking clearly and understanding somebody else clearly. I think

00:10:10.000 the reason why I'm excited to speak to you today is because you're someone who celebrates being

00:10:15.820 precise in your speech. And I've always appreciated your desire to make sure that you're really

00:10:21.400 understanding what somebody else is saying. I've made attempts in the past to, I mean, my channel is

00:10:26.960 mostly focused on the philosophy of religion.

00:10:28.680 Yes.

00:10:29.360 And I've made attempts in the past to try to understand your worldview.

00:10:31.760 Yeah, yeah. I've watched some of them.

00:10:33.660 And I made a video essay.

00:10:35.240 Yeah.

00:10:36.480 And some of the things I said there, I think, at least one thing in particular, I'd probably

00:10:41.300 think I was wrong about. But what I was trying to do there, I've seen that people would ask you

00:10:45.520 on interviews and podcasts, you know, do you believe in God? Do you think that Christianity is true?

00:10:50.080 And it was sort of, you would sort of struggle to answer the question. And I thought to myself, well...

00:10:57.120 People come at the question with a priori commitments about what they think

00:11:00.540 truth constitutes. That's a big problem.

00:11:03.140 There must be something important that's being left out of the sort of precondition of that

00:11:08.040 question or conversation if it's so unimaginably difficult to answer, you know?

00:11:14.160 Well, I'll give you an example. I watched that essay this morning, right? And I also wanted to talk to

00:11:20.280 you about your discussion with Dawkins.

00:11:22.140 Yeah.

00:11:22.680 So, people say, ask me, for example, do you believe in God? And I think, well, I don't know what you are

00:11:30.800 driving at with that question. Because I don't know what you mean by believe. Most people, modern

00:11:36.420 people, believe that a belief is a description of accordance with a set of facts.

00:11:42.380 Sure.

00:11:42.920 Right. Well, I don't think that's what belief means in the religious sense, in the least. So,

00:11:46.700 I just think that's a non-starter.

00:11:48.360 If you have something to do with what you act out, right?

00:11:50.520 It has to do with what you're... What you believe is what you're willing to die for,

00:11:55.560 fundamentally. It's what you're committed to or live for, if you think about it,

00:11:59.540 as life in the most extensive manner. It's a matter of commitment.

00:12:03.180 So, I understand what you mean in the religious context.

00:12:05.800 Yeah.

00:12:05.880 So, religion is a big topic. Religion is a mighty area to be talking about. But when I talk about

00:12:13.620 belief in a more mundane sense, I believe that this chair exists. That is a belief that I hold. I

00:12:19.780 sort of can't help but hold that belief because I can see it.

00:12:21.860 Well, that's a place where your action and your statements align.

00:12:25.880 Exactly.

00:12:26.340 Right. You believe in the chair and you're sitting in it. It's like, fair enough.

00:12:29.020 Which is why I totally agree when you say that what you believe might really be what you act out.

00:12:32.820 But I think when people are looking for essentially definitions, and just a second ago, you said,

00:12:37.300 well, what is it to believe? And you said, well, what you believe is what you're willing to die

00:12:40.180 for. I'm not willing to die for my belief that this chair exists.

00:12:44.380 Maybe.

00:12:44.860 Maybe in a broad sense.

00:12:46.520 Maybe. Hard to say.

00:12:48.000 If not believing that the chair existed required me to sort of give up my trust in my sense data,

00:12:52.940 then I might literally die by accident by sort of walking off a cliff because I don't trust my

00:12:56.560 eyes anymore. So, it's true in that sense.

00:12:57.660 Well, it's also not something that you're likely to forego given your role, let's say, as a rational skeptic.

00:13:02.460 That's right.

00:13:02.960 Seriously. Like, it's a commitment that you've made to a certain view of reality.

00:13:06.420 But you understand, surely, that when somebody asks, do you believe in God, although they're

00:13:10.720 asking the sort of subject of the belief, is a much more grand entity. The word belief itself,

00:13:18.140 for them, at least in their question, even if you think it's an inappropriate question,

00:13:21.580 they mean something much more mundane. They mean, like, you believe in the existence of chair.

00:13:24.360 It's hard to know. It's hard to know what people mean. You know, like, one of the things I've

00:13:28.140 noticed, for example, is there are no shortage of Christian trolls, right? I mean, there are

00:13:34.780 atheist trolls and there's engineering trolls. There's lots of trolls, but there are Christian

00:13:38.940 trolls. And the Christian trolls, when they ask that question, and it's often the Christian trolls

00:13:44.640 who ask that question, what they mean is, are you in my club?

00:13:49.180 Exactly.

00:13:49.860 Right. And my answer is, I'm not even sure you know what club you're in. So there's a trap in

00:13:56.940 the question, which I don't appreciate, because I don't like questions that have traps in them.

00:14:01.060 Yes.

00:14:01.500 Now, not everybody who's asking that question has a trap, but many people do. And so I find that

00:14:07.200 off-putting, let's say, because it's manipulative. In terms of that descriptive belief,

00:14:14.660 that's something we could go into. I think we should do that, because it does get to the core of

00:14:19.100 the matter that you were attempting to untangle, let's say, in your essay.

00:14:22.840 Yeah. I mean, my understanding of, and I had to sort of piece together different things you'd said

00:14:27.700 in different interviews. And I suppose the reason I had to do that was because I didn't have you in

00:14:30.560 front of me. So I'm grateful to have the opportunity now. It seems to me that when you

00:14:34.620 speak of God, you mean something like that, which is at the, I don't know if you'd rather say the

00:14:39.000 basis or the top, but the basis or the top of a value hierarchy. And it begins with the

00:14:44.320 recognition that anything that anybody does requires some kind of value. Even just to do

00:14:48.900 something as simple as sitting in a chair or picking up a glass.

00:14:51.540 Well, you don't do anything without it being oriented towards a value.

00:14:54.360 Exactly. Right. And so even to perceive the glass, it's something you've spoken about before,

00:14:58.100 you know, why do I see the glass as one object? Even though it's got multiple parts,

00:15:01.800 it's got a side and a bottom and top. I see them together in a way that I don't see

00:15:05.160 the cup and the table as one object. Well, you said before, it's because I can grip it.

00:15:09.520 It's sort of functional. It's because I can use this cup. And the reason that I see it in that

00:15:12.980 way is because I can then drink from it. And the reason that I want to do that is because I sort

00:15:17.400 of value my health and there's sort of a value regress that goes on. Always.

00:15:24.520 And more broadly, this comes out in the question of like, you know, why are you writing an essay

00:15:28.480 to get a good grade? Or why do you want a good grade to get a good job? Why do you want a good

00:15:32.180 job to get money? And you keep going back and back. It has to terminate somewhere.

00:15:37.140 That's right.

00:15:37.640 Because otherwise, there would be nothing to sort of lend that value.

00:15:42.040 Well, otherwise, you'd always be in an infinite regress.

00:15:43.960 Further down.

00:15:44.500 You'd just die of questioning.

00:15:45.860 Or it would be infinite. Yeah. You literally, it's the kind of regress in which the value

00:15:51.120 that you have for A actually borrows the value from B. You don't value A at all without B.

00:15:56.100 So it doesn't get it without B. And B doesn't get it without C. And C doesn't get it without

00:15:59.360 D. So if that went on infinitely, there's nothing to give the entire sequence value in the first

00:16:04.220 place.

00:16:04.620 Right.

00:16:04.800 And so there's got to be something at the basis here. And then you said, at least on one occasion,

00:16:09.120 that we'll call that place, whatever's at the top there, we'll call it the divine place.

00:16:13.080 Yeah, that's right.

00:16:13.380 And you said, we'll make that a matter of definition.

00:16:15.060 That's a matter of definition.

00:16:15.500 Yeah, yeah.

00:16:15.920 Now, I'm kind of, I'm fine with this, but it seems to me that what you're doing is you're

00:16:22.080 giving a definition of God that makes Him, or makes it Him, whatever, unavoidably exist,

00:16:29.240 and also makes it a quite different entity to the entity described by a great deal of,

00:16:34.740 for instance, your Christian listeners, who will say that God is not the basis of a value

00:16:40.160 hierarchy. God is an omnipotent, omniscient, agential being with consciousness that intentionally

00:16:46.480 brings about human beings and sent down a physical man to sacrifice his life in order

00:16:50.760 to save us for our sins. Now, that means that when someone asks you, does God exist? And you say,

00:16:55.240 well, look, I think that's almost an inappropriate question. At times you sort of imply that you don't

00:17:01.720 even believe in atheists because you sort of act as if you believe in God. If what you mean by God

00:17:06.660 is just- Well, Dawkins himself admitted he was a cultural Christian.

00:17:09.360 That's another matter, because that's much more specific. I mean, that's cultural Christianity,

00:17:12.480 right? This is just- But it's a reflection of the same problem.

00:17:15.700 But, you know, when a Christian says to you, I'm being very clear that that's what I mean by God,

00:17:20.600 I don't know if you do believe in the omniscient, omnipotent, agential being, but

00:17:24.200 if you start talking about the inevitability of believing in some basis of a value hierarchy-

00:17:28.540 Well, it's not so obvious from the traditional Judeo-Christian perspective that God is properly

00:17:34.620 conceptualized as a being. That's probably right.

00:17:37.440 Well, so it's tricky, right? Because one of the ways that you can approach God traditionally

00:17:44.140 is in relationship to a being, but that's a veil. So why do I say that? Okay, so let's speak about

00:17:52.380 it religiously first, and then we can speak about it conceptually. So there's a tremendous insistence

00:17:58.260 in the Judeo-Christian tradition that God is outside of the categorical structure, right?

00:18:04.460 Like seriously outside. Elijah, the prophet, establishes that God is not in nature. He's

00:18:11.380 not in the earthquake. He's not in the conflagration. He's not in the storm, right? So that doesn't mean

00:18:18.040 that nature doesn't speak of God, but it does mean that whatever God is, is not in the natural world.

00:18:23.580 Okay, now we can extend that. Not bound by time, not bound by space. Well, does that make God a

00:18:29.380 material object? Because when people say, is God real, which is a variant of the question is,

00:18:34.740 do you believe in God? It's like, well, God's immaterial and outside of time and space. So if

00:18:40.120 your definition of real is material things in the domain of time and space, then we're not talking

00:18:46.520 about the same thing. Now, usually people approach that question of belief with some materialistic

00:18:53.260 framework like that in mind, even if they don't know it. The Christians, let's say, who put this

00:19:02.260 question forward in the hope of getting the answer they want to hear, are materialistic and

00:19:09.400 enlightenment minds, even though they don't know it, because they have an implicit definition of what

00:19:14.460 constitutes real. Is God real? It's like, no, no, God's hyper real. That's not the same thing.

00:19:20.420 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

00:19:25.880 Most of the time, you'll probably be fine. But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from

00:19:31.060 overhead and you have no idea what to do? In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't

00:19:36.440 just a luxury. It's a fundamental right. Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe,

00:19:41.380 hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical

00:19:46.740 know-how to intercept it. And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:19:51.300 With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords,

00:19:56.420 bank logins, and credit card details. Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data

00:20:01.700 anyway? Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000. That's right,

00:20:07.440 there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities. Enter ExpressVPN. It's like a digital

00:20:13.500 fortress, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. Their encryption is so

00:20:18.620 robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.

00:20:22.920 But don't let its power fool you. ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly. With just one click,

00:20:28.260 you're protected across all your devices. Phones, laptops, tablets, you name it. That's why I use

00:20:33.240 ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop. It gives me peace of mind knowing

00:20:37.900 that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes. Secure your

00:20:43.100 online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash Jordan. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash

00:20:50.780 Jordan, and you can get an extra three months free. ExpressVPN dot com slash Jordan.

00:20:55.600 I think that the physicality of God is an interesting question. In the Old Testament

00:21:02.500 tradition, it seems to evolve as far as I can see. If you look at some of the earlier descriptions

00:21:07.420 of God, you've got a God who walks through the Garden of Eden. You've got a God who has a council

00:21:14.960 of angels and the accuser. You have a sort of, it's being at least conceptualized as a much more

00:21:21.100 physical being. And as time goes on, God becomes less localized. And I've heard a lot of theories

00:21:27.720 as to why that's the case. I've just done an episode on my own show.

00:21:30.060 Yeah, I'm not sure that's true. Exactly. I don't think there's a clear historical progression like

00:21:34.560 that. There is a constant tension between God as ineffable and then God as manifest in a manner

00:21:41.900 that's comprehensible, right? And if, so Mircea Eliade had mapped the consequences of this out to some

00:21:49.020 degree. So he was very interested in Nietzsche's proposition that God had died. Most people,

00:21:57.520 including Nietzsche, regarded that as like a unique historical event. There was a religious tradition,

00:22:04.100 the enlightenment arose. In consequence, we became skeptical about God. And in 1850,

00:22:10.480 the philosophers decided that he was no longer necessary or real. But Eliade, who is a brilliant

00:22:17.520 historian of religions, has noted that this has happened many, many times, that God has vanished,

00:22:24.600 disappeared. And one of his explanations for that is that a God that's too ineffable,

00:22:30.460 so that's completely outside of the categories of time and space, let's say, and who doesn't make

00:22:35.580 himself present as a being, who doesn't have a heavenly council, who has no hierarchy between the

00:22:41.640 pinnacle and earth itself, tends to float off into space. It becomes so abstract that you can't have

00:22:47.940 a relationship with it, him, and then he disappears.

00:22:51.440 In many ways, this is what Christianity provides with the New Testament and the figure of Jesus.

00:22:55.820 And that's why I think for a lot of Christians, the more important question for you and the question

00:22:59.760 that they're interested in, and you're quite right that a lot of people are like,

00:23:02.540 I want to get you on my team. I have no dog in this fight. I'm not a Christian.

00:23:06.160 But I know that a lot of Christians are frustrated when they begin asking about Jesus,

00:23:11.060 who's a much more physical entity. It's a real human being. It's someone in flesh and blood.

00:23:16.200 It's someone who's physically crucified by the Romans.

00:23:18.440 It's a very different question. It's a very different question.

00:23:20.540 And then is seen as a physical entity, at least according to the canonical tradition,

00:23:26.280 by his disciples after he died. So when somebody asks you, do you believe that that happened?

00:23:30.840 And when I've seen you ask about that question, you tend to still speak in terms of the psychological

00:23:37.960 and the mythological. I think the frustration is that, as you've just said, these are two

00:23:43.160 different conversations. I don't mind frustrating Christians in that regard either, because the

00:23:46.600 truth of the matter is, with regard to the gospel accounts, that the mythological and the historical

00:23:51.220 are inextricably cross-contaminated. There's no pulling out the historical Jesus.

00:23:58.420 Right? That's a non-starter. And why that is, I don't know. It's very mysterious. It's very hard

00:24:06.540 to understand, as are, let's say, the accounts of the resurrection. Okay, so what do I think about

00:24:12.260 that? Well, I think that denying the historical reality of Christ is, I think that's just a fool's

00:24:17.880 errand. I don't know why anybody would bother with it.

00:24:19.880 So a man exists called Jesus. We have that much.

00:24:22.200 Yes. Now, Christ, now, there's a claim that is attributed to Christ that he is the embodiment

00:24:28.720 or the incarnation, the fulfillment, let's say, of the prophet and the laws.

00:24:33.160 Yes.

00:24:33.320 I think that's true. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, you know, I think it's in the Gospel of

00:24:40.640 John. I think Gospel of John closes with a statement that's something like, if all the

00:24:44.600 books that were ever written were written about the gospel accounts, that wouldn't be enough books

00:24:48.360 to explain what it had.

00:24:49.500 Yeah, if all the things that Jesus did.

00:24:51.820 Yeah, yeah. And there's a truth in that. The truth is that profound religious account is

00:24:59.340 bottomless, and the biblical representations are like that. There's no limit to the amount

00:25:05.400 of investigation they can bear, not least because the text itself is deeply cross-referenced.

00:25:12.300 So there's an innumerable number of paths through it. It's like a chessboard. And so it's inexhaustible

00:25:20.660 in its interpretive space.

00:25:22.440 That's true.

00:25:23.020 And that's a problem, too, because it means it's also susceptible to multiple interpretations,

00:25:28.140 including potentially competing interpretations.

00:25:29.960 I think a lot of people interpret Paul, for example, the earliest New Testament source,

00:25:35.100 as saying that if Jesus did not literally rise from the dead, if there was not a man who stopped

00:25:40.760 breathing and then started breathing again, then your faith is futile and you're still in your sins.

00:25:44.380 That is, Christianity is undermined. Now, that means that, and Paul doesn't say sort of believing

00:25:51.500 that that's false is really bad. He says, if you do not believe this proactively,

00:25:54.780 then your faith is futile.

00:25:57.980 Yeah, that's the problem I have with that.

00:25:59.420 So if you don't proactively believe that yourself, then I think when a Christian asks you,

00:26:03.060 you know, do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus? Are you a Christian? I think you must

00:26:06.480 be committed to saying no, at least under that interpretation of Paul. And even if you're not

00:26:10.840 sure, I mean, it's fine if I say to you, do you think that a man physically rose from the dead?

00:26:14.900 And you say something like, well, I don't know. I mean, I wasn't there, but I think it has a lot

00:26:18.880 of mythological significance. Or I think that maybe it happened in a different sense,

00:26:23.300 or it happened in the sense that good fiction happens, you know, then fine. But it needs to

00:26:27.320 begin with that caveat of the simple sort of, historically speaking, I don't know. And I

00:26:31.240 know you don't like to pull out the historical Jesus from the mythological, but-

00:26:33.700 That's a good objection.

00:26:34.420 But it's an important question to ask.

00:26:35.480 No, no, of course. It's a very good objection. So I just did a seminar on the Gospels with

00:26:41.600 a crew of about eight people. And it was the same crew that walked through Exodus with me

00:26:47.640 with a couple of variations. And we spent a lot of time on the resurrection accounts,

00:26:52.060 for example. And of course, that was the toughest, let's say, that was the toughest morsel to chew

00:26:58.000 and digest. The thing about the resurrection accounts is that they're all, look, so I could

00:27:03.900 say something like this, which will just annoy people, but it doesn't matter. I believe the

00:27:10.740 accounts, but I have no idea what they mean.

00:27:12.720 When you say you believe the accounts, do you mean, and I hate to be sort of pedantic

00:27:18.320 here, it seems pedantic, but do you mean you believe that these are things that happened

00:27:22.560 such that if I-

00:27:24.440 That's a strange state.

00:27:25.320 I know you don't like that. Let me put it this way. If I went back in time with a Panasonic

00:27:30.940 video camera and put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, would the

00:27:37.900 little LCD screen show a man walk out of that tomb?

00:27:41.620 I would say, suspect yes.

00:27:44.340 So that to me seems like a belief in the historical event of the resurrection, or at least of Jesus

00:27:51.040 leaving the tomb, which means that when somebody says, you know, do you believe that Jesus rose

00:27:54.720 from the dead? It doesn't seem clear to me why you're not able to just say, it would seem

00:27:58.520 to me yes.

00:28:00.540 Because I have no idea what that means. And neither did the people who saw it.

00:28:06.080 Hmm. I mean, I suppose one-

00:28:08.520 Look, let's approach this obliquely, let's say.

00:28:12.020 Yeah.

00:28:13.240 The miracle of the loaves and the fishes.

00:28:15.300 Yeah.

00:28:15.880 Okay. So people will say, well, do you believe that happened literally, historically? It's

00:28:20.500 like, well, yes, I believe that. It's okay. Okay. What do you mean by that? That you believe

00:28:24.540 that? Exactly.

00:28:25.240 Exactly. So you tell me, you're there in the way that you described.

00:28:30.280 Right, right. What do you see?

00:28:31.460 What are the fish doing? Exactly. And the answer is, you don't know. You have no notion about

00:28:37.460 it at all. You have no theory about it.

00:28:39.480 Sure.

00:28:39.880 So your belief is, what's your belief exactly?

00:28:42.520 Well, I think a Christian might say something like, my belief is that I have no idea, looking

00:28:48.540 at those fish, what I would see in the process of them being converted into enough food for

00:28:53.140 the 5,000 to eat. I have no idea what I would see. But I do know that what I would see is

00:28:57.560 the fish end up being spread amongst the 5,000. In the same way, like if I opened up the water

00:29:03.180 jar, what would I see when the water became wine? I have no idea. Does it sort of blend from

00:29:07.920 one color into another? Does it suddenly snap? Does it disappear and then reappear? I don't

00:29:11.320 know. But what I do know as a Christian is that I would see something at some event in

00:29:18.860 which when I look at the beginning, it's water and when I look at the end, it's wine. And

00:29:21.600 I mean, actually, I don't mean that Jesus turning water into wine is some kind of inextricably

00:29:28.560 mythological story and the question of whether it happened sort of doesn't matter or maybe

00:29:31.880 it happened in a meta manner or maybe it happened in a hyper-reality sense. I would be, as a Christian,

00:29:37.060 I'm more inclined rather than to believe. I'm more inclined to understand. And then when I hit

00:29:48.140 the limits of my understanding, I think, I don't understand that. Now, do I believe it or not

00:29:54.520 believe it? I think often, especially with regards to biblical matters, let's say, I have a suspension

00:30:04.420 of belief and disbelief. Yeah. And that's fine too. I think part of the reason that I've been

00:30:09.620 able to be an effective interpreter of the biblical texts and a relatively scientific interpreter is

00:30:15.380 because I approach the texts with respect, the same respect that I would approach a lab animal.

00:30:22.580 It's like, I don't know what this is. Like, I seriously don't know. And I'm not going to come at it

00:30:29.000 with axiomatic assumptions that are unquestionable. I'm going to try to see what's right in front of

00:30:35.720 my eyes. I'm going to try to see what mystery reveals itself if I take this phenomenon seriously.

00:30:42.720 This is one of the things that I find puzzling, for example, about Dawkins. Because Dawkins

00:30:50.360 formulated the idea of meme, which is, by the way, the same idea as archetype. It's exactly the same idea,

00:30:58.400 except he just stopped. It's like, okay, there are memes they're selected for. Okay.

00:31:04.180 Selected on what basis exactly? Does that mean there's a hierarchy of memes? Are the memes more

00:31:09.580 likely, are the memes that are conserved more likely to be, what would you say, viable organisms?

00:31:16.220 And if they're viable organisms, are they microcosms?

00:31:18.980 This is really interesting in terms of the survivability, because there's a point,

00:31:22.500 I've spoken to Richard Dawkins, well, a number of times, but twice on my podcast.

00:31:26.160 And the second time, somebody pointed out to me that there might be a point of agreement between

00:31:30.920 you two that has been overlooked, which is that, I don't know if you've ever come across the

00:31:35.040 evolutionary argument against naturalism, or the argument from reason, the idea that if you're

00:31:40.140 a materialist, you can't trust your reasonable faculties. So Alvin Planting have formulated this

00:31:46.040 very well, very geniusly, I think, in saying that if you believe that evolution by natural selection

00:31:51.160 happens materially, what does natural selection select for? Survivability. So if you're a

00:31:56.680 materialist, that means that the very rational faculty that you're using right now evolves not

00:32:01.480 to be sensitive to truth, but to survivability.

00:32:04.460 Yes, that's right.

00:32:04.980 And if that's the case, well, why do you believe in the truth of evolution? Well, because you've

00:32:08.660 been rationally convinced of it. But the thing that you've just assented to, the belief itself

00:32:13.460 has just undercut the process by which you came to that belief.

00:32:15.980 There's a whole, the New England pragmatists figured this out in like 1880.

00:32:20.480 Yeah, now I think this is a fascinating, I think it really is just a...

00:32:23.040 It is.

00:32:23.660 It's exciting. It's a novel.

00:32:25.140 That's for sure. That's for sure.

00:32:27.300 It's actually a point where Darwin and Newton do not come together.

00:32:32.200 Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is

00:32:36.720 easier than ever. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of

00:32:41.760 your business. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a

00:32:45.920 million orders stage? Shopify is here to help you grow. Our marketing team uses Shopify every day

00:32:51.480 to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track

00:32:56.240 conversions. With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and

00:33:01.700 powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand

00:33:06.600 printing, accounting, and chatbots. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the

00:33:11.460 internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce

00:33:16.180 platforms. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take

00:33:20.800 control and take your business to the next level. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period

00:33:25.780 at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business

00:33:33.120 no matter what stage you're in. That's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:33:37.440 How do you mean?

00:33:41.520 Well, the Darwinian definition of true and the Newtonian definition of true are not the same

00:33:45.700 thing. So here's the thing. You had a conversation with Sam Harris. You've had a number, but one of

00:33:49.780 them, I don't think it was a live event. I think it was before that. You're talking about truth.

00:33:53.380 Yeah.

00:33:53.660 And you're trying to-

00:33:54.160 That was a very awkward first, second talk I had with him. I was extremely ill.

00:33:58.540 It was, you know, it was awkward to listen to because it felt very much like, and I remember

00:34:02.880 at the time thinking, you know, what is this Jordan Peterson talking about? Like truth is

00:34:06.680 like Darwinian? Truth is about like survivability? Well, what do you mean? Truth is true.

00:34:10.480 True the way an arrow flies.

00:34:11.860 Yeah. Right. And now I asked Richard Dawkins about the evolutionary argument against naturalism.

00:34:16.340 Yeah.

00:34:16.500 I said, well, how can you know that what you believe is true? And he said, because believing

00:34:21.220 true things makes me more likely to survive.

00:34:24.820 Hey, boy, watch where you go with that, man.

00:34:27.060 I didn't catch it at the time, but I thought to myself afterwards, it was one of my commenters

00:34:30.840 on Patreon actually had mentioned this. He was listening to Richard and I said, but, you

00:34:35.420 know, but, okay, maybe, but sometimes it's at least possible that something that's false

00:34:40.020 helps you to survive. You know, the rustling in the bushes, believing that that's a lion

00:34:43.320 every time or a tiger, even if it's not, it helps you to survive because that one time

00:34:47.160 that it is, you're still going to run away and it costs you nothing to run away when it's

00:34:50.440 not a tiger. So believing it's a tiger, even when it's not, it's going to help me to survive.

00:34:54.960 That's why we have a negativity bias.

00:34:56.380 Yeah. And Dawkins said, well, yeah, of course there are some circumstances where believing

00:34:59.520 something false could be beneficial to survival. And I said, well, how do you know that two

00:35:03.820 plus two equals four is not one of those? And it seemed as though he was just saying

00:35:10.040 that believing that would not be advantageous to our survival, which might well be true.

00:35:15.840 But if that's the case, then suddenly I'm listening to what you're saying about truth being more

00:35:20.460 sort of Darwinian and related to survivability. And I think maybe you two would agree there.

00:35:23.900 And I think, well, why is it that when you sit down with Richard Dawkins, you find it difficult

00:35:26.960 to have a conversation with each other? And, and...

00:35:30.400 Well, I think it's partly because we don't know each other very well.

00:35:33.180 That's what's probably true.

00:35:34.500 And also there are things he knows that I don't know.

00:35:39.000 And there are things I know that he doesn't know. Now I would say in my defense that I,

00:35:44.780 what would you say? I'm more aware of the things he knows that I don't know than he is of the

00:35:51.760 things I know that he doesn't know. Right? So for example, as far as I can tell, Dawkins doesn't

00:35:57.880 know anything about the Jungian tradition of literary interpretation.

00:36:01.200 And that actually, if you're going to talk about religion, that's actually a fatal flaw.

00:36:06.560 Right? So, and you know, he's called me, for example, drunk on symbols. It's like, well,

00:36:12.040 the imagination is a biological function and it has a structure and a purpose and it has its own

00:36:19.160 logos, its own intelligible order. And if you're not aware of that order, that doesn't make me drunk

00:36:25.640 on symbols. It just means you don't know what you're talking about.

00:36:28.460 Now that frustration that you appeal to there, when you hear Richard Dawkins,

00:36:36.000 I think Terry Eagleton said that listening to Dawkins on theology is like listening to somebody

00:36:40.980 write a book about biology whose only knowledge of the subject is having once read the great

00:36:45.040 British book of birds. And okay, fair enough.

00:36:47.840 Hmm. But that actually turns out to be a real problem. And it's a problem with regards even

00:36:53.420 to the meme idea, because you don't have to extend Dawkins' work very far to understand that

00:37:00.180 religious stories are memes.

00:37:02.240 Sure.

00:37:02.740 Right? Yeah.

00:37:03.380 Well, and there's a hierarchy of memes and some of them are very functional.

00:37:07.180 But then here's the thing, like that frustration that you're sort of throwing in that direction,

00:37:10.800 I think people throw towards you when you say, well, religion, you don't have to look

00:37:15.160 very far to see that religion is a meme. Well, without further clarification, and of course

00:37:19.280 there's going to be it, you can understand why to somebody first listening, that sounds

00:37:22.520 almost atheistic, or religion is a meme.

00:37:24.980 Right?

00:37:25.500 Religion is not a true historical account of the history of the universe.

00:37:29.920 It's not a true historical account.

00:37:31.380 It's a meme.

00:37:32.000 Now, when you say that the resurrection of Jesus-

00:37:37.740 Well, what does it mean historically that the Spirit of God brooded upon the primordial

00:37:43.300 waters? Like, what does that mean historically? No one knows what it means historically.

00:37:48.500 I agree. I don't think that at least most of Genesis or parts of Genesis are supposed to

00:37:52.980 be, I mean, the Bible is a library, right? It's not a book. And that means that it's going

00:37:57.060 to contain different genres.

00:37:58.100 That's for sure.

00:37:58.940 And so when we know-

00:38:00.280 Some of them are more historically accurate, and some of them tilt more towards that kind

00:38:05.420 of elusive, I don't mean elusive in the, I mean, A-L-L-U-S-I-V.

00:38:11.220 Yeah, sure.

00:38:11.700 Right? That elusive and symbolic form that characterizes Genesis 1.

00:38:17.440 So because there are different genres here, it depends on what story we're talking about.

00:38:20.740 And I think that what I often observe you doing is we might talk about Christianity, and

00:38:28.900 if you aren't comfortable committing to a historical ideal, you'll start talking about the Spirit

00:38:34.820 moving over the face of the waters, which is obviously a much more mythological ideal,

00:38:39.520 and not quite equivocating them, but moving between them too quickly, and not delineating

00:38:44.500 them enough. So if I asked you, you know, do you think that the Spirit moved across the

00:38:48.660 face of the waters? And you said to me something like, I think it's still happening.

00:38:52.000 Right.

00:38:52.280 That is what I would say.

00:38:53.260 I'd say, hey, fair enough. Yeah, that makes sense.

00:38:54.960 It always happens. It happened at the beginning of time, and it's always happening.

00:38:58.900 And when he says, did the Exodus story happen? Did the Jews enslaved in Egypt break free

00:39:05.200 of their slavery and move to the Promised Land across the desert for 40 years? Did that

00:39:09.620 happen? You have also said, of the Exodus specifically, it's still happening.

00:39:15.100 Yes.

00:39:15.620 Now, to me, that's far more inappropriate than saying that the Spirit is still moving across

00:39:20.300 the face of the waters. Because I think what people mean there is, do you believe that

00:39:24.560 these people in that time period actually did this in such a way that, for instance, might

00:39:29.040 show up in an archaeological report?

00:39:30.860 Well, I think that's the simplest answer to that is probably.

00:39:35.960 Sure. And that's fine too.

00:39:37.740 But we don't know.

00:39:39.160 I mean, to the degree that there's been archaeological investigations into the kinds of biblical

00:39:46.160 narratives that you've described, the archaeological evidence tends to fall on the side of historical

00:39:53.600 accuracy in relationship to the Bible quite surprisingly often.

00:39:56.620 Clearly, you're, I mean, you've spent more time in Exodus than probably any person I've

00:40:01.540 ever met in person, right? Clearly, the story sort of captivates you and you think it's

00:40:05.080 really important and can teach us a lot, right?

00:40:08.000 Of course.

00:40:08.520 It's an infinitely deep story.

00:40:09.980 I think most people speaking to you already know that you think that, right? And so when

00:40:13.480 they ask you a question, when they suddenly say to you, but do you think it really happened?

00:40:17.660 Well, what the hell does that mean?

00:40:19.100 You must know that what they mean is what I was talking about a second ago, which is that

00:40:22.920 sort of-

00:40:24.760 What? Okay, so fine. So it's easy just to turn this around. It's like, okay, what exactly

00:40:30.700 happened in your historical account when Moses encountered the burning bush?

00:40:35.480 I don't need to know exactly what happened. What I need to know is-

00:40:37.560 I'm not asking you specifically or attacking you for that.

00:40:40.440 What I need to know is that if I sort of went to the Egyptian desert at sort of the time

00:40:49.260 that this story is alleged to have taken place in history, would I see a mass movement of

00:40:55.640 Israelites from Egypt into the Promised Land? Would I see people with feet walking through

00:41:00.160 the desert leaving footprints?

00:41:01.000 Well, let's take it apart rationally.

00:41:04.440 But you also understand that when someone's asking that, and even if you don't like the

00:41:07.920 question, you must understand what someone's asking that.

00:41:09.620 Oh, yes. Well, I understand many of the things that they're doing simultaneously.

00:41:14.140 You must also understand that when you then say, it's still happening, people just go,

00:41:19.120 what are you talking about?

00:41:20.340 Yeah, well, I would say that's not my problem.

00:41:24.080 But it becomes a problem when you understand that someone's asking a quite banal historical

00:41:30.380 question.

00:41:30.980 Yeah, but you don't get to do that.

00:41:32.840 But why not?

00:41:33.920 Because the stories that you're dealing with aren't banal.

00:41:36.280 I agree, but like-

00:41:38.200 So you can't reduce them to something banal, even if it's, what would you call it?

00:41:42.400 Even if it's reassuring, this actually happened.

00:41:45.820 Well, then what do you do with the burning bush?

00:41:48.200 This actually happened.

00:41:49.520 One comparison I would make is between this and talking about fiction more broadly.

00:41:56.120 Yeah.

00:41:56.480 Well, you got it right earlier, I would say.

00:41:59.060 You noted that the stories in the biblical library leap across genres, right?

00:42:06.820 Well, we know this because sometimes they're poetry and sometimes they're song.

00:42:09.940 Sometimes they're epistles, you know?

00:42:10.340 Yeah, exactly.

00:42:11.220 And so in any given story, there's going to be historical account plus mythological overlay.

00:42:18.140 And you have to be a discriminating reader to kind of see what's different.

00:42:21.960 And you don't just get to say, well, all the mythological symbolism is historical reality.

00:42:28.220 It's like, no, it's not.

00:42:29.340 But here's the thing, for example.

00:42:30.340 So like, take a piece of trivial fiction like Forrest Gump.

00:42:33.500 Yeah.

00:42:33.940 Right?

00:42:34.780 We say like, okay, did that happen?

00:42:37.500 Now, I think that what you'd probably say is something like, well, I don't think the events

00:42:41.740 literally occurred, but I think that they obviously get at something that's sort of perennially

00:42:45.280 true about human nature.

00:42:46.240 Right, exactly.

00:42:46.340 But then suppose I said-

00:42:47.200 That's right.

00:42:47.360 So they happened to, they existed as a pattern.

00:42:50.320 But there's a scene in Forrest Gump when, you know, he, I think he meets the president.

00:42:54.040 Is it JFK at the time?

00:42:55.020 I think he goes and meets John F. Kennedy.

00:42:56.840 And so I said to you, well, is JFK the, like that part of that specific part of that

00:43:00.880 story?

00:43:01.280 Is it true that JFK was the president?

00:43:03.460 Right.

00:43:03.920 And you would probably just say, yeah.

00:43:05.500 Yeah.

00:43:05.940 You wouldn't say anything more complicated.

00:43:07.960 And even though the subject as a whole of like, is Forrest Gump true?

00:43:11.140 Is Hamlet true?

00:43:12.240 That's a complicated question.

00:43:13.800 Very.

00:43:13.920 But specifically, when I say, but interestingly, there's this little point I want to make in

00:43:20.420 this board of discussion.

00:43:21.560 Do you think that JFK was actually the president?

00:43:23.480 He would say yes.

00:43:24.180 Why do you think it matters to people?

00:43:26.100 Like, I don't know.

00:43:27.400 These are ancient accounts.

00:43:28.980 Maybe that's the biggest problem.

00:43:30.040 Maybe that's the biggest problem that you have with the people who are asking these questions.

00:43:33.080 It is.

00:43:33.680 And hopefully-

00:43:34.320 What point are you trying to make here?

00:43:36.920 So-

00:43:37.200 The point is, I know what the point usually is, is the people who are asking the question

00:43:41.060 believe that true in unerringly means objectively happened in history like the things that we're

00:43:50.080 seeing right now happen.

00:43:51.420 Yeah.

00:43:51.660 It's like, well, no.

00:43:53.420 That's not how, that's not what those stories are like.

00:43:56.440 For me-

00:43:57.560 Some of it is, but-

00:43:58.620 For a Christian, when asking you that, it's probably because for them, they have an understanding

00:44:02.460 of Christianity that requires believing in that kind of truth.

00:44:05.240 For me, and the reason why I hope that like me asking these questions will be less frustrating

00:44:10.480 to you is because I have no desire for that.

00:44:13.840 I don't care about that.

00:44:14.720 I'm genuinely just interested in what you think.

00:44:17.300 Yeah.

00:44:17.580 I understand.

00:44:18.600 And so my desire to know whether you think Exodus historically happened goes no further

00:44:24.220 than a point of interest about your beliefs.

00:44:26.140 Well, so there's elements of the, especially the setup to the Exodus story that strike me

00:44:33.520 as very, very plausible historically.

00:44:36.000 So for example, the Jews before the Pharaoh of that time were under the guidance and protection

00:44:44.820 of Joseph and the previous Pharaoh.

00:44:46.760 And they regarded the Israelites as benefactors because they had, Joseph had helped save the

00:44:55.120 kingdom and his people were welcome, but that was forgotten.

00:44:59.480 And so the new Pharaoh and the new Egyptians regard the appallingly successful Jews as destructive

00:45:08.820 interlopers and they make them slaves.

00:45:11.260 It's like, well, can you believe that?

00:45:13.380 It happens all the time.

00:45:15.240 Sure.

00:45:15.840 It's happening right now.

00:45:17.260 So it's very plausible.

00:45:18.560 It sounds to me that in this particular case saying it's very plausible, it's like saying

00:45:21.580 something like, well, yeah, it could have happened.

00:45:22.700 I don't know.

00:45:24.480 Well, I don't know.

00:45:25.640 So when somebody-

00:45:26.220 I don't think anybody knows.

00:45:27.500 So when somebody asks, did the Exodus really happen?

00:45:30.620 That word really, when they say-

00:45:32.600 Yeah, really is the crux.

00:45:34.580 If I said, did the Exodus happen?

00:45:36.760 And I'd understand why you would then say, well, you've got to understand what kind of story

00:45:39.520 this is.

00:45:40.160 Fine.

00:45:40.300 But then if somebody says, yeah, but did it really happen?

00:45:42.780 Well, which parts of it?

00:45:43.720 Even if they're not expressing it very well, like what they're getting at there is they're

00:45:47.400 trying to emphasize the historicity.

00:45:49.280 They're trying to say, yeah, but did it historically happen?

00:45:50.960 Probably is what they mean by the word really there.

00:45:52.820 Right.

00:45:53.260 But the thing is, it speaks of their-

00:45:55.720 See, they have a-

00:45:56.880 The problem is, is that Christians who ask that have a metaphysics that's not Christian.

00:46:02.620 So it's a non-starter, the question.

00:46:05.660 It's like, you're asking me the question a materialist atheist would ask, and you want

00:46:13.160 me to give you an answer that bolsters your faith, but the presumptions of your question

00:46:18.000 are enlightenment atheistic.

00:46:20.420 So it's like, I don't know how to play that game.

00:46:23.460 So do you think that to be a Christian, you don't need to believe in the historicity

00:46:28.240 of the Exodus or the resurrection of Jesus, for example?

00:46:30.640 Well, I think those are separate issues, actually.

00:46:32.960 Okay.

00:46:33.160 Yeah.

00:46:33.320 That's probably right as well.

00:46:34.640 And interesting, you know, I spent-

00:46:36.520 Last night, it's a bit of a time delay, so it feels like longer, but last night I was

00:46:39.920 having a conversation with a friend of mine.

00:46:42.400 I said, you know, I'm speaking to Jordan Peterson tomorrow.

00:46:44.140 I was thinking, how can I prepare for this?

00:46:45.780 And we ended up, my friend Sheehan's his name, we ended up having a conversation about

00:46:49.180 whether Hamlet is a real person, right?

00:46:52.240 Right, right.

00:46:52.360 And that was probably better preparation than anything else I could have done.

00:46:54.680 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:46:56.480 So take, if somebody asks, you know, was Hamlet a real person, sort of naively, I say, have

00:47:02.200 you heard of the story of Hamlet?

00:47:02.880 Oh, no, is that a real person?

00:47:04.100 Right.

00:47:04.320 I would say no.

00:47:05.220 However, there is a sense in which, and I'm trying to understand what you're saying here.

00:47:08.520 Yeah.

00:47:08.760 There is a sense in which there are a lot of characters, infinitely many characters, that Shakespeare

00:47:12.640 never wrote about.

00:47:13.720 Yeah.

00:47:14.200 Right?

00:47:14.420 But those characters seem to exist less than Hamlet does.

00:47:18.980 Yeah.

00:47:19.380 Even if Hamlet exists less than Jordan Peterson and Alex O'Connor do in the-

00:47:23.460 Well, Hamlet might exist more.

00:47:26.080 Than-

00:47:27.060 Me.

00:47:27.460 Me and-

00:47:27.860 Hey, everyone.

00:47:29.920 Real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:47:34.120 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling

00:47:38.560 depression and anxiety.

00:47:39.900 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a

00:47:44.820 moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:47:47.440 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of

00:47:52.780 why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:47:55.520 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely

00:48:00.640 possible to find your way forward.

00:48:02.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.

00:48:06.180 There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:48:09.380 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:48:14.600 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:48:21.340 Thank you.

00:48:22.140 Well, okay.

00:48:24.060 One of the things you-

00:48:24.920 You, but not me.

00:48:25.340 One of the things you-

00:48:26.140 Okay.

00:48:26.700 One of the things you pointed to in the analysis that you did-

00:48:31.800 Yes.

00:48:31.900 Of a talk I had with Jonathan Paggio is my somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment that God is

00:48:37.500 the ultimate fictional character.

00:48:38.800 Yes.

00:48:39.420 Right?

00:48:39.620 Which I think is a hilarious line, by the way.

00:48:41.820 Yeah.

00:48:42.080 But-

00:48:42.940 Which, by the way, I think I misunderstood.

00:48:44.100 Now that I've-

00:48:45.580 Watching that back, that's the thing I say I think I might have misunderstood.

00:48:49.500 And maybe that's what you were about to tell me.

00:48:50.800 I shouldn't interrupt.

00:48:51.300 Well, let's walk through that.

00:48:52.640 Yeah.

00:48:52.980 Because people-

00:48:54.780 See, and this is part of this underlying materialist, atheist, enlightenment ethos.

00:48:59.120 People think that fiction and fact are opposites.

00:49:02.400 It's like, no, they're not.

00:49:03.340 Okay.

00:49:03.800 Not at all.

00:49:04.700 Okay, so let's use an analogy to begin with.

00:49:09.180 What's more real?

00:49:10.800 Things or numbers?

00:49:12.220 Mm-hmm.

00:49:12.920 Okay, now, I'm not going to make a case for either of those positions.

00:49:18.420 I'm just saying that's an actual question.

00:49:20.660 Yeah.

00:49:20.960 You talk to mathematicians, they think, well, numbers are way more real than things.

00:49:25.620 Things are evanescent.

00:49:27.000 They disappear.

00:49:27.840 They flash in and out of existence.

00:49:29.940 Numbers are permanent.

00:49:31.120 Yeah.

00:49:31.260 And then you could think about it biologically.

00:49:33.680 It's like, well, how useful is numeracy to survival?

00:49:38.580 Yeah.

00:49:38.740 Like, very, right?

00:49:40.600 When you become numerate, you're powerful in a way that the mere grip you have on the

00:49:46.080 individual facts doesn't afford at all.

00:49:47.960 So there are forms of abstraction that are clearly more real than the things from which

00:49:53.240 they're abstracted, or at least as real.

00:49:55.360 I would say more real, because they're so powerful.

00:49:58.840 Well, fiction is an abstraction.

00:50:01.020 Sure.

00:50:01.480 Right?

00:50:01.740 And so Hamlet, did Hamlet exist?

00:50:04.120 It's like Hamlet is the pattern of character that existed in multiple people over a very long

00:50:12.800 period of time.

00:50:13.660 And so Hamlet is an abstraction, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.

00:50:18.400 Did Raskolnikov exist?

00:50:19.660 It's like Raskolnikov existed in the soul of every Russian from like 1850 to 1990.

00:50:26.280 Right?

00:50:26.600 And so is it real?

00:50:27.760 It's like, it's hyper real.

00:50:30.060 Yeah.

00:50:30.260 Fiction is hyper real.

00:50:31.540 It's a meta truth, as you put it in that podcast.

00:50:34.520 Now, is that real?

00:50:36.600 Well, when someone says, if they've listened to what you've just said and understood it,

00:50:41.140 then if they still ask the question, but is it real, you must understand that what they

00:50:45.600 mean is like, you know, like, did a woman, did Aliona Ivanovna get hit in the head with

00:50:52.320 an ax?

00:50:52.940 Right.

00:50:53.300 Like, yes, did that happen?

00:50:54.960 And again, you could still resort to saying, you know, it happened in the heart of every

00:50:58.580 Russian who's ever thought about killing their mother-in-law.

00:50:59.820 Well, I would say no to that specific question.

00:51:01.440 But no, right?

00:51:02.220 No is the answer.

00:51:03.120 And so, and we can say no with confidence because we know that Dostoevsky sort of thought

00:51:08.300 this up.

00:51:08.780 Yeah.

00:51:08.940 With something like the Egyptians walking through the desert, we can't as confidently

00:51:12.540 say something like, no, that didn't happen.

00:51:15.140 But we'd have to be more humble in saying something like, I don't know.

00:51:19.840 But the comparison I made in this video, I put two questions side by side.

00:51:23.880 You were asked by Douglas Murray, you know, did Raskolnikov exist?

00:51:28.580 And you say, well, I think that the events literally didn't happen, but that kind of misses

00:51:33.080 something and there's something more to talk about.

00:51:35.260 And then you're asked, you know.

00:51:36.260 The pattern is extremely real.

00:51:37.820 Sure.

00:51:37.980 So, then you were asked about Cain and Abel, you know, the story of Cain and Abel happened.

00:51:41.320 Yeah, that's a better example.

00:51:42.900 A famous, you know, the question, did that happen, you know, begs the question, if you've

00:51:46.740 got to, you've got to, and you sort of, in a way that it seems strange to me that the

00:51:52.060 ease with which you were able to say of Raskolnikov and Dostoevsky, well, no, that didn't literally

00:51:56.580 happen, of course.

00:51:57.240 But you've got to understand that there's another sense in which we've got to talk about the

00:51:59.740 truth of the story.

00:52:00.380 Well, the Cain and Abel story is quite complex because you could imagine easily that there

00:52:09.160 was a fratricide at some point in the past that was of sufficient emotional magnitude

00:52:13.980 to have stories aggregate around it, to have an account aggregate around it.

00:52:18.380 So, it's easiest to presume that there, because why not?

00:52:23.020 It's perfectly plausible that a primordial murder of that sort happened in the memory

00:52:29.320 of that tribal people and was represented in that manner.

00:52:32.340 Now, as the account, and Iliad has done a very good job of pointing out how this develops

00:52:39.480 too, you can think of Iliad's work on the mythologization of stories as an extension of

00:52:45.560 Dawkins' idea of the meme, because Iliad discusses in great detail how an account mutates to, what

00:52:58.680 would you say, to be maximally memorable across time.

00:53:02.340 So, it mutates.

00:53:03.700 You can take there as a core that's true, let's say, in a narrow historical sense, but

00:53:09.300 the account mutates to be optimally adapted to the structure of memory that characterizes

00:53:16.420 the human psyche.

00:53:16.920 And that comes out in the story, like the story of Cain and Abel.

00:53:19.580 Right, right.

00:53:20.100 And you get a maximally memorable story.

00:53:22.640 Now, that's a meme.

00:53:23.700 Is it true?

00:53:25.960 That's a hard question, because you see-

00:53:29.180 I think Cain and Abel probably belongs more on the sort of brooding over the face of

00:53:32.940 the waters category than it does Exodus category, for example.

00:53:36.540 Like, so I think with Cain and Abel, sure-

00:53:38.140 Yeah, well, there's very little detail in it that would make it a specific historical

00:53:41.520 event, right?

00:53:42.280 I mean, because it's two generic brothers, and there's a generic murder.

00:53:47.420 But it's interesting, too, because even in the case of a specific fratricide, let's say,

00:53:53.840 that actually happens in the world.

00:53:55.960 Well, there's all sorts of principalities involved in the background, right?

00:53:59.900 So, for example, I spent a lot of time looking at Dylan Klebold's accounting of his mental

00:54:06.160 state before shooting up the Columbine High School.

00:54:08.780 Well, you know, if you read that, it'll make your blood run cold.

00:54:13.700 Oh, yeah.

00:54:14.020 He's obviously possessed, whatever that means.

00:54:18.180 Whatever that means.

00:54:19.000 I'm happy to accept the word possessed.

00:54:23.080 Well, look what he did.

00:54:24.360 Knowing, in part, I take this the wrong way, knowing that I'm speaking with you.

00:54:28.220 I'm not going to take that as literally as I would if I was speaking to an evangelical.

00:54:32.260 Yeah, well, literal is a very hard thing in a circumstance like that, because Klebold

00:54:35.860 invited something in, and it wasn't pleasant, and it had its way with him, right?

00:54:41.080 And the results, although dreadful, were nowhere near as dreadful as he was hoping they would

00:54:46.900 be, right?

00:54:47.800 It's dark.

00:54:48.980 And is that real?

00:54:50.200 So what happened there?

00:54:51.440 It's like, well, one way of describing it is that, you know, an alienated young man shot

00:54:57.620 up a high school.

00:54:58.880 Another way of representing it, which may be more true, is that it was another, what

00:55:03.740 would you say, punctuated episode of a cosmic drama that's been going on forever.

00:55:09.320 Fine.

00:55:09.860 And it isn't obvious to me at all which of those two accounts is more real.

00:55:13.120 Well, it depends on what specific question is being asked.

00:55:15.520 For example, right now, suppose that you were a witness to this crime, and the police pull

00:55:23.140 you into questioning as a witness.

00:55:24.620 Yeah.

00:55:24.940 And they say, we're trying to gather information to try and, you know, catch the suspects.

00:55:28.860 Suppose that there's no suicide involved.

00:55:30.300 You know, the suspects at large.

00:55:31.740 Yeah.

00:55:31.900 And they're trying to get your help.

00:55:33.020 And they say, so, Dr. Peterson, what happened?

00:55:36.020 And you say, well, I think what happened was the continuation, sort of a punctuation in

00:55:41.600 the long paragraph of the cosmic drama that is our human existence.

00:55:45.600 And the police sort of say, that's not what we meant.

00:55:48.300 Okay.

00:55:48.820 But like, come on, help me out here, man.

00:55:50.660 Yeah, right.

00:55:50.980 Like, really, like, and I think that's what people are doing with the religious question.

00:55:54.540 Well, that's a level of analysis problem.

00:55:56.480 So we went, when we started this discussion, you talked about the infinite regress for purposes

00:56:02.120 for writing an essay, right?

00:56:03.660 So what are you doing when you're writing an essay?

00:56:06.180 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:56:06.820 Well, you're making horizontal and curved marks with a pen.

00:56:10.760 Sure.

00:56:11.240 Right.

00:56:11.460 Well, right.

00:56:11.900 But there is a cosmic tree of events in every micro event, right?

00:56:20.260 And when people, when they're looking for eyewitness testimony, they're asking you for something

00:56:27.280 like the highest possible level of narrow resolution you can manage, right?

00:56:33.560 Ian McGilchrist just-

00:56:35.160 Yeah, that's right.

00:56:36.400 I just spoke with him.

00:56:37.820 And unfortunately, I think we lost about half of the footage.

00:56:39.580 So I'm not sure how much that will be seen in the world.

00:56:42.860 But he brought to my attention, I'm sure he said it was John Ruskin who talked about having

00:56:47.820 a, you see in the garden, you see like a square and you think it's a, you think it's

00:56:53.080 like a white square in the garden, inexplicably.

00:56:55.240 And then you go a bit closer and you see, oh, it's actually a page, it's a book.

00:56:58.400 And then you look a bit closer and you see it's got words on it.

00:57:00.120 Yeah.

00:57:00.260 And then you see a microscope and you see, actually, it's got like ridges.

00:57:02.880 Yeah.

00:57:03.280 You know?

00:57:03.540 And then you go a bit closer and you actually see atoms bumping into each other.

00:57:05.860 Yeah.

00:57:06.220 And you go a bit closer and you see sort of waves and energy.

00:57:08.260 Yeah, right.

00:57:08.940 And it's sort of like, well, which of those is the real thing you saw?

00:57:12.640 Right.

00:57:13.020 You know?

00:57:13.280 Okay.

00:57:13.600 Well, and the thing is, is that that hierarchy that you just described, this is the cosmic tree of

00:57:19.720 life.

00:57:20.080 This is Yggdrasil.

00:57:20.900 It's like you have got the quantum level and the atomic level and the molecular level

00:57:25.640 and so forth up to the phenomenal level.

00:57:28.020 That's not where it stops.

00:57:29.800 I started to understand this when I was thinking something very peculiar.

00:57:33.640 This is decades ago.

00:57:34.940 I thought people will go to a museum to look at Elvis Presley's guitar.

00:57:39.280 Yeah.

00:57:39.660 It's like, what the hell are they doing?

00:57:41.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:41.600 So you can imagine that you have a display case and you have Elvis's guitar in it.

00:57:46.800 And now you take that guitar out.

00:57:48.580 Let's say it's a mass produced guitar, just for the sake of argument.

00:57:51.200 You replace it with a identical model from the same year.

00:57:54.560 Yep.

00:57:54.960 Okay.

00:57:55.280 Now, is that Elvis's guitar?

00:57:58.000 And people will say, and you can think this is so strange.

00:58:01.500 People would say, well, even if I couldn't tell the difference, I would rather look at

00:58:06.120 Elvis's guitar.

00:58:07.160 Yeah.

00:58:07.560 And then you think, well, what?

00:58:08.940 Is that some kind of delusion?

00:58:10.320 Like, what the hell's going on here?

00:58:11.840 No.

00:58:12.320 The answer is, this is what Duchamp was on about when he, I think it was Duchamp, who

00:58:16.700 put the urinal in the art gallery.

00:58:19.060 Yeah, right, right.

00:58:19.540 That's right.

00:58:19.900 What he was pointing to, and it was brilliant, was that much of what we perceive as concretely

00:58:28.040 real is actually dependent on a hierarchical context that isn't part of the apprehension

00:58:34.960 of the object.

00:58:35.520 So when you go to see Elvis's guitar in a museum, the perception is informed by the

00:58:43.880 context.

00:58:44.440 It's like, well, you're an Elvis fan, and you know a lot about Elvis history, and you

00:58:48.300 know that this is Elvis's town, and the object itself partakes in that higher order unity.

00:58:54.180 That's the unity that extends off to heaven.

00:58:56.200 And every object partakes in that embeddedness above.

00:59:00.820 Like, for the reductionist types, you'd say, well, what's this made of, right?

00:59:04.180 It's like, well, it's molecules, and then it's atoms, and then it's like quantum, whatever

00:59:10.540 the hell exists down in the quantum level.

00:59:12.700 That's what this is made of.

00:59:13.820 It's like, wait a second.

00:59:15.280 It's on this table.

00:59:17.100 It's in this room.

00:59:18.860 It's of this time.

00:59:20.480 And that's all this thing, too.

00:59:22.760 Yeah.

00:59:23.140 You know, and that's the higher order conceptualization, but it's just as much part of the object.

00:59:30.340 Yeah.

00:59:30.880 And a reductionist view doesn't take that into account, and that's a big problem.

00:59:35.500 I think it's true that, you know, looking at Ruskin's book, piece of paper, it would

00:59:41.920 be silly to always say, well, what's that in the garden over there?

00:59:45.000 Oh, it's a bunch of atoms bumping into each other.

00:59:46.420 Right.

00:59:46.880 That would be ludicrous.

00:59:47.560 Well, that's also, so back to our discussion of Darwinian utility, it's like, well, it's

00:59:52.840 the wrong level of functional analysis.

00:59:54.340 But look, surely it would also be inappropriate to do the opposite.

00:59:57.540 That is, like, to always think at a higher resolution than people are obviously sort of

01:00:01.980 practically trying to.

01:00:03.200 So, for example, if I was close enough to see, and I was interested in what paper is

01:00:07.400 made of, and I said, well, what is this?

01:00:08.820 And someone said, oh, it's a white square in the garden.

01:00:10.720 Yeah.

01:00:11.280 So, well, that's inappropriate.

01:00:12.160 You've gone too high.

01:00:13.120 It's not helpful.

01:00:13.220 You need to focus down, right?

01:00:14.180 And I feel like where you might criticize the reductionist materialist for going to too

01:00:20.460 high a resolution or too narrow, you go too wide on issues of religious historicity.

01:00:26.240 Well, you want to hit the target squarely, right?

01:00:28.940 And that's hard.

01:00:30.200 So, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ addresses that to some degree.

01:00:34.080 So, his injunction for paying attention properly takes local and distal into account simultaneously.

01:00:44.880 He says, okay, this is what you have to do first of all.

01:00:49.040 You orient yourself.

01:00:50.760 So, this is the highest level of orientation, right?

01:00:53.100 So, this is the divine orientation.

01:00:54.780 It's the thing at the top of Jacob's ladder.

01:00:57.080 It's the value at the pinnacle of the value hierarchy.

01:00:59.440 You put what's properly highest first and foremost in the theater of your imagination, right?

01:01:07.700 And then you align that with the belief that other people have the same intrinsic value as you

01:01:12.300 and that are a reflection of that infinite value.

01:01:15.200 You start there.

01:01:17.160 Then you pay attention to the moment.

01:01:18.920 Yes.

01:01:19.620 Tolstoy wrote about this in his confession.

01:01:21.600 He sort of, he was, I love it.

01:01:24.500 It's like 100 pages long.

01:01:25.780 You can read it in no time.

01:01:26.740 Yeah, it's a great book.

01:01:27.500 It's this wonderful account of essentially him sort of trying to battle with his reason

01:01:32.500 and his faith.

01:01:33.100 And he eventually concludes that he was looking in the wrong place.

01:01:35.260 He was looking amongst intellectuals.

01:01:36.800 Yeah.

01:01:37.120 And he found that he looked to, I think he sort of, he quite dismissively called him

01:01:40.440 like the simple people and just your everyday person, the working man.

01:01:43.740 And he found that it was something about sort of, you know, if you take someone who's starving

01:01:48.880 and you bring him and you tell him to sort of take this metal pump and just pump it up

01:01:53.580 and down and don't tell him why.

01:01:54.800 And he does it and the water starts flowing.

01:01:56.240 It's like, you have to actually do the thing.

01:01:57.820 You have to live out the thing and then you get to see why it's, why it, why it works.

01:02:01.900 So it's, you know, I, I, I understand that.

01:02:05.180 I think that's, that's probably, that's probably true.

01:02:08.080 He also says Tolstoy, that is in that, in that same account that he found that the, there

01:02:14.220 was a, there was a, an exactly inverse correlation between the specificity of an answer and like

01:02:23.780 the importance of the question.

01:02:26.160 I can tell you exactly how many molecules are in that glass of water, but who cares?

01:02:31.000 Right.

01:02:31.340 And the more the question becomes about, you know, humanity, human life, the important

01:02:36.620 stuff, the less specific the answer necessarily has to become.

01:02:40.300 So I understand there is a, there is a.

01:02:43.680 So, so you, you, you've, you've alluded there to, or, or indicated the relevance of value

01:02:51.920 for perception, right?

01:02:53.440 You nailed it with that observation, because as you pointed out, any phenomena can be analyzed

01:02:59.300 at a multitude, multiple levels of, of, of the hierarchy that it exists within.

01:03:05.640 Okay.

01:03:05.940 So what makes the choice of level of analysis appropriate?

01:03:10.480 Well, it's something like, it is something that's akin to Darwinian utility.

01:03:15.420 It's something like that.

01:03:17.060 You, you can think about it less abstractly is that you want the level of resolution that

01:03:23.760 gives you maximal functional grip in relationship to your pursuit.

01:03:28.240 Absolutely.

01:03:28.560 So what's your pursuit?

01:03:30.100 Well, two questions.

01:03:30.980 What is your pursuit?

01:03:31.860 What should your pursuit be?

01:03:33.360 Well, your pursuits necessarily nested inside a hierarchy of pursuits.

01:03:38.560 And when I said that God is the, what would you say?

01:03:42.980 The ultimate pursuit that sits at the apex of the progression of pursuits, that is Jacob's

01:03:48.840 ladder.

01:03:50.060 That's what that's indicating in that vision is that every, every act of perception unites

01:03:56.280 earth and heaven.

01:03:57.580 Yep.

01:03:57.780 And the perception itself is invisibly dependent on whatever it is you're worshiping.

01:04:08.120 Well, like here's one problem, right?

01:04:09.240 So that's very comical.

01:04:10.260 Because I think I see what you're saying and I hope, you know, what I tried to do in making

01:04:15.780 that video essay about your religious views and I suppose I wasn't, the main thing I was

01:04:23.260 trying to do was sort of offer an interpretation, trying to get to grips with it.

01:04:25.900 And I hope that you feel as though at least I'm making an effort here to really try and get what you're

01:04:32.360 thinking at.

01:04:33.900 One problem is that, you know, in the early church, there was a debate around the physicality of

01:04:41.260 Jesus' resurrection.

01:04:42.620 Yes.

01:04:43.000 So the canonical tradition ends up stipulating that Jesus physically resurrects and you must

01:04:48.380 believe that otherwise you're a heretic.

01:04:49.840 Yeah, and that's part of the Catholic particular emphasis on the divinity of the body, which

01:04:55.080 has a real wisdom rather than a disembodied soul.

01:04:58.000 You also have like the Gnostic tradition, broadly speaking, the Gnostic tradition in early

01:05:03.340 Christianity that's so popular that Valentinus nearly becomes the Bishop of Rome.

01:05:08.240 He's nearly the Pope, you know, and there's, I talked about this the other day and I should

01:05:14.000 have looked it up.

01:05:14.460 I can't remember which church father it was that was telling the church community, the early

01:05:18.760 church community, when you go to a new place, don't ask to be taken to the Christian church.

01:05:22.760 Ask to be taken to the Catholic church because otherwise you might

01:05:25.040 end up in a Gnostic church.

01:05:26.280 It was so popular.

01:05:27.420 Right, right, right.

01:05:28.200 And a lot of the Gnostic tradition says that the thing that's being gotten wrong is the

01:05:34.140 idea that there was this literal resurrection.

01:05:35.860 Right.

01:05:36.320 No, no, the kingdom of God is here and now.

01:05:38.460 The resurrection is inside of you and you attain it through Gnosis.

01:05:41.800 I mean, the Gospel of Thomas, which is probably the most famous non-canonical gospel and could

01:05:45.800 have been written at the same time as like the Gospel of John.

01:05:48.600 This is an early text.

01:05:49.520 It doesn't even mention the resurrection.

01:05:51.700 It doesn't mention a crucifixion.

01:05:52.980 It's a list of sayings.

01:05:54.260 Yeah.

01:05:54.460 And the very form of that book, as one scholar whose name I've forgotten, unfortunately,

01:06:01.280 has pointed out, of that collection shows that these people believed that the thing

01:06:06.560 that's important is not what Jesus did, but what he said.

01:06:09.000 The thing that's important is the knowledge.

01:06:10.600 The thing that's important.

01:06:11.100 Yeah, right.

01:06:11.360 And so this resurrection stuff sort of doesn't matter.

01:06:14.240 Now, the thing is, in that early church community, somebody who said, well, this question of

01:06:19.640 like the resurrection as a physical, you know, historical event, that you're kind of missing

01:06:23.580 the point.

01:06:24.100 The thing that matters is like, you know, the resurrection that takes place inside of every

01:06:28.280 person.

01:06:28.720 Yeah.

01:06:28.920 It sort of sounds a little bit like the kind of approach that you would take.

01:06:32.440 Now, if that's true, that would mean that in the early church, you'd have been condemned

01:06:36.100 as a heretic.

01:06:37.440 Yeah.

01:06:37.600 So when a modern Catholic says to you, you know, Jordan Peterson, are you a Christian?

01:06:42.320 You know, what do you think about Catholicism?

01:06:44.720 I think that the reason that they're interested is because if it's true what I'm saying, then

01:06:48.740 they would have to say, oh, I suppose, at least according to my understanding of Catholicism,

01:06:52.180 That's a form of Gnosticism.

01:06:53.460 I can't count you among my number, you know?

01:06:54.900 Yeah, yeah.

01:06:55.220 So I think that's probably why people are interested.

01:06:56.900 And I wonder if you agree.

01:06:58.060 Well, that's a genuine, that's a, that, what would you say?

01:07:00.240 That would constitute a genuine form of inquiry, for sure.

01:07:03.300 And I wonder if you feel like you're, I mean, I don't know.

01:07:05.440 See, one of the things I really like about the bodily tradition of the resurrection is

01:07:13.260 that it, see, what it does that's so remarkable is that it doesn't desacralize the body.

01:07:22.640 And that's very, very important.

01:07:24.220 You know, I think the fundamental problem with Gnosticism is that it becomes a, it's very

01:07:29.880 easy for it to become a doctrine that's contemptuous of the body and contemptuous of the

01:07:35.440 the, of the material world.

01:07:37.560 A great deal of the Gnostic tradition literally believes that the material world is created

01:07:41.320 by an evil demon.

01:07:42.080 Right, exactly.

01:07:42.800 Right?

01:07:43.060 Well, exactly, exactly, exactly.

01:07:44.660 And Jesus comes to save us from that.

01:07:45.840 And the insistence on the bodily resurrection is a medication against that.

01:07:50.100 Oh, you know.

01:07:50.240 And it's an effective one.

01:07:51.520 I would, I would really love to ask about Genesis.

01:07:55.200 This might be a bit of a tangent and tell me if it's, if it's uninteresting to you, but

01:07:58.680 there's one Gnostic text called, called the testimony of truth that was discovered in

01:08:04.160 the Nag Hammadi library.

01:08:05.480 And this is buried probably around 300 AD.

01:08:07.660 So it must be earlier than that.

01:08:08.720 It's a fairly early text.

01:08:09.960 And this text identifies the serpent in the garden of Eden with Christ.

01:08:15.700 And this is fascinating to me because when I, when I read.

01:08:20.080 But as a leader to illumination.

01:08:21.720 Yes, exactly.

01:08:22.620 I know there's a Gnostic tradition that makes the serpent a higher God than the original

01:08:26.880 God because he's the agent that calls to conscience.

01:08:30.040 Yeah.

01:08:30.200 Now, of course, the serpent, yes.

01:08:31.680 Now the serpent doesn't, is never identified as, as Satan or the devil, except by, except

01:08:36.240 by Christian tradition.

01:08:37.020 It's just the serpent.

01:08:37.980 Now, there's so much interesting about this.

01:08:39.480 When I, when I first read the, the, the Genesis, when I read.

01:08:42.780 Well, even the classic Christians often regarded the fall as the, what would you say?

01:08:50.240 Fateful, but heaven sent error that made the incarnation of Christ both possible.

01:08:57.680 Yeah, sure, sure.

01:08:58.520 Right.

01:08:58.800 So there's, it's very interesting because there's a gloss on that where even in traditional

01:09:03.820 Christianity, the serpent becomes.

01:09:04.600 It gives you Christ.

01:09:05.560 That's right.

01:09:06.040 Yeah, it gives you Christ.

01:09:06.820 And Jesus at one point compares himself to a serpent in the gospel of John, you know,

01:09:10.720 early in.

01:09:12.160 Oh, yes.

01:09:12.780 You know, he'll raise himself up.

01:09:15.200 Except as I'll be lifted up.

01:09:15.800 Like, like, like Moses lifts up the serpent.

01:09:18.600 Insanely, see, that's one of the passages actually, sorry, I don't want to derail you

01:09:23.320 from your tangent, but that's one of the passages that I've concentrated a lot in this

01:09:29.420 new book that I've just finished, We Who Wrestle With God, because that equation that Christ

01:09:34.520 manages with his identification with the serpent in the desert, that is so stunningly brilliant

01:09:41.420 that I cannot possibly imagine how anyone could have thought it up.

01:09:47.960 It's to, to, to, to identify him with the source of the poison that to gaze upon, what would

01:10:01.620 you say, redeem the Israelites in the desert.

01:10:03.960 It's so, there's so much in that, that it's, it's, it's, it's really a kind of miracle.

01:10:09.200 Well, that serpent on the stake, that's Asclepius, say, it's the same symbol.

01:10:13.700 Yeah, I think.

01:10:14.120 So that just in itself is something stunning to contemplate.

01:10:16.680 There is something, there is something amazing that I think, of course, well, obviously I'm

01:10:20.060 not going to go as far as saying that I can't imagine that was thought up, maybe not by

01:10:23.680 somebody, it's, it's complicated with the Bible, of course.

01:10:26.720 And there's a lot to say there.

01:10:27.940 I mean, I mean, the author of the Gospel of John is obviously a sort of theological genius

01:10:31.340 in the way that the authors of the synoptic gospels at least weren't as much.

01:10:35.860 So, you know, it's, it's, it's believable to me that, that, that, that could be the

01:10:39.360 case, but, but besides the point, because that would, that, that's another complicated

01:10:44.540 thing to talk about.

01:10:45.320 But when I first, I, I, it wasn't the first time, but the first time I really tried to

01:10:49.760 read the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden, and I was doing it in the service of sort

01:10:53.940 of producing a video.

01:10:55.100 I was, I want to make sure I want to revisit the story, make sure I sort of understand it

01:10:57.820 properly.

01:10:59.460 I'm reading this text and God says, you must, you can eat of any of the,

01:11:05.180 any of the trees, but not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

01:11:07.260 Immediately you think to yourself, well, why not?

01:11:08.880 You know, why, why wouldn't?

01:11:10.060 And some people like to say, oh, it's because that's actually by eating of the tree of the

01:11:13.500 knowledge of good and evil, you get to dictate morality.

01:11:16.320 It doesn't read like that to me.

01:11:17.820 It reads to me like knowledge of good and evil.

01:11:19.680 Let's just take it at face value to start with.

01:11:21.720 It's like, why not God?

01:11:22.580 Why not?

01:11:22.980 Well, we're not told, but don't do it because in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely

01:11:27.000 die.

01:11:27.720 Yeah.

01:11:28.300 Now the serpent comes along and the serpent is described as more cunning than any of the animals

01:11:32.500 that God, God created.

01:11:33.900 Yeah.

01:11:34.000 Um, I don't speak Hebrew, unfortunately, but where it says, you know, for example, more,

01:11:38.260 more cunning than any of the, the, the beasts that God had created, that could mean of all

01:11:42.620 of the beasts that he'd created or more cunning than the beasts that he had created.

01:11:45.740 Almost as if this is a, a, a, a, a being in the garden that, that God himself didn't

01:11:51.520 actually create or God isn't sort of connected to in the same way.

01:11:54.340 Cause why is the serpent there in the first place is a question that's worth asking, you

01:11:57.180 know?

01:11:57.440 Okay.

01:11:57.720 That's for sure.

01:11:58.460 So you have the serpent and, and that word cunning, I thought to myself, well, what does that

01:12:02.440 mean?

01:12:02.660 So, so I, I, I looked it up and it's, it's the word like Arum or Arum.

01:12:06.880 I don't know how to pronounce it, but I looked elsewhere in the old Testament and it's used

01:12:10.980 in a few different ways.

01:12:11.820 You know, it means cunning.

01:12:12.980 It means subtle.

01:12:13.960 Subtle.

01:12:14.400 Yeah.

01:12:14.600 Throughout Proverbs, it's used to, it's used consistently to mean sensible or to mean prudent.

01:12:23.420 And so there's one reading of this, you know, now, now the serpent was more sensible than

01:12:27.800 any of the other beasts of the garden of Eden.

01:12:29.180 And he comes to Eve and says, did God say that if you eat of that tree, you'll surely die?

01:12:33.800 And she says, yeah, that's what he said.

01:12:35.060 And he says, you will not surely die in the day that you eat thereof.

01:12:38.260 You'll just, God just knows you'll become like him knowing good and evil.

01:12:40.560 And he doesn't want that.

01:12:41.760 So Eve looks at the fruit and she eats the fruit.

01:12:44.280 And does she die in the day thereof?

01:12:46.300 Well, again, a complicated question, but on face value, no.

01:12:50.760 She doesn't die.

01:12:51.720 She gives them to Adam.

01:12:52.460 He doesn't die.

01:12:53.420 And what does happen?

01:12:54.860 Well, God says to them, well, God says, now they have become like us knowing good and

01:12:59.020 evil.

01:12:59.220 They must be banished from the garden so they do not outstretch their hand and eat from

01:13:02.820 the tree of life.

01:13:03.480 So it seems to me that you've got this serpent who could plausibly be described as the most

01:13:09.160 sensible of the animals telling Eve seemingly the truth.

01:13:13.340 The people, the people who regard Milton, Satan as what an admirable revolutionary tend to

01:13:21.160 have the same attitude towards the serpent in the garden.

01:13:23.860 And it's a complicated, it's a very complicated issue because even to the degree that the serpent

01:13:30.460 is an agent of Lucifer, which I think is an extraordinarily profound, what reading and

01:13:38.200 overlay on that initial story, I think it's remarkable.

01:13:41.260 Lucifer is the bringer of light, right?

01:13:44.540 Yeah.

01:13:44.740 The spirit of enlightenment.

01:13:45.460 Jesus himself is referred to as Lucifer at one point in the gospel, which is quite a fascinating

01:13:50.260 side note.

01:13:53.120 I guess the question is like illumination to what end?

01:13:56.540 I do think that the interpretation that you rejected with regard to the consumption of the

01:14:04.800 fruit of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil is moral presumption.

01:14:09.640 It's the sin that Nietzsche suggests to everyone as the medication for the death of God.

01:14:16.300 We have to define our own values.

01:14:17.580 It's like, no, we can't.

01:14:20.320 But it's knowledge of good and evil.

01:14:21.760 Yeah, but it's more than that.

01:14:24.540 It's the consumption of the essence of moral knowledge itself.

01:14:29.020 It sounds to me that like, I can never, you know, contradict an exegesis.

01:14:35.140 It's sure that that may be the case.

01:14:36.720 But if I read this text naturally, if I just say, well, like, how does this naturally read

01:14:40.520 to me?

01:14:40.980 Yeah.

01:14:41.440 It reads to me like you have.

01:14:43.040 And that's why I brought it up, because you consider this Gnostic tradition, right?

01:14:46.180 The evil demiurgic creator of the universe.

01:14:49.080 And like you have, and the author of the testimony of truth says, you know, what God is this?

01:14:53.220 What God is this?

01:14:54.060 That firstly, you know, condemns man for wanting to eat the tree of the knowledge of good and

01:14:58.740 evil.

01:14:59.280 And secondly, lies him about what's going to happen when he does.

01:15:02.400 And recognizes, and we're missing like 50% of the text.

01:15:06.020 Like it's ripped to shred.

01:15:07.700 These Gnostic texts, it's fascinating.

01:15:09.100 Yeah.

01:15:09.660 I think the Gospel of Judas spent about 30 years in a safety deposit box in New York City

01:15:13.760 and he destroyed the whole thing.

01:15:15.100 It's a fascinating story.

01:15:15.860 But so we don't know for sure, but there's a point where it seems to identify this serpent

01:15:19.580 with Christ, with Jesus.

01:15:21.880 And reading that, I'm like, that makes a lot of sense to me on a surface reading of Genesis.

01:15:27.660 Part of it reflects the ambivalence about the human rise to self-consciousness, right?

01:15:32.940 Is that a good or is that something good or something evil?

01:15:36.180 Because why does God then say, now they've become like us, knowing good and evil.

01:15:39.660 They must not be allowed.

01:15:41.340 We must banish them lest they reach out their hand and eat from the tree of life.

01:15:46.160 Yeah.

01:15:46.980 And sort of then guards Eden with the cherubim, with the flaming sword.

01:15:50.780 Like it seems to me that God is saying, you know, because we're told that because of the fool,

01:15:55.560 now man can't inherit eternal life and Jesus must come to save him.

01:15:59.580 Yeah.

01:15:59.860 But as soon as they eat of this tree, God banishes them.

01:16:02.780 See, okay, I don't have an interpretive problem with that part.

01:16:07.700 Yeah, that's, I don't know what sense to make of that.

01:16:12.020 I should ask Jonathan Paggio because I suspect he'd have something to say about that.

01:16:16.160 Yeah.

01:16:16.400 I think that the one way of interpreting the account of the fall is that it was the inevitable

01:16:24.380 consequence of Adam and Eve's overreach.

01:16:27.080 Sure.

01:16:27.280 And so they end up banished, not so much because God wants them out of the garden, but because

01:16:33.000 they're in their pride, they threw themselves out of the garden in their overreach.

01:16:38.720 And I wrote about this, it's very hard for me to generate the entire interpretation on the fly.

01:16:45.080 I wrote about this extensively in this new book that I'm publishing in November, trying to take

01:16:49.560 apart that particular issue. Because what seems to happen in the Adam and Eve account is that

01:16:56.740 you have an allusion to the function of male and female consciousness. First, you have Adam

01:17:05.760 who names and subdues and orders, right? And so he's an extension in some ways of the Logos,

01:17:12.600 right? In human form. And God's curious enough about that to bring everything to Adam to just

01:17:18.660 see what he'll name. Yeah.

01:17:19.860 But the command is for Adam to put everything in its proper place in this hierarchical organization

01:17:26.560 with its proper name. And Adam can do that if he's an adequate and faithful reflection of the Logos.

01:17:36.060 Then Eve is created as the counterpart to that. And it's something like, well, there's an ordering

01:17:42.880 tendency and there's the order that that produces. But then there are things that are on the margin

01:17:48.960 that aren't accounted for by the divine order and they need a voice. And Eve is the voice of,

01:17:55.840 you think about this biologically. What does a woman do in the context of a family? She brings the

01:18:05.600 attention to that which is vulnerable and has not yet been properly incorporated. So-

01:18:14.640 Well, what do you mean by that?

01:18:15.840 Well, imagine that you have a well-constituted family and there's a new baby. Well, the baby

01:18:22.460 doesn't fit in. The baby is an anomaly. The baby is an individual that has its own idiosyncrasies.

01:18:29.640 And the mother who's sensitive to the needs of the infant, she's going to be the voice of that.

01:18:37.140 She's going to knock on the door of the ordering principle and say,

01:18:41.700 you need to make some adjustments here so that what can't fit does.

01:18:45.820 If it feels, because, yeah, and again, I'm trying to be, to understand what you're saying

01:18:52.000 and trying to be charitable. It does seem to me that this is an unnatural interpolation

01:18:57.960 in that sort of, it seems like maybe it's too much. Like, I don't know if that's,

01:19:05.260 that's, you can make that work, right? You can make that work, but it's just-

01:19:08.920 There's always, this is, this is the kind of objection that Sam Harris had to the sorts

01:19:15.680 of things that I said. He said, well, you can interpret a cookbook that way.

01:19:18.380 Exactly.

01:19:18.880 Yeah. Well, and this is, look, this is a huge problem. This is the problem that postmodernists

01:19:24.020 dangled in front of everyone. It's like, well, what's the canonical interpretation of a text?

01:19:28.180 The answer is no one knows. Right. And so does that mean that there's an infinite number

01:19:33.040 of interpretations per text? Yes. Which one's correct? Hey. Now, that problem, I think,

01:19:41.080 to some degree, has actually been technically solved. Well, the large language models do this.

01:19:46.260 Okay.

01:19:46.920 You bet.

01:19:47.420 Right.

01:19:48.060 So, I've been talking to one of my colleagues about a new discipline, which is something like

01:19:53.080 computational epistemology. Well, because the large language models track patterns of

01:19:59.140 interrelationships between words. Okay. So, when you're trying to interpret something like the

01:20:03.700 story of Adam and Eve, the story is the words. The story is the letters. The story is the words.

01:20:09.880 The story is the phrases. The story is the sentences, and the paragraphs, and the chapters,

01:20:14.520 and the whole biblical corpus, plus the entire bloody culture. And all of that bears on those

01:20:20.100 interpretations. So, you say, well, am I overreaching my interpretation in relationship to

01:20:25.920 Adam and Eve? And I would say, well, that's a very difficult question. And it's possible to

01:20:31.520 overreach, and it's possible to overinterpret. I mean, specifically with the female in the family.

01:20:36.360 Well, the thing is, though, that there is- I mean, could any other person, like,

01:20:40.600 having not listened to this conversation, and not spoken to you-

01:20:43.200 Daoists would know that.

01:20:44.220 But any other person in the world, sort of read the story of Adam and Eve, and similarly say,

01:20:49.780 well, I think that this is because Eve is representing what a woman does in a well-oriented family,

01:20:53.660 which has to do with, you know, when you have a child, it's sort of a- it's an anomaly,

01:20:57.360 it's something new, and it's the woman that brings that-

01:20:59.600 Well, that's- Eve stands for the voice of the serpent.

01:21:03.460 Yeah.

01:21:03.900 The thing that's excluded.

01:21:05.160 That's true, but-

01:21:06.020 Yeah, but that's exactly the point, is that that's exactly-

01:21:08.700 So, would someone else come to that conclusion? I would say, well, people can make that decision

01:21:17.740 for themselves when they read the text, but I would say it's very much in keeping, let's say,

01:21:21.700 with Daoist interpretations of what masculine and feminine are.

01:21:25.000 It's not an infallible way to understand whether an interpretation is correct, but I think it's

01:21:29.460 helpful to know, if you read a novel, there's that sort of joke that schoolchildren make about,

01:21:33.600 like, it doesn't matter what a novel says, it'll be like the curtains were blue, and the English

01:21:36.880 teacher will say, well, let's unpack that, let's look at what that means, right? And people make

01:21:40.640 fun of that, because that's their experience in school.

01:21:42.860 Yeah.

01:21:43.040 I think that one way to understand if we're doing this appropriately is if two people simultaneously

01:21:48.280 think, oh, actually, the fact that the curtains were blue is significant here, if you consider

01:21:51.540 this, so it seems to point to that. If people can independently, even if they don't get it

01:21:54.740 quite the same, recognize that that's significant, right?

01:21:56.160 Yeah, well, certainly-

01:21:57.040 It's helpful to understand that there's something-

01:21:59.040 Yes, definitely.

01:21:59.700 There's something legitimate about that kind of analogy.

01:22:01.500 Definitely. This is actually part of the reason that I became so interested in the Jungian

01:22:06.860 Iliad, Eric Neumann School of Mythological Interpretation, because that's exactly what

01:22:12.700 they did, was they took patterns of interpretation, let's say, of masculine and feminine from multiple

01:22:18.960 cultures and looked for overlap.

01:22:20.540 Yeah.

01:22:20.640 Okay, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, so I did that, I used the Jungian works in that regard,

01:22:27.060 but I also used what I knew about neuropsychology and neuropsychopharmacology, with the presumption

01:22:33.260 being that if all of these pointers pointed to the same thing, it was probably there. That's

01:22:40.100 multi-method, multi-trait construct validation fundamentally, and the notion is that your senses

01:22:45.400 do the same thing. If your eyes and your ears and your sense of smell and your taste and your touch

01:22:51.920 all report the same thing, then you have a reasonable probability of assuming, of surviving

01:22:58.720 if you assume that it's true. Now, that's not perfect, because the reason we talk is that

01:23:03.280 I don't want to just rely on my own senses, even though there's five of them. So I've got a

01:23:08.600 quintangulation happening, which is a pretty decent way of specifying truth. I want to know

01:23:13.760 if your perception shows concordance, right? We want this converging evidence. Now, it's trickier

01:23:21.500 with textual interpretation. Partly, it's trickier too, because mere consensus is not

01:23:27.800 sufficient. You need deep expertise. Okay, so why would I say that? Well, we have these large

01:23:35.360 language models, for example, and they're doing statistical analysis of textual interrelationship

01:23:40.280 at every level, right? Billions of parameters. So the letter conjunctions, the word conjunctions,

01:23:46.600 the phrase conjunctions, the sentence conjunctions, the whole bloody thing. But even they're prone to

01:23:51.640 go astray, and the reason for that is that they're overweighted to the present. So we have the alignment

01:23:58.660 problem as a consequence, which is, well, how do we trust the AI interpretations? Well, the same problem

01:24:04.800 obtains for human beings, the alignment problem. How do we align ourselves? Well, that's what a

01:24:09.500 classical education did, right? And that was steeping in the ancient texts. Why? Because the

01:24:15.840 ancient texts are distillations of patterns that have existed over thousands of years. And if you

01:24:21.740 know the patterns, you orient yourself properly. And that also makes you immune to, see, the problem

01:24:26.860 with the convergence notion is it can produce a false consensus. Like all the Nazis agreed. Well,

01:24:32.900 that's a problem because they were wrong. You think we should be sending ChatGPT to Bible school?

01:24:36.900 Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, we've been, I have a colleague, we've been training AI systems on

01:24:44.400 classic texts. They're way more useful. I use one all the time. We haven't released it.

01:24:49.760 How is it more useful? It's not woke. Seriously. It's not ideologically added.

01:24:56.180 But surely it is, I mean, it's ideologically controlled and confined, just in a different way.

01:25:04.280 No, I don't think it's ideologically confined. An ideology doesn't need to be bad, especially

01:25:12.320 given that like as a non-believer in Christianity, I see Christianity as an ideology, right?

01:25:17.660 That's a good objection. This goes back to the point that you made. This goes back to the point

01:25:24.800 you made about people taking the right to themselves to define the moral order, let's say,

01:25:30.000 in the Garden of Eden. Okay. So what's the problem with that? The problem is, is that the proper

01:25:35.840 interpretation is bounded by the actuality of the cosmic order, right? So it isn't, the postmodernists

01:25:44.080 say, well, it's just one ideology. It's either this one or this one. But then that's all grounded

01:25:48.860 in power, as it turns out. So they've got something at the bloody pinnacle anyways. That philosophy

01:25:56.060 either degenerates into a kind of incoherent nihilism or it turns into a power play. It's

01:26:00.640 like, no, there are canonical interpretations. Well, what are they? Well, that's what's encapsulated

01:26:06.180 in the religious text is canonical interpretations. Okay. Why are they canonical? Okay. I'll give

01:26:11.040 you an example. You tell me what you think about this. This is good. This is a good rejoinder

01:26:15.080 to dark and selfish gene. Right. Okay. So God is conceptualized in the story of Abraham as the

01:26:22.760 call to adventure. Yeah. Okay. So Abraham is privileged. He's rich. He's in a state of infantile

01:26:30.500 security. He doesn't have to do a damn thing till he's like 70. He has rich parents. He doesn't have

01:26:35.300 to lift a finger. Okay. And then a voice comes to him that says, get the hell away from your zone of

01:26:41.960 comfort. Leave your family, leave your tent, leave your community, go out in the world. Okay. Well,

01:26:47.760 so what is that? Well, that's the same impulse that drives a child to develop. It's the impulse that

01:26:53.040 drives a man to continue to mature. Right. So you can think about as an instinct, if you want the

01:26:59.440 instinct to growth. Okay. God makes Abraham a deal. It's such a stellar deal. He says, look, if you listen

01:27:05.840 to this voice of adventure, if you commit to it, if you live by its dictates and you make the proper

01:27:13.720 sacrifices along the way, this is what will happen to you. You'll be a blessing to yourself. Okay. So

01:27:20.700 that's a good deal. That's a nice start. Right. So you don't have to be miserable and self-conscious.

01:27:25.640 Right. Aware of your own nakedness. You can start to walk with God again. Okay. But more,

01:27:31.620 you'll do that in a way that will ensure your valid reputation. So that's a good deal because

01:27:38.000 you want to have a reputation that's distributed in the social community, obviously. And if it's

01:27:44.060 based on something real, so much the better, then you're not a charlatan or a fake or a psychopath.

01:27:49.240 Okay. But that's not all. He says, you'll do that in a way that will enable you to establish

01:27:53.420 a permanent dynasty that will cascade down the generations. And that's not all either. You'll do

01:27:59.520 all that in a way that's beneficial to everyone else. So this is so cool because it speaks of,

01:28:05.520 it's something like the tree of life. It speaks of a concordance, right, between the instinct to

01:28:11.660 mature and develop, that calling of adventure, the pathway that actually works best for you,

01:28:18.440 the pathway that works best for you and establishes something permanent in a manner that enhances your

01:28:24.340 reputation that cascades down the generations. Okay. Now, Abraham is offered, if he follows this

01:28:32.000 pathway, God says, well, you'll be the father of nations. Okay. So now imagine this.

01:28:39.600 This is contra the selfish gene, let's say. The human pattern of reproduction.

01:28:46.140 Dawkins' mistake was that he thought reproduction and sex were the same thing. And they're not.

01:28:51.320 They're not. Especially not in the human case. Because human beings are high investment, long-term

01:28:57.620 maters, right? Sure. So we have very few offspring and we invest like Matt in them.

01:29:04.280 Pair bond, you live long enough to be grandparents, you put a multi. Okay. So that means that to be the

01:29:10.720 proper father, you have to act out a sacrificial ethos. Okay. The idea in the story of Abraham is that

01:29:17.840 if you act out that sacrificial ethos properly, which aligns the spirit of adventure with the

01:29:24.140 harmony of the community, you will act in a manner that best ensures the long-term survival of your

01:29:29.680 offspring, right? So you can imagine it's not just the contribution of sperm to egg. It's the development

01:29:35.400 of an ethos of paternal care that increases the probability that your children will be successful,

01:29:41.720 but also in a way that increases the probability that their children will be successful.

01:29:45.980 All right. So that's an alignment with a genuine cosmic order. It's not arbitrary. And so there

01:29:52.020 are interpretations, we'll say, they're not just ideologies. They're not just arbitrary

01:29:58.100 interpretations of the way the world lays itself out. They are in harmony with the cosmic order.

01:30:04.640 And that's what makes them deep, sacred, fundamental. And in the truest possible sense,

01:30:12.620 that is the proper rejoinder to the postmodernists. It's like, see, this is why they insist. It's why

01:30:18.220 they're so anti-science in their ethos too. And this is where Sam Harris has got a point because

01:30:22.620 Harris likes to make a case for objective morality, objective. It's like transcendent is the right word,

01:30:30.140 not objective.

01:30:30.880 But did it actually happen? I'm kidding. What I was really interested in thinking about that,

01:30:36.980 and I just had three hours with Sam Harris where we sort of went around on that question. And I agree

01:30:42.240 that I think his system fails essentially for what it's worth.

01:30:46.840 He's got a point. He wants to ground morality in something that isn't a mere postmodern illusion.

01:30:52.380 And there's something to be said for that.

01:30:54.680 I want to know how much, like, the story of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible,

01:31:01.940 the story of Abraham, okay, train a large language model on that because it's integrated

01:31:08.560 into the cosmic order, however you want to say it. How far do you go with this? I mean,

01:31:13.320 like, do you train this model on the New Testament?

01:31:16.700 Do you train it on the epistles?

01:31:17.740 We're playing with that. I don't know.

01:31:19.120 Do you train it on John Milton?

01:31:20.280 Good question. Dante.

01:31:21.660 Dante. Well, so imagine, that's a very good question. So imagine that at the foundation,

01:31:27.560 you have the biblical library, okay? But then you have, like you said, the secondary literatures.

01:31:32.840 What about the Quran?

01:31:34.240 We want to train a separate one on the Quran and the Hadith, and then we want to have them debate.

01:31:39.320 Yeah. Well, what's really interesting in the case of Islam, because there's an insistence in

01:31:44.500 the Islamic world that the entire epistemology is actually contained in the text and nothing else.

01:31:52.640 I think the mistake that people make in comparative religion between Islam and Christianity is that

01:31:56.980 they think that the Bible and Christianity is what the Quran is in Islam.

01:32:00.140 Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. That's just not the case.

01:32:01.820 In Islam, the word becomes a book, and in Christianity, the word becomes a person.

01:32:06.000 Yeah.

01:32:06.120 I think Jesus is, to Christianity, what the Quran is to Islam, right?

01:32:09.760 Yeah, right. Absolutely.

01:32:10.820 And that's a big difference.

01:32:12.260 I think that's a mistake that people make, partly because, you know, I mean, the Quran is infallible.

01:32:15.760 Right.

01:32:16.000 You can't think that any word of the Quran is wrong, because it's the literal and altered word of God.

01:32:20.540 Right.

01:32:20.820 Which, with the Bible, you've got a bit more leeway, say it's mythology, or maybe there's a historical contradiction,

01:32:25.980 but it's not actually that much of a problem. However, if you had Jesus in front of you, you can't contradict him.

01:32:30.940 Right. I think that's an important distinction for people to keep in mind.

01:32:36.500 Well, that also makes, yeah, that also makes the logos the living word.

01:32:40.420 Yeah.

01:32:40.840 Right.

01:32:41.280 Which is very, that is a very important distinction.

01:32:43.120 It makes it more difficult to put forward the somewhat naive criticism that I think people often make of the Gospels as contradicting each other.

01:32:52.080 Because, again, like we're talking like historically here, you know, was Herod on the throne at the same time Quirinius was the governor of Syria as Lucius?

01:32:58.880 Yeah, yeah.

01:32:59.020 And it's sort of like, in a sense, who cares?

01:33:00.880 I mean, one of the points that my friend John Nelson has made brilliantly is, have you ever come across the concept of the, what do they call it?

01:33:09.640 The, the, the Churchillian drift where a bunch of quotes that Churchill never said just get attributed to him.

01:33:15.740 You know, I find, I find that the best breakfast is a-

01:33:18.900 That's part of the mythologist. That's part of the pattern of mythologization.

01:33:20.700 If someone says, you know, I think-

01:33:21.840 It's they fall into his orbit because they're of his type.

01:33:24.540 I think the best breakfast in the morning is a glass of champagne, a hearty glass of champagne, right?

01:33:28.320 He never said that, but people sort of think maybe he said that.

01:33:30.900 Sounds like something Churchill might have said.

01:33:32.380 Same thing happens with C.S. Lewis. Now, the point that my friend John pointed out to me was that, well, if all you had, the only information you had about Winston Churchill was a book of apocryphal quotes that people had attributed to him and agreed that he'd said.

01:33:46.020 Yeah.

01:33:46.600 You'd still probably get a pretty good idea about who Winston Churchill was.

01:33:50.920 Yeah, well.

01:33:51.700 And that's, that's something you can do with the Bible.

01:33:53.440 Well, that's partly because you, well, you-

01:33:55.260 Or the Gospels.

01:33:56.080 Well, you put something, you see, let's say that, let's say that there's a shape, there's a three-dimensional shape on the wall and you want to, the wall's like flat whites, you can't really see it.

01:34:10.460 So what you want to do is you want to throw a bunch of like garbage at the wall, so to speak.

01:34:15.460 And the outline, despite the fact that everything you throw at the wall is garbage and it lands in many different places, if you throw, if you throw enough of it at the wall, you'll get the shape.

01:34:26.940 Yeah.

01:34:27.140 Well, that, it's partly because you can imagine that there's a set of apocryphal, there's a set of sayings that have been, what, misremembered, but a fairly comprehensive set.

01:34:41.280 There's, you're still going to be able to extract signal, right?

01:34:44.480 Right, there's going to be noise, but there's going to be signal there.

01:34:46.840 That's partly because the truth will be encoded in the panoply of the-

01:34:50.760 That's why it's a bigger problem if somebody points out like some flat historical, if there was discovered just like a flat historical contradiction in the Quran, that'd be a big problem because the Quran is the literal word of God.

01:35:02.820 If someone points out a flat historical contradiction in the Gospels, it kind of doesn't matter as much because you're able to accept that maybe that is just a contradiction, but the thing that matters is the word of God.

01:35:11.580 And the word of God is not the Gospel of Luke or the Gospel of John, but the person that they were sort of writing about.

01:35:17.020 Well, that's, that's also partly, you see that, that, you, you just pointed to another reason why I don't like the over-concretized questions.

01:35:25.440 Yeah.

01:35:25.560 It's like, you're looking for truth in the wrong place there, buddy.

01:35:28.900 I understand that, but it also depends on what kind of truth you're looking for, right?

01:35:32.340 Because for me, as an interested third party-

01:35:35.560 Yes, that's for sure. Everything depends on that.

01:35:36.680 I'd really like to know if, if, if Jesus actually rose from the dead as a historical fact.

01:35:40.840 I'd love to know if there was a real exodus, you know?

01:35:43.000 Like that's really interesting and important to me.

01:35:44.820 Now, as somebody who, who doesn't believe that those things did happen, I still have access to the, to the meaning of the story of something like a resurrection.

01:35:54.180 Well, let's assume just for the sake of-

01:35:55.980 But I'm not a Christian. It's not enough for me to say, well, you know, do I believe that, you know, self-sacrifice is at the basis of, of, of a meaningful life?

01:36:05.120 Oh, maybe. But that's not enough to make me a Christian because I don't believe it's the case.

01:36:08.200 I'm also, I'm, I'm quite interested actually how, I mean, you're obviously quite attracted to, to Christianity and the Christian story.

01:36:14.220 I mean, you've got Jesus on your jacket, but, but, but I'm, I'm interested how that, how that dovetails with your insistence on personal responsibility as the way to live a proper and meaningful life, given that the story of Jesus is one of vicarious redemption.

01:36:32.120 I sort of throw my sins on him, you know, I, I, he takes responsibility for the sins that I've committed.

01:36:37.200 Yeah, well, I, you know, I'm-

01:36:38.760 I wonder how those go together.

01:36:39.940 Well, I'm, what would you say?

01:36:43.980 No, Jesus will clean up your room for you.

01:36:47.060 It's really good to have a divine ally.

01:36:49.200 And I, I think the more unerringly you aim upward, the more you walk with God.

01:36:56.480 And that does mean that Christ is beside you.

01:36:59.600 And so that is a reflection of the truth of vicarious redemption.

01:37:04.140 But that doesn't mean you have nothing to do, right?

01:37:08.340 And, and Christ makes that very clear in the gospels.

01:37:12.480 Not everyone who says, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, right?

01:37:16.400 Only those who do the will of my father.

01:37:18.640 You must be willing to hate your brother and your-

01:37:20.200 Well, there, there's, it just, see, there, there's a tension there because the vicarious redemption idea

01:37:26.880 is a reflection of the mercy of God.

01:37:29.040 It's like, if you, and I, I believe this to be the case, as I said, if your aim is upward, then God is your ally, right?

01:37:38.620 And so he's there with you bearing the cross, but you're still obliged to carry it, right?

01:37:46.780 Right. And you see that in the story too, that's embedded in the passion story, because there's an insistence in traditional Christianity that

01:37:53.700 the suffering and the death that a man would experience in that situation were real, despite the fact that God was also experiencing it, right?

01:38:03.880 So there's this duality.

01:38:05.120 And I think that's reflected in the idea of vicarious redemption, when it's understood properly.

01:38:10.140 It's like, yes, you'll have, here's another way of thinking about it, is that if you aim upward unerringly, you have the spirit of what's good, what are you saying?

01:38:23.280 You've established a relationship with the spirit of what's the highest good.

01:38:27.300 Well, then that's with you.

01:38:28.800 And that's, that's, that's, that's not just a reality.

01:38:31.980 It's like the ultimate reality.

01:38:34.080 It's, it's partly, it's, it's Nietzsche even alluded to that when he said, if you have a why, you can bear any how.

01:38:40.440 Well, what why?

01:38:41.760 Well, the ultimate why.

01:38:43.200 Well, what does that enable you to do?

01:38:44.780 To bear the ultimate how?

01:38:46.420 And that's exactly what the passion story is.

01:38:49.920 And so there is a vicarious redemption there, because if you do it properly, you don't have to do it alone.

01:38:57.500 But that doesn't mean that there's nothing on you, you know, and, and you see that too.

01:39:01.720 There's an insistence in the entire biblical library that what humans are called to do is real.

01:39:11.960 Like we're, we're made in the image of God.

01:39:15.340 We're participating in the process by which possibility is transformed in order.

01:39:20.680 We're building, as far as I'm concerned, we're, we're either building the city of God or we're building its alternative, right?

01:39:26.760 It's the domain of hell, actually, right?

01:39:30.880 Actually, really, as well as metaphysical.

01:39:33.340 I mean, it's interesting you say hell and actually in the same sentence, because.

01:39:38.700 Well, it's easier to believe in hell than heaven.

01:39:40.380 One of the other criticisms that I made of you in this video was that I felt like you were appropriating religious language illegitimately to apply a sense of the sacred to profane things, to mundane things.

01:39:54.000 And that's perhaps one example.

01:39:56.080 So I can give you a few examples.

01:39:57.180 I mean, one is implied in what you just said there, but you said it, I think, explicitly to Matt Fradd recently on, on Pines with Aquinas, where you said, if you have studied any amount of history and you don't believe that hell is real.

01:40:11.780 Right, right.

01:40:12.680 Then you're an idiot.

01:40:13.800 Yeah, definitely.

01:40:14.720 I understand, I think, what you mean by that, because hell, like, you know, hell is a place on earth in many respects, right?

01:40:22.980 Like, if you study history and you look at just, like, what levels of depravity humanity can sink to, like, and you could quite poetically say, well, if hell isn't the right word to describe that, then I don't know what is.

01:40:34.660 Right.

01:40:34.840 Something like that, right?

01:40:35.680 But clearly, a theological conception of hell does not exist on planet earth.

01:40:43.180 It's somewhere you go after you die.

01:40:44.060 It's not so clear.

01:40:44.840 I wouldn't say it's so clear.

01:40:46.400 Well, certainly not in, like, the Jewish tradition.

01:40:51.180 And, okay, maybe.

01:40:51.980 Oh, Dante?

01:40:52.840 Maybe not in the, okay, maybe not, but, like, I mean, like a modern Christian who asks you, for example, do you believe in hell?

01:40:59.260 And you know that what they mean.

01:41:01.080 They mean the place you go after you die.

01:41:02.360 The place you go after you die.

01:41:03.360 Then when you respond and say, sort of, well, of course hell is real.

01:41:06.960 Well, you don't believe in hell?

01:41:07.880 Have you studied any amount of history?

01:41:09.280 If you've, you know, it's sort of, it feels like you're sort of describing two different things.

01:41:12.980 Yeah.

01:41:13.400 There's a equivocation.

01:41:13.980 The other area where this largely happens, I think, is when you said that the very act of doing science.

01:41:20.620 See, there's a concordance there between that concept of eternal punishment in the afterlife and the hell that unites all totalitarian states.

01:41:32.940 But I don't know what the concordance is.

01:41:35.560 Like, it's, I don't understand.

01:41:41.920 Like, do you think that-

01:41:43.200 And I don't speculate generally on anything that's, let's say, beyond death.

01:41:47.320 I mean, what the hell can you say about that?

01:41:49.020 I don't have anything to say about that.

01:41:50.860 But that's another I don't know point, right?

01:41:52.440 So if I ask you, for example, you know, do you think that Hitler is being punished now?

01:41:57.120 You know, I mean, he's dead, but is he being punished?

01:41:59.780 Or did he ever get punished?

01:42:00.900 See, the answer to that question is something like, what is the relationship between the evanescent consciousness of man and eternity?

01:42:12.520 And the answer is, we don't know.

01:42:15.300 Yeah, when Matt Fradd asked you, do you believe in an afterlife, you said that something like your behaviors or your actions resonate through eternity.

01:42:20.920 Yeah, well, there's that, which is, you know, in a way an evasive answer too.

01:42:24.900 But the thing is, we don't understand.

01:42:28.200 We exist in relationship to the infinite, obviously.

01:42:31.820 What that relationship is, I don't, no one knows how to conceptualize that in the final analysis.

01:42:36.980 I don't understand the relationship between our binding temporally and eternity.

01:42:44.180 Like, is there something permanent about our conscious experience?

01:42:47.460 I don't know.

01:42:48.900 I think you excite your Christian listenership when you say, like, not only, you know, do I believe in hell, but you can't not believe in hell.

01:42:58.100 I mean, are you serious?

01:42:58.720 You seriously don't believe in hell?

01:42:59.960 And they think, oh, here's a strong sort of warrior.

01:43:02.080 Well, and you go, well, the other thing too.

01:43:03.380 But then they realize that what you mean by hell is just like.

01:43:05.680 Well, it's so, I.

01:43:07.220 Lots of human suffering and catastrophe, you know, on a planet Earth.

01:43:10.460 But it's more than that because it's more than that, you know, because it is the case that the invitation to hell is offered by the eternal usurper of the moral order.

01:43:21.820 That's true.

01:43:22.620 You end up in hell because you lie.

01:43:24.760 That's also true.

01:43:26.520 And so.

01:43:26.840 But when you say that's true, you end up in hell because you lie.

01:43:29.580 Yeah.

01:43:29.920 What do you mean?

01:43:30.920 Well, the totalitarian state.

01:43:32.860 You're not allowed to use the word hell, right?

01:43:33.540 Like, what is the thing you're describing?

01:43:34.580 You end up where?

01:43:35.680 In a totalitarian state.

01:43:37.740 Yes.

01:43:38.120 And that's fine.

01:43:39.020 A state of ultimate misery.

01:43:40.560 But I think this is where somebody might be prone to confusion.

01:43:43.080 And you could say that's their fault.

01:43:44.120 Maybe it is.

01:43:44.840 But if somebody's listening to you and do you believe in hell?

01:43:47.140 And you say, of course I believe in hell.

01:43:48.140 How can you not believe in hell?

01:43:49.100 And they go, oh, you know, thank goodness.

01:43:50.660 Because that, of course, is my worldview.

01:43:51.880 I'd love to know how I can defend my vision of hell.

01:43:54.100 And then they realize that when you say hell, what you actually mean is something like totalitarian human regimes.

01:44:00.320 I guess I mean at least that.

01:44:02.600 Sure.

01:44:03.060 Right?

01:44:03.380 And so.

01:44:03.860 Fine.

01:44:04.060 I'm often trying to make a minimal case, right?

01:44:07.260 If I'm trying to elaborate on the meaning of a religious text, what I'm trying to say in all humility is it means at least this.

01:44:18.360 Now, does that cover the entire territory of the meaning?

01:44:23.380 That's very unlikely.

01:44:24.640 You're going to give an exhaustive account?

01:44:26.160 I don't think so.

01:44:27.500 What does that mean in eternity?

01:44:29.560 It's the same question.

01:44:30.760 And then we should draw this part to a close.

01:44:33.100 It's the same question in some sense as the reality of the resurrection of Christ.

01:44:36.980 So the Christian interpretation is Christ defeats death in hell.

01:44:42.420 Okay.

01:44:43.420 Well, the logical objection to that is, well, where's the evidence for the defeat?

01:44:48.500 Since death still exists and so does malevolence.

01:44:51.940 Yeah, sure.

01:44:52.400 Well, the Christians then will escape, so to speak, into something like a symbolic interpretation and say, well, it's true in eternity.

01:45:00.820 And I think fair enough.

01:45:03.300 Like I do believe, I do believe that the idea that Christ defeated death in hell is true.

01:45:09.800 But I don't know what that means.

01:45:11.540 Yeah.

01:45:12.300 And so, and that, does that bother me?

01:45:14.460 Well, I'd rather know when I'm continuing to investigate it.

01:45:17.000 But I, like, I do know, for example.

01:45:18.940 You know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who recently became a Christian, she just had a conversation with Richard Dawkins.

01:45:23.200 Yeah.

01:45:23.360 It hasn't, it hasn't gone out yet.

01:45:24.360 I was there.

01:45:24.940 I had the, I had the privilege of being.

01:45:26.020 Oh, yeah.

01:45:26.540 So I've already heard it.

01:45:27.500 You know, I know what they, they spoke about.

01:45:28.980 But one of the things that, that Ayaan does is, and I've described it as a sort of almost comical, the way that Ayaan talks about her struggle with depression, suicidality, total hopelessness, and then finds that by praying, she's able to sort of elevate her life.

01:45:44.800 And then it cuts to Richard Dawkins, sort of, but do you believe that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth?

01:45:51.460 It was funny.

01:45:52.660 It was, I, I, I couldn't.

01:45:53.540 Right, level of analysis problem.

01:45:55.340 At the same time, I sort of understood it.

01:45:56.360 Yeah.

01:45:56.580 But, and Dawkins says, you know, but surely when you go to church and you're having these, these, these feelings, Ayaan, you must recognize that the things he's saying at the pulpit are nonsense.

01:46:05.440 And Ayaan said that she is, that she chooses to believe it.

01:46:09.120 She says, she says that I no longer find it to be nonsense because she, what she implied, and I don't want to put words in the mouth, I can't remember, but it was something like, look, I, I've been so captured by this, this, this meaning.

01:46:21.360 Yeah.

01:46:21.580 And that, although I don't really understand what it means to say that, you know, Jesus was born of a virgin, I just choose to believe it.

01:46:28.960 Well, okay.

01:46:29.400 Now, that's fine, but what she does, what I was going to say is what she does is, is says that this to me is like a mystery.

01:46:35.540 I don't really know exactly what it means, but I, but I choose to believe that it's true.

01:46:39.840 And I wonder if, if, if that's something like what you're doing here when you say that you, you believe it's true, but you don't know what that means.

01:46:44.240 Well, I can, I can just tell you what my experiences mean in this sort of thing.

01:46:48.100 So I've spent a lot of time digging into the substructure of mythological accounts, right?

01:46:54.860 In many different cultures.

01:46:56.660 Yeah.

01:46:56.920 Now, and my experience continually is the deeper I look, the more that's there.

01:47:03.160 And so, and then I see things come together that make sense that I thought were disparate and that there doesn't seem to be any limit to that.

01:47:11.320 And so now when I see things that are disparate or even contradictory, I think, well, as you already pointed out, given the nature of the biblical library, there's room for some contradiction.

01:47:22.160 But more than that, I think, well, that might be illogical or irrational, or I might just not understand it.

01:47:31.040 And my experience has been that that presumption turns out to be the case far more often than not.

01:47:36.600 And so, you know, you can imagine that you can get the apprehension of a pattern and you can think the pattern is, the pattern is compelling.

01:47:48.360 And then there are details within the pattern that you don't know how to reconcile.

01:47:55.000 But this is what I am just doing in accordance with your account.

01:47:58.240 It's like, well, I'm willing to, I'm not willing to forego my view of the pattern because of some lack of concordance with details, especially given that I'm ignorant.

01:48:08.920 Yeah.

01:48:09.040 No, like, well, I can only tell you what has been the pattern of my investigations.

01:48:18.060 It's like the more deeply I, this is knocking and asking, the more deep, the more I see, the more is present.

01:48:28.500 I guess, you know, to conclude, I suppose, like, so suppose I'm somebody, and broadly, this is true, you know, I think the gospel stories are fascinating and resonant.

01:48:42.500 You know, I like the idea of the resurrection of Christ, the way that it's criticized as this evil human sacrifice, I think, is misleading.

01:48:50.520 You know, I'm sort of, I have all of those parts.

01:48:52.940 Yeah.

01:48:53.420 Right.

01:48:53.880 But I'm not a Christian.

01:48:55.720 And I suppose the question.

01:48:57.120 In what way are you not?

01:48:58.200 Well, that's what I mean.

01:48:58.840 To help me understand what you mean by this, you know, what is the difference between someone who's not a Christian and not, they don't have, they're not, they're not some new atheist type.

01:49:09.260 They're not like, I wouldn't worship God even if they're just not a Christian and someone who is.

01:49:12.960 What's the difference between those two people?

01:49:14.300 I think Dawkins is like 90% Christian.

01:49:16.480 That's what people keep saying about him.

01:49:18.100 Well, I think partly because I do believe that he is committed to the truth.

01:49:21.680 He does believe that the truth will set you free.

01:49:23.900 He does believe that there's an intelligible order.

01:49:26.260 Yeah.

01:49:26.360 He believes that the investigation of the intelligible order is redeeming.

01:49:30.020 This is, it's a shame we don't have a bit more time to do the science thing.

01:49:33.900 Perhaps that will have to be another conversation.

01:49:35.240 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:49:35.600 So, you know, who is and who isn't a Christian?

01:49:38.660 That's not an easy question.

01:49:40.140 And that's, again, why I started our conversation.

01:49:42.220 Well, I think it's inappropriate for you to try to say who is and who isn't, but just abstractly, like, what you think the difference is.

01:49:47.820 Like, what is it that, you know, under what conditions does somebody say?

01:49:50.760 Christians hoist their cross and walk uphill.

01:49:52.800 Right.

01:49:53.180 Okay.

01:49:53.400 So I've heard you say that before as well, right?

01:49:54.800 But like.

01:49:55.380 But that is what I think.

01:49:56.860 That's the difference.

01:49:57.780 Not to sort of try to be too left-brained about this, but like, in practice.

01:50:02.520 Yeah.

01:50:03.320 What do you mean?

01:50:03.900 Or like, perhaps two sort of symmetrical questions.

01:50:07.280 What conditions under which, what are the conditions under which somebody can say?

01:50:10.140 How careful are you with your words?

01:50:12.780 Well, I try to be careful.

01:50:15.260 Okay.

01:50:15.920 Well, that's, that's a good approximation to Christian conduct, right?

01:50:20.420 Because that's worship of the Logos.

01:50:22.800 Fine, but.

01:50:23.380 Right?

01:50:23.740 But that's really a serious part of it.

01:50:25.780 I don't know if that, that, that will be enough.

01:50:27.620 I certainly don't know if the word worship there is, is particularly appropriate.

01:50:31.800 How, how much, how high, how profoundly do you value it?

01:50:35.560 To the extent that it helps me to convey my ideas properly.

01:50:37.940 I don't worship the, the, the words that I'm using themselves.

01:50:40.540 No, no, I understand that.

01:50:41.520 But the words are a tool and the reason that I'm precise, as precise as I can be.

01:50:46.120 Is?

01:50:46.560 In service of trying to communicate my ideas to you.

01:50:49.060 For what purpose?

01:50:50.040 So that what I am, whatever it is that I'm feeling or thinking in my head,

01:50:54.440 if I could somehow take a medical instrument and prod your brain to make the same thought arise,

01:51:00.820 that would be really helpful to me because you'd see the world how I see it.

01:51:03.620 That is what language is.

01:51:05.120 It's that tool, except instead of prodding your brain with a physical bit of metal,

01:51:08.220 I'm prodding your ears with vibrations in the air.

01:51:10.060 But I'm trying to do the same thing.

01:51:11.780 To what end?

01:51:12.480 I'm just trying to make that thought arise so that you can see the world as I do

01:51:16.820 and so that I can see the world as you do.

01:51:18.180 Okay, to what, to what end?

01:51:19.080 Well, I don't know.

01:51:21.580 Well, how about productive harmonization of vision?

01:51:26.660 But fine, yeah, it depends on the conversation, right?

01:51:28.160 So like in this, in this instance, it will be, it will be, I mean, I came into this conversation,

01:51:34.580 I suppose, with a goal to more thoroughly understand your worldview, which is more specific than usually with these conversations.

01:51:43.080 It would be, let's try to learn something from each other and convince each other of something.

01:51:47.300 And in this case, I really was just fascinated to sit down and try to understand, you know,

01:51:50.260 what does Jordan Peterson think about religion?

01:51:52.060 Like that's probably the goal, which maybe is a slightly inappropriate goal to come into a conversation with.

01:51:56.760 But that's really what I've been trying to understand.

01:51:59.660 So I suppose that's the goal.

01:52:00.860 So it's a, the idea, we can wrap this up with, let's say, a Christian observation,

01:52:08.460 is that there's a notion, a classical Christian notion that wherever two or more are together in Christ's name,

01:52:15.820 the Spirit of God is there, right?

01:52:17.820 Okay, so what does that mean?

01:52:19.260 Well, as far as I'm concerned, what it means is that if you're unerring in your choice of words,

01:52:24.460 if you're seeking with them and exploring, and I'm doing the same,

01:52:27.240 and then we do that together, that's a mutually redemptive process that spirals upward.

01:52:34.040 So could, if somebody...

01:52:35.120 And that's, that's a Christian endeavor.

01:52:36.720 One of the conditions under which somebody can say they're a Christian and be either lying or wrong,

01:52:41.720 and the condition under which someone can say, I'm not a Christian and be either lying or wrong,

01:52:46.040 if you see what I mean.

01:52:51.020 That's a very good question.

01:52:52.160 Well, something came to mind right away when you asked that question, like, pretty much instantly.

01:53:03.840 It said, the, the, the redemptive...

01:53:10.160 There's a, there's a reason that Christ is represented as the person who took the sins of the world onto himself.

01:53:16.960 Well, that's the, that's the essence.

01:53:20.020 It's like, the world is a fallen place.

01:53:26.660 And you have the responsibility to do something about that.

01:53:30.900 And the degree to which you take that responsibility onto yourself,

01:53:35.760 that's the degree to which you are a follower of Christ.

01:53:41.700 I suppose it's not an on and off switch.

01:53:43.680 That was an, it's unfair to frame it as such, I suppose.

01:53:46.100 It's not like you either are on or off switch.

01:53:49.080 It's not like you're...

01:53:49.540 No, I think you want to make a...

01:53:50.780 A Christian or you're not.

01:53:51.700 It's like you're more or less.

01:53:52.680 When, when Jacob decides to be a good person instead of a bad person,

01:53:56.420 he builds an altar and it signifies his willingness to sacrifice his past self.

01:54:04.740 I think that people decide in many ways and maybe multiple times,

01:54:09.460 whether they're going to aim up or not.

01:54:11.680 Now, that's that initial commitment.

01:54:15.160 It's like a baptism in a sense that you decided that you're going to aim up.

01:54:19.320 Okay, well, now you can do that badly because you will.

01:54:22.700 And you see this in the Old Testament accounts of the prophets all the time.

01:54:26.140 A lot of them are pretty reprehensible when they first find their feet.

01:54:29.660 But you can stumble your way uphill.

01:54:32.860 And that is the essence of Christian belief is to stumble your way uphill with the maximum load you can bear.

01:54:41.540 And the thing that's so fascinating about that is that that's also the pathway of maximal meaning.

01:54:48.300 And that meaning is exactly what enables you to bear the load.

01:54:52.340 So it's a very, it's a very paradoxical, what would you say?

01:54:58.140 It's a very paradoxical reality.

01:55:00.860 And, and I think the, the essence of the Christian faith is the imitation of Christ.

01:55:09.100 It's not the mouthing of the words.

01:55:11.160 Now, that doesn't mean the words shouldn't be in accordance with the commitment.

01:55:15.160 They should be.

01:55:16.020 But, but the commitment can't be reduced to the utterance.

01:55:19.680 The commitment is the carrying.

01:55:22.340 Yeah.

01:55:22.780 Right.

01:55:23.120 And the carrying in relationship to a goal.

01:55:25.460 In, in the imitation of Christ.

01:55:27.020 It's in the imitation.

01:55:28.020 The, the, the, the text, I mean, the book, you know, the imitation of Christ.

01:55:32.240 You won't be judged on, you won't be judged on what you say, but what you've done.

01:55:36.520 Yeah, well, and I don't mean, that also doesn't mean that the treasure that you stack up on earth is a indication of your transcendent value.

01:55:46.340 Right.

01:55:46.740 You don't, you shouldn't fall into the justification by works heresy.

01:55:51.480 Right.

01:55:51.640 But, but with that coda firmly in mind, I don't think there's anything in that proposition that isn't in accordance with the gospel accounts.

01:56:05.360 Like Christ calls on his disciples to be followers, right?

01:56:10.580 To, to walk the same path and they're given the power to do the same things because of that.

01:56:17.300 And Christ says himself that the people who come after him, which means us, will be capable of more than he managed.

01:56:25.020 Right.

01:56:25.700 Well, that's, that doesn't mean that there's no redemption by proxy, let's say, because we already covered that is that if you aim up, you have the spirit that's inviting you up.

01:56:41.100 You've invited it to take residence in you.

01:56:45.260 And that's, that's true.

01:56:47.260 That's true.

01:56:48.160 As far as I can see, I think it's the most accurate way of construing the situation that does give you a form of, it gives you what I am found.

01:56:57.420 Right.

01:56:57.900 Right.

01:56:58.460 It gives you a spine.

01:57:01.620 But that doesn't, that doesn't mean you don't have a cross.

01:57:05.920 Right.

01:57:06.500 And that, you see that insistence in the gospel accounts.

01:57:09.320 As I said, you know, the insistence that Christ suffered as a man, despite having God, what would be in God.

01:57:20.760 But that's, those are both true at the same time.

01:57:25.540 So the Christian pathway is the pathway of maximal self-sacrificial responsibility.

01:57:32.160 Right.

01:57:32.920 Right.

01:57:33.100 Well, I hope those who have been wondering whether you should be legitimately called a Christian in their worldview, in their version of Christianity, will be helped by this, by this conversation.

01:57:43.280 I mean, I suppose that's in part what I'm, I'm trying to do too here is for people who, who sort of, who say to you, you know, just, just say what you think.

01:57:51.040 It's complicated, you know, but hopefully.

01:57:53.560 Well, I am trying to say what I think.

01:57:55.340 Yeah.

01:57:55.540 It's just that, you know, the world's a complicated place.

01:57:58.340 Yeah.

01:57:58.640 Yeah.

01:57:58.820 Well, hopefully we're helping to make it.

01:58:00.420 And so it's nice to get your words in pristine order, but the more complicated the topic, the longer it takes to manage that with stellar precision.

01:58:09.940 So, yeah, well, it's taken us probably nearly two hours now just to, to, to get about around to the idea of maybe, well, maybe you don't know if, if the Jews walked through the Egyptian desert, but maybe that also doesn't.

01:58:24.600 They're still walking through the Egyptian desert.

01:58:25.100 Maybe that also, maybe they're still walking.

01:58:28.060 Good to talk to you.

01:58:29.340 It's been fun.

01:58:29.840 All right.

01:58:30.160 So everyone, I'm going to continue this conversation.

01:58:32.600 We're going to continue this conversation on the Daily Wire platform.

01:58:35.320 And so I think I'll talk to Alex a bit, something, a bit more personally.

01:58:43.060 I want to find out how he managed his podcast and why he's interested in the things he's interested in, what his pathway to that occupation was and what his hopes for the future are and all of that.

01:58:55.540 And so if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side, please do.

01:58:59.640 Thank you to the film crew here.

01:59:01.400 We're in LA.

01:59:02.240 Right.

01:59:02.560 We're in LA.

01:59:03.180 And thank you very much for coming all the way from London.

01:59:06.080 Of course.

01:59:06.560 It's very good.

01:59:07.460 And it was a fine conversation.

01:59:09.920 Much appreciated.

01:59:10.660 Yeah.

01:59:10.880 We enjoyed it very much.

01:59:11.420 And thank you, all of you who are watching and listening for your time and attention.

01:59:15.780 Well, hopefully we'll see you on the Daily Wire side.

01:59:17.700 And if not, then, well, for the next podcast.

01:59:20.220 Thank you.

451. Navigating Belief, Skepticism, and the Afterlife ｜ Alex O'Connor

Summary

Transcript