In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson continues the psychological significance of the Biblical Stories lecture series with a lecture entitled, God in the Hierarchy of Authority. Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series at the Isabel Bader Theatre throughout the summer. Tickets can be found at jordanbpeterson.net/biblehyphen or by finding the link in the description. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Petersen s PODCASTS by going to the website listed below and making a donation of $1 or more per month. If you're struggling with depression or anxiety, or if you just want to support the Bible Hyphen Series, you can do so by becoming a patron patron patron by clicking the link below. Don't forget to also support the series by making a monthly donation of any amount you can afford to do so, which will help keep the series running through the summer! Thank you so much for all the support you've shown so far, and we look forward to seeing you again in the fall. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, Eternally grateful and Keep Shining! -EDUCATION - Dr. J.B. Peterson, MD. - The Jordan Peterson Project Music: "In Need of a Savior (feat. Andrea Thomas) Words and Music by Zapsplat, "Outro: "Cain and Abel" by Ian Dorsch (ft. Robert Blake) - "Solo" by Fountains of Creation (featuring: "The Little Drummer" by Jeff Perpetual) Join us on SoundCloud: "Let's Talk About It" by Shadydave, "Noah's Song" by Zumba, "Goodbye Outer Space" by Cairo Brant, "Instrumental Music" by Joseph McDade and "Gimlet" by Robert Ferell, "Let Me Hear You" by Eddy, "Brujor, "A Little More Than This" by Scott Holmes, "Mr. & Other Things" by Squeen, "I'm Too Effortless" , "Feat. , "Blessed by You, I'm Yours Truly" by John Williams, "Thank You" & "We'll Figure it Out How To Say It Out" by Fergie, "The Realest Thing" by Skynyrd, "You're Not Alone" by Haley Shaw, "The Good, I'll See You (and I'll Hear It Out, We'll Figure It Out How Much Better Than That?"
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00:01:14.680This is part three of the psychological significance of the Biblical Stories lecture series.
00:01:24.420The lecture is entitled, God in the Hierarchy of Authority.
00:01:30.900Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series at the Isabel Bader Theatre throughout the summer.
00:01:36.800Tickets can be found at jordanbpeterson.com slash bible hyphen series, or by finding the link in the description.
00:01:46.100I'm really looking forward to this lecture, not like I wasn't looking forward to the other ones, but
00:01:55.240the stories that I want to cover tonight, one of the things that just absolutely staggers me about them,
00:02:00.880especially the story of Cain and Abel, which I hope to get to, is, like, it's so short, it's unbelievable.
00:02:06.180It's like 10, 11 lines. There's nothing to it at all.
00:02:08.520And I've found that it's essentially inexhaustible in its capacity to reveal meaning, and I don't exactly know what to make of that.
00:02:16.100I mean, I think, you know, because I said I was going to take as rational an approach to this issue as I possibly could,
00:02:22.360I think it has something to do with this intense process of condensation across very long periods of time.
00:02:28.020That's the simplest explanation, but I'll tell you, the information in there is so densely packed that it really is,
00:02:33.800it's really, it's not that easy to come up with an explanation for that.
00:02:39.640I mean, I do think that the really old stories, and we've been covering the really archaic stories in the Bible so far,
00:02:46.740I think that one of the things that you can be virtually certain about is that everything about them that was memorable was remembered, right?
00:02:52.840And so in some sense, and this is kind of like the idea of Richard Dawkins' ideas of memes,
00:02:57.020which is often why I thought that Richard Dawkins, if he was a little bit more mystically inclined, he would have become Carl Jung,
00:03:03.360because their theories are unbelievably similar, the similar of meme and the similar of the idea of archetype of the collective unconscious are very, very similar ideas,
00:03:10.900except the Jungian idea is far more profound in my estimation.
00:03:16.800He thought it through so much better, you know, because Dawkins tended to think of meme as sort of like a mind worm,
00:03:23.380you know, something that would infest a mind and maybe multiple minds, but he never really took,
00:03:27.860I don't think he really ever took the idea with the seriousness it deserved,
00:03:30.920and I did hear him actually make a joke with Sam Harris the last time they talked about the fact that there was some possibility that the production of memes,
00:03:41.480say religious memes, could alter evolutionary history, and they both avoided that topic instantly.
00:03:46.220They had a big laugh about it and then decided they weren't going to go down that road, and so that wasn't very, that was quite interesting to me.
00:03:52.260But these, these, the density of these stories, I do really think still is a, is a mystery.
00:04:01.100It certainly has something to do with their absolute, their impossibility to be forgotten.
00:04:07.520You know, and that's actually something that could be tested empirically.
00:04:10.180I don't know if anybody has ever done that, because you could tell naive people two stories even equal length, right?
00:04:15.360One that had an archetypal theme and the other that didn't, and then wait three months and see which ones people remembered better.
00:04:20.960It'd be a relatively straightforward thing to test.
00:04:23.460I haven't tested it, but maybe I will at some point.
00:04:25.900But anyways, that's all to say that I'm very excited about this lecture,
00:04:31.240because I get an opportunity to go over the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Abel,
00:04:35.380and I hope we manage both of those today, and maybe we'll get to the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel as well,
00:04:49.080All right, so we're going to go, before we go that, before we do that,
00:04:53.120I want to finish my discussion of the idea of the psychological significance of the idea of God.
00:04:59.660And I've been thinking about this a lot more, you know,
00:05:02.260because, of course, this lecture series gives me the opportunity and the necessity to continue to think.
00:05:07.000And, you know, it certainly is the case.
00:05:09.400So the hypothesis that I've been developing with the Trinitarian idea is something like that the Trinitarian idea is the earliest emergence in image of the idea that there has to be an underlying cognitive structure that gives rise to consciousness as well as consciousness itself.
00:05:26.120And so what I was suggesting was that the idea of God the Father is something akin to the idea of the a priori structure that gives rise to consciousness.
00:05:35.440You know, that's an inbuilt part of us, so that's our structure.
00:05:39.000You could think about that as something that's been produced over a vast evolutionary time span.
00:05:43.360And I don't think that's completely out of keeping with the ideas that are laid forth in Genesis 1, at least if you think about them from a metaphorical perspective.
00:05:52.540And it's hard to read them literally because I don't know what, you know, there's an emphasis on day and night.
00:05:57.480But the idea of day and night as 24-hour diurnal, you know, daytime and nighttime interchanges that are based on the earthly clock seems to be a bit absurd when you first start to think about the construction of the cosmos.
00:06:13.900So it just doesn't seem to me that a literal interpretation is appropriate.
00:06:17.320I mean, it's another thing that you might not know, but, you know, many of the early church fathers, one of them, Origen in particular, stated very clearly, this was in 300 AD, that these ancient stories were to be taken as wise metaphors and not to be taken literally.
00:06:31.800Like the idea that the people who established Christianity, for example, were all the sorts of people who were biblical literates is just absolutely historically wrong.
00:06:40.820I mean, some of them were and some of them still are.
00:06:43.700Many of them weren't and it's not like people who lived 2,000 years ago were stupid by any stretch of the imagination.
00:06:49.360And so they were perfectly capable of understanding what, you know, what constituted something approximating a metaphor and also knew that fiction, in some sense, considered as an abstraction, could tell you truths that non-fiction wasn't able to get at.
00:07:04.380Unless you think that fiction is only for entertainment and I think that's a very, that's a big mistake to think that.
00:07:12.820So, yes, so with regards to the idea of God the Father, so the idea is that in order to make sense out of the world, you have to have an a priori cognitive structure.
00:07:21.620And that was something that Immanuel Kant, as I said last time, put forward as an argument against the idea that all of the information that we acquire during our lifetime is a consequence of incoming sense data.
00:07:34.060And the reason that Kant objected to that, and he was absolutely right about this, is that you can't make sense of sense data without an a priori structure.
00:07:41.720You can't extract from sense data the structure that enables you to make sense of sense data.
00:07:47.900And that's really been demonstrated, I would say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, since the 1960s.
00:07:54.060And the best demonstration of that was actually the initial failure of artificial intelligence.
00:07:58.560Because when the AI people started promising that we would have fully functional and autonomous robots and artificial intelligence back in the 1960s,
00:08:07.140what they didn't understand and what stalled them terribly until about the early 1990s was that it was almost,
00:08:13.740that the problem of perception was a much deeper problem than anybody ever recognized.
00:08:17.160Because, like, when you look at the world, you just see, well, look, there's objects out there.
00:08:21.040And, by the way, you don't see objects.