The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Susan Blackmore - Do we need God to make sense of life？

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.000 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

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00:00:19.000 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

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00:00:47.000 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

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00:01:52.000 You will have heard me already talking about a new project from Unbelievable, The Big Conversation.

00:01:58.300 Well, today it launches.

00:02:00.320 The Big Conversation is a new video, podcast and radio series from Unbelievable

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00:02:08.280 to talk about science, faith, philosophy and what it means to be human.

00:02:12.220 Well, in a moment I'll introduce today's guests, Jordan B. Peterson,

00:02:15.620 in debate with atheist psychologist Susan Blackmore.

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00:03:22.680 Right now, it's time for the first episode of The Big Conversation.

00:03:32.380 Welcome to The Big Conversation here on Unbelievable with me, Justin Briley.

00:03:36.880 The Big Conversation is a series of shows exploring faith, science, philosophy

00:03:41.040 and what it means to be human in association with the Templeton Religion Trust.

00:03:46.160 Today, our conversation topic is the psychology of belief

00:03:49.180 and do we need God to make sense of life?

00:03:52.940 Well, the Big Conversation partners I'm sitting down with today

00:03:55.440 are Jordan B. Peterson and Susan Blackmore.

00:03:58.680 Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto

00:04:02.280 and author of the new book, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

00:04:07.340 Jordan rose to prominence in 2016 when his stance on free speech

00:04:10.800 and the threat of legal action for refusing to use transgender pronouns

00:04:14.040 created a media storm.

00:04:15.820 But since then, many new people have discovered his academic work

00:04:18.780 including a very popular lecture series on the psychology and wisdom

00:04:22.120 of ancient Bible stories.

00:04:24.280 And his new book, 12 Rules for Life, distills much of the wisdom

00:04:27.360 into a guide to leading a meaningful life.

00:04:31.220 Our other guest is Susan Blackmore.

00:04:32.880 She's a psychologist, lecturer and author of books on consciousness

00:04:36.080 and evolutionary psychology including The Meme Machine

00:04:39.260 and Seeing Myself, The New Science of Out-of-Body Experiences.

00:04:43.820 And she views many forms of religion as fundamentally negative

00:04:46.440 for human flourishing.

00:04:47.760 She's written, for instance, that religions are an example par excellence

00:04:50.900 of meme plexes that use wicked tricks to ensure their own survival.

00:04:55.200 Well, today we'll be looking at the psychological roots of faith beliefs.

00:05:00.080 Can we make our own rules for life or are we subject to some higher level of meaning?

00:05:04.820 And are even atheists fundamentally religious deep down?

00:05:09.140 I'm really looking forward to today's conversation.

00:05:11.380 So, Susan and Jordan, welcome along to the programme.

00:05:13.960 Thanks.

00:05:14.360 Thank you, Justin.

00:05:15.660 We'll start with you, Jordan.

00:05:17.120 You're a hard man to categorise in many ways.

00:05:20.080 Your work actually attracts attention from both believers and non-believers.

00:05:23.900 Many of whom say that you've actually made them reconsider their views about religion,

00:05:28.940 especially many atheists I've heard on who have said your work opens up things in a new way.

00:05:34.400 Do you just tend to describe yourself as a religious man at all?

00:05:38.420 I would definitely describe myself as a religious man, yeah.

00:05:41.400 I think that's fundamentally true.

00:05:43.840 The devil's in the details.

00:05:45.640 What does that mean exactly?

00:05:47.520 I've seen you being asked the question, do you believe in God?

00:05:50.000 And that's not a question you necessarily find it terribly easy to answer.

00:05:53.560 Well, I don't know what people mean when they say believe.

00:05:56.460 It's as if that question explains itself when it's asked.

00:05:59.140 It's like it doesn't.

00:05:59.880 What do you mean by believe?

00:06:00.940 What do you mean by God?

00:06:01.920 And what makes you think that the question that I'm answering is the same one that you're asking?

00:06:06.420 This is not something that you can say yes or no to in any straightforward manner.

00:06:10.040 So I find it an off-putting question, and I don't think it's because I'm avoiding the issue.

00:06:15.460 I think that to answer it properly requires books and lectures.

00:06:20.820 Do you see yourself at least in the Christian tradition as far as your, I suppose, worldview?

00:06:27.420 Well, there's no doubt about that because I'm a Westerner.

00:06:29.680 There's no escape from that.

00:06:31.060 I'm conditioned in every cell as a consequence of the Judeo-Christian worldview.

00:06:36.980 And so I've read a fair bit in other religious traditions and have a reasonable grasp on some of them, I would say, not trying to overestimate my knowledge.

00:06:47.320 But we're saturated in Judeo-Christian ethics.

00:06:52.120 And so I've seen you say that you certainly live your life as though God exists.

00:06:57.160 Yes, I would say, well, to the best of my ability.

00:06:59.300 Right, yeah.

00:07:00.980 And I think that that's the fundamental hallmark of belief is how you act, not what you say about what you think you think.

00:07:07.080 What do you know about what you think?

00:07:09.420 Seriously, I mean, we wouldn't need a psychology, an anthropology, a sociology, any of the humanities if our thoughts were transparent to ourselves.

00:07:16.640 They're not in the least.

00:07:17.880 In the least, they are.

00:07:19.460 You've been willing to be quite critical as well of some of the new atheists, so Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins.

00:07:25.540 What have you made of their particular way of approaching religion?

00:07:28.020 No, they just don't take it seriously enough.

00:07:30.100 As far as I'm concerned, they don't contend with the real thinkers.

00:07:35.100 Oh, I know all three of them very well.

00:07:37.440 And I have deep, great arguments with them.

00:07:40.180 And they seem to be taking it seriously.

00:07:42.100 I know what you mean.

00:07:43.880 There's a certain sort of superficiality in the writings of all of them.

00:07:47.320 But as people, I find they really care about these issues.

00:07:50.520 Oh, there's no doubt about that.

00:07:52.720 And it's not like I'm not sympathetic to the atheist or rationalist claim.

00:07:58.600 I'm perfectly sympathetic to it.

00:08:00.320 But I don't believe that the level of discussion that's characteristic of Dawkins and Dennett and Sam Harris, say, approaches the level of complexity of, say, Friedrich Nietzsche or Dostoevsky.

00:08:10.920 Well, that would be asking quite a lot, wouldn't it?

00:08:12.800 Yeah, but if you're going to play in that arena, man, you're going to play with the heavyweights.

00:08:16.720 But what I've noticed is it's a lot of people who maybe up to a point have been interested in what those people have been saying from the New Atheist side who are also interested in what you're saying.

00:08:25.320 There's an interesting sort of correlation there.

00:08:27.300 Yeah, definitely.

00:08:27.820 And why is it that especially some of these, you know, potentially I see a lot of men in this audience are coming to you, Jordan, to sort of sit at your feet and hear what you have to say at this point?

00:08:38.980 Well, the New Atheists have a hell of a time with an active ethic.

00:08:44.020 You know, they say, well, you can build an ethic on rationality.

00:08:47.020 It's like, well, first of all, that's not self-evident.

00:08:49.300 It's possible, but it's by no means self-evident.

00:08:51.340 And their essential existential concept is rather hollow.

00:08:57.060 Like with Harris, for example, we never, when I talked to him twice on two different podcasts, and we never really got to his sense of what the ideal society might be.

00:09:05.760 But I've read his writings on the maximization of well-being, for example, and it's just, that's just not going anywhere.

00:09:12.720 You can't even measure it properly.

00:09:14.040 And if you're thinking about something like that scientifically, that turns out to be like, that's not a problem.

00:09:19.420 It's a catastrophic problem.

00:09:21.340 But Sam really goes deeply into the consequences of meditation, and he tells stories about his own experience of how behavior changes.

00:09:28.480 Compassion seems to arise naturally.

00:09:30.400 This is not based on rationality, which is not everything, and I would agree with you there.

00:09:35.580 It's based on practical experience, training in observing one's own thoughts, which is also of interest to you,

00:09:41.540 and in the way behavior changes in ways which he would say, and also query whether it's true, that it's better behavior.

00:09:48.300 That being compassionate and kind to people is better.

00:09:50.400 We can't have some great underlying reason why if you don't have God.

00:09:55.040 You know, it's a very difficult question.

00:09:56.680 You've got to find some basis.

00:09:58.040 But even without one, Sam is trying to say, as I would, that if you spend a lot of time meditating and really becoming to understand yourself and see the consequences of certain thoughts and actions, then better actions follow.

00:10:09.960 So that's one of the things I like about his work.

00:10:12.920 Well, and I'm certainly not questioning his ethical integrity or his commitment to these problems, although I certainly don't think that compassion or kindness constitutes a sufficient grounds for a transcendent ethic, not in the least.

00:10:27.640 Partly because both—and I can speak about that technically to some degree.

00:10:31.280 Compassion is associated with trait agreeableness fundamentally, and agreeableness is a great short-term strategy for infants.

00:10:38.800 But it's a very bad medium to long-term strategy for adults, and it's by no means the ground upon which an entire complex society can rest.

00:10:47.100 And that's partly what you see playing out right now in the political world, because the politically correct types are very high in compassion.

00:10:53.380 We have research that demonstrates that, but that ethic doesn't work for a sophisticated society.

00:10:59.700 We were only doing introductions.

00:11:01.140 We're already well into the—

00:11:02.580 It's my fault. I started. I interrupted.

00:11:05.100 But let's come to you, Sue.

00:11:06.420 You may be familiar to some unbelievable listeners who have already heard you on the show before.

00:11:10.920 I think you're happy to describe yourself as an atheist.

00:11:13.660 Does that mean for you that you are a naturalist, someone who's committed to a view that our experiences can be fully explained by a purely material world?

00:11:21.340 No.

00:11:21.740 I mean, I sign up in a way to naturalism groups and beliefs, but because I work on consciousness such a lot, and the problem of how do we relate—the mind-body problem, you know, here's this table, here's my glass of water.

00:11:37.780 We'll agree that if I go like this, it'll go all over the place.

00:11:40.760 And ruin the microphone.

00:11:41.780 And ruin the microphone.

00:11:42.880 How does that relate to my—the taste of the water?

00:11:45.400 So, you know, these fundamental problems mean I have big queries about naturalism as you described it there.

00:11:52.240 Okay.

00:11:52.640 In a much broader sense, yes.

00:11:54.100 As you know, and many listeners will know, I started out being a parapsychologist and rejected ideas of clairvoyance and telepathy and ghosts and poltergeists because of lack of evidence.

00:12:04.860 So that's one way to naturalism to throw that lot out.

00:12:08.720 I was brought up like you as a Christian, and I threw that out because in the end it didn't make sense to me. 1.00

00:12:15.180 So that's another way to say I'm left with naturalism, but I'm not left with a naturalism that explains everything.

00:12:20.300 I'm left with a feeling that that's what I want to try to do to understand what's going on here in minds, in bodies, in tables and glasses of water, and it's very difficult.

00:12:31.800 You're well known for picking up the idea of memes that sort of originated at some level with Richard Dawkins, the idea of an idea propagated across generations.

00:12:40.220 And you even went as far as to describe religion as a virus of the mind in terms of its mimetic...

00:12:45.480 That was Richard's term, but yes, okay, yeah.

00:12:47.960 Is that a kind of view you would still stand by today?

00:12:52.100 Yes, but you've got to be careful about what you mean by a virus.

00:12:55.100 I mean, I think if I often say in lectures, imagine a continuum between what you mean as being a virus of the mind.

00:13:04.500 It's really bad.

00:13:05.620 You know, it's like a flu virus or AIDS or something.

00:13:07.520 Usually we think of a virus in negative terms.

00:13:10.220 Yes, and they aren't always.

00:13:11.300 So imagine that you think, you know, religion is utterly bad or you think religion is utterly wonderful and utterly good and all in between.

00:13:19.040 I think Richard is way down there and I'm somewhere here.

00:13:22.440 I think by and large, on balance, the world would be a better place without any religions. 1.00

00:13:27.440 But the religions would not thrive if they didn't have within them things which are positive.

00:13:34.420 I mean, we know at a personal level, at a society level, the worst societies are more religious. 1.00

00:13:39.420 At a personal level, there's evidence that people are happier and they have better social connections and so on if they're religious.

00:13:44.940 So I don't think we would be stuck with these horrible memes if it weren't for the fact that they also have some good qualities.

00:13:50.080 What do you make of the whole meme theory and the fact that Sue does feel ultimately...

00:13:54.660 I think it's a shallow derivation of the idea of archetype and that Dawkins would do well to read some Jung.

00:14:00.520 In fact, if he thought farther and wasn't as blinded by his a priori stance about religion, he would have found that the deeper explanation of meme is, in fact, archetype.

00:14:10.820 I disagree.

00:14:11.640 I mean, you...

00:14:12.200 Can you just first of all explain archetype for those who are not perhaps familiar with that particular psychological...

00:14:16.500 Well, an archetype is partly a pattern of behavior that's grounded in biology.

00:14:21.040 So it's the behavior itself.

00:14:22.340 So you could think about that as both the instinct and the manifestation of that instinct.

00:14:27.380 But it's also the representation of that pattern.

00:14:30.360 So part of what's coded in our mythological stories, for example, are images of typical patterns of behavior.

00:14:37.280 And those are the typical patterns of behavior that make us human.

00:14:39.800 I really want to have this discussion about memes, by the way, because it's really a discussion that needs to be had.

00:14:44.620 But because I think that the meme idea is very interesting, and I do think that there are contagious ideas.

00:14:51.600 But that needs to be chased down much deeper, because there are ideas that are so contagious that we've actually adapted to them biologically.

00:15:00.720 And once that happens, they're no longer merely memes.

00:15:06.180 They're something else.

00:15:06.980 They're built into us.

00:15:08.060 I can give you...

00:15:08.680 These archetypes, as you described.

00:15:09.880 Yeah, well, I can give you a kind of example of that.

00:15:11.740 So imagine, I'll have to try to do this relatively rapidly.

00:15:16.260 It's very complicated, so I'm hoping I can do it.

00:15:18.780 So imagine that we live in dominance hierarchies.

00:15:22.160 We don't have to imagine that.

00:15:23.100 That happens to be the case.

00:15:24.320 They're at least 350 million years old.

00:15:26.660 So they're really, really old.

00:15:28.480 So the idea of the archetype of dominance is older than our ability to perceive trees, right?

00:15:36.620 It's really down there.

00:15:37.700 And our nervous system is fully adapted to the existence of dominance hierarchies.

00:15:41.080 It's one of the things the serotonergic system tracks.

00:15:43.820 Okay, so now, we also know that your position in a dominance hierarchy, especially if you're a male, is proportionate to your reproductive success.

00:15:50.060 The higher you are up in the hierarchy, the more likely you are to succeed.

00:15:53.280 Okay, so what that means is that males have been selected for their ability to move up a dominance hierarchy.

00:15:57.940 But that's not quite right.

00:15:59.520 They've been selected for their ability to move up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies.

00:16:04.500 And that's a very abstract set.

00:16:06.160 And there's a set of characteristics that go along with the ability to move up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies that's represented in religious terms as the optimal ethical manner in which to conduct yourself.

00:16:18.420 I see.

00:16:18.680 And that's not a meme that's casually passed from person to person.

00:16:23.140 It's way, way deeper than that.

00:16:25.340 I think you're being unfair to memes.

00:16:26.800 I would make this response here about the difference between memes and archetypes.

00:16:31.700 So archetypes are there whether we have memes or not.

00:16:34.960 All of that history of evolution is there.

00:16:37.780 So we have ideas about sex differences or ideas about dominance is a very good example that don't require memes.

00:16:46.280 They can then become memes.

00:16:47.340 And a meme by definition, as Dawkins started it out, is that which is imitated or that which is copied from person to person.

00:16:54.640 So the idea of dominance hierarchies can be a meme and all the ideas we build on top of that as long as we pass it from person to person.

00:17:01.860 Now we can certainly think of hierarchies of memes from ones that are no more than fads that wash across the culture to ones that are permanent in your journey.

00:17:10.980 But you were kind of trivializing memes.

00:17:12.540 And I think the power of the idea of memes is this.

00:17:14.800 We have the first replicator genes on the planet and we know the consequences of that producing all these organisms.

00:17:23.240 But the idea about memes is that they are a second replicator.

00:17:26.800 So genes are copied by chemical processes in bodies.

00:17:30.440 Memes are copied by imitation and other kinds of interactions between human beings and very little in any other species at all.

00:17:38.220 And that's what gives rise to culture.

00:17:39.880 So the whole theory about memes is one of many ways of trying to understand the evolution of culture.

00:17:47.060 And in that way, I say it's not trivial at all.

00:17:49.920 Quick response and I want to move on to talking about the 12 rules, Jordan.

00:17:52.280 Well, the issue is what happens when a meme is so widely distributed that it becomes a determining factor in evolution itself.

00:18:00.160 Ah, meme-gene co-interaction.

00:18:01.720 Yes, exactly.

00:18:02.520 Well, see, that's where I think the religious – that's – for me, that's the grounds of the essential religious instinct.

00:18:10.840 It's a meme-gene interaction. 0.53

00:18:12.500 And it goes back forever.

00:18:13.760 Yes, yes.

00:18:14.140 And then – so I'll finish with this.

00:18:17.100 See, because once you see that there's a meme-gene interaction and that there's selection in favor of a certain meme, let's say,

00:18:23.520 then you open up the entire question of what constitutes the underlying reality.

00:18:28.820 Because, you see, one, this is something I tried to have a talk with about Sam Harris, and we augured in very rapidly.

00:18:35.560 You could say that reality is that which selects.

00:18:39.580 Now, it's not exactly a materialist viewpoint.

00:18:41.680 It's more of an evolutionary viewpoint.

00:18:43.820 And if reality is that which selects, then what's selected by that reality is in some sense correct.

00:18:50.440 Now, that's not – well, this is why –

00:18:54.300 Yeah, you're adding on.

00:18:55.340 I mean, that's a big claim you're adding on.

00:18:57.240 I know it's a big claim.

00:18:58.280 I understand it's a big claim.

00:18:59.320 But it's also the central claim of pragmatism.

00:19:01.560 Let's move it on just a bit because this is all fascinating stuff.

00:19:04.620 I do want to talk about the book, which I read, found really interesting, Jordan, 12 Rules for Life,

00:19:10.780 very much drawing, actually, on your biblical series as well.

00:19:15.140 And that was interesting to me.

00:19:16.380 It's almost like, I don't know, psychological theology or something like that.

00:19:20.020 I'm not sure what term to give it.

00:19:21.600 But you constantly draw throughout it.

00:19:24.660 It's a rule book for helping people to lead meaningful lives, very practical in that sense,

00:19:29.320 but stacked with illustrations and stories from biblical stories, Adam and Eve, the flood, Cain and Abel, and so on, and Jesus as well.

00:19:37.920 Why has that particularly been your focus recently to explain life and psychology from this very religious standpoint?

00:19:44.060 Well, I wouldn't say recently.

00:19:45.520 I think I've been doing this since about 1985.

00:19:48.080 But the reason, there's multiple reasons.

00:19:51.400 The reason, fundamental reason, is because I was trying to solve two problems, three problems, I would say.

00:19:57.580 One would be the problem of how to live in the face of the undeniable tragedy of life.

00:20:02.540 The other is what to do with the fact that malevolence exists.

00:20:08.320 And while those are the two most fundamental questions, and they're interrelated,

00:20:14.500 because what happens is that the apprehension of tragedy is one of the things that drives people towards malevolence.

00:20:20.760 I have a chapter in there called, Don't Criticize the World Until You Put Your House in Order.

00:20:24.620 And I draw writings there from some of the worst people about whose actions I'm familiar with,

00:20:30.800 like the Columbine High School shooters and a mass murderer named Carl Panzram, who's a very insightful person.

00:20:36.100 And I've tried to track how it is that people develop a malevolent attitude towards being, I would say, towards life.

00:20:42.560 And that's intrinsically associated with tragedy.

00:20:45.180 Well, these great stories that we have, part of the substructure of our culture,

00:20:50.460 are antidotes to both malevolence and tragedy.

00:20:54.080 That's what, and I mean that, I'm not necessarily even saying that they're successful antidotes,

00:20:59.260 but the reason that they were formulated, the deep reason, is as a response to the tragic conditions of life and to malevolence.

00:21:06.400 And then my experience in delving into these stories is that the farther I delve into them, the deeper they get.

00:21:13.060 And that never ends.

00:21:14.300 Just when I think I've got to the bottom of a story, like the story of Cain and Abel, which is like 12 sentences long.

00:21:19.140 I mean, it's so short, it's unbelievable.

00:21:20.740 It has no bottom.

00:21:22.840 And that's a really fascinating phenomena.

00:21:25.820 I guess it's partly, like the Bible is a hyperlinked text, you know, so that every verse refers to many other verses.

00:21:31.680 And so you never get to the end of it in some sense.

00:21:33.940 But then it's also hyperlinked with the entire culture around it.

00:21:37.040 And so, and then I also think that because the stories in Genesis, especially the first part of Genesis, are deeply mimetic in the sense that you've been describing, that they have a kind of biological depth that's unparalleled as well.

00:21:50.400 Yes, they have a life of their own, that's for sure.

00:21:52.760 A life that lasts a lot longer than the mere lives of mortals, let's say.

00:21:56.500 So, and you, the rules all have, you know, quite fun titles in a way.

00:22:02.800 In fact, I think they originally came from a blog post you put up on an internet website.

00:22:06.400 But you've obviously developed them in all kinds of different ways.

00:22:09.860 Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

00:22:11.920 Rule number two, treat yourself like someone you're responsible for helping.

00:22:15.480 Number three, make friends with people who want the best for you.

00:22:18.280 And so on.

00:22:18.860 I guess I'd be interested to know what your response, having had a chance to look at the book, is to this way of looking at life and how we create meaning for ourselves in the process.

00:22:29.520 Oh, is my reaction, if you like.

00:22:33.300 It's so full of lovely stories, really interesting, thought-provoking stories, wisdom, lots of wisdom all over the place.

00:22:43.140 Then the Bible stories, then this.

00:22:45.680 You just don't understand that?

00:22:46.920 You don't get why the Bible is being invoked?

00:22:49.760 Well, I get it in this sense that those stories, many of them, are very deep and have something to tell us.

00:22:56.060 But it's the way I think that Jordan kind of slithers from a good idea about this might be a good way to live your life to this story.

00:23:04.640 I mean, let me give you an example.

00:23:06.420 You talk about, with great knowledge, about the evolution, the evolutionary arms race between the size of babies' heads and the size of women's pelvises. 0.90

00:23:16.060 And this is something that's always fascinated me.

00:23:18.860 I think it's meme-driven that we've ended up with childbirth being painful, as I well know, and you probably don't, how painful it is for those reasons.

00:23:32.200 But then later in the book, you bring in the story of Adam and Eve and how God says, you know, women will suffer and so on. 0.81

00:23:40.040 And the implication, not clearly stated, but the implication to the reader is God did it.

00:23:46.400 Now, on the one hand, you're saying, look, we evolved this way.

00:23:48.960 This pain and suffering is an inevitable consequence of the way that evolution has played out.

00:23:54.260 And in the other, you're kind of luring people into believing that God actually made that.

00:23:58.120 And even worse than that, the idea that it at least speaks to me that somehow we're so bad and deserve all that suffering, which in other places in the book you try and get rid of that we shouldn't feel so wicked and bad.

00:24:11.320 How do you respond to that, Jordan?

00:24:13.020 Well, you asked a little bit earlier about, you were talking about psychological theology.

00:24:17.320 I did this lecture series on Genesis, 15 lectures on Genesis, and it was called a psychological interpretation of the biblical stories, psychological approach to the biblical stories, I think.

00:24:29.180 And I've been trying to do that.

00:24:31.040 Like, I'm not a theologian, even though I'm very interested in these stories.

00:24:35.080 And what I was trying to do with, see, I do believe that the biblical texts are foundational.

00:24:40.340 I believe it in the Nietzschean sense.

00:24:42.220 And Nietzsche, of course, announced famously in the 1800s that God was dead.

00:24:46.920 And the typical rationalist atheist regards that as a triumphalist proclamation.

00:24:53.300 But that wasn't that for Nietzsche.

00:24:55.180 And Nietzsche knew perfectly well and said immediately afterward that the consequences of that was going to be bloody catastrophe because everything was going to fall.

00:25:03.700 And he predicted the rise of communism, for example, and the deaths of tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the death of God.

00:25:10.280 Because Nietzsche knew perfectly well that when you pull the cornerstone out from underneath a building, that even though it may stay aloft in midair like a cartoon character that's wandered off a cliff for some period of time, that it will inevitably crumble.

00:25:23.420 And that it will be replaced by something that's perhaps far worse.

00:25:27.600 Now, Nietzsche hoped it would be it would be replaced by man's ability to recreate meaning spontaneously out of his psyche, for example, which I think is a doomed enterprise.

00:25:36.140 But he knew that in the interval it would be replaced by both nihilism and by communist totalitarianism, which is a hell of a prediction because it was done like 40 years before the events actually unfolded.

00:25:47.280 Well, you can you can see it that way. But if that is the case, why do we have evidence that the most dysfunctional societies today are the most religious?

00:25:56.920 And, for example, in the United States of America, the higher if you go across different states, the higher belief in God is proclaimed belief in God, whatever you think that means.

00:26:05.620 The the more murders, suicides, marital breakdown, various measures of dysfunctional society are.

00:26:14.120 Well, it depends on how you define religion in part. I mean, first of all, America is a very religious country.

00:26:19.060 And to think of it as a country that's doing worse than other countries in the world is just not the case at all.

00:26:23.360 Well, its incarceration rate is higher than any other.

00:26:25.900 Well, true, but so is its standard of living. And it's and it's and it's what would you say ability to provide the basic essentials of life for people and and the essential freedoms that go along with that.

00:26:35.400 You wouldn't compare that to an African dictatorship. 0.87

00:26:37.400 No, no, no. But most of these studies have been done only in developed societies. But there, if you look at income inequality, that's much worse in the States.

00:26:44.160 So, yes, a lot of people in the States have a very high standard of living, but the poorest are really poor.

00:26:48.760 Yes. Income inequality.

00:26:50.600 You know, with Obama care being dismantled and so on. Well, but but nevertheless, let me go back to that point.

00:26:56.320 We know that more dysfunctional societies have higher proclaimed belief, higher attendance in church and so on.

00:27:01.900 Now, this doesn't fit with what you were saying. Now, Nietzsche's ideas are very profound and interesting.

00:27:06.020 But I just want to stop you from saying that he was absolutely right about somehow if if we get rid of God, we're going to be worse because we have very well functioning societies.

00:27:14.960 We were pretty we were pretty bad in the 20th century. Oh, we were. Yes. Yes. And we and we could easily drift that way again.

00:27:21.760 And there have been terrible bad things done in the name of God. And there have been terrible bad things done in the name of communism and and and and atheism.

00:27:27.980 I don't think we can. I don't want to weigh them up. I'll weigh them up.

00:27:32.640 You'll weigh them up and you'll say no problem.

00:27:35.000 But then you have to go against this evidence that I've just stated.

00:27:37.400 Jordan, come back on this evidence. I mean, obviously, from her perspective, Sue feels like actually we've got pretty stable societies that are increasingly secular these days.

00:27:48.020 So perhaps Nietzsche was wrong. And in fact, we're not going to see this.

00:27:51.600 Well, I would say they're stable to the degree that they're actually not secular.

00:27:55.520 And this is also a Nietzschean observation and the Dostoevskian observation for that matter is that we're living on the corpse of our ancestors like we always have.

00:28:02.940 That's a very old idea. But that run you that runs that stops being nourishing and starts to become rotten unless you replenish it.

00:28:10.300 And I don't think we are replenishing it. We're in danger of running.

00:28:13.440 We're living on borrowed time and in danger of running out of it.

00:28:16.980 I like I I think that the reason that the Western societies essentially work quite well is because they act out a Judeo Christian ethic and one that's essentially predicated.

00:28:27.080 It's predicated on utmost regard for the sovereignty of the individual.

00:28:31.320 So the individual sovereign in relationship to the state, which is a remarkable idea and one that's fundamentally religious in its in its in its essence, in my mode of mode of thinking.

00:28:41.580 And it's also predicated on honest speech. And there's there's other predicates at all as well.

00:28:47.380 But those are religious predicates in my estimation.

00:28:49.680 We'll come back to this. We've got to go to a quick break. I will. I will come back to you, Sue.

00:28:54.340 We'll come back to you.

00:29:24.340 Do check us out at premierchristianradio.com slash unbelievable or find the unbelievable podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast from.

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00:32:19.660 Hello and welcome to the program that brings Christians and non-Christians together with me, Justin Briarley.

00:32:31.160 For over 10 years as host of Unbelievable, I've listened to objections to faith from the world's leading skeptics.

00:32:37.920 And the most common question I get is, how come you still believe?

00:32:41.640 Unbelievable, the book, is my answer.

00:32:43.840 Telling the story of the show and drawing on hundreds of conversations with atheists and Christians,

00:32:49.220 I explain why I still believe Jesus is the answer to life's deepest questions.

00:32:54.400 Get your copy of Unbelievable, why after 10 years of talking with atheists, I'm still a Christian, 1.00

00:33:00.080 at unbelievablebook.co.uk.

00:33:07.620 You're listening to Unbelievable on Premier Christian Radio.

00:33:11.620 Thank you for coming back for the second part of today's show.

00:33:15.840 Special edition of Unbelievable and something we've been working up to for a long time.

00:33:20.540 We've got a special website that's been created for The Big Conversation,

00:33:24.560 a newly refurbished YouTube channel, an app, a newsletter and much more.

00:33:28.540 You can sign up to that newsletter to be notified of new episodes, bonus content and extra resources

00:33:33.620 at thebigconversation.show.

00:33:36.580 You can, of course, follow Unbelievable on Facebook and Twitter too.

00:33:40.080 Facebook.com slash unbelievablejb and twitter.com slash unbelievablejb to follow the show on social media

00:33:47.360 where we're posting up plenty of info on The Big Conversation,

00:33:50.240 this first programme with Jordan Peterson and Susan Blackmore,

00:33:53.100 plus some of the short bite-sized video segments from their conversation as well.

00:33:57.280 You'll want to go and check those out too.

00:33:59.500 Thebigconversation.show as well, where you can get hold of all of that material.

00:34:02.960 Let's return to part two of our first Big Conversation.

00:34:10.660 Welcome back to the programme.

00:34:12.320 We're talking about the psychology of belief.

00:34:14.460 Do we need God to make sense of life?

00:34:16.600 My guests are Jordan Peterson and Susan Blackmore,

00:34:19.480 and we're talking about Jordan's new book, especially 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

00:34:25.280 We were talking just in that last section about whether faith, religion, Christianity specifically,

00:34:30.240 has been of benefit ultimately for people and the world.

00:34:33.960 There's a section actually, Sue, in Jordan's book where he says this,

00:34:37.260 Christianity elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master, commoner and noblemen alike, 0.75

00:34:42.800 on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law.

00:34:46.960 It's nothing short of a miracle.

00:34:49.280 He has a very high view of what Christianity has done for the world,

00:34:53.200 whether or not it's objectively true.

00:34:56.020 What do you take from it?

00:34:57.720 Well, that evidence that I was discussing earlier,

00:35:00.420 that there's plenty of now that the most dysfunctional societies are also the most believing societies.

00:35:04.580 There are lots of hypotheses about why that is the case.

00:35:07.140 But I would like to challenge Jordan on the implication that he put before,

00:35:11.400 that because a lot of our moral stance today comes from religion,

00:35:16.600 and not all of it does, that it has to have that as a basis.

00:35:20.100 I don't think it does.

00:35:20.940 I feel very grateful to live in a country where now, at last, the majority are not religious. 0.99

00:35:26.760 It's just tipped over in the latest polls.

00:35:29.780 And in fact, coming up on the train from Devon today, I got chatting with various people.

00:35:34.080 The assumption that I find here, I don't know what it's like in Canada,

00:35:36.900 is I always start with assuming someone's an atheist,

00:35:39.280 and it nearly always turns out to be there.

00:35:41.120 Oh, yeah, all that religion stuff, you know.

00:35:43.300 It's very, very common in this country.

00:35:45.200 Now, we have not descended into being a terrible country.

00:35:48.580 We have, you know, yes, we have our problems.

00:35:50.940 We're still fairly early on in the experiment, I suppose, of ditching God.

00:35:55.240 Like about 10 years.

00:35:56.860 Yes, I will await with interest and hope I live long enough to see.

00:36:00.960 But then if we look at many of the Scandinavian countries, which are way ahead of us in that move,

00:36:05.080 they have wonderful health systems, welfare state, support for people out of work.

00:36:12.920 Well, I'd be really interested in hearing your response to all this then, Jordan.

00:36:16.880 Ultimately, we can divorce the good principles that we may have had in some respects from religion,

00:36:21.660 from religion ultimately, and still leave a perfectly happy set for their lives.

00:36:24.400 Well, see, a lot of this depends on your definition of religion.

00:36:27.540 Like, I know perfectly well from my own empirical studies that there's at least two disparate sets of phenomena

00:36:33.240 that might be regarded as religious, right?

00:36:35.820 There's the dogmatic element, which is really what Sue's referring to when she talks about the pathology of religious belief.

00:36:41.580 And there's the spiritual element.

00:36:43.060 And the dogmatic element tends to appeal to people who are essentially conservative in their temperamental nature.

00:36:48.460 And I mean that scientifically speaking.

00:36:50.020 And the meaningful element, the spiritual element, let's say, tends to appeal to people who are more liberal in their temperamental fundamentals.

00:37:00.520 And religion, overall, is a continual dialogue between the dogmatic element and the spiritual element.

00:37:06.280 And if either of those exceeds its proper boundaries, then there's a degenerative consequence.

00:37:12.080 Like, if the spiritual types get the upper hand, then the structure disappears.

00:37:15.820 And if the dogmatic types get the upper hand, then everything clamps down into too much stasis.

00:37:20.760 So to make a direct claim, say, between the existence of dogmatic belief and the pathology of society,

00:37:29.240 and then to assume that that encompasses the entire relationship between religion and the functioning of society,

00:37:34.920 I think is based upon an unfortunate narrowing of the definition of what constitutes religious.

00:37:40.500 But then back to the idea that our moral claims can be divorced from the religious substrate.

00:37:47.120 It depends on what you mean, and here we go with the definition, by moral substrate, you know, or religious substrate.

00:37:54.440 Let's say that I regard you as a sovereign individual.

00:37:59.320 Well, the question is, what does that mean?

00:38:01.460 It might just be an opinion.

00:38:02.820 It might just be a meme.

00:38:04.180 It might be reflective of something far deeper.

00:38:06.640 So deep that if we transgress against it, it will be fatal.

00:38:10.300 And my investigations have convinced me that that's exactly the case.

00:38:14.180 That although it may be a rational claim, it may be an enlightenment claim as well,

00:38:18.640 that there's something underneath it that's so much deeper than that,

00:38:21.440 that to reduce it to mere rationality or to mere enlightenment claim is to do it an immense disservice.

00:38:27.000 And also to fall prey, I would say, to the postmodern quandary,

00:38:30.860 because the postmodern quandary is all belief systems are equally invalid.

00:38:36.680 It's something like that.

00:38:37.740 And that's a real problem when you try to erect a belief system on purely rational axioms.

00:38:43.300 So, and you can't, besides that, you can't even do it.

00:38:46.000 It's like, I don't respect you as an individual for rational means.

00:38:50.340 The rationality didn't precede my respect for you.

00:38:53.440 It's way deeper than that.

00:38:54.640 But it's embodied, for example.

00:38:56.760 It's built into our emotions and our motivations.

00:38:59.040 You have this issue with rationalism and the enlightenment and so on,

00:39:01.820 where you feel that those who appeal to that as somehow we're in this golden age now

00:39:05.900 are forgetting that it's all built on a much deeper, longer evolutionary psychological history,

00:39:11.740 which is completely different to rationalism per se.

00:39:15.400 You know, I see a university professor, let's take Dawkins, for example.

00:39:19.820 He's a sovereign, rational individual.

00:39:23.240 But there's a wall around him.

00:39:25.480 That's the wall, let's say, of his university.

00:39:27.620 And then outside the university, there's the wall of the town.

00:39:29.960 And outside the town, there's the wall of the state and the wall of the country.

00:39:33.780 And there's just these concentric rings that are protecting him.

00:39:36.540 And he can stand in the middle and say, well, I'm divorced from all that.

00:39:40.280 It doesn't undergird me.

00:39:42.320 It's like it undergirds you to a degree that you can't possibly imagine.

00:39:46.060 And you're living on the, well, really it is,

00:39:49.860 the resources that have been gathered painfully and bloodily in the past

00:39:54.220 and saying, well, we can just detach ourselves from that and float off.

00:39:58.160 It's like, no, you can't.

00:39:59.080 You don't understand what you're talking about.

00:40:00.680 All that leads me to gratitude for all that we have.

00:40:04.220 I mean, I recognize that.

00:40:06.500 I recognize that nothing to do with any religious basis at all.

00:40:10.200 I recognize that I could not come on the train here,

00:40:13.060 have a really interesting discussion, meet Justin again,

00:40:16.000 have a nice glass of cool water, you know,

00:40:17.940 without a load of other people doing it for me.

00:40:20.220 That gratitude, which is one of the things that you quite rightly put into your book,

00:40:25.040 it gives good place to it.

00:40:26.440 And it's very important.

00:40:28.460 That doesn't come from anything religious,

00:40:30.860 unless you say because I was brought up a Christian, it came from there.

00:40:33.340 But I don't base it on that anymore.

00:40:36.240 What do you think it comes from?

00:40:37.920 I think it comes from a recognition that I've done a lot of meditation.

00:40:43.080 I've meditated every day for 30 years,

00:40:44.760 and I think this has something to do with it.

00:40:46.760 But it's observing the inner consequences of different ways of confronting the world.

00:40:52.620 And I'm much more in recent years in the habit of waking up in the morning,

00:40:55.780 even if it's raining in January in England,

00:40:57.820 and looking out and going, oh, and it's a feeling of gratitude,

00:41:02.200 not gratitude towards God or towards anybody or anything,

00:41:06.440 just free-floating gratitude.

00:41:08.520 That seems to have a positive consequence.

00:41:10.600 I set the day up better.

00:41:12.360 And it's kind of self-perpetuating.

00:41:14.140 It pops up again and again.

00:41:15.340 Do you think you can just have gratitude in general,

00:41:17.980 or must gratitude always be given towards something and ultimately God?

00:41:21.640 Well, that's a good question.

00:41:22.900 That goes back to our discussion about acting things out.

00:41:27.800 Like, gratitude is something you feel towards something.

00:41:32.240 And you can say, well, I don't feel it towards anything in particular.

00:41:34.820 And I would say, all right, well,

00:41:36.080 the diffuse nothing that you feel it towards

00:41:39.000 serves in your psychological hierarchy as your equivalent of God.

00:41:43.080 Oh, no, but it's gratitude.

00:41:44.720 This morning, for example, I looked out, and it was so green.

00:41:49.100 We've had frosts, and it's been white the last few days.

00:41:51.860 And it was green this morning.

00:41:53.080 And it was just gratitude to the universe, if you like.

00:41:55.740 It's not really God because it's not a creator.

00:41:58.140 It's not anything I can pray to.

00:41:59.860 It's, I mean, I know.

00:42:00.960 Why feel gratitude towards it?

00:42:02.340 I don't know, but I find it.

00:42:04.060 That's fine.

00:42:04.380 I know that you tackle in this book that happiness is not an ultimate good.

00:42:08.960 And I struggle this way.

00:42:09.960 No, no, it's just not an ultimate goal.

00:42:11.580 Oh, okay, all right.

00:42:12.060 I didn't say it wasn't an ultimate good.

00:42:13.220 All right, all right, okay.

00:42:14.440 There's a big difference between those things.

00:42:15.680 Yes, you're right, you're right.

00:42:16.400 You picked me up correctly on that.

00:42:17.620 But nevertheless, we are happiness-seeking creatures.

00:42:21.560 And I have found through practice and growing older that acting gratitude, thinking gratitude,

00:42:28.040 feeling gratitude makes me happier and seems to kind of rub off on other people.

00:42:32.120 Okay, so I don't think we are happiness-seeking creatures.

00:42:35.140 And I think it's a low goal.

00:42:36.900 Not because there's something wrong with being happy because, you know, thank God if you get

00:42:40.820 to be happy now and then.

00:42:41.840 But I don't think that that's what we seek.

00:42:44.100 I think we seek a meaning that's deep enough to sustain us through tragedy.

00:42:49.020 And that is way different.

00:42:50.180 Do you know, when I hit some – tragedy is too strong a word.

00:42:53.900 I think – but when horrible things happen to me or I feel or I read some terrible thing

00:43:01.320 going on in the world, yes, those are tragedies going on in the world, my response is nothing

00:43:07.140 matters.

00:43:08.100 It's all empty and meaningless.

00:43:10.080 This is how the world is.

00:43:11.760 Get used to it.

00:43:13.140 Get on with it, girl. 1.00

00:43:14.420 That sounds like a very Zen Buddhist way of dealing with meaning.

00:43:17.760 I guess it is.

00:43:19.080 Well, it's a paradoxical way, though.

00:43:21.000 It is kind of paradoxical.

00:43:21.980 The first part of that is nihilistic and the second part isn't.

00:43:24.800 So how do you reconcile those two things?

00:43:26.740 Why get on with it, girl? 1.00

00:43:28.380 Because – oh, well, here's another thing.

00:43:30.660 I've often done this with my students.

00:43:32.740 Let's suppose you become nihilistic.

00:43:35.240 Nothing matters.

00:43:36.300 There's no point in doing – I mean, I think we live in a pointless universe.

00:43:39.180 What are you going to do?

00:43:40.420 And I say to them, like William James in his wonderful thing about getting up in the

00:43:43.580 morning, but that's a slightly different point that he makes there.

00:43:46.860 But I say to them, OK, tomorrow morning when you wake up, think it's all pointless.

00:43:51.320 There's no point in doing anything.

00:43:52.580 Now, what are you going to do?

00:43:53.920 Well, actually, you're going to need to go to the loo.

00:43:56.820 You're going to get out of bed and you're going to go to the bathroom.

00:43:58.860 And when you're there, you'll think, well, actually, I'm hungry.

00:44:00.780 I think I want to go down to the kitchen.

00:44:02.760 Oh, I probably should put my slippers on.

00:44:04.080 Why don't I get dressed?

00:44:05.080 You go and have something to eat.

00:44:06.060 And then you think, I'm bored.

00:44:07.460 And you go to university and go into your lectures.

00:44:09.940 And, you know, we are not creatures who will just not do anything.

00:44:13.160 To me, to go through that process, which I've done in the past a lot, and it's just natural

00:44:19.860 now, is a very positive way of living, to accept the meaningless and ultimate emptiness

00:44:27.880 of everything and accept that this creature here, this thing, this evolved creature just

00:44:33.300 will get on with life.

00:44:34.700 But you're not accepting the meaninglessness of it, even by going through those actions

00:44:38.700 that you described.

00:44:39.340 Not at all, because you're acting as if those things are meaningful.

00:44:43.440 Yes, I am.

00:44:44.000 I'm acting as though those things are meaningful.

00:44:45.300 Are you pretending that they're meaningful?

00:44:46.780 Pardon?

00:44:47.100 Are you pretending that they're meaningful?

00:44:48.420 No, I'm not pretending.

00:44:49.980 My way of putting it would be that those meanings are constructed by myself and others.

00:44:54.080 They're personal meanings other than...

00:44:56.100 Because of the kind of creatures we are, because of the meme plexes.

00:44:59.000 But they're not constructed.

00:44:59.700 I'd like to say, Jordan, is it constructed?

00:45:01.240 Neither is your desire to use the loo.

00:45:02.900 None of that's constructed.

00:45:03.760 No, no.

00:45:04.260 But the fact that there is a loo is part of the culture.

00:45:06.920 Yes.

00:45:06.940 Well, thank God for that.

00:45:08.040 Oh, thank God, would you do that?

00:45:11.140 Sorry, that's a poor joke.

00:45:12.220 Well, you see, so imagine this.

00:45:14.640 You have the proximal meanings that you described that are sort of a priori, right?

00:45:18.540 They're handed to you.

00:45:19.820 You might consider them as needs or drives, although they're not.

00:45:22.920 They're personalities.

00:45:24.000 That's not the right way of conceptualizing them.

00:45:25.860 But then there's the intermingling of all those needs and drives, let's say.

00:45:31.080 And that constitutes a new layer of structure, because it isn't just that you have to eat and that you have to use the washroom and that you have to have something to drink and that you have to be warm enough or cool enough to survive.

00:45:42.120 It's that you have to do all those things at the same time in a situation where you're going to have to propagate that across time.

00:45:48.620 And you're going to have to do it with a bunch of other people.

00:45:51.060 And it's always been like that.

00:45:52.840 And so what that means is that out of those proximal meanings, higher meanings arise.

00:45:58.040 And you might say, well, those meanings are arbitrary.

00:46:00.280 And I would think those are religious meanings.

00:46:02.380 I wouldn't say they are arbitrary, but I would say they were constructed.

00:46:05.360 It's very interesting.

00:46:06.400 Reading your book.

00:46:06.900 What do you mean by constructed?

00:46:08.420 Well, they are a consequence of memetic evolution, of the language that people are brought up in, the culture they live in, the arguments they have.

00:46:16.620 What about the biology that they're given?

00:46:18.600 Well, we start with the biology and the memes build on top of that.

00:46:22.220 No, the memes are biology too.

00:46:24.400 Well, by definition, they are.

00:46:27.100 See, this is the thing.

00:46:28.420 I would follow Dawkins in saying, well, talk about genes as biology, talk about memes as culture.

00:46:32.400 That's all I meant by dividing that.

00:46:33.660 But let me say this.

00:46:34.640 Yeah, but I don't accept that division.

00:46:36.180 But I want to get back to what we're saying about meaning.

00:46:38.500 Reading your book made me think a lot about what you mean by meaning and your claim that we should have a meaningful life or strive for a meaningful life, that meaningfulness is important.

00:46:52.260 And I kept asking myself, do I live that way?

00:46:56.980 What meanings does my life have?

00:46:59.160 And, you know, if I think for something like, well, most of my striving goes into writing my books.

00:47:04.120 And is that meaningful?

00:47:05.760 And again, I have the same response when I ask myself that question.

00:47:09.400 It's just what this body does.

00:47:12.480 Then you should listen to the body and stop listening to the thing that's criticizing it.

00:47:16.280 And what would the body say?

00:47:17.800 It would say, write your book and try to be as clear as you possibly can about it.

00:47:20.260 Yeah, that's what I do.

00:47:21.040 And that's exactly what I do.

00:47:22.360 That's exactly what I said at the beginning is that the atheist types act out a religious structure and criticize it.

00:47:26.040 No, there's no religious structure.

00:47:27.520 Oh, we've come to this big question now.

00:47:29.160 Let me get to this question because I did want to get to this because you have a fascinating part in your book, Jordan, where you do say this.

00:47:36.240 You're simply not addressing atheists.

00:47:38.480 You say you're simply not an atheist in your actions.

00:47:41.660 And it is your actions.

00:47:42.460 Or if you are, look out.

00:47:44.000 And it is your actions that most accurately reflect your religious beliefs.

00:47:47.740 What do you mean by that?

00:47:48.600 Are you saying that no one is really an atheist deep down?

00:47:52.520 I didn't say no one was.

00:47:54.000 I said that most of the people who claim to be atheists aren't.

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00:50:31.940 So this is why I like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment,

00:50:37.380 because Raskolnikov tried to act like an atheist, right?

00:50:40.580 He took the ideas that were floating around,

00:50:42.700 Dostoevsky took the ideas that were floating around in the late 1800s,

00:50:45.540 which are still the ideas that we're discussing today.

00:50:48.340 The most fundamental idea, I suppose,

00:50:50.440 being after Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God,

00:50:53.580 that if there is no God, then anything is permitted.

00:50:55.780 That was Raskolnikov.

00:50:57.020 Raskolnikov's the criminal in Crime and Punishment, the murderer.

00:50:59.580 He gets away with his murder, you know, technically.

00:51:01.940 But not psychologically.

00:51:03.440 And he decides that if there's no God, anything is permitted.

00:51:07.420 But this doesn't have to be true.

00:51:09.400 That's a person in a character in a novel.

00:51:13.920 I don't think that that's so.

00:51:15.600 Well, let's hear the end of that story.

00:51:18.200 And what do you take away from what Dostoevsky has to say about?

00:51:23.420 Well, Dostoevsky's takeaway was, too, was that there was a moral law that Raskolnikov was breaking,

00:51:28.640 even though he rationalized his way through it.

00:51:30.680 Like, he committed the perfect murder, right?

00:51:32.120 He murdered a woman who people would have voted to murder, and then he got away with it.

00:51:36.820 And he did it for good reasons, at least reasons that he could rationalize as good.

00:51:40.420 And then he got away with it, but it destroyed his soul.

00:51:43.640 And Dostoevsky's right about that.

00:51:45.140 And one of the things I like about Dostoevsky, as compared to Nietzsche's say,

00:51:48.480 because I think Dostoevsky is the profounder of the two,

00:51:50.740 is that in The Brothers Karamazov, for example, Ivan is the atheist.

00:51:55.260 And Ivan is everything you'd want a man to be, like, seriously.

00:51:58.480 And Dostoevsky, man, he doesn't straw man his opponents.

00:52:01.300 The most powerful characters in his books are always the opponents of what he himself believes.

00:52:07.500 And Ivan is always arguing with Alyosha, who's his younger brother,

00:52:10.240 who's a monastic novitiate and really can't articulate himself very well.

00:52:13.320 He has nowhere near the force or charisma of Ivan.

00:52:16.420 But Alyosha wins the drama, even though he loses all the arguments.

00:52:21.340 And that's where Dostoevsky is so great.

00:52:23.160 It's like, and this is what you're doing in your life.

00:52:26.160 You're acting, look, you're acting out the logos, Susan.

00:52:28.920 That's what you're doing.

00:52:29.600 You're writing books to illuminate the world.

00:52:32.140 And that's not coming from a place of meaninglessness.

00:52:34.860 Don't you think it's kind of offensive to say to me that I'm not an atheist when I am?

00:52:43.940 Answer me this question.

00:52:45.060 Why do you think I don't go around murdering people?

00:52:48.300 Why do you think I go around trying to be...

00:52:50.900 I don't know you well enough to know.

00:52:52.580 I think often the reason that people don't do it is because they're too cowardly.

00:52:58.000 Oh, that could be a reason.

00:52:59.340 It could be that I don't murder people.

00:53:01.200 I'd really love to.

00:53:01.760 No, I'm not necessarily saying you...

00:53:03.520 No, no, it's a possible one.

00:53:04.880 It's in fact highly likely at some times in your life if you're a normal person.

00:53:09.100 It's a very strange claim you make.

00:53:11.200 I say that I do not believe in God in any of the various forms that I have read about God

00:53:16.640 or the forms I was brought up with or...

00:53:19.100 Except perhaps something like the cloud of unknowing.

00:53:21.540 I mean, when you sit on the top of the mountain and everything you know about God you throw into the fog of forgetfulness or whatever the phrase is, there's nothing left.

00:53:31.620 Okay, that's about the only God that I could have any connection with or feel anything for.

00:53:37.820 So I live my life without that belief.

00:53:41.320 I think in the way I tell you that about this body just being an evolved thing that gets on, it has no free will.

00:53:47.180 It just does what happens.

00:53:49.660 And...

00:53:49.820 That's another inevitable claim of atheist materialism.

00:53:53.460 Now, you are telling me...

00:53:55.440 Try having a conversation with someone and acting that out.

00:53:58.480 But you're telling me that this isn't true.

00:54:00.560 I'm having a conversation with you.

00:54:01.920 Isn't what Jordan is saying is you may believe that's the case, but you don't act your life as if you don't have free will.

00:54:07.800 That's the point.

00:54:08.260 Or you don't treat anyone else as if they don't have free will because they would be...

00:54:11.420 Oh, I do.

00:54:11.980 I do.

00:54:13.220 I do.

00:54:13.640 I mean, if I think about why you are here now, I just think about all the reasons that brought you here.

00:54:19.660 And you probably have an upbringing and a place where you live and your wife and your children and everything else that's brought you here that makes that body there say the things it says.

00:54:28.240 I have found...

00:54:29.620 And the I, of course, is a kind of another illusory thing, but I have to use the word.

00:54:34.600 I have found that by looking at, for example, my husband or my children as evolved creatures living the life they do because of the circumstances they're in,

00:54:43.740 I can feel much more forgiving, much more understanding because I can see what they're doing and why.

00:54:49.880 Do you demand of them better behavior?

00:54:53.220 Come on.

00:54:54.520 I hope so.

00:54:55.740 Well, demand of them.

00:54:57.500 I mean, I don't go around saying you're in, but I mean, if any of them do something that I...

00:55:01.180 I'll tell them that I think that what they've done...

00:55:03.500 I mean, my daughter recently did something that I really felt...

00:55:06.580 I suddenly realized that in a very old-fashioned sense, I'm head of the family because her father's dead and her grandparents are dead and I'm the only one of this generation left.

00:55:17.540 And I had to make a stand and say, you don't do that.

00:55:20.260 Now, is that the sort of thing you meant?

00:55:21.920 Despite being determined.

00:55:22.620 Yeah, absolutely.

00:55:23.820 I mean, all these things, I think, are part of...

00:55:26.360 I just...

00:55:27.120 We're needing to close things out.

00:55:28.800 And I know, I know.

00:55:30.540 We've had not long enough.

00:55:31.940 But, Jordan, just come back to this because I want to hear why ultimately, despite everything that Sue said there, you still think she's behaving as though there is, in some sense, a God or some ultimate meaning, even though she protests that, no, that's...

00:55:46.580 Well, I would say she's acting it out.

00:55:48.000 Well, for example, the act of writing a book.

00:55:50.260 I mean, the Judeo-Christian culture is the culture of the book.

00:55:54.940 It's the revelation of the proper mode of being in written form.

00:55:58.360 It's not only that, but it's a large part of that.

00:56:01.400 It's the culture of the book.

00:56:03.020 You're acting out the culture of the book.

00:56:05.140 It's thousands of years old.

00:56:06.360 And the voice, the true voice in the culture of the book is the Logos.

00:56:10.620 That's what it is, technically speaking.

00:56:13.160 And so she's acting out the Logos and writing a book.

00:56:16.560 It's like...

00:56:16.860 And then she says, well, I don't believe in God.

00:56:18.520 It's like, okay, that's fine.

00:56:19.460 The Logos, of course...

00:56:20.500 Acting like you do is fine.

00:56:21.560 In Scripture, in the New Testament, is brought into the Word.

00:56:25.160 And it, of course, relates to...

00:56:25.960 The Word that brings order out of chaos.

00:56:27.780 And to Jesus Christ as the sort of personification, almost, of that.

00:56:31.180 Right.

00:56:31.460 He's the archetypal manifestation of the Logos.

00:56:33.880 I mean, these are all big words and things.

00:56:36.340 I mean, a lot of people will be asking, what do you actually make of, in Christian terms,

00:56:40.740 the figure of Jesus?

00:56:41.900 Do you believe that he was, in some sense, divine?

00:56:46.260 Was there...

00:56:47.040 You know, when you look at what the Bible tells us about Jesus...

00:56:50.020 One thing you might ask yourself is, do you believe that each individual is divine, in

00:56:54.320 some sense?

00:56:54.880 And I would say, well, perhaps not, but you act as though you do.

00:56:58.360 And our law acts as if it does.

00:57:00.520 It's predicated on that idea.

00:57:02.020 Because the sovereignty of the individual is the divinity of the individual.

00:57:05.180 There's no difference between those two things.

00:57:06.720 And I can make an absolutely brutally clear case for the development of that idea historically.

00:57:12.840 I've traced it back to Mesopotamia, at least in its earliest written forms.

00:57:17.160 I mean, originally, the only real sovereign individuals were the sovereigns, right?

00:57:21.020 The emperors and pharaohs. 0.72

00:57:23.140 But the idea of the sovereign individual descended down the hierarchy of power, so to speak,

00:57:28.440 until with Christianity it was universalized.

00:57:30.500 We're each sovereign individuals.

00:57:32.160 And that means that the law itself is written as if we each contain a spark of divinity.

00:57:38.500 And so then I think, well, what is that divinity?

00:57:40.600 And in the Christian worldview, well, that's the logos.

00:57:43.100 That's the true speech that brings forth habitable and good order from the chaos of potential.

00:57:50.740 And in your view, whether she likes it or not, Sue is at some level a benefactor of that

00:57:55.880 reality of what undergirds her.

00:57:57.500 Not a contributor.

00:57:58.200 Not only a benefactor.

00:57:59.300 Much better than merely being a benefactor.

00:58:01.380 An active contributor.

00:58:02.760 It's no easy thing to write a book and to get your thoughts straight and to put them forward

00:58:06.440 into the world.

00:58:07.020 But she couldn't do it without this idea, in a sense, of God.

00:58:10.980 She doesn't need the idea even.

00:58:12.160 It's embodied.

00:58:13.300 She's acting it out.

00:58:14.080 One of the consequences of the way I've been thinking about it, and Sam Harris talks about

00:58:17.740 this too, is the way I think about it prevents me going, oh, I'm so clever.

00:58:22.240 I've written a brilliant book.

00:58:23.820 I mean, it doesn't always.

00:58:24.800 I have those thoughts come up.

00:58:25.920 But I've got quite good at seeing them coming up and going, oh, there comes that thought

00:58:29.000 again.

00:58:30.000 Because I'm taking the view that these books are, the memes are doing it through this organism

00:58:35.880 here.

00:58:36.320 And I have fun.

00:58:38.580 That would be the eternal logos manifesting itself.

00:58:41.240 All right.

00:58:41.660 If you want to.

00:58:42.380 No, but I'm not.

00:58:43.200 I'm not playing games.

00:58:44.700 Like, that's the oldest language we have for that sort of thing.

00:58:46.920 And the logos that I'm talking about is the integration of those motivational forces that

00:58:51.660 you were describing.

00:58:52.800 It's not merely a meme.

00:58:54.460 Like, that's where Dawkins is.

00:58:55.900 Dawkins is wrong about that.

00:58:58.040 There isn't biology and memes.

00:59:00.660 The interactions matter.

00:59:02.180 They're crucial.

00:59:03.480 They're crucial.

00:59:04.300 Some of these memes are millions of years old.

00:59:07.480 But you've slipped away.

00:59:09.340 If I can bring you back to Justin's question, really, because you slithered out of it, I

00:59:14.160 think, in your question was, was Jesus different from the rest of us by saying, oh, we've all

00:59:17.980 got a spark of divinity.

00:59:19.380 But do you then believe that Jesus was somehow divine in a sense that other than what I am?

00:59:24.040 What was it?

00:59:25.520 You know, did he do miracles?

00:59:26.840 Was he, you know, all of that stuff?

00:59:28.560 Quick answer, and then we'll finish with a final question.

00:59:30.560 Quick answer.

00:59:32.880 How about this?

00:59:34.480 Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. 0.78

00:59:38.680 That's a miracle.

00:59:40.080 That's the separation of church and state in one sentence.

00:59:43.120 So there's a miracle for you.

00:59:44.700 We're going to go for a final question.

00:59:47.000 I'm going to ask it for both of you, which is the question we began with.

00:59:50.120 We're talking about the psychology of belief.

00:59:52.340 Do we need God to make sense of life?

00:59:54.620 Your one-minute answer begins now, Sue.

00:59:57.000 Absolutely not.

00:59:57.960 That will do for an answer.

00:59:59.220 OK.

01:00:00.040 Do we need God to make sense of life, Jordan? 0.99

01:00:02.480 Well, God is what you use to make sense of your life, by definition.

01:00:06.220 This is one of the things I learned from Jung.

01:00:08.680 The highest value, you have a hierarchy of values.

01:00:11.640 You have to.

01:00:12.500 Otherwise, you can't act or you're painfully confused.

01:00:16.640 You have a hierarchy of values.

01:00:17.740 Whatever is at the top of that hierarchy of values serves the function of God for you.

01:00:24.340 Now, it may be a God that you don't believe in or a God that you can't name, but it doesn't matter because it's God for you.

01:00:30.900 And what you think about God has very little impact on how God is acting within you, whatever God it is that you happen to be, let's say, following.

01:00:40.240 It's been fascinating to share this time with you both.

01:00:42.940 Thank you so much for being with me on the program.

01:00:45.460 Sue and Jordan, all the very best.

01:00:47.740 Thanks very much for the invitation.

01:00:48.840 Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

01:00:49.300 Nice talking with you.

01:00:50.180 Well, I hope you enjoyed that interaction and can I encourage you to go and watch and share the video of today's show and you'll see just how expressive Jordan and Sue got during the course of their conversation.

01:01:06.740 It's available now at the Big Conversation website and while there, you can sign up to the unbelievable newsletter to be notified of new episodes, bonus content and extra resources.

01:01:17.060 That's thebigconversation.show.

01:01:19.940 The next edition on video and podcast of our Big Conversation series is going to be Steven Pinker, the Harvard atheist psychologist, in conversation with Christian guest Nick Spencer.

01:01:30.140 They're going to be debating the future of humanity.

01:01:32.700 Have science, reason and humanism replaced God?

01:01:36.060 And here's a little promo taster of what we heard today and we'll continue to hear in future editions of the Big Conversation.

01:01:42.080 Are you saying that no one is really an atheist deep down?

01:01:48.640 I didn't say no one was. I said that most of the people who claim to be atheists aren't.

01:01:54.600 My response is, nothing matters. It's all empty and meaningless. This is how the world is. Get used to it.

01:02:02.500 The first part of that is nihilistic and the second part isn't. So how do you reconcile those two things?

01:02:07.000 But humanism is grounded in our universal humanity. In fact, we're made of the same stuff. We're the same species. We all are sentient.

01:02:14.500 I don't doubt that many, many of my atheist friends are committed to human dignity or human equality.

01:02:20.620 I can't see, as it were, where the deep foundations for that are.

01:02:26.580 Nature is awash in purposes.

01:02:30.800 They emerge from the bottom up from a purposeless process.

01:02:34.140 That's the genius of Darwin's idea.

01:02:37.740 That's a heroic project.

01:02:40.640 It is.

01:02:41.560 It is, but I don't think it's a possible one.

01:02:46.760 Something that makes us connect with that thing that is outside of ourselves.

01:02:52.680 I can't put a name on that or call it God.

01:02:55.940 That experience of an encounter with the reality of the resurrected Christ was life-changing.

01:03:04.720 Well, among the voices you heard coming up on future editions of The Big Conversation were Daniel Dennett and Keith Ward,

01:03:12.520 Derren Brown and Reverend Richard Coles.

01:03:14.620 We heard, of course, Jordan and Sue.

01:03:16.700 And, of course, Stephen Pinker and Nick Spencer.

01:03:19.240 Stephen Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

01:03:22.160 We'll be joining us on the next programme to debate science, reason, humanism and God with Nick Spencer,

01:03:28.280 research director at Theos and author of books such as The Evolution of the West,

01:03:32.520 How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values. 1.00

01:03:35.080 Don't miss that coming soon from the Unbelievable podcast and the Big Conversation series.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 28, 2018

Susan Blackmore - Do we need God to make sense of life？

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