Audio only:
In this episode Trent analyzes Jordan Peterson’s recent debate with 20 atheists on the Jubilee channel.
Transcript:
Trent:
This week, the Jubilee Channel released an episode that was originally called Christian versus 20 Atheists featuring Jordan Peterson, but Peterson wouldn’t even use the label Christian to describe himself, so they changed the title to simply Jordan Peterson versus 20 Atheists. But for many people who do call themselves Christians, this was a missed opportunity to show the truth of the Christian faith to inquiring skeptics. So in today’s episode, I’m going to discuss what’s wrong with Jordan Peterson’s apologetics, if you can call it that, but also what Peterson gets right as a sincere truth seeker. And if you want to help us keep making great content like this, don’t sit around asking what does it mean to subscribe. Just hit the subscribe button and visit us@trenthornpodcast.com to keep our channel sponsor free. Now, the Jordan Peterson Christian phenomena is an odd one because he is famously ambiguous about his religious beliefs, but many people also see Peterson as a kind of Christian figure.
There have even been entire books written about him and his relationship to the Christian faith. I think Jordan Peterson is popular with an extremely frustrating for Christians. For this reason, Peterson is very good at explaining the bad news of the secular life, but he is not able to explain the good news of Christianity when it comes to the bad news. Peterson initially rose to prominence as a critic of Canadian transgender laws that threaten free speech by compelling people to use certain pronouns. In this iconic interview from 2018, Peterson shuts down a Canadian broadcaster who floats the silly idea that people have the right to not be offended.
CLIP:
You cited freedom of speech in that why should your right to freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended
Because in order to be able to think you have to risk being offensive, I mean, look at the conversation we’re having right now, like you’re certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that? It’s been rather uncomfortable.
Well, I’m very glad I put you on the spot.
I’ve exercised my finger speech. You get my point. It’s like you’re doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell’s going on, and that is what you should do. But you’re exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me, and that’s fine. I think more power to you as far as I’m concerned,
Except you haven’t sat there and I’m just trying to work that out. I mean,
Trent:
Peterson’s online lectures have garnered millions of views and many young men have been attracted to his message about masculinity and opposing political correctness in favor of what is actually true about reality. One of the Jubilee non theists in this recent discussion, even praised Peterson for this.
CLIP:
You and I agree on a lot. I mean when it comes to talking about how men should be masculine and things of that nature, you and I are 100% in agreement
Trent:
Through his books and lectures. Jordan Peterson has done a good job in exposing how modern secular liberalism contradicts what we know about reality and how it fails to fully explain the human person. Peterson has also shown how our identity can only be fully explained in a religious context, and his wife has gone one step further in formally embracing the Catholic faith. Though as you’ll see, Jordan Peterson remains fairly ambiguous about it. This background helps us to understand the good and the bad in Peterson’s recent jubilee appearance. Let’s start with the good. Peterson begins his appearance by saying
CLIP:
Atheists reject God, but they don’t understand what they’re
Trent:
Rejecting. I’ve seen this countless times. For example, many atheists think the following question is a kind of kill shot against arguments for God. If God created everything, then what created God? However, the question assumes that God is just one superpowered thing among other things, and so saying God caused the universe doesn’t answer the question because God is just one more thing that also has to be explained. But God isn’t one thing or one being among many God just is infinite being itself. God is the ultimate foundation of reality, the ground of being asking what created God is like asking what pulls the locomotive of a train. A locomotive is not like a box car or other cars on the train because it gives motion to all the other cars without receiving motion itself. Likewise, God, the uncreated creator of all is not like a creature because God gives existence to all creatures without receiving existence from anything. Philosophers say God’s essence or what God is just is existence or that he is. That’s why God told Moses and the burning bush that his name is I am that I am now watch as these two atheists who engage Jordan Peterson in spite of their individual claims to being well-informed on religion. Treat God as just one being among many. And if you don’t believe in certain gods, then you should reject the Christian God as well.
CLIP:
There are as many gods out there as there are believers because everybody has mutually exclusive and different views of what God is.
I don’t know anything about the Polynesian deity of lno.
So you’re rejecting something without knowledge of what you’re rejecting.
I’m not rejecting it no more than I’m rejecting anything. Do you believe in L? I don’t know anything about
Do you believe in lno?
Do you believe
That he has a deity that exists in the world, exists in the universe, that exists in the existence of everything,
Trent:
But the reason I don’t believe in Lno or Zeus or Thor isn’t because they are other gods. I arbitrarily reject because I prefer my own God. It’s because those things are not God at all. They fail the definition because God, as St. Anum said, is that which no greater can be thought. God is a maximally great being. So if Lno or Thor or the flying spaghetti monster had some limit in being finite or bound by time or space or being contingent, then they just aren’t capital GOD. They’re not God full stop. That’s why I don’t believe in them as God. Now, I might believe in them through other frameworks. For example, there could be a powerful creature like a demon that calls itself lno or some other name of a deity that is worshiped by people falsely but is not actually God. But these things are not God in the proper full sense of that term.
God just is the infinite explanation of all there is. Either the universe explains itself, has no explanation, is the product of an infinite chain of explanations, or the universe is explained by something which explains itself. And theistic philosophers have argued for thousands of years that only the last option makes logical sense, and we can then narrow down the faiths that believe in an infinite God like Islam or Baha or Judaism and realize Christianity is true among them because the Christian God revealed himself through Jesus Christ, specifically his resurrection from the dead. Next, Jordan Peterson does a good job of showing that secular morality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When he engages critics on the claim that
CLIP:
Morality and purpose cannot be found within science,
Trent:
And here he does a good job of showing that while science can describe behaviors and provide evolutionary explanations for why humans and chimpanzees and other social animals engage in certain behaviors, science cannot explain why we have a moral duty to engage in those moral behaviors.
CLIP:
We have examples of chimpanzees who actually have a basic understanding of fairness. If you give a chimpanzee two grapes, right, and his buddy gets three, right? He actually freaks out. But we have similar examples where we do animal tests, right? And
So morality is intrinsic,
I think,
So it precedes science.
I think that actually a better way to define it would be that social animals, which we are right, require some level of morality or into
What I’m not disagreeing.
Sure.
Why do they require that?
Because it’s the only way that social groups can actually survive, right? That’s
My point with regards to science. Thank you very much.
Trent:
Science can’t do this because science just tells us what the world is, not what the world ought to be. For more on this, see my previous episode where I critique atheist, Sam Harris’ attempts to ground morality in science. In this exchange, many of the atheists make it sound like morality is easy to have without God because it’s just obvious you should act in a way that benefits the most people.
CLIP:
Social animals, which we are require some level of morality.
My conscience is my sense of
Right or wrong. Yeah, exactly. Where does that come
From?
I would say that comes from an evolved capacity to empathize and a recognition of the benefits of engaging with and nurturing that capacity.
Trent:
Sam Harris, in his book, the Moral Landscape, seems to endorse a kind of utilitarianism that matches a similar definition of morality being the science of improving the wellbeing of conscious creatures. But later in this episode, Jordan Peterson says,
CLIP:
Atheists accept Christian morality but deny the religion’s foundational stories.
Trent:
He’s correct. For example, let’s say you’re an atheist who believes morality is just the self-evident fact that you should do what you can to improve the wellbeing of conscious creatures. The 1973 short story, the ones who walk away from MLUs describes a utopian society where life is perfect, but that perfection depends on one small child being kept starving and abused in a tiny cellar. It can’t be perfect unless this child suffers. And the narrator says this, to exchange all the goodness and grace of every life and oms for that single small improvement to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. Now, in the story, some people can accept this as the price of utopia, but others are disgusted and they walk away from this supposed paradise. And most of us consider that those who walk away are the heroes of the story who did the right thing? Now granted, that’s a science fiction example, but throughout human history, slavery was justified on the grounds that people do not have equal rights, and it was in the best way to promote everyone’s interests through an institution like slavery. Now, Jordan Peterson is good at pointing out that slavery was universal in human history, but it was distinctly Christian principles that eventually brought about its global abolition.
CLIP:
We’re talking about slavery. So many people bolstered it based on everyone, based on the Bible. They looked at it and they justified it in the United States and the deep south, they justified slavery. Yeah, but
The main thrust, the main thrust of Protestant thought in particular was stringently against slavery, and it was about the only movement in the history of the human race that had an anti-slavery
Direction.
All human societies were slave owning.
So you can’t blame that on the Bible if humanity decided,
Oh, wait, address that first.
What
On slavery, all human societies were slaves. So you can’t blame that on the Bible. Well, you can say it bolstered it. Well, not if you look at the broad sweep of history,
Trent:
Whether it’s a hypothetical like the ones who walk away from Olas or horrifying real life examples, secularism has a difficult time explaining in a non arbitrary way why we should treat everyone as having equal rights, even though we are all unequal in our abilities and it can’t explain why we should not exploit the minority if that will end up helping the majority. As Commander Spock would say,
CLIP:
Where I to invoke logic, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Trent:
But another problem is that this does not mean you should never cause a single creature to suffer in order to improve the wellbeing of others. When we incarcerate a murderer for life, we harm his wellbeing, but we also many other people’s wellbeing by making them feel safer. Of course you’ll say that’s different because the murderer deserves to suffer, but the child in Omahas does not deserve to suffer, which adds a new equation into the moral calculus. Science cannot discern the idea that human beings deserve to be treated in certain ways based on their actions or even their intrinsic moral worth. For example, you could improve the wellbeing of conscious creatures overall by painlessly, euthanizing, disabled children after birth, even mildly disabled children. But almost everyone agrees that this would be murder, not morality. So once again, Peterson is good at showing why the bad news is bad, but because he has not fully embraced a correct understanding of the Christian faith, he cannot explain why the good news is so good about how Christ redeems us and the whole world. For example, consider Peterson’s answer to the question, if there is a God, what’s the purpose of life?
CLIP:
If there is a God, what is the purpose of life?
Well, in the Christian tradition, the purpose of life is to engage in voluntary upward self-sacrifice so that the kingdom of heaven can be established on earth.
So you’re trying to make it to heaven and avoid hell.
Yes, that’s a good way of thinking
About it. What is the purpose of heaven? Do you understand? So here’s the deal.
At minimum, at minimum, it’s the opposite of endless suffering.
Trent:
Like with many in Peterson’s answers, there are glimpses of the truth here, but not the main point. In contrast to Peterson’s answer, the Baltimore catechism says this question, why did God make you answer? God made me to know him, to love him and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in heaven. But it seems that for Jordan Peterson, what matters is not so much what you believe or even your relationship with God, but what you do. The purpose of life is to inaugurate the kingdom of God. Heaven is at minimum a life without suffering or consider as other answers about what it means to believe being rooted in what you do rather than what you say
CLIP:
Optimally. What you say and what you do would be brought into harmony. But I would say if you had to prioritize, it should be what you attend to and what you act first. And that’s what Christ actually says in the gospels because he points to the Pharisees, for example, who say all the right things but don’t do any of the right things and points out very clearly that that’s not acceptable.
Trent:
So it seems like Jordan Peterson is not interested in identifying as a Christian as much as he’s interested in living like a Christian, and that has some merit because the Bible routinely condemns people who claim to be religious but don’t live that way. But this kind of anonymous Christian or Christian in deed, but not creed, that can only take you so far. It’s not the kind of faith you should have if you’re advertised as someone who is publicly defending Christianity against atheists out to attack it. The part of the Jubilee episode that got played the most online is this where Peterson says, everybody including atheists, worship something and one of the atheists, Danny tries to trap Peterson by linking him to the Catholic faith.
CLIP:
What’s your definition of worship? Attend to, attend to prioritize. Do Catholics sacrifice for what? Do Catholics attend to? Do they prioritize Mary over all other human beings?
No, I didn’t say over all did I? I didn’t add that to my
Definition. You understand?
I said there was a hierarchy
As well. You attended,
So you can attend to something trivially or you can attend to it deeply.
Now you’re adding stuff to the definition, but your original
Definition, I added the hierarchy part at the beginning.
Trent:
What’s making this exchange problematic is that we have to define the word worship. What does worship mean? Now, I know Jordan Peterson gets grief about over defining words, but a lot of people, atheists and even many Christians think worship is a binary category. Worship is something you either give to God or to no one else. You give it to God alone. But traditionally, the word worship has a range of meanings based on the idea of giving someone his or her worths ship, giving him or her what she is worth. It’s why we call a judge, your Honor, or in Canada, some mayors are called your worship. That’s why Catholics give the saints what they are worth, the respect that they are due and what God has done in their lives. And Catholics give even more respect and worth to the blessed Virgin Mary who said that all generations would call her blessed, but Catholics only give the highest worship sacrifice to God because God is the foundation of all reality and deserves our highest worship. But this whole part of this exchange, it just seemed odd to me like it was a Protestant trying to trip up an apostolic Christian, but then it gets thrown for a loop with Jordan Peterson’s response.
CLIP:
Are you familiar with the Immaculate conception? Why is that relevant? Because you go to a Catholic church, don’t you? You’ve attended recently. You’re interested in Catholicism, aren’t
You? Sure?
Alright. Are you familiar with their doctrines?
Somewhat.
Okay. You’re
Familiar. Their doctrines are very,
How do they regard Mary?
Why are you asking me
That? Because you’re a Christian. You say that. I haven’t claimed
That.
Well, what is this? Is this Christians versus atheist? I don’t know. You don’t know where you are right now?
Don’t be a smart ass
And I mean, well, you’re a Christian or you’re not. I
Won’t talk to you if you’re a smart
Ass. Either you’re a Christian or you’re not. Which one is it?
I could be either of them, but I don’t have to tell you. You could
Be. You don’t have to tell me. I was under the impress impression. I was invited to talk to a Christian. Am I not talking to a Christian?
No, you were invited to.
I think everyone should look at the title of the YouTube channel. You’re probably in the wrong YouTube video.
You’re really quite something.
You are, aren’t I? But you’re really quite nothing, right? You’re not a Christian. Oh yeah, I’m done with him.
Trent:
I agree. This was really frustrating because this round table was advertised, at least initially to the atheists who were invited as a chance to debate a Christian Jordan Peterson Can’t just say his beliefs on the matter are private when he publicly puts himself out there on these important issues. Though the atheist debating him doesn’t seem to have the most charming demeanor either. And while it’s good to show the flaws of a secular worldview, you need to do so in a way that steal man’s the other side. Consider what Jordan Peterson said on a recent interview on Pints of Aquinas.
CLIP:
What do you think the best argument for atheism is?
I don’t think there is a good argument for atheism. I think it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the world. So it’s, what would you say? It’s an illegal chess move.
Trent:
But even St. Thomas Aquinas said that the problem of evil and the possibility of a natural explanation for existence, these represented arguments for atheism that were at least worth engaging. And so Aquinas offers a response to them. The kind of dismissive rhetoric Jordan Peterson puts forward isn’t helpful when you’re trying to engage people who disagree with you. Now, we also need to remember that Jordan Peterson is a psychologist, not a philosopher. He has some good insights on the human condition, but when it gets into deeper metaphysical questions, I think he ends up over his skis. But the biggest frustration is that Jordan Peterson will get really, really close to affirming the Christian faith and then he’ll retreat again when it seems like he’s basically there. Consider what Peterson said to Alex O’Connor about Christ’s resurrection.
CLIP:
If I went back in time with a Panasonic video camera and put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, would the little LCD screen show a man walk out of that tomb? I would suspect, yes. So that to me seems like a belief in the historical event of the resurrection, or at least of Jesus leaving the tomb, which means that when somebody says, do you believe that Jesus frozen the dead? It doesn’t seem clear to me why you’re not able to just say, it would seem to me yes,
Because I have no idea what that means, and neither did the people who saw it.
Trent:
It’s just sad to see someone who is clearly thoughtful on important questions, be unable to fully embrace the truth God has revealed. I think part of this comes from Jordan and thinking that in order to be a free thinker who questions paradigms and seeks out the truth that he himself cannot be put in any neat and tidy boxes, consider what Jordan Peterson said about whether he’d ever follow his wife’s example and become Catholic.
CLIP:
What is stopping you from embracing the fate of your wife?
You mean all those pesky Catholics? I don’t know if anything is stopping me.
What’s holding you back?
I don’t think anything’s holding me back. Everybody’s got their own destiny. And so
Is it in yours?
Is it in mine? I would say it’s unlikely. But why do you say unlikely? I exist on the borders of things. So why is that? I dunno, but that’s how it is.
Trent:
I’ll close what I said previously in my episode on political Christianity, which I’ll link to below because there are other figures in that movement who have issues similar to Jordan Peterson. It would be tragic if Peterson felt like he could not be Catholic because his identity rests and being the kind of person who doesn’t settle for easy answers or lives on the margin. But I would tell Jordan Peterson that one can be a Catholic and spend a thousand lifetimes contemplating questions about God and the world for which there are no easy answers. And many of the saints are people that do not fit into neat and tidy boxes. Also, it’s okay to sometimes just have an easy answer in the interviews that he gives. It’s clear that Jordan Peterson loves his wife Tammy, and the meaning of those words he loves his wife are patently obvious to him.
No qualification is needed. Now, we shouldn’t have an immature, childish faith, but we should have the faith of a child and trust God in the same way that a toddler trusts his parent in the midst of a baffling world. That’s why our Lord said, unless you turn and become like children, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven. So while it’s fair to offer criticism of Jordan Peterson’s recent appearance on Jubilee, that should not overshadow our duty to respond to him with charity and pray for his continual conversion to Christ and to his church, thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.