Jordan, Dawkins, and Maher Wrestle With God

DR. CRAIG: Hello. This is William Lane Craig. Here at Reasonable Faith we are in the midst of our fall matching grant campaign. From now until the end of the year, every gift you give to Reasonable Faith will be doubled by a group of generous donors, up to $250,000. So this is a tremendous way to double the impact of your giving to the Lord’s work. Remember this offer goes until December 31st at midnight, so I hope that you'll consider this and be a part of our fall matching grant campaign.

KEVIN HARRIS: Jordan Peterson has a new book coming out called We Who Wrestle With God. He recently talked about it with Richard Dawkins and comedian Bill Maher, both atheists. As we’ll see in these clips, they both press him on similar things. Peterson’s specialty as a psychologist prompts him to mine the Bible and other religious texts for literary and cultural archetypes and symbols. This is not your area of specialization, but do you have any interest in this area or have you read much on it?

DR. CRAIG: This is not an area in which I have studied, and so I haven't read much on it. But nevertheless I am really interested in learning about it, and I think that Jordan Peterson, as a psychologist, has a great deal to say about these biblical narratives from the standpoint of their psychological insight into human nature and how we relate to one another. I value what he's doing.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the first clip with Dawkins asking Peterson if Biblical characters like Cain actually existed. Here's the first clip.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: The fact that I care about are the facts that are true and have evidence going for them, and I'm not that interested in symbols. I think, Dr. Peterson, you're drunk on symbols.

DR. PETERSON: Yes. I've heard that comment.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: For example, I counted up in your book, We Who Wrestle with God, the number of references to Cain. There are 356 references to Cain in the book, and 20 references to the descendants of Cain. You're obsessed with Cain because Cain is symbolic of evil – all the evil in the world, you more or less blame Cain for. You don't believe Cain actually existed, I presume.

DR. PETERSON: I think of Cain as . . . well . . .

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Do you believe Cain existed?

DR. PETERSON: I think the pattern that Cain represents is an eternal pattern . . .

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Ah, yes. That’s different.

DR. PETERSON: . . . and so it's a higher level of existence.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: That's different. I realize . . .

DR. PETERSON: There are Cain types who exist.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Yeah, yeah. There are Cain types, but Cain himself . . . I mean, you give the game away where you say in your book, “Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in the natural way.” Now, that betrays you, as it were, pretending you think they really existed because you wouldn't have said they were born in a natural way unless you were muddling up facts with symbols there. . . . I care about facts. I mean, did they exist or did they not exist?

DR. PETERSON: Well, I can imagine a situation where when the story was originated that it referred to two actual brothers.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dawkins wants to know if the account of Cain and Abel is actually true, and Peterson really doesn't want to answer the question. He says two actual brothers may be the basis for the account. This exchange sounds like it relates to some of your research on mytho-history, Bill.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I do think you're right that it does. I must say, without wanting to be condescending in any way, I feel sorry for Richard Dawkins. His naive literalism is just aesthetically and spiritually impoverished. It would prevent you from getting in touch with the deepest elements of the human spirit. If he took that naive literalism seriously he could not appreciate forms of literature which are not literal. I find it hard to believe that Richard Dawkins really sees no value, for example, in the plays and the sonnets of Shakespeare or the literature of Dostoevsky like Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov which are some of the most profound and important novels ever written even though they are fiction. Or, take Aesop's fables, for example. As a boy reading Aesop's fables, I learned a great deal about moral lessons that are taught in these fables. So Dawkins’ literalism is just really impoverished, and I don't think any of us should limit ourselves in that way. Jordan Peterson has clearly got the better view here.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip, Dawkins presses Peterson further on the truth of the Scriptures. Here's a clip.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Dostoevsky was a great writer. What makes you think the writers of Genesis were a great writer? Who were they? We know nothing about them.

DR. PETERSON: Well, I think they were great writers because I think I understand the patterning of the stories and what it points to. I think the idea, for example, that Cain and Abel are emblematic of two opposed patterns of adaptation to the world is brilliant. It's almost brilliant beyond imagining especially because the story is so insanely compressed. It's certainly evident to me as a clinician that the patterns that are portrayed in the story of Cain and Abel play themselves out in the real world continually and terribly.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: You think the author of that story in Genesis was a literary genius?

DR. PETERSON: I think that there's a spirit of literary genius at work across millennia crafting that story so that it has almost an infinite depth.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: That's very interesting. If they really did evolve over time, if you could actually trace successive manuscripts. You can't do that. There's presumably a couple of Hebrew manuscripts and a Greek one. What do you mean when you say . . .?

DR. PETERSON: You criticized the biblical text at one point – correct me if I've got this wrong, because I don't want to get this wrong – you said that there isn't anything in the biblical text that constitutes, let's say, significant original discovery, which is something that you'd expect if it was of divine providence, let's say. I was thinking about that objection, and I think that one of the discoveries that the text lays bear in an insanely brilliant manner is that the foundation of the community is sacrifice – that that's an appropriate conceptualization. And you can see the concept of sacrifice evolve across the biblical texts as their sequenced chronologically in the overall story that makes up the biblical text.

KEVIN HARRIS: Peterson has moved toward theism these days. I think that the insights he says that are found in Scripture are further convincing him. But Dawkins seems unimpressed.

DR. CRAIG: Here, I think, again, that Jordan Peterson is right on the money. You don't need to know the name of the author in order to recognize literary genius. If Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov were written under a pseudonym and we didn't know who actually wrote it, that would not affect in any way the literary genius that is expressed in that novel. As Peterson points out, in these Genesis narratives the literary genius is evident, and it doesn't matter that there was a long tradition history behind the stories before they finally came to be written down and incorporated into the Pentateuch. We do not know what oral sources or written sources lay behind the primeval history and the stories of Adam and Eve and of creation, but we do have the final issue of that long tradition history and, as Peterson says, it is full of psychological insights and deep truths. He mentions, for example, the sacrifice motif. I would also want to point to the motif of Sabbath-keeping. This is one of the central identifying marks of Judaism, and in the narrative it is grounded in God's Sabbath rest on the seventh day of creation. He works for six days and then he rests from his creative work. This is taken to be a primordial grounding of the Jewish practice of Sabbath-keeping which was absolutely central to their identity. So the narrative, as Peterson says, is deep. It is rich. And that is not in any way evacuated or trivialized by saying that we don't know the name of the author.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, Alex O’Connor is moderating this exchange. He tries to clarify the issue of divine inspiration. Next clip.

ALEX O'CONNOR: OK. So the criticism is the Bible as a text gives us nothing to indicate that it has divine origin. There's nothing that we can read in it where we think there's no way this idea could have evolved were it not divinely put into this text. That's a criticism that perhaps Professor Dawkins made in the past.

DR. PETERSON: I think it's reflective of some order that's so profound and implicit that there isn't a better way of describing it than divine. But I don't really care if we look at that from the bottom-up as a biological phenomenon or from the top-down. I don't think it makes any difference.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Well, let's go back to what you said earlier which I was very interested in. You implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved in progression during a series of manuscripts, presumably. I think that's genuinely interesting, but it's a huge difference. It's not the same thing. I mean, either it was divinely inspired or it wasn't.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think you might be more in line with Dawkins on this. I mean, the Scriptures are either divinely inspired or they're not.

DR. CRAIG: That's just the law of excluded middle! Either p or not-p. You've got no other choice. Either they're inspired or they're not. But what Peterson points out is whether they were formed from the bottom-up or from the top-down is irrelevant to the quality of inspiration. The bottom-up metaphor would be the metaphor for a long tradition history lying behind the Genesis narratives. The top-down model would be the dictation model of inspiration where God whispered into the ear of Moses, “Write down these words,” and he wrote the narrative. And Dawkins seems to think that only the top-down model of dictation is compatible with inspiration. That is a view that is rejected universally by Christian theologians and biblical scholars. There is no problem at all in God using and supervising a long tradition history to form the Genesis narratives for us which are now for us God's inspired Word.

KEVIN HARRIS: If Dawkins would get that it would change his life. I really think so. Here's the next clip. Peterson is still a little fuzzy on whether the biblical texts are true.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Are you saying that Jesus really did die for our sins? I mean, do you believe that? Do you believe that as a fact? That Jesus died for our sins?

DR. PETERSON: There are elements of the texts that I don't claim to understand. What my experience has been is that the more deeply I look into these texts, the more I learn. That doesn't mean that I can proclaim full knowledge of what the texts proclaim. Although it's perhaps even impossible for creatures embodied like us to get a grip on quantum phenomena – the strange wave-particle duality, for example – we have ample evidence that it works and stellarly. And I would say exactly the same thing about the biblical text. They run into a mystery. There is a horizon of mystery which I do not claim to penetrate, but insofar as I've been able to understand the text, every time I make an improvement in understanding it reveals something to me that's just life-shattering.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Quantum physics is deeply mysterious, and you're saying that biblical texts are deeply mysterious. The difference is quantum physics – the predictions you derive from quantum physics – are fulfilled to the umpteenth decimal place. By umpteenth decimal place I mean, I think it was Richard Feynman says, equivalent to predicting the width of North America to the nearest hair's breadth. Now that's impressive.

DR. PETERSON: No doubt.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: The mystery there, as it were, gains its credentials by its predictions. The mysteries of the Bible don't have any credentials at all as far as I can make out.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dawkins says the crucifixion accounts and quantum mechanics are a false analogy.

DR. CRAIG: Let's take the statement that they used: Jesus died for our sins. There are two parts to that statement. The statement that Jesus died is a historical statement that can be verified by historical evidence. This is a truth which is universally agreed upon by historians and biblical critics – that Jesus of Nazareth did in fact perish by Roman execution around AD 30. So that part of the statement is verifiable – that Jesus died. The second part of the statement “for our sins” is a theological interpretation that gives the meaning of his death. It attempts to discern the meaning that lay behind this death on the cross. It wasn't just a tragic accident of history. It was for our sins and for our redemption. That part of the statement is not comparably verifiable because that's a theological interpretation, but the factual part is. Dawkins wants to say that the predictions of quantum mechanics are empirical and verifiable whereas the mysteries in the Bible have no credentials. That is simply false. The Gospels are historical documents. They are similar to ancient biographies, and they are therefore factually checkable by historians examining the evidence. So with respect to the historical truths that they contain, they are historically verifiable. They are credible. They have credentials, as Dawkins would put it. But then what Peterson discerns is the deeper theological meaning of these events. He says when he plumbs the meaning of the text, he finds it shattering in what it tells us about human existence. So, again, I am so impressed with Jordan Peterson on this score. I think he's got it exactly right.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the final clip with Dawkins and O’Connor and Peterson.

ALEX O'CONNOR: Do you think, for example, if you were looking in Scripture for something which would identify this as a God-given text, maybe you as a scientist would look for some scientific information. It might have told you the shape of DNA or something like that. Do you think that a literary brilliance of a similar kind or a similar intensity that if the Bible is not a scientific text you might be looking for some scientific fact which it couldn't have otherwise known. Is it possible that some kind of genius moral move or literary move could also indicate that this is something more impressive.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: You more or less asked me what would impress me. I'm a naive literalist, and so I would say if any prophet had said something like, “The world is just one object rotating around the Sun” – something like that. They never do. I mean, it's always some kind of moral lesson which leaves me cold.

ALEX O'CONNOR: Why is it that there is no . . . they say that God meets you where you're at, right? And there are some people who just care about scientific truth. That's what they know. That's their profession. Why is there not anything in the Bible for them?

KEVIN HARRIS: I think this is a question that you should answer rather than Peterson. He does give an answer. He tries to meet that criterion. A lot of Christian apologists have tried to meet Dawkins' standard by appealing to alleged scientific knowledge in the Bible.

DR. CRAIG: I think that is completely misconceived because the Bible is not intended to be a scientific book. Though I have to note at least in passing that although it doesn't teach heliocentrism, as Dawkin would like, it does teach the beginning of the universe which is far more remarkable and has come to be confirmed in the 20th century through contemporary cosmology. But I think O’Connor is on the right track here. There is moral or spiritual or literary truth revealed in the Bible that is deeply meaningful. Here, again, Dawkins says “I'm a naive literalist. These moral lessons leave me cold.” I think that shows once again just how impoverished this man is that he cannot appreciate or discern these moral or literary or aesthetic or spiritual virtues in texts like these. In response to O’Connor’s question, “Why is there nothing in the Bible for those who care only about scientific truth?” Why isn't there something for those who are so impoverished as spiritually and morally as Dawkins is? I think that Galileo, the great astronomer, put it exactly right. He said the purpose of the Bible is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. The message of the Bible – of salvation, of how to go to heaven – is the far more important lesson. That is the lesson that we need to hear, and we need to learn and to profit from.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to a couple of clips. Peterson and Bill Maher who says religion is supremist.

BILL MAHER: What has made people go to war more than anything? Belief in who's the real God. I mean, religion – I could take any number of reasons why I think it's better to junk the whole thing – but start with religions are supremist just by their nature. If you're telling people what happens when you die, which nobody knows, and you're telling who the Great Master of the Universe is, you kind of have to be in a place where you can't abide other thoughts on the subject. Certainly all religions are like that. Islam is super-supremist in that way. A lot of the people today who are speaking for it will tell you right to your face – “Why am I supporting this? Because Islam is the best. Of course. Obviously. That's why we justify these things.” Certainly, the Bible – same thing. I mean, God is very supremist.

KEVIN HARRIS: I guess that's why God is called the Supreme Being.

DR. CRAIG: I don't even know what the word “supremist” means. What does he mean by supremist? And why is atheism not in exactly the same sense supremist? The atheist also tells us what happens when we die. And as for the old canard that religion has been the source of wars – the worst wars in history have been carried out by atheistic regimes like Mao Tse-Tung's cultural revolution in which 25 million Chinese perished. Or Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Or Stalin's purges of Ukraine and the millions that were killed through that. There is no way in which you can indict religion as being supremist that would not with equal justification apply to Bill Maher's atheism.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more clip. In this one, Bill Maher talks about the self-correcting nature of science.

BILL MAHER: That's the big argument against religion versus science. It's self-correcting. We can be self-correcting. Religion, to a lot of people, seems too rigid. Its virtue is that it's set in stone. “This is what we believe.” That's what they're counting on. People want that sort of certainty about something. It's not going to change. That's what the Pope is always telling.

DR. PETERSON: One of the criticisms that Christ levies against the Pharisees in particular is exactly that criticism. He says to them – this is one of the things that sets himself up for crucifixion because it's a very vicious insult – he tells the Pharisees that they worship their own doctrines as if they're religious truths and that they would have killed the prophets had they been around in the time of the prophets that they purport to worship. They would have killed them. He said that they walk across the graves of their own prophets. They haunt the graves of their own prophets. That's a good way of thinking about it. He accuses them of a very deep cynicism. He's trying to make the same point you're making which is that you're not supposed to worship the static doctrines of men as if they're religious doctrines and that there's something in the transformation process that isn't encapsulated in, say, the letter of the law. What would you say? You don't privilege the letter of the law over the spirit of the law.

KEVIN HARRIS: Is Peterson interpreting what Jesus said correctly?

DR. CRAIG: No, I don't think so. Jesus came to fulfill the law, not to abolish the law. But I think the more interesting point here is the self-correcting nature of science. That is one of the glories of science. Because it is a description of the empirical universe in which we live, reality has a way of getting in the way of postmodern theorizing and relativism. Reality imposes a tremendous constraint upon successful theorizing about the world. By contrast, philosophy and religion are not so closely tethered to the empirical world as physical science. But, as I alluded to previously, history is so tethered, and Christianity is a historical religion. It is founded upon the truth of certain historical facts which are open to investigation and confirmation. Maher’s idea that religion is set in stone is just naive. It's true there are core truths in our understanding of Christianity, but we are open to correction and development in Christian doctrine. Just take, for example, the concept of God. At one time, it was very widely believed that God is timeless, immutable, and impassible. But I think relatively few philosophers and theologians today would affirm those attributes of God. I don't. So the concept of God can be revised in line with biblical and theological reflection. And since the Bible is under-determinative with regard to these conceptions, biblical Christians are very free to reflect upon these things and to develop the doctrines in different ways that they find the most coherent. That's one of the most exciting things about Christian philosophy – far from being set in stone, this is an ongoing and creative enterprise.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm sure you have plenty of concluding thoughts on what we've seen today in these clips, but Jordan Peterson has a huge following. I wonder if he will continue to influence this archetypal view of Scripture? On the positive side, his new book may encourage a renewed interest in the Bible, especially among the millions of young men who follow him who may not be reading the Scriptures at all.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I have not read Jordan Peterson, but on the basis of the clips that you’ve shown me today I have to say I am very impressed with this man and with the depth of his insights.^[1]