Jordan Peterson vs Twenty Atheists Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: There’s a debate forum on YouTube that is very popular. It’s an entertaining format, kind of like the old musical chairs game that you played when you were a kid. Everyone scrambles to get in the seat opposite the main guest, and if you're the first to touch the chair you get to debate the guest for about 10 minutes unless the other participants vote you out. If they don't like the way it's going, they hold up a red flag, and when the majority of red flags fly you're out. They just hosted Jordan Peterson to face off with 20 atheists. By the way, several of them complained that they thought that they were invited to debate a Christian. But Jordan Peterson would not claim to be a Christian even when pressed point blank. He said he keeps that to himself. “I don't need to tell you things like that.” But he has joined other intellectuals in praising the Christian worldview as the greatest influence on the world and the only hope for civilization. Bill, you've been on the platform with Jordan. We've had some podcasts on him. What do you make of his religious views?

DR. CRAIG: I think he is deliberately evasive and very cagey. This keeps the interest in him going. It heightens the mystery and the controversy. As I've said before, if I were his public relations agent I would advise him to keep on evading the question because it just contributes to his popularity. But I want to say about this exchange that I loved the format. When I heard that it was Jordan Peterson versus 20 atheists, I thought, “Oh, this is going to be a chaotic mess. Everybody talking over one another. Terrible!” But then when I watched it, as you described it, I thought it was just extraordinarily well done. Really entertaining and really interesting. Now, in this exchange Jordan Peterson defends four basic claims or puts forward these four basic theses for debate. First, that atheists don't understand what they're rejecting. Second, that everybody worships something. Thirdly, that morality and purpose cannot be found within science. And finally, that atheists accept Christian morality while rejecting its foundational stories. Two things occur to me about these four theses. First of all is that they are all plausibly true. Some of them, I think, even obviously true. Therefore, it's very bizarre that the students would seek to try to refute these, and most of the arguments that they bring are not really relevant to Peterson's four theses as stated. But then the second thing that I noticed about his four claims is that these claims are largely socio-psychological claims which are frankly tangential and irrelevant to the truth of Christian theism. You notice that in this dialogue there was no discussion of arguments for the existence of God or evidence for the Gospels and for Jesus. Rather, the whole thing was about these socio-cultural issues like: Do atheists borrow their morality from Christianity? Does everybody worship something even though they do not know it? I'm inclined to say in response to these questions, who cares? These are questions that have no relevance to the truth of Christian theism. You could go either way on these questions as a Christian. It wouldn't matter how you answered these issues. So, in general, as interesting as these questions might be, I think they're basically talking about the wrong things. I suspect that's probably because Peterson is a psychologist, and so he chooses to remain within his own discipline. Now, that's good. That's a strong suit – that he stays in his own field of expertise. But the downside is that we hear no positive case at all presented for the truth of Christian theism.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's look at those four claims then. They called it on the show “prompts” to get the discussion started. Here's Dr. Peterson's first prompt. Clip number one.

DR. PETERSON: My first claim: Atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they're rejecting.

KEVIN HARRIS: Before he elaborates, what's your initial reaction to that, Bill? You've chided Internet atheists for calling God, “Sky Daddy” or “the Flying Spaghetti Monster” and related things which shows ignorance of theism in general.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that is clearly correct that this claim is true. I do not think atheists in general have an adequate conception of God as a maximally great being – a being that is necessary, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, perfectly good, and so forth. Their conception of God is much more like Zeus than the conception of a maximally great being. One reason I'm sure that this is true among atheists is that I think it's true among Christians! I think most Christians in the pews do not have a very profound concept of God and have a very limited, finite notion of who God is. So if that's true of Christian believers, how much more true is that of secularists? I would encourage our viewers here today to take a look at our series of Zangmeister videos on the attributes of God. This is an ongoing series under development now that discusses attributes like incorporeality, necessity, self-existence, eternity, and so forth. I think that this will help to expand your concept of God immeasurably.

KEVIN HARRIS: When he made this prompt, they started scrambling to get in that chair. The first atheist up once studied for the priesthood, and he bristles at Peterson's prompt. Check this out. Clip number two.

ATHEIST: It seems kind of like this No True Scotsman type of fallacy in which you're the arbiter of people's aims and how they understand those aims to be. How is it that you can claim that people don't know something that you know about their life despite not having met them?

DR. PETERSON: It's obviously a generic claim just like the atheist’s claim that there's no God. It is a generic claim. In your case it would have to be specified more, and I'm not claiming to understand what was going on in your mind. But my experience with atheists is twofold. They have a very reductive notion of what constitutes God (let's say in the Judeo-Christian tradition). They've often been hurt by someone who was religious or by the religious enterprise or perhaps by God himself so to speak, and that's left them with animus.

KEVIN HARRIS: Several things there. The No True Scotsman fallacy. I think it's been a few years since we talked about that. Is that a real fallacy? Peterson seems to be citing mere psychological reasons for being an atheist.

DR. CRAIG: The No True Scotsman fallacy is an attempt to accuse someone of making a glittering generalization. So, for example, suppose I say Scotsmen love haggis, and your interlocutor says, "Well, what about McGregor there? McGregor doesn't like haggis." And you respond, "Oh, well, McGregor, he's no true Scotsman." The idea here is that you ignore these counterexamples. Notice that Peterson doesn't respond that way. He's not committing this fallacy. He does not say, “Well, you're no true atheist.” Not at all. What he says is you're the exception that proves the rule. He uses the word “generic.” He says it's a generic claim. Unfortunately, he gives a bad example – a bad illustration – of a generic claim: atheism. That's not right. The atheist doesn't claim that “Gods don't exist, but, well, maybe some do.” Rather, what Peterson is saying is that, “I am making an inductive generalization.” What one can distinguish here is between a universal generalization (which admits no exceptions) and an inductive generalization (which does admit exceptions). So, for example, if I say “cigarette smoking causes cancer,” that isn't refuted by you're saying, “My uncle smoked all his life, and he didn't get cancer.” He is the exception that proves the rule. It's an inductive generalization that is true, and I think that's exactly the case with regard to this first claim that atheists don't understand what they are rejecting. They have an inadequate conception of who God is.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip, Peterson asked him to define what he's rejecting. Check this out.

DR. PETERSON: Let's start with your claim. How do you define the god that you're rejecting? What is “God” to you? You studied in the church. You found that unsatisfactory. How would you characterize what you rejected?

ATHEIST: I think the average Christian believer, when they say that they're Christian and they believe, they mean some sort of God that is all-powerful, all-perfect, is somehow involved in the matters of this world, and that we look to them through wisdom and with the Logos incarnate in Christ. It also seems like you don't believe in religion in the way that the average Christian says that they believe in religion, and there are as many gods out there as there are believers because everybody has mutually exclusive and different views of what God is. So it seems like . . .

DR. PETERSON: Well, if everybody had mutually exclusive views of what God is no one could speak to each other. The mere fact of communication presumes a commonality of assumption and definition.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's a guy who seems to have a good definition, and Peterson admits that he was making a more general claim about what atheists reject. Bill?

DR. CRAIG: I think that this student did offer a fairly good definition of God. He refers to God as an all-perfect being, I think, and that captures the idea of maximal greatness just so long as you have a good conception of what it means to be a perfect being. So this student would be one of the exceptions to this inductive generalization if indeed he does have a good concept of what a perfect being would be like – what sort of attributes he has. Clearly, the fact that there are a diversity of understandings or conceptions of God doesn't undermine the concept of God as a maximally great being or a perfect being. It would simply show that many people have a defective concept of God. I think that is, in fact, the case.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next debater who asked Dr. Peterson if he rejects the Polynesian god Lono. Clip number four.

ATHEIST: Tell me everything that you know about the Polynesian deity Lono.

DR. PETERSON: I don't know anything about the Polynesian deity Lono.

ATHEIST: So you're rejecting something without knowledge of what you're rejecting.

DR. PETERSON: I'm not rejecting it no more than I'm rejecting . . .

ATHEIST: Do you believe in Lono? Do you believe that he is a deity that exists in the world, exists in the universe, that exists in the existence of everything? Do you believe that . . .

DR. PETERSON: I'll answer that question once you answer my question which is do I reject everything that I'm ignorant of. Because that's your presupposition that undergirds your argument, and unless you can prove that that's valid then there's no point.

ATHEIST: My question is quite simple.

DR. PETERSON: Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's formulated accurately.

ATHEIST: Do you believe that Lono exists? Yes or no?

DR. PETERSON: I'm not going to answer that question for the reasons I just described. You already insisted that if I'm ignorant of something I reject it. Do you think that everyone in the world has to know everything simultaneously for that to be valid and true?

ATHEIST: I think in order for your argument to be true. In order for it to be true that we atheists don't understand what we're rejecting, then you need to also apply that to yourself and to Christians and to Muslims and to any other person on this Earth where if you don't understand what you're rejecting the belief in then you can't reject the belief in it. That's the implication of your . . .

DR. PETERSON: I didn't say that I rejected the belief in Lono. I said I didn't know who Lono was. I didn't say anything about rejecting.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm sure you see where this is going, Bill. Would Peterson have to become familiar with some 25,000 plus gods in order to reject belief in them?

DR. CRAIG: It's really hard to understand the kid's point. I think that he wants to turn the tables on Peterson by showing that Peterson also rejects something that he doesn't understand, to which I would say, “So what?” How does that even begin to answer Peterson's claim that atheists reject God without understanding the concept of God? The fact that Peterson does the same thing doesn't do anything to refute Peterson's claim. Moreover, notice that Peterson says he doesn't reject Lono because he doesn't know what it is. He doesn't believe in it, but he doesn't reject it either. He's just agnostic. And that is a perfectly respectable position – to be agnostic. When you think about it, maybe Lono is actually the Indonesian word for “Jesus Christ,” and so in that case, if you understood it, you would not reject it. So I think the kid’s argument is just an attempt to have what philosophers call a tu quoque argument, or in more popular parlance, “So’s your old man!” He wants to say, “We reject something we don't understand. Well, you also reject something that you don't understand” Which is irrelevant to the truth of Peterson's claim, and in any case not true since Peterson takes an agnostic position on Lono.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, it was only a matter of time before conscience and morality would come up. Sure enough, the next debater goes there.

ATHEIST: OK. So that's how I'm defining my conscience. My conscience is my sense of right and wrong.

DR. PETERSON: Where does that come from?

ATHEIST: I would say that comes from an evolved capacity to empathize and a recognition of the benefits of engaging with and nurturing that capacity. And that empathy is constrained and guided by reason. For example, I am driving down the highway. There's a kitten in the road. I'm going to empathetically feel, “Oh, my God. I want to save the kitten.” But then reasonably, I'm going to get hit by a car. So that's sort of the process through which I make ethical decisions – constrained by reason.

DR. PETERSON: Do you think that people can differ in their response to something empathically?

ATHEIST: Yes.

DR. PETERSON: Is there a mediating principle that can tell you one person who's empathic and another person who's empathic that disagree who's correct?

ATHEIST: Interesting. I mean, I think that's where we'd have to talk it out. Right? We do that in real life all the time. Whether that's a discussion with a friend about the right thing to do in a situation. Whether that's a policy discussion about law. That's where we can converse with each other, think about things, explain our perspectives, and then kind of reach a conclusion. Right? I think we do that all the time.

KEVIN HARRIS: The atheist gentleman is apparently comfortable with there not being an objective standard and just says we have to talk it out. I'm wondering, because we do talk about having moral intuition and things like that, is that a good answer to just appeal to moral intuition?

DR. CRAIG: I think the difficulty here is that Peterson took the question down a false route by asking the student, “Where does your conscience come from?” That leads then to this sociological discussion about empathy. But that says absolutely nothing about the moral value or normativity of empathy. Peterson tries to come back to that by saying people can be empathetic about different things. One person might feel very sorry for the Israelis who were attacked on October 7. Someone else might feel very sorry for the Gazans who have been attacked by the Israel IDF. So how do you determine, without some sort of objective standard, right and wrong, good and evil? It's not enough just to appeal to feelings of empathy because those are subjective. I think that the deeper point here, which is unfortunately, as I say, not stated clearly by Peterson's prompt or claim, is whether or not there is some sort of foundation for the affirmation of objective moral values and duties that go beyond mere subjective preferences or patterns of behavior ingrained by biological evolution.

KEVIN HARRIS: We have a lot more to get to. Let's pick it up right there next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. Thank you for your support of Reasonable Faith, and thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.^[1]