Jordan Peterson vs. Twenty Atheists Part Two

KEVIN HARRIS: Here’s Peterson’s next claim – his next prompt – and, not surprisingly, science enters the picture.

DR. PETERSON: My next claim is that morality and purpose cannot be found within science.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is familiar territory, and as the discussion continues it becomes obvious that Dr. Peterson pretty much concurs with your view on the limits and the domain of science.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. This is one of those claims that is just obviously true and could only be disputed by someone who didn't understand it. Science is an exploration of the natural world and does not speak to the issues of ethics. It does not tell us what is right or wrong; what is good or evil. It is morally neutral just as mathematics is morally neutral and doesn't speak to ethical issues. Certainly science doesn't tell us whether there is, for example, a purpose to the evolutionary process on Earth, that it's aimed at something. So this is one of those claims that for anybody who understands science and ethics is obviously true.

KEVIN HARRIS: Science and morality continues with this next debater. Here's the clip.

ATHEIST: Morality is actually something that we do see. We actually have examples of Neanderthals. An older individual is found in a tribe missing an arm, missing teeth, still alive somehow in his 40s and 50s. Typically, if you're a Neanderthal, you can't eat, you can't hunt, you die. Right? We know that members of a tribe were taking care of him. So we know that at some level early in our evolutionary history we actually developed altruism. But we have similar examples where we do animal tests.

DR. PETERSON: And so morality is intrinsic. So it precedes science. Is that right?

ATHEIST:  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 . . .

DR. PETERSON: Into what? I'm not disagreeing. Why do they require that?

ATHEIST: Because it's the only way that social groups can actually survive.

DR. PETERSON: That's my point with regards to science. Thank you very much. Precisely the point that you just made – that science has to exist within a moral framework that isn't in itself scientific.

ATHEIST: How is that not scientific?

DR. PETERSON: Because it's not derived from the scientific process as you just indicated.

ATHEIST: It doesn’t need to be derived from the scientific process, it’s just that we are social animals and we need that to exist as a group.

DR. PETERSON: I agree. But you pointed to the morality of Neanderthals, to the morality of chimpanzees. They didn't derive that from science.

ATHEIST: They don't need to. That's not how that works.

DR. PETERSON: That’s my point.

ATHEIST: Science explains it.

DR. PETERSON: No, science doesn't explain morality.

KEVIN HARRIS: That's interesting what he was saying about the Neanderthals.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Was this what you were talking about earlier? The young man seems to be confusing the scientific measurement of the effects of morality and morality itself.

DR. CRAIG: Right. The young fellow here is saying that moral beliefs arise because we are social animals, and among social animals cooperative behavior has a selective advantage in the struggle for survival and so will be passed on to future generations. Not only among human beings but also among other social animals like elephants and pigs you see this sort of cooperative and even apparently altruistic behavior. But that says absolutely nothing about the objectivity of moral values. This is where Peterson just goes completely wrong. He thinks the kid is proving his point and says that it shows that there is morality among animals. Peterson even speaks of chimpanzee morality. This is just a complete misnomer. These are merely biological behavior traits that are ingrained into a species in the struggle for survival by natural selection. They have nothing to do with normativity or moral values about what one ought or ought not to do. That's so easy to see. If you were to rewind the film of human evolution and shoot it over again, a very different sort of creature might have evolved with a very different set of moral values. And by what right could we say to them that our values are right and theirs are wrong? On a naturalistic basis you cannot. So there's a fundamental confusion here, unfortunately that both of them are laboring under, that the sorts of patterns of cooperative behavior existing in the animal kingdom is moral behavior.

KEVIN HARRIS: The next debater picks up the theme and continues with morality and purpose. Clip number eight.

ATHEIST: If you're saying that morality and purpose cannot come from science, is the opposite of that true that morality and purpose can only come from God?

DR. PETERSON: That's a way of defining it. Yes. That's right. That's good. So I would say that with regard to the first claim, say, atheists don't understand what they're rejecting because I would say by definition God is the unity upon which moral claims are based. That's a definition.

ATHEIST: OK. If there is a God, what is the purpose of life?

DR. PETERSON: 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.

KEVIN HARRIS: I want to stop the clip right there. I actually like Peterson's definition of Christian purpose – to bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth. The Lord's Prayer. And he argues that the atheist wants that, too. Just so you know, the debater goes on to argue that he can act morally even if there was no God, and Peterson doesn't disagree with that.

DR. CRAIG: Right. I would say rather, in the words of the Westminster Catechism, that the purpose of life is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We were made to know God. The fulfillment and end of human existence is to be found in loving fellowship with God.

KEVIN HARRIS: I couldn't resist this next clip. It's a topic that's near and dear to our hearts.

ATHEIST: Also, if you believe in an all-knowing God then free will is impossible because people like Graham Oppy make arguments about the incompatibility of omniscience and free will – that if God created this world, if he chose this world instead of that world, then he makes it causally inevitable every single action that you were going to make. If he made a world where we were just electrons in love then none of this would have happened. But by making us in this world, knowing exactly what's going to happen in the future, it makes all of those events inevitable which means that they're all causally determined which means that we have no free will. If you believe in an all-knowing God that made everything.

DR. PETERSON: Well, have it your way.

KEVIN HARRIS: I hope everybody got that. Peterson said, “If you choose to believe that, go ahead.” But the debater brings up Graham Oppy. I'm not aware of Oppy arguing that God's knowing what one will freely choose eliminates free will.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I am not aware that Professor Oppy argues in favor of this sort of theological fatalism anywhere. I can't help but suspect that the student here is just involved in named-dropping. With respect to what he says, he has a fundamental confusion here between fatalism and causal determinism. He thinks that if God foreknows everything that will happen that everything is causally determined to happen, and that's just a confusion. Fatalism is the doctrine that everything that happens happens necessarily. It doesn't need to be causally determined. It's just logically fated to occur. In the ancient world, Greek fatalism was purely logical. If it's true that I will eat pizza for lunch next Saturday then necessarily I will eat pizza for lunch next Saturday. On the other hand, causal determinism is the view that all of our actions are causally determined by prior events leading up to and simultaneous with those actions. That's a fundamental difference. Fatalism doesn't imply or require causal determinism. Now, the argument for theological fatalism based on divine foreknowledge is simply logically fallacious. The basic argument goes like this. Premise one: Necessarily, if God foreknows X then X will happen. Premise two: God foreknows X. Premise three: Therefore, necessarily X will happen. And that commits a fallacy in modal logic. It does not follow from those two premises that necessarily X will happen. All that follows from those two premises is that X will happen. And it will happen contingently. It could fail to happen, but if it were to fail to happen then God would have had different foreknowledge than the foreknowledge that he has. So the argument is modally fallacious. I've written extensively on this. For example, my little book The Only Wise God deals with the question of theological fatalism and exposes its many errors as well as shows the rejection of fatalism by philosophers and scientists in many other fields.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's get to the next claim then. Here's Peterson's next prompt.

DR. PETERSON: My next claim is that everybody worships something, including atheists, even though they might not know it.

KEVIN HARRIS: Sounds like Bob Dylan’s song. You're going to have to serve somebody. We'll see how Peterson defines “worship” but do you agree with the prompt in any way?

DR. CRAIG: I don't know if I agree with it. This is one which I'm undecided about. I am aware that the theologian Paul Tillich defined God as “the object of ultimate concern,” and Tillich thought that everybody has some object of ultimate concern and in that sense would have a god. On that basis one might say that everyone worships something in that everyone has an object of ultimate concern. So if that's all that's meant, I think it's not an implausible claim. But ultimately, as I say, this is a socio-psychological claim which I don't think is all that important so I just remain undecided.

KEVIN HARRIS: Peterson is asked to define worship in this next clip.

ATHEIST: How do you define worship?

DR. PETERSON: Prioritize.

ATHEIST: So almost like having a preference over something rather than the other.

DR. PETERSON: It's a hierarchy of preferences. You use it to direct your attention. So whatever you're attending to, you're worshiping.

ATHEIST: Right. I've kind of become a little bit familiar with your idea of this value-laden hierarchy. You kind of posit that at the bottom of this hierarchy (you could call it top or bottom, I suppose) at the bottom of this hierarchy this foundational priority in your life is going to be considered God. Is that correct?

DR. PETERSON: That’s right. Yes.

ATHEIST: I'm trying to imagine a situation in which could there be that someone has a priority at their foundation that is different from someone else's?

DR. PETERSON: Oh. Definitely.

ATHEIST: Right. So we can have different conceptions of God.

DR. PETERSON: That's why we fight.

ATHEIST: Right. So essentially there's not one God but there are multiple gods, and these gods exist in some realm of truth. Like it's true that this person has one god and it exists.

DR. PETERSON: Probably better to think about it as multiple values, but that there's a hierarchy of values with something at the bottom.

ATHEIST: Right. But at the bottom is God.

DR. PETERSON: That's a definition.

ATHEIST: So at the bottom is God and there can be multiple people with different conceptions of God, and they are each valid in being called “God.” So there are multiple gods that exist.

DR. PETERSON: It depends on what you mean by valid. So far, so good. But it depends on what you mean by valid. Because I would say that some foundational conceptions don't play out when they're implemented. So if you put the wrong thing at the foundation you end up in hell, for example. That's what happens in totalitarian states.

KEVIN HARRIS: There's a lot to unpack in that clip. Peterson's hierarchy of values. I think I detected a little utilitarianism in there in his definition of worship.

ATHEIST: This girl is so fundamentally confused. I could not believe my ears when she said that because there are different conceptions of God therefore different gods exist! And to my shock Peterson didn't call her out on this. He says, “So far, so good.” He goes along with it. This is crazy. This is to confuse the realm of thought with the realm of reality. It's to confuse a concept with an instantiation of that concept. She is confusing the subjective (which is mind-dependent) with the objective (which is mind-independent). From the fact that there are different conceptions of God, it doesn't at all follow that there exist many gods! She's offering, in effect, an argument for polytheism – that polytheism is true because we can think in our minds of different gods. And that is . . . it's crazy. I just can't believe she really thinks this. I'm even more disappointed that Jordan Peterson doesn't spot the fallacy and call her out on it.

KEVIN HARRIS: It may have just been the editing. I couldn't tell if she was arguing that or if she was trying to accuse him of doing that.

DR. CRAIG: Ah. That would be to put a sympathetic spin on her words in which case he should have repudiated it vigorously by saying “No, no. That is not what I mean. That's not what I think. I'm not confusing thought and reality.”

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the final clip, and Peterson gets to choose one of the debaters to come back and present a prompt. Apparently, he was most impressed with this young lady.

ATHEIST: My claim is Jordan Peterson's framework for understanding Christianity is probably not the one that the Bible intended us to use. In regards to the way that you interpret the Bible, I don't see . . . you have said in some circumstances that there's not a way to kind of say whether or not ontologically the historical claims made by the Bible are true. For example, the story of Cain and Abel. You've said that this story is a metatruth in the sense that it exists all throughout time culturally. The way that you define metatruth, I don't see a distinction between that and like a metaphor. And you also said you cannot say whether this story was true. You can say that it exists internally metaphorically but you can't say that it's true. And if you can't say that the historical facts being said in the Bible as stories that weren't really said with much ambiguity, how can we say that we can understand the Bible in the way that it's meant to be interpreted? If you cannot make any claims about these stories – right? – you don't know if they are true or false – how do you know that your interpretation is the correct way? The reason why it's important – very important – is because, for example, you can talk about something like God says — I believe it's 1 Corinthians 15:17 — something about how belief in God (specifically as someone who resurrected or as someone who died for our sins) is important. But we can interpret that as just like you have to believe that God is a symbol of sacrifice. That is different from believing that there was an actual person named Jesus Christ who died on the cross for our sins.

DR. PETERSON: That’s true.

ATHEIST: So if you believe one and not the other that can be the difference between you going to hell and you going to heaven. So if we cannot say that we know whether or not certain historical facts in the Bible happened — even as just events (because the events matter) because again God dying for our sins on the cross was an event — if we can't say that we know these things did or didn't happen, this then leads us to kind of like a conundrum of how do we know what we are meant to believe, what the Bible intended for us to believe. This can be very, very important to our fate. That and destiny is an important question. The burden is on Christianity to answer and specifically interpretations of Christianity. If we can't do that . . .

DR. PETERSON: Why is the burden on Christianity?

ATHEIST: Because it posits that this interpretation is going to be a way to understand God. But if it's faulty that can . . .

DR. PETERSON: What evidence would you accept?

ATHEIST: That would be an interesting question because I haven't met . . . I've seen people try to answer the question, and I've never really been moved because I can always attack and go against this point where the answer is “I don't know.”

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, they ran out of time. Unfortunately. The producer called it, and that was it. Several things in that. One of the things I'm most interested in is her statement that the burden is on Christianity. Well, obviously because it makes profound claims of being the way to God. She presses him on the difference between mere metaphor and actual historical events. I'm sure there are several things you got out of that.

DR. CRAIG: This girl, in this clip she sounds very much like a Christian. She seems to be coming at it from a Christian point of view and saying that Peterson is misrepresenting Christianity. That makes me think that maybe you were right in the way you interpreted that previous clip. She wasn't herself inferring that because there are different conceptions of God therefore these different gods exist. Perhaps she's charging that on Peterson's subjective misunderstanding of Christianity that would be the implication. But here she's very emphatic that biblical Christianity makes ontological and historical claims that are either objectively true or objectively false. I really resonate with what she has to say about that. And she rightly presses him on this. Now, where she does err, I think, is in contrasting metaphor with truth. What she fails to see is that metaphorical statements can also be true or false. For example, if I say, “No man is an island” – that's true. Or if I say, “She has a bee in her bonnet,” that's a metaphor for saying that she's angry or irritable, and that may be true. Or if I say, “I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road,” that's a metaphor for the side of the road, and that can be true. So it's a fundamental mistake to contrast metaphorical statements with true statements. Metaphorical statements can be true once you understand the metaphor. Now, when it comes to the stories of Adam and Eve and the primeval narratives in the book of Genesis, I think that these are largely metaphorical and figurative language. This is most obvious in the descriptions of God in chapters 2 and 3 as a sort of finite humanoid being walking in the cool of the garden and calling out to Adam and Eve who are hiding from him in the foliage. This is completely incompatible, if interpreted literally, with the transcendent portrayal of God in the opening chapter of Genesis where God creates time and space and all of physical reality in the beginning. So the author of the Pentateuch (the author of the story) obviously knew that God is not a physical humanoid being. He is a transcendent creator of the universe. So these descriptions are simply using anthropomorphic language in the story. That is to say, language that describes God in bodily terms but it is figurative or metaphorical, not to be interpreted literally. And that doesn't mean that these narratives do not embody important theological truths such as Jordan Peterson has sought to explicate. So I think she needs to be more open to finding truth in types of literature that are not intended to be read in a literalistic or wooden way. Having said that, she is absolutely correct that there is a good deal of Scripture that does belong to the historical genre of literature and therefore is to be interpreted as narrating actual historical events. The Gospels would be a prime example of that, as would be the book of Acts in the New Testament. So I do think that she's right to press Peterson about the objective, ontological, historical claims of traditional Christianity.

KEVIN HARRIS: You notice she brought up 1 Corinthians 15: “If Christ is not risen then your faith is in vain.” She wanted to show that Peterson was inconsistent with Christian doctrine by just claiming all this metaphor and things like that.

DR. CRAIG: She certainly sounded like a Christian believer at that point. Someone with a church background.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think so. As we conclude, tell us some of your impressions and what you think of the key takeaways within these clips that we've heard.

DR. CRAIG: I've got to say, for me watching this, it was just heartbreaking to see these beautiful young people rejecting God and his purposes for their lives and especially for such flimsy reasons. Most of their arguments did not say anything relevant to the truth of Jordan Peterson's claims. But unfortunately Peterson was not making claims that are essential to the Christian faith. His claims were tangential and ultimately irrelevant to the truth of Christianity. So I think he directed the discussion down the wrong path, and he got these kids unfortunately focused on tangential and irrelevant issues.^[1]