Is There Meaning to Life? | William Lane Craig, Rebecca Goldstein, Jordan Peterson - Toronto 2018

On January 26, 2018 Dr. Craig participated in a dialogue with Jordan Peterson and Rebecca Goldstein at the University of Toronto. Each speaker addressed the question "Is There Meaning to Life" and then were able to engage one another following their lectures.

TRANSCRIPT

KAREN STILLER: Good evening everyone. Welcome to the Religion and Society Series event, “The Meaning of Life: Three Perspectives.” We are a sold-out crowd, and apparently half the world is watching us on YouTube right now. So that's very exciting. My name is Karen Stiller, and I'm your host for this evening of rich discussion and meaningful conversation including your questions with three fascinating and accomplished professors and authors: Dr. William Lane Craig, Dr. Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, and Dr. Jordan Peterson.

Sponsored by Wycliffe College, the U of T Secular Alliance, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, Power to Change, the Network of Christian Scholars, and Faith Today magazine, the Religion and Society Series generates critical dialogue on matters of faith, society, and public interest. The series tries to shape conversation around teeny-weeny topics like this one (the meaning of life), topics that deeply matter, ideas that are potentially life-changing. And now a word from our sponsors. Tonight sponsors want me to state that this evening’s discussion is being staged in the hope that a free and frank exchange of ideas will aid us all in the exploration of important questions and lead us to deeper truth. They would also want me to affirm that sponsorship does not imply endorsement of the perspectives or opinions of the speakers and that they are committed to a manner of discourse that respects the dignity of all human beings.

Each of our guests will speak for 20 minutes, then we will engage in conversation here on the stage giving our speakers an opportunity to interact with each other. Then we will take some of your questions. You can ask questions via Twitter (#religionandsociety) and by texting a number which should appear on the screen (and if it's not there now, it will be) or through the YouTube stream. So now it's my honor to briefly introduce our speakers.

Dr. William Lane Craig is a Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University. He has authored or edited over 40 books as well as over 150 articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology. In 2016 Dr. Craig was named by The Best Schools as one of the 50 most influential living philosophers, and his website is ReasonableFaith.org.

Dr. Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She is visiting Professor of Philosophy at New College of the Humanities in London, England. She is a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University and received her PhD in philosophy from Princeton. She is the author of 10 books which have received wide attention from such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail and others including for her most recent book (but not for long, a new one is coming), Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. In 2005 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has won numerous other awards for both her fiction and scholarship including in ‘95 a MacArthur Fellowship prize known in the US as the Genius Award. In 2015 she was awarded the National Medal of the Humanities by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House. You can find her on Twitter at @platobooktour.

Finally, Dr. Jordan Peterson is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. A clinical psychologist and the author of the just-released Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. His now classic book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief offers a revolutionary take on the psychology of religion and the hundred or more scientific papers he published with his colleagues and students have advanced the modern understanding of creativity and personality. As a Harvard professor he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize and is regarded by his current U of T students as one of three truly life-changing professors. For years his own practice helped his clients manage things like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety. He has taught mythology to lawyers, doctors, and business people, and consulted for the UN Secretary General's high-level panel on sustainable development.

We welcome each of you, and we anticipate what you'll bring to us tonight. I would like to invite Dr. William Lane Craig to the podium first.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you so much for coming this evening to share this special forum with us.

The question “Is There Meaning to Life?” is closely connected to another, equally profound question, namely, “Does God Exist?” For if God does not exist, there is no transcendent reality, and so both mankind and the universe are as a result inevitably doomed to death. Like all biological organisms, each of us must die. And the universe, too, faces a death of its own. Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding, and everything in it is growing farther and farther apart. As it does so, it grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes. There will be no light; there will be no heat; there will be no life; only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies, ever expanding into the endless darkness and the cold recesses of space — a universe in ruins. This is not science fiction. As unimaginable as it may seem, this will happen. So not only is the life of each individual person doomed; the entire human race is destined to destruction. There is no escape. There is no hope.

These plain scientific facts seem nearly incontestable. The question then becomes, what is the consequence of this? Many atheist thinkers have argued that it implies that human life itself becomes absurd. It means that the life that we do have is without ultimate purpose, value, or significance. These three notions — purpose, value, and significance — though closely related, are conceptually distinct. Purpose has to do with a goal, a reason for something. Value has to do with something’s moral worth, its being good or evil, right or wrong. Significance has to do with something’s importance, why it matters.

Many atheist philosophers, from Nietzsche to Russell to Sartre have argued that if God does not exist, then life is ultimately absurd. It is without ultimate purpose, value, or significance. Let me say a word about each of these.

First, if God does not exist, there is no ultimate purpose of life.

If death stands with open arms at the end of life’s trail, then what is the goal of life? Is it all for nothing? Is there no reason for life? And what of the universe? Is it utterly pointless? If its destiny is a cold grave in the recesses of outer space, the answer must be, yes — it is pointless. There is no goal, no purpose for the universe. The litter of a dead universe will just go on expanding and expanding — forever.

And what of mankind? Is there no purpose at all for the human race? Or will it simply peter out some day, lost in the oblivion of an indifferent universe? The English writer H. G. Wells foresaw such a prospect. In his novel The Time Machine Wells’ time traveler journeys far into the future to discover the destiny of man. All he finds is a dead Earth, except for a few lichens and moss, orbiting a gigantic red sun. The only sounds are the rush of the wind and the gentle ripple of the sea. “Beyond these lifeless sounds," writes Wells, "the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”^[1] And so Wells’ time traveller returned. But to what? — to merely an earlier point on the purposeless rush toward oblivion. When as a non-Christian I first read Wells’s book, I thought, “No, no! It can’t end that way!” But this is reality in a universe without God. If there is no God it will end that way, like it or not: there is no hope; there is no purpose.

Second, if God does not exist there is no ultimate value in life.

If there is no God, then there are no objective standards of good and evil, right and wrong. By “objective standards,” I mean moral standards which are valid and binding independently of human opinion. If God does not exist, then there is no transcendent source of moral values. Rather moral values are either just the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning or else expressions of personal taste. As philosopher of science Michael Ruse explains,

The position of the modern evolutionist . . . is that humans have an awareness of morality . . . because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love they neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . . Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory . . . .^[2]

Richard Dawkins puts it succinctly: “there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference . . . We are machines for propagating DNA.”^[3]

In a world without God, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. So who’s to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? Who’s to judge that one person’s values are inferior to those of another? The concept of objective morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. All we are confronted with is, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, the bare, valueless fact of existence.

That means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or bigotry as evil. Nor can you praise tolerance, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist — there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.

Third, if there is no God then there is no ultimate significance to life.

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate importance can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all? Certainly, his life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If everything is doomed to destruction, then what does it matter that you influenced anything? Ultimately, it makes no difference.

The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the researches of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good people everywhere to better the lot of the human race. In the end they don’t make one bit of difference. They all come to nothing.

In a famous passage, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell lamented,

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; . . . that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.^[4]

Thus, on atheism, life itself becomes ultimately meaningless. If God does not exist, then life is without ultimate purpose, value, or significance.

In his poem “The End of the World” the American poet Archibald MacLeish portrays life as an idiotic circus, until one day the show is over. Let me read it to you now:

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.^[5]

This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.

Do you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us? If God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. As Francis Schaffer has aptly put it, “If God is dead, then man is dead, too.”

Unfortunately, most people do not realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing had changed. I’m reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche’s story of the madman who in the early morning hours burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying, “I seek God! I seek God!” Since many of those standing about did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter. “Did God get lost?” they taunted him. “Or is he hiding? Or maybe he has gone on a voyage or emigrated!” Thus they yelled and laughed. Then, writes Nietzsche, the madman turned in their midst and pierced them with his eyes:

‘Whither is God?’ he cried, ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? . . . God is dead. . . . And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?^[6]

The crowd stared at the madman in silence and astonishment. At last he dashed his lantern to the ground. “I have come too early,” he said. “This tremendous event is still on its way — it has not yet reached the ears of man.” People did not yet truly comprehend the consequences of what they had done in killing God. But Nietzsche predicted that someday people would realize the implications of their atheism; and this realization would usher in an age of nihilism — that is, the destruction of all meaning and value in life.

I find that most people still do not reflect upon the consequences of atheism and so, like the crowd in the marketplace, go unknowingly on their way. A few years ago a Toronto-based Freethought organization bought bus ads that proclaimed: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” According to a spokesman for the group, they wanted “something happy, something bright.” I wonder what Friedrich Nietzsche would have thought of those ads. Few contemporary atheists have Nietzsche’s courage to look atheism squarely in the face without blinking. But when we realize, as did Nietzsche, the nihilism that atheism implies, then his question presses hard upon us: how shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?

Confronted with the human predicament, about the only solution the atheist can offer is that we simply face the absurdity of life and live bravely.

The fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that it’s impossible to live consistently and happily within the framework of such a world view. If you live consistently, you will not be happy; if you live happily, it is only because you are not consistent. Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, lives in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. While giving lip service to atheism, the atheist lives as though life were important, as though it really mattered what he does or thinks, as though certain things were really right and wrong and so is outraged at the injustices of this world, and acts as though his petty projects and plans really were significant.

The human predicament is thus truly terrible. The atheistic world view is insufficient to maintain a happy and consistent life. Man cannot live consistently and happily as though life were ultimately without purpose, value, or significance. If we try to live consistently within the framework of the atheistic world view, we shall find ourselves profoundly unhappy. If instead we manage to live happily, it is only by giving the lie to our world view. Atheism, therefore, cannot support a happy and consistent life. 

But if atheism fails in this regard, what about Christian theism? According to the biblical worldview, God does exist, and man’s life does not end at the grave. God has created us for a purpose: to know Him and enjoy Him forever. God Himself, who transcends socially relative mores, is the objective standard of moral principles and goodness and His commandments are the source of our objective moral duties. Because we shall live forever, the decisions and actions we take in this life are imbued with an eternal significance that lasts beyond the grave. Biblical theism therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a purposeful, valuable, and meaningful life: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily within the framework of such a worldview. Thus, biblical theism succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.

Now I would be the first to say that none of this proves that God exists. Even if atheism is unliveable, it may still be true. But in tonight’s dialogue we’ve not been asked to discuss whether God exists or not. I’ve written extensively on that question elsewhere. Tonight we have been asked to discuss, “Is There Meaning to Life?” On this score there need be no dispute between the theist and the atheist. Indeed, it has been the atheists themselves, as we have seen, who have given the most poignant analyses of the human predicament. Let them speak for themselves: without God, they tell us, life becomes absurd, for it is without ultimate purpose, value, or significance. I agree.

But I would add one thing: we’ve seen that if God does not exist, then life is futile. If God does exist, then life is meaningful. Only the second of these two alternatives enables us to live consistently and happily. Therefore, it seems to me that even if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose theism. That is to say, if the evidence is equal, it seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and despair to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. Therefore, my advice is: go with God. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

KAREN STILLER: Thank You Dr. Craig. We now welcome Dr. Newberger-Goldstein.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Thank you very much for coming tonight. This is one of those rare occasions when I'm going to speak in public to a room full of strangers in a personal way which isn't easy for me. I'm one of those people who finds it difficult to speak in a personal way even in private. Just ask my loved ones. But this question which we are discussing tonight (life's meaning) which forces us to confront how we ought to live so as not to squander our one and only chance at our one and only life – this question is for me, as it is for each of you, personal. It’s personal not just because it matters so much to each of us, matters as much as our own lives matter to each of us, which they of course must matter given that we have to live them. After all, who else's life are you going to pursue if not your own? But also personal in the sense that how you approach this question, how you make sense of it and perhaps resolve it (or perhaps don't resolve it) draws on the deepest aspects of who you are as an individual. Your particular passions and interests and talents and culture and temperament and character as well as on what your view of reality is. Your view of reality in the grandest sense. The answers you give no matter how tentative to the questions that philosophers call metaphysical – Is there a God? Are there immaterial souls? Is there an afterlife? Have we free will? A person's metaphysics is going to affect her thinking about life's meaning which is why the sponsors of tonight's event so wisely invited three speakers with disparate metaphysical outlooks to address this question. And I'm very honored to be one of them.

Because of the weight that I give to individual variability in determining approaches to this question of the meaningful life, I don't believe that there does exist one definitive answer to tonight's question “the meaning of life” (definite article firmly in place). My meaningful life may not be right for you. I suspect for many of you that is true. To begin with, it may not be right for you because you disagree with my metaphysical outlook. So then what is my metaphysical outlook? In a word, I'm a naturalist. A naturalist in the philosophical sense, in the metaphysical sense. I don't think that anything supernatural exists, and by the supernatural I mean anything that is not subject to the laws of nature. My naturalism is inconsistent with a transcendent God, immaterial souls, an afterlife. Another way of putting naturalism is that I believe we humans are part of the rest of nature. I'm not interested (at least not tonight) in arguing for my naturalism or in going into how it differs from scientism to which I don't subscribe. Nor am I interested in going into the personal story as to why I, who happen to have been born into a profoundly religious family and who strictly adhered to its very demanding tenets for most of my decades, finally abandoned it for naturalism. I'll simply tell you that it wasn't undertaken lightly. Rather, what I am interested in discussing is how the metaphysical stance of naturalism which might strike you as a severely disadvantaged vantage point for contemplating the meaningful life isn't. That it provides all the resources one needs for pursuing a meaningful life, and that perhaps – perhaps – what I have to say might even be meaningful to those of you who metaphysically disagree with me so that we can, in approaching this all-important question of pursuing a meaningful life, agree on more than we disagree on, which would be nice especially for me. Since being able to reach a point of deep commonality across divides even so fundamental as metaphysical divides which, stop and think about it for a moment, means that we inhabit entirely different subjective realities – that's a deep divide. Deeper than political divides. To nevertheless reach commonality in virtue of our shared humanity across so deep a divide is for me one of the main goals of my pursuing a meaningful life.

I wouldn't be so bold as to universalize this goal of mine and say it's necessary for any meaningful life, but it does happen to be necessary for mine which explains a lot about why I'm standing here tonight talking in a way that I'm not comfortable talking before a room full of strangers. But nobody wise ever said pursuing a meaningful life is easy, that it's comfortable, that it's constituted of only pleasant experiences or desires for pleasant experiences. That's hedonism, and being a naturalist doesn't commit a person to hedonism. If it did, I wouldn't be here.

But now I do pass to a feature that I would be prepared to universalize to all meaningful lives. Call it epistemic responsibility, from the ancient Greek word episteme meaning “knowledge.” And I mean by the phrase taking very seriously the responsibilities of being the kind of creature who forms beliefs on the basis of reason which of course describes us – us humans. We are reason-giving creatures. We offer reasons for both our beliefs and our actions and always the reasons for our actions include reference to our beliefs. We act not only on our desires but also on beliefs. So reasons for beliefs are always involved, always central. When challenged about our beliefs, whether by others or by ourselves, we stand ready to offer reasons and when challenged on those reasons we offer reasons for those reasons and then reasons for the reasons for the reasons and so on. That's why Aristotle defined us as the “rational animal” because of our readiness to offer reasons. Aristotle wasn't claiming that they're necessarily good reasons that we offer. The man wasn't a fool. The philosopher Bertrand Russell (already came up today) also a metaphysical naturalist offered a kind of witty rejoinder to Aristotle's definition: “It has been said that man is a rational animal [this is my Bertrand Russell impersonation]. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.” But Russell isn't really regarding . . . maybe I should give the rest of the talk in that accent! It is more authoritative, I think! But Russell isn't really negating what Aristotle was addressing – our always standing ready with the reasons – but rather pinpointing the fact that so often the reasons are bad. Taking seriously the possibility that the reasons for one's own beliefs might be substandard, standing ready to expose them to the severiest criticism, not just criticism that you yourself can think up or those who share your own beliefs namely in your own epistemic bubble, but also crucially exposing them to criticisms of those who disagree with you – that's what I mean by epistemic responsibility. It's what Socrates meant when he announced that the unexamined life is not worth living, which is a somewhat harsh way of saying that epistemic responsibility ought to be universalized to all meaningful lives. We can forgive Socrates for being a bit harsh when he made that pronouncement; he'd just been voted guilty by a jury of over five hundred of his fellow Athenians charged with the capital crime of introducing new gods and corrupting the young. Again, nobody wise ever said that the meaningful life is the maximally pleasant, the comfortable life.

But just in case it seems as if the meaningful life is nothing but unpleasantness, let me just say that changing one's point of view under the strictures of epistemic responsibility is, as best as one can, a pleasurable experience. There is pleasure in the sense that one is seen more objectively than one had before – that one is making progress in understanding, discarding more narrow, contingent perspectives. It feels expansive.

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza (also a metaphysical naturalist whose own religious community excommunicated him at the age of 23) argued that the experience of expanding one's viewpoint under the strictures of epistemic responsibility beats out all other pleasures including riches and fame and sensual delights, that it alone provides us “continuous supreme and unending happiness.”

But whether pleasurable or not, we all want to live a meaningful life because our lives matter to us. This is not a matter of argument. This is an immediate fact. Of course, I matter to me because I am me. In fact, Spinoza in his concept of conatus made this first person self-referential kind of mattering – I matter to me – the very essence of our individual identities. What am I? I am the thing who doesn't have to offer any reasons to explain or justify why the survival and flourishing of one Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein matters to that thing. But it's also true of us – universally true – that we have a will to matter that extends beyond the first person self-referential type of mattering. The will to matter. The profound longing. Not to be as nothing. Is there any will deeper than that in us humans? It's deeper even than the will to survive. We don't want to live when we become convinced that we don't, that we can't, that we will never matter. Those are the words of clinical depression. In fact, the website in the US for suicide prevention is called “You Matter.” We no sooner discover that we are that we want that which we are to matter. We are creatures of matter who long to matter. And I don't think that we can discuss the meaningful life without addressing this profoundest of our longings. A meaningful life has got in some way to satisfy the will to matter.

Let me just explicate what I don't mean to imply by speaking of the will to matter. First of all, by the will to matter I don't mean the will to matter more than others matter. Though for many people competitive mattering (being richer, smarter, taller, more powerful, better looking, more stylish, more athletic, more talented, more original, more pious, more whatever) is the only kind of mattering they can contemplate. Such people are often quite unpleasant to be around. It seems to me (if I can get political for one moment) that we've got a stunning specimen in the current President of the United States of America. Is Donald J. Trump living a meaningful life in his endless pursuit of competitive mattering? (Stop using up my twenty minutes!) In any case, when I say the will to matter, I definitely do not mean the will to demonstrate that one matters more than others matter. In fact, I believe it to be demonstrably true that to the extent that any of us matter we all matter to that same extent. Demonstrably true. So many human goods are inequitably distributed among us – riches and power, beauty and health, talent and status, and luck and love – are not mattering. Which is why it is so unspeakably tragic when people lead their lives badly. Their lives matter.

And when I say the will to matter I don't mean the will to demonstrate that you matter in some spectacular heroic way. Your name to be spoken for as long as there shall be speakers. That's what the ancient Greeks called kleos – getting spoken about because of something extraordinary about you, something worth recounting that you did even if it wasn't moral. It was in terms of kleos that the ancient Greeks defined the meaningful life, and that was precisely the point about which Socrates was consistently hectoring them, which hectoring, as you know, his fellow Athenians didn’t altogether appreciate.

Nor does will to matter necessarily require that one matters in the even grander transhuman cosmic eternal scheme of things, that one matters to the very universe itself which is the master of the universe. This is the religious point of view, and I know – believe me I know – how potently it satisfies the psychological will to matter. My opinion is that all the arguments for God's existence come after the fact which is an emotional fact generated out of the common emotional core of us all – the will to matter. And, yes, there is nothing as powerful as the Abrahamic religions – all three of them: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – to make a believer feel that she matters – cosmically matters. It is powerful stuff. When I lived according to my family's faith I wasn't allowed to eat anything that didn't have a proper rabbinic imprimatur (if I can use a word for Roman Catholicism to apply to the rabbis). And there was this kind of pastry – Hostess Twinkies. I actually got one with me because I didn't know whether you'd be familiar with it. It just looks so delicious to me as a child, especially that creamy inside smeared all over my friends’ lips as they gobble them. But I harbored not a doubt that were I ever to taste a hostess Twinkie, the Lord of the Hosts himself would instantaneously know and be angered. That was frightening, but I never doubted for a moment that I powerfully, I cosmically, mattered. That God Himself would care if I took a bite. A naturalist can’t satisfy her will to matter in such a psychologically powerful way as someone who holds such religious beliefs. But that doesn't mean we can't satisfy it as sufficiently to live a meaningful life, a life that permits us to add something of value to the world.

But wait a minute. Where did this talk of value all of a sudden come in? I've just been talking about the will to matter, a completely naturalist concept that I think can be explained by way of evolutionary psychology, and suddenly here's an invasion of value talk – what philosophers called normative language. Well, values do come in when we consider wisely what it is to satisfy the will to matter. The awful thought – it's 4 a.m. and I'm wide awake and wondering what it all means thought – is that had I not existed, the world would have been no different at all. That my existence that means all the world to me adds nothing of value to the world beyond my perspective. The world would have been just the same or maybe even better had I never been. To live a meaningful life is to live so as to expunge this 4 a.m. thought. Here is where the individual variability that I spoke about before comes in. A person's talents, commitments, temperament, culture, character yield with what the 20th century philosopher Bernard Williams (also a metaphysical naturalist) had called projects, including a person's ground projects “providing the mode of force which propels him into the future and gives him in a sense a reason for living.” There is tremendous variety between us in what our ground projects are. The full spread of human diversity and ingenuity is on display in the ground projects devised to confront the will to power, and it includes the heights of our human achievements, creations, and the arts, discoveries in the sciences, improvements in forms of government, as well as the depths of injustice and cruelty. There is within the full range of our ground projects both darkness and light. A ground project that successfully ministers to the will to matter may not add up to a meaningful life, certainly not if it comes at the expense of epistemic responsibility nor if it crucially depends for its success on undermining others' sense of mattering which is a hallmark of viciously false ideologies. And if to achieve a meaningful life one's ground project has not only to avoid these grievous errors but also add some value to the world then we can also be sadly mistaken thinking we're adding positive added value to the world when alas were not. Then it will feel to us from the inside as if we're living a meaningful life, but we'll be self-diluted. It's good to get some objective feedback if possible.

I've shared with you that my ground project crucially involves reaching across the deepest divides so as to touch on the even deeper commonalities between us in virtue of our common humanity. Whether I succeeded here tonight (and that goal isn't for me to say, but rather for you) but, of course, I hope I have, and I thank you humbly for giving me the opportunity.

KAREN STILLER: Thank you Dr. Newberger-Goldstein. And now we welcome Dr. Jordan Peterson.

DR. PETERSON:  One of the things that's really struck me about intellectual life is how often we get the questions wrong, and we often get them backwards; not just wrong but actually backwards. As a clinical psychologist I've often treated people with anxiety, and people wonder practically, individually, clinically, why are people anxious? And I think that's a completely ridiculous question. The reasons for anxiety are starkly self-evident. What I wonder is why aren't people terrified out of their skulls so badly every second of their life that they can't even move. You all laugh because you understand that. It's, like, anxiety? That's no mystery. It's brief spells of calm – that's a mystery. A client will come to me and say, “I'm procrastinating. Why do I procrastinate?” It’s like, “No, that's a stupid question.” It's easy just to sit there and do nothing. What's the mystery is why you ever get up and do anything difficult at all. Procrastination is the default. Psychologists ask, doctors ask, why do people take cocaine? It's, like, no, no. It's the wrong question. The right question is: why not, like an addicted rat, don't you just take cocaine all the time until you die? That's the question. And this question about meaning is like that, too. Is there meaning in life? That's a stupid question. I'm serious about that. That's not a question you ever ask yourself if you're in pain, right? Because when you're in pain you know that life has a meaning. It's the pain. And you can't argue yourself out of that meaning. So when we're asking whether or not life has meaning, that isn't what we mean. What we mean is: in the face of life's pain and suffering, does life have any positive meaning? And that is not the same question.

Now, leave that aside for a minute. I'm going to tell you a little story. It's a little experiment. Remember in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell down, there was a great celebration in Berlin and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra played a part in it. They came out to a section of the wall that had been knocked down where there was a huge crowd and played Beethoven's 9th. I remember watching that. The great third movement – the triumphant third movement. It was so wonderful to see everyone there and hear this orchestra playing those unbelievably remarkable notes in triumph; that this horror show had finally come to a halt. You can imagine someone critically-minded and rational at an event like that standing behind you as you're listening to the great strains of that symphony manifest themselves tap you on the shoulder and say “Well, you know, that symphony is going to end. What makes you think it has any meaning at all?” Well, how do you respond to something like that? You say, “You should reconsider the way you're looking at the world there, buddy, because that's just not the right answer.” It's just not the right question. The symphony has no meaning because it ends. Well, you're not paying attention to what's going on if that's the way you think. Or maybe you're thinking too much. Yes, you're thinking too much and not paying enough attention. But it's more serious than that, and this ties in the issue of pain. You say, “What does it all matter if in ten billion years the Sun is going to expand and consume the Earth? What difference does it make?” I would say is that the kind of answer you're going to give to a child that's in pain? That's your answer? It's like, hey, you've got the flu, you're anxious, you're having a nightmare, you're in terrible pain, but in ten million years who the hell is going to know the difference? Yeah, right. No kidding. If that response is absurd in that situation then it's an absurd response. The mere fact that you can come up with a time frame across which your current activity is meaningless only means that you're capable of playing with meanings across time frames. It doesn't mean anything at all about meaning as far as I can tell. Is it absolutely obligatory that everything that's meaningful has to be significant in some unimaginable distant future? Why is that the hallmark? Why wouldn't you just say, here's an idea, why don't you stop conceptualizing your life across timeframes that takes all the positive meaning out of them? How would that be for a suggestion? Maybe the fact that posing the question in that way makes you feel miserable and wretched and futile is an indication that there's something wrong with posing the question in that manner. And you might say, well, there's nothing wrong with posing questions. And I would say that brings us back to the child-in-pain problem. Sometimes there is a problem with posing questions in a certain way. And “What difference is it going to make in ten million years” is not a sufficient response to someone who's suffering. Then you might say we could expand that idea even. We could play with that idea of suffering. We could say maybe it's a child in Auschwitz and the suffering isn't merely a consequence of an illness (not that that's trivial) but the suffering is the consequence of conscious malevolence. How about that? And the purpose of the malevolence is just to make things worse. And to top it all off, because malevolence is a form of art, it's not only to make things worse, it's to make things worse in the worst possible imaginable way which is basically to amplify the suffering of someone maximally innocent in the most pointless way possible. Well, what's your answer to that? Ten million years, what difference is it going to make? Life is fundamentally meaningless? What kind of answer is that? It's an answer that shows that the framework within which that question is generated is invalid. That's what kind of answer it is.

I realized a while back that I had gone through a process when I was in my 20s. It was akin to something Descartes did. I'm not trying to compare myself to Descartes, but he was trying to look for something that he couldn't doubt. And the consequence of his search was, “I think, therefore I am” which I don't think is exactly a good translation of what Descartes meant. I think he meant something more like, “I can't dispute the reality of my own consciousness.” Something like that. And that's good. That isn't where I got to in my contemplations. I was looking for something that I regarded as incontrovertible. I was fortunate at that time because I was reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago among many other things. The Gulag Archipelago is a description of the absolute catastrophes of the Soviet state and the entanglement of the individual psyches of the Soviet citizens in that catastrophe – their descent into deceit, resentment, and cruelty. Solzhenitsyn said in The Gulag Archipelago that he thought the Nuremberg trials were the most important event of the 20th century. The reason he said that was because the Nuremberg judgement for better or worse was that there were some acts that were so viciously brutal that there was no excuse whatsoever for engaging in them no matter who you were or what your culture was or what your rationale was. And so for Solzhenitsyn the Nuremberg trials established what you might describe as the transcendent reality of evil. And that's an unbelievably useful thing. It's akin to this idea of suffering in my estimation because, well, it's the child-in-Auschwitz problem. You need an answer to the problem posed by the suffering of innocence as a consequence of malevolence. You say that's evil. The conscious exaggeration of unnecessary suffering. That gives you a vantage point. That's wrong. Whatever it is, that is – that's wrong. Well then you have a place to stand. You can say, oh, okay, now I know that there's something that's wrong in a non-trivial way. In a way that can't be just dispensed with rational objections that emerge as a consequence of contemplation of the boundedness of life. Those answers aren't serious enough to address the issue. I thought, okay, well I found something that I can grip on to or stand on without dispute. There are acts that are unquestionably evil, and that means that there are acts that are unquestionably good. Now, it doesn't mean that we know what they are. Right? Because just because you know one pole of something doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. I could say that whatever leads us as far away as we can possibly get from Auschwitz, that's good. I've been trying to puzzle out what that might be for 25 years to outline it in the practical manner, I suppose, in an abstract manner. To understand if there's a route – a mode of being, let’s say, that takes us away from undue suffering but more than that. It takes us away from undue suffering multiplied by malevolence. It's a fundamental existential problem of life. We all suffer. That's the meaning of life. We all suffer. The suffering is exacerbated by the malevolence in our hearts and the malevolence in the hearts of all of us.

The paramount issue that faces us is what to do about that. The answer is, I think, live a life that manifests itself as meaningful. Because it seems to me that the meaning isn't a rational phenomena. It's not something that you create. This is where Nietzsche, I think, got it wrong. He believed that as a consequence of the death of God we would have to create our own values; we would have to become gods ourselves so to speak. But I don't think that Nietzsche was right because I don't think that we can create our own values. I think that we have to discover them, and I think that when we discover our eternal values, and I think that the eternal values that are discoverable are precisely the values that lead us away from the pathway to perdition that was characterized by places such as Auschwitz. I also think that we all know this. Now, it's not that we can't question it because we can question it. But the questioning is in some sense beside the point. Like the person objecting to the grandeur of Beethoven's 9th by pointing out that it's going to end. The questioning is beside the point. It's missing the point.

I've studied a variety of great psychologists – Jean Piaget and Carl Jung and Freud and Carl Rogers. Many of the great 20th century clinicians. My sense is that, along with the biologists and the evolutionary psychologists, we're starting to map out the pathway that might be the opposite of the catastrophic mode of being that leads us into pits of hell like Auschwitz and that there's something genuinely real about it – seriously real, metaphorically real, and literally real, both at the same time. The instinct to meaning that you experience – for example, when you listen to something great. That experience of meaning that overcomes you isn't some epiphenomena. It's not some mere reflection of some more fundamental process but that which is more fundamental than anything else. You say you can't deny that pain is real and suffering is real and you can't deny that suffering induced by malevolence is the worst of all possible sufferings. Those are all undeniable as far as I'm concerned. Those are all meanings of life. And they're real enough so that if you encounter them – like if you encounter true malevolence – the probability that you'll walk away from it unscathed is very, very low. It will damage you psycho-physiologically. And you might never recover. And that's real enough for me. Well, is the path away from that real? Is the path that transcends that real? Maybe it's more real. That's what I've come to believe as pessimistic as I am about the nature of humanity, myself included. As real as I believe suffering and evil to be, it appears to me that the mode of being that leads you away from that, that enables you to bear the suffering with nobility, and to be useful to others who are in pain, and to constrain the malevolence in your own heart and around you – that mode of being is more powerful than that which it is set against. And not only that, I think that we experience this – I think we experience it – we just don't notice. Maybe because we're too busy thinking. Because noticing and thinking aren't the same thing.

We see in our own lives when we're engaged in something deeply meaningful. Music is the best pathway to that, I think. It's the most rapid and indisputable pathway to that. Everyone, virtually everyone, loves music. And music speaks of meaning. It does it directly. It shows you what life would be like if it was ordered and harmonious and you were dancing along with it properly. It gives you an intimation of psychological integrity. But you watched your lives day to day, week to week, month to month, you'll notice that there are times when you're so deeply engaged in what you're doing, when what you're doing is so meaningful, the kind of meaning that announces itself (not the kind that you're creating) that life is so meaningful you think this is worth the suffering. You think, well, that's meaning. Right? Meaning is what makes the suffering worthwhile. Is that real? It's not something you think up. It's something that you discover. And you can watch. You could see, day to day, minute to minute, hour to hour, week to week. You can see when you're conducting yourself or being conducted in a manner that allows that meaning to reveal itself in a way that in the moment (even if you don't notice) the conditions of your life justify themselves. And that's really saying something because pain and suffering and malevolence are real. And for something to justify that, it's really something for something to justify that. But when you find that – you find it in art, you find it in literature, you find it in the relationships you have with others if those relationships are founded on trust and truth, you find it in what you say and do if what you say and do comes from the heart. You can experience that.

The price of experiencing it I would say is twofold. You have to take responsibility for being. You have to do that voluntarily, and that means that you have to take responsibility for the suffering of being and accept it and work to ameliorate it. And you have to do that voluntarily. That's a barrier. I think very frequently that arguments like, “What difference is it going to make ten million years in the future?” aren't hyper-rational objections to the nature of being itself but hyper-rationalistic excuses for failing to bear the responsibility of living properly moment-to-moment and hour-to-hour. Say you have a child who's sick, maybe one who's been hurt. What do you say or do in the face of that? Well, you say, “Hey, kid, I'm here with you. I'm here beside you. It matters what's happening to you, and we're going to do everything we possibly can to get through this together.” And if you're lucky you get a hug. There's a consequence of that. If you don't think that's meaningful, man, there's something wrong with your soul. And the answer to, “What the hell difference is it going to make in ten million years?” That's the devil himself speaking. Well, that's good enough, so, thank you.

KAREN STILLER: Thank you to all three of you. You've given us a lot to think about. I would like to open this time by just throwing it open with the three of you. You were all taking notes at various times. Is there something you would like to jump on to right away that you heard? Dr. Craig?

1:12.44...

DR. CRAIG: Well, I was very heartened, Jordan, by your affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and duties. You said there are things that are unquestionably good and unquestionably evil; that these moral values are not things that are invented but they are discovered. And I couldn't agree more. And I would want to push you on this to say that this very consideration ought to help you to move through naturalism and beyond naturalism to a transcendent ground for the objectivity of these moral values and duties because they won't be found in naturalism. The naturalist is trapped in the lower story. Objective moral values and duties are not physical entities described by the laws of nature; these are transcendent realities (either Platonic or else grounded in God) and therefore the very affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and duties that was so strong throughout your talk which I so appreciate – it's anti-relativistic, it’s objectivistic – I want to encourage you to push through that naturalism to finding a transcendent ground for these in theism. I think that's the most plausible moral theory that will enable us to affirm the objectivity of these moral values and duties.

DR. PETERSON: I've tried to work out the sorts of ideas that I portrayed in this talk today within a naturalistic framework as much as possible because the naturalistic technique is so powerful, not least for that but also because there's glimmerings in the scientific literature of the sorts of ideas that you portrayed when you mentioned that the evolutionary biologists are increasingly making the claim that morality is a biological adaptation. I think you can make a very strong case for that, a much stronger case than has actually been made so far. I think there is a very sophisticated ethic that has evolved that we recognize as a consequence of the evolution of our cognitive and emotional structures. I think that that recognition manifests itself in admiration. People are very imitative. It's one of the things that characterizes us in contradistinction to animals who are not very imitative. It's probably the precondition for our linguistic capacity. One of the things that characterizes human existence is the capacity to spontaneously pick a model for emulation, a model for admiration, and that's the manifestation of that moral instinct to say to admire is to want to copy. Well, what do you want to copy? Well, you want to copy that which is most admirable. What is most admirable? What is most admirable – that starts to become a transcendent question. You can imagine that the local examples of what's admirable, they're right in front of you and they're concrete and tangible. But to abstract out from that that which is admirable in and of itself is simultaneously to construct something like the representation of a transcendent good. And that's to some degree how religious conceptions emerge from their underlying biological substrate. Now, you might say that's merely reducing the religious conceptualization – the religious abstraction of what's good – to the biological substrate, and I think you can read it that way but I don't think that that necessarily indicates what it is. I think that the entire process of evolution is somehow shaping itself around maybe Platonic ideas, something like that, some transcendent good, and that it's a mistake to assume that just because you can make an association between the transcendent abstract good and the process of evolution that one is necessarily reducible to another. It isn't the way reality works.

DR. CRAIG: Doesn’t that commit the genetic fallacy to try to say that because one's moral beliefs originated through such a biological evolutionary process that therefore they are explained away and have no objective validity. That just is to commit the genetic fallacy.

DR. PETERSON: I think partly what happens, too, is that at that level of analysis you have to start questioning your initial presumptions like the idea that the most true truth is objective. Because I'm not sure it is. I don't think we understand what constitutes truth very well. And there's the truth that you act out as well as the truth that tells you what the world is made of, and those aren't necessarily the same thing. So things get very murky at that level of abstraction. But one thing I have learned from attempting to reduce religious preconceptions to their biological substrate is that there's always something left over that you haven't explained. And it's not something trivial because every time I look into what's left over, it turns out to be unutterably deep. I get rid of some more of it and the rest becomes unutterably deep.

KAREN STILLER: Dr. Goldstein?

DR. GOLDSTEIN: I believe just as strongly in objective moral truths, and I do in fact completely reject your argument that it requires either a grounding in God or in some sort of Platonic ideals. There's an ancient argument. It goes back to Plato – Plato's Euthyphro – that tries to argue that – my book successfully argues that – the addition of God really doesn't help with grounding morality. Socrates asked a priest, Euthyphro of the Athenian religion, “Tell me, what is it that makes something good?” And Euthyphro answered that God loves it. It’s God’s attitude or the gods’ attitude that makes it good. Socrates asked, “Well, does God love the good because it's good, or is his loving it what makes it good?” If it's the first – that God loves giving to the vulnerable, to the victims, to the orphan, to the widow because it's good – then there is something independent in virtue of which God loves these actions that makes them good, and that constitutes the reason for the goodness. If God hates genocide and loves a charity then there is a reason in virtue of which God has these moral attitudes. And if God himself has no reason for it, if it's just whim and its caprice, then is that really satisfying our answer as to what makes good acts good and bad acts bad? That the addition of God doesn't ground things at all. It makes what seems to us mysterious and answers it with another mystery. This is an ancient argument repeated by Spinoza and repeated by Russell and repeated by people. I would like to ask you how you answer the question. The whole history of moral philosophy from Spinoza through Kant through Rawls through Tom Nagel, all these arguments have given completely naturalist arguments to try to ground morality, and they are in fact the kinds of arguments by means of which we've made progress, in fact. That all of the individual rights movements – anti-slavery, emancipation of women, and on and on and on – have been made on the basis of completely naturalist arguments, taking it as elemental from something that we've learned from our own lives that we matter and that if we want to answer “What is it in virtue of which we matter?” what we get to fairly quickly is it’s in virtue of something that we share with everybody else. This is the kind of arguments that have actually had real consequences in terms of emancipating and making real people's lives better ever since I would say the Enlightenment actually. So I guess my question to you is double: what do you say to the Euthyphro argument? How does God really help? And two, what do you say about the whole progress of moral philosophy which has in fact been completely secular and has helped more people then, I'm not going to say religion, I'm not going to say it, but religion, believe me, has made a lot of people suffer as well. When you speak about Auschwitz, it's very hard for me not to cry. Every person of my generation and my family is named after a dead child who died there. So to me this is extremely personal. My very name, Rebecca, is some child who died. So this is – how does this come up? – I don't know. I just had to say that. I’m sorry. Those are my two questions to you.

DR. CRAIG: I'm really surprised to hear you trot out the old Euthyphro dilemma because this has been answered over and over again by contemporary Christian philosophers like Robert Adams, William Alston, and others. The Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma. It posits two non-mutually exhaustive choices. Either the gods love something because it is good, or it is good and therefore they love it. The theistic alternative to the Euthyphro dilemma is that something is good because it is identical with God. God is the good. God is what Plato referred to as The Good. So the reason God wills something is because he is good, and his moral commands to us reflect the goodness of his own intrinsic moral nature. God is by nature essentially kind, loving, compassionate, fair, and so forth. This completely resolves the Euthyphro dilemma because it's a third alternative to the question. Now, in terms of the second question you raised, the problem with all of these theories is that they can't justify their starting point. They just take it for granted that some sort of humanism is true; that there is something about human beings that is intrinsically morally valuable. But that's precisely what's called into question by naturalism. If the film of evolutionary history were rewound and shot over again a very different sort of creature might have evolved from the evolutionary process with a very different set of values. And by what right would we be able to say, “Our values are the correct ones, and yours are the wrong ones.”? It is all culturally relative. And so while I applaud the advances in human rights and things of the sort that you mentioned, I want to help by offering a foundation for the objectivity of the moral values and duties that we both hold dear – a foundation that I think is conspicuously lacking in naturalism.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: I think the way that you approach this is wrong. There is a kind of transcendental argument meaning that kind of argument that is inspired by Immanuel Kant where we look at not an extra fact in order to justify something but we look at the very conditions that make certain kinds of thinking possible. The categories of the mind. This is how he tried to confront Hume's problem with Kant. We can't justify induction. David Hume had demonstrated there's no non-circular way to justify induction. And yet rational life depends on induction. We can't justify deduction, logic. Non-circularly, how could one accept any argument for deduction if that was the very thing that was being called into question? There is a kind of normative reasoning without which life is impossible. And we certainly apply it always to ourselves. If somebody treats us in a way that completely violates our mattering, our sense of dignity . . . if I'm lying on a beach soaking up the rays (I'm thinking about this right now because I'm freezing in here), soaking up rays, some big guy wants to get from point A to point B and I'm lying at some point in the sand and he doesn't step over me or go around me but just clump, clump, clump, right on my stomach to get to the next point. What am I going to feel? I am going to feel complete outrage, complete indignation. How can you possibly have done that? You had reason not to behave that way. What is the reason? My pain, my suffering.

DR. CRAIG: Animals don't care about causing pain to each other. In the natural world, animal pain, predation, goes on all the time. What he's doing is just preserving his evolutionary advantage.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: That is not the point I am concentrating on. I am concentrating on the point of me lying there thinking in my wrathful indignation, “How could you have done that? You had reason not to do that.” My pain gives you reason not to do that. There is no way that we can conduct our lives without having those kinds of reactions which they are emotions  (indignation, outrage) that are very complicated – they're called moral emotions because they have hidden in them the claim that somebody has reason to act otherwise. Right? And there is no way that we can conduct our lives without having these reactions. Right?

DR. CRAIG: Isn't that exactly my point? That it's impossible to live consistently and happily as though your life were valueless, as though you had no value. I agree with that.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: So that is our starting point. And from that, one goes on to other things. Then one thinks if I can't possibly live without feeling that my life has some value, that when you treat me as if I don't matter, this outrage I feel, you had a reason to act otherwise. What is it about me that gives me this claim of putting reasons on you. When I think about that and try to justify it I very quickly see there's nothing special about me. Everybody is living this way. Everybody knows first person naturally that they matter. They can’t act otherwise, they can't conduct their lives otherwise. That is what Spinoza called conatus. Right? This is a complicated emotion. It isn't some sense what the genes would have a very complicated creature like us who has self-reflection and reasons would end up saying, “I matter” and then ask why exactly do I matter? You come to the conclusion, not so quickly . . . it's taking us millennia . . . because I come from this tribe, or I'm a member of this race, or this people, or this gender, or whatever . . . slowly, slowly, slowly it's taken us a very long time to actually get to the point. Moral philosophy has helped us a great deal here. What it is in virtue of which I matter is the same in virtue of which we all matter.

KAREN STILLER: Why do so many people then tussle with the question of “Do I matter?” Why do so many of us struggle with the meaning of life then?

DR. PETERSON: We're all pretty much painfully self-aware of all our inadequacies. People know that they're finite and brutally breakable and capable of reprehensible actions. It makes all of us doubt the validity of our claim to a continued untrammeled existence. We have to bear the existential guilt that that knowledge of finitude and insufficiency and malevolence leaves us with. I would say that's part of the call to noble action as an antidote to precisely that, and that call to what you could be rather than what you are. That's a good call to meaning.

I also had the answer to your question. I had a dream. I had a dream once, and I'm speaking psychologically here, not theologically. I had a dream once. I was in the cemetery of an old church, an old cathedral, surrounded by the graves. And there were indentations in the ground where all the graves were. And all of a sudden the graves started to open. It was a graveyard where great people – great men of the past – had been buried. So a grave opened and an armed king stood up, and then another grave opened and another armed king stood up. This happened all around me. These were very formidable figures. They were the great heroes of the past. And after a number of them appeared on the scene, they looked around and saw each other and being warrior-types they immediately started to fight. And the question is: what stops the great kings of the past from fighting? I had a revelation after the dream. I can't remember if it was part of it but they all bowed down to the figure of Christ. Then I woke up and I thought what in the world did that dream mean? What in the world could that possibly mean? Then I understood it. I understood that if you have 20 kings let's say, and you took the thing that was most king-like about each of them and then you combined it into a single figure then you'd get a single figure of transcendent heroism, of transcendent good. It's a tenant of the union school of psychology, let's say, that that figure of transcendent good is symbolized by the image of Christ. The purpose of that image is so that even the tyrannical king has someone to bend his knee to. That's absolutely vital. You don't have to approach it from a religious perspective, although you inevitably do because when you speak of things at this level that's what happens. But you need an image of the transcendent embodied good to serve as something that unites the great tyrants of the past. It's something like that. It's an emergent vision of embodied unity. It's a psychological necessity. It's a sociological necessity. I think it bears very strongly on your question about why is it that people matter. It's the classic Western answer to that, the Judeo-Christian answer to that, is because you have a spark of divinity within you and that divinity is a reflection of this transcendent good and it's obligatory for me to recognize that in you and vice versa if we're going to inhabit the same territory without mayhem, peacefully, and with the ability to cooperate. Now, you might say the mere fact that a transcendent image is necessary as a uniting figure doesn't prove the reality of that image, but I would say, well, yes but it doesn't disprove it, and it strongly hints at something more profound especially when you also ally it with the observation that the encounter with something truly admirable produces the instinct of awe, and that's not a rational instinct. It's an irrational instinct, but it's a marker that you're in the presence of something greater than yourself. It's not something that you have voluntary control over. It's something that overtakes you, and it could easily be a reflection of the truth. Now you can make a biologically reductionistic argument about that, but it starts to become extraordinarily difficult because you enter into the realm where these transcendent experiences of religious significance and awe are phenomenological and psychological reality. And it's not easy to explain why that's the case.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Let me just say that I am somewhat suspicious of the transcendent. Some things that make us feel part of something . . .

DR. PETERSON: . . .what makes people matter is transcendent. You said that.

DR. GOLDSTEIN:  No, no, no. I was using a transcendental kind of argument a-la Kant. Transcendental. This is different from transcendence.

DR. PETERSON: Well, if it's the same for everyone, it's transcendent because it transcends the individual. If there's something about every individual that matters, it's transcendent.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Then human nature is transcendent. Right?

DR. PETERSON: That's fine with me.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: That’s fine with me, too.

DR. CRAIG: There is a vocabulary confusion here that needs to be cleared up. You are talking about a transcendent reality beyond the natural realm. Rebecca doesn't believe in such a reality. She says everything is confined to the laws of nature and things subject to that. But she's using the word transcendental (a transcendental argument) like Kant where in order to justify, for example, reasoning you show that without the assumption of reasoning you couldn't even deny the validity of reasoning. It's almost kind of pulling it up by your bootstraps sort of argument. That's what you're talking about.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: It creates the very conditions for coherence in your life. There are transcendental arguments for logic, for deduction, for induction. And I would say for moral reasoning as well – that there are certain preconceptions that we can't live our life coherently without them. We can stop with ourselves but if we push it further that's exactly what Spinoza’s project was – a completely naturalist deduction of ethics. He calls it the Ethics. It had a profound effect on European history. It took a hundred years but it seeded the Enlightenment from which so much moral progress has derived that I am very much a beneficiary of it as a woman, as a Jew. I am very much a beneficiary of that – of what came from the Enlightenment. The thing that I was . . . that makes me . . . the being part of a movement, that bigger makes us more than we are, this kind of trying to transcend our humanity is what makes me very nervous because what can . . . the imprint on my mind is always both the victims of the greatest horror that I know of and the perpetrators of it who felt so transcendent. Those Nazis. They were part of a very larger-than-life movement that made them feel . . . talk about symbols. Symbols galore. Spectacle galore. It was a kind of drunkenness of transcendence. I'm nervous about that. Give me music. Give me art. Give me great novels. Give me poetry. That kind of transcendence. But the sort of transcendence that is the transcendence that makes us feel all at one in our humble humanity, that kind of transcendence I believe in. But I don't like the larger symbolic “we are transcending our human condition.” Let's just be human. That would be triumph enough.

KAREN STILLER: We want to move very quickly into starting to take questions because the time is moving. But first I want to talk about the Twinkie in the room. Because that really is about religion – putting rules on. You have an answer to the meaning of life that religion would be a freedom experience, I'm sure. Can you respond to that, Dr. Craig?

DR. CRAIG: I didn't catch the question.

KAREN STILLER: Just this idea that religion being an oppressive reality versus a meaningful reality for the meaning of life.

DR. CRAIG: I think that the argument that I have offered this evening is simply irrelevant to the societal effects of religion. You cannot judge the truth or falsity of a worldview based upon its societal impact. For example, Einstein's theories of relativity being largely misunderstood led to a cultural relativism where people thought he meant or taught everything is relative. They didn't understand the difference between relativity and relativism. And so in some ways relativity theory has had negative cultural consequences in terms of promoting a kind of moral relativism. Does that show the theory is false? Of course not. The truth or falsity of a worldview doesn't depend upon its societal impact. And so as a philosopher I'm just not that bothered or interested in what are the social implications of theism. I'm talking about a metaethical argument, a metaphysical argument, that will give us an objective grounding for significance, human value, and purpose in life that can then be fleshed out in practical normative ways.

KAREN STILLER: This is from a viewer. How does your perspective on the meaning of life account for evil and suffering? Would you like to take that first, Dr. Peterson?

DR. PETERSON: Well, I read something very interesting many decades ago. It was a Jewish meditation on finitude. It was presented in what you might describe as a Jewish Zen koan. There aren't that many of those. So here was the question. What does a being who's omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent lack? Those are the three classical attributes of God. The answer was: limitation. And that was the reason for the creation of man. If there's something about limitation that the absolute lacks. Say being requires limitation, let's say, because if you can be anything at all at any moment then you're everything at once and in some sense you're nothing at all. We're in this situation. Our being is defined by our limitations, and that produces suffering. The question is whether there is a mode of being that justifies the suffering. That's the fundamental religious question. I think that the answer to that is yes. So being requires limitation. Limitation necessitates suffering. But there are modes of being that allow you to transcend the suffering. That's the hope. And then with regards to evil, it seems to me, I have to speak metaphysically or theologically here, that a universe without the possibility of evil is also one without the possibility of good. I would say that if human beings conducted themselves properly we could have a universe where free choice was the rule, we were free to choose evil, but there would be no evil because we would choose good. I think that we should be very careful at laying the existence of evil at the feet of the Creator without looking to our own role in producing it. So that's my answer to that question.

KAREN STILLER: This is a question for you specifically, Dr. Peterson. Do you believe religions like Christianity have a role in the pursuit of discovering that which is opposite of evil?

DR. PETERSON: I think that that is what they are fundamentally. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand the underlying narrative structure of the Bible, for example. It is a very strange collection of books, but it has a narrative structure. The narrative structure is something like: people fell into history when they became self-conscious, and because they were self-conscious (conscious of their own limitations, conscious of suffering itself) they are also able to become and motivated to become resentful and cruel and bitter and homicidal and genocidal. That's, I suppose, in some sense the genesis of evil. Our life is bounded by suffering and tainted by malevolence and there's a pathway through that. As far as I can tell, the entire Bible is a meditation on the pathway through that. Now, it's not a meditation we understand because most of it is story. It's embedded in stories. Stories are the way that we transmit information that we don't yet understand. But I think that the Bible properly understood is the best . . . what would you say . . . it's the best set of instructions that we have to understand what it would mean to live a life that would enable us to bear suffering nobly and to constrain malevolence. That's what it looks like to me. I can give you a quick example of that. There's an idea, a deep idea, that emerges in the first chapter of Genesis. That being that extracts habitable order out of nothingness and potential, uses truthful speech to do that as the mechanism by which that occurs, and that the habitable order that's extracted from the chaotic potential by truthful speech is good, and that the capacity to do that is part and parcel of each human being – something I believe to be as accurate as anything can be accurate. And so there's an idea right in the beginning – right in the first chapter of that book – that if people spoke truthfully that the order they spoke into being would be good. I believe that to be the case. I think that people experience that in their own lives. You know what happens if you lie to yourself. You know what happens if you lie to other people and betray them. You produce little pockets of hell within you and around you. And if you cease to do that then things improve, and that begs the question of just how good they could get if we cease to do that all together.

KAREN STILLER: Dr. Craig, this question is for you. Why does the lack of ultimate significance entail the lack of temporary significance?

DR. CRAIG: It seems to me that in order for something to be significant – to be important – it needs to make a difference. That's what it means to be significant. And so if no matter what you do everything winds up the same, your choices are ultimately insignificant. That is to say, they're inconsequential. And on naturalism all of our choices, the entire human race is ultimately inconsequential. It doesn't matter. It's insignificant. And that seems to me to be virtually undeniable on atheism.

DR. GOLDSTEIN:May I deny it?

DR. CRAIG: Sure.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Somehow it’s this temporality that seems to really matter to you. Unless it is . . . you're right. It's almost a tautology. In order for something to be significant it has to make a difference. But why can't it just make a difference for some duration and not forever? If somebody is in pain, is suffering, and I can do something to take that suffering away, that matters. And it doesn't matter that neither I nor the sufferer will exist.

DR. CRAIG: Let's remember my argument is a tripartite argument. There are three components to it: purpose, value, and significance. Now, I agree that if things have objective moral worth and value then their being merely temporary does not mean that they're insignificant. In that case you can have significance despite its transitoriness in virtue of its moral worth. But my argument is that in the absence of God there isn't any objective foundation for the affirmation of objective moral values and duties. These are simply illusions fobbed off on us by the socio-biological evolutionary process, and therefore you can't rescue significance by appealing to the inherent moral worth of temporary things.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: If it were only the biological process, the evolutionary process, how could it be that through reflection, slowly, far too slowly, we actually can make progress? Everything. There's nothing more biologically determined than male dominance over women. Nothing is more . . . right?

DR. CRAIG: Well, now, wait Rebecca.

DR. PETERSON: You underestimate women!

DR. GOLDSTEIN: We have our ways! We are slowly . . . there's all sorts of behavior that is biologically determined. Right? Xenophobia. I spent a lot of time in Africa observing the chimps. It was one of the most amazing experiences for me. I mean, I came back and all I could only see . . . I came back to a conference actually and there were two men on either side of me. This is my fate! This is my doom. They were arguing over me, and there was a little lady in between, and they were pointing their fingers and trying also to impress me a little bit. All I could see was what I had just seen in Uganda.

DR. CRAIG: You mean among the bonobos and the chimps?

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Not bonobos! Oh bonobos are entirely different. Bonobos are females . . . among the chimps.

DR. CRAIG: Fair enough, but the point is the same sort of social behavior exhibited by Homo sapiens is already present in their primate relatives like baboons and chimpanzees.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Yes!

DR. CRAIG: And there is no reason to invest human morality with any more objective significance than that kind of behavior that evolution is programmed into other primate species because it's advantageous in the struggle for survival. That’s just a herd morality.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: But that is not how we have progressed.

DR. CRAIG: That is not what?

DR. GOLDSTEIN: What civilization is, what moral progress is . . .

DR. CRAIG: Wait. Wait. Where do you get the word “progress?”

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Oh, yes, I get the progress.

DR. CRAIG: On a naturalistic worldview? I think on a naturalistic worldview you would be justified in talking about moral change but the word progress smuggles in a standard.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: But that is because you think on a naturalist basis, on a purely naturalist basis, there is no way to justify, to ground, objective morality. That is what you expressed.

DR. CRAIG: True.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Since I don’t buy that premise, I do think that one can talk about moral progress.

DR. CRAIG: Can I read you a quotation, and I want you to comment on it?

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Sure.

DR. CRAIG: OK. Here’s the . . .

KAREN STILLER: Before you do that, we are running out of time and as much as I hate to say it. Please do that. Then I am going to ask you to each make a last statement.

DR. CRAIG:

The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. . . . the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real . . .? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?^[7]

That's a statement by Steven Pinker.

DR. GOLDSTEIN: Steven Pinker clearly believes that we can make sense out of moral progress and believes that we can ground morality on purely naturalist . . . we are creatures who offer reasons. Right? We offer reasons. We reflect upon reasons. We reflect upon our own reactions. Certain of our reactions are biologically determined. But we reflect on them and we can ask whether or not – this is how we are not animals, this is how we are not chimps – we can ask whether these reactions are right. What gives us the right? Were I not myself, would I tolerate this in somebody else? We're able to rise to that level. Evolution has given us that capacity. It's given us language. It's given us self-reflection. It's given us the ability to contemplate points of view other than our own. That's what human intelligence is. And given that, and given certain reactions that we have that ground our lives, that without these reactions we could not even pursue our lives, we can ask, “What is it? Am I special? Am I special that I have the right to ask you to treat me with dignity?” Is there something . . . do I cosmically play some special role? No. Obviously I don't. That's delusion. That's insanity. This is the kind of reasoning, reasoning that biology has equipped us with that allows us to go beyond the chimps that we descended from.

KAREN STILLER: Thank you. I'm going to ask each of you – and I'm going to ask you to start with this, Dr. Peterson, and this is how we will end this evening – I'm going to ask you to pretend you're speaking to a friend or maybe a young person who is struggling with finding meaning in life. I'm just going to ask you to share what you would tell them and how you would encourage them as we end out.

DR. PETERSON: I've been working on trying to get these words right, these particular words, for the last couple of weeks and a good answer may be to the question. Being is suffering, tainted by malevolence. And so what's the meaning? There's pain to alleviate. There's chaos to confront. There's order to establish and revivify. And there is evil to constrain not least in our own hearts. And that's meaning enough for everyone.

KAREN STILLER: Dr. Newberger-Goldstein?

DR. GOLDSTEIN: We are creatures; we're trying to get our bearings. This is, I think, something very, very deep about us. We come into this world, we want to know what it is, where are we, what are we, and what are we supposed to do with whatever it is that we are. We are creatures who are trying to get our bearings. And we ask two sorts of questions in trying to get our bearings. We asked what is, and we ask what matters. And the question “What matters?” comes in two forms: who matters? and what matters? We all want to matter. We all want to matter beyond the first person, the thing that's just given that our genes are driving us to feel that we matter until our genes are replicated into the next generation. There is . . . I guess, I concentrate . . . you see a lot of darkness, and I see so much more light in trying to make our lives matter. The positive value that we can add most importantly to those fellow creatures, those who are going along. We are all in on this together trying to get our bearings. Any help that we can offer, any contribution that we can offer, like this – right? I mean this is a meaningful occasion. People struggling hard with very, very different points of view to say something that will be universally beneficial no matter how much you disagree. That is meaning. I would say to them get in on this; get past yourself. Think about all the other fellow creatures who are with you in this struggle together and let's join forces and move forward. That's what I would say.

DR. CRAIG: The great American philosopher William James once remarked that we may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries – seeing the books and hearing the conversation but having no inkling of the meaning of it all. I would want to encourage you to think that perhaps the universe is a far, far more wonderful place than you've yet suspected. That there may be a transcendent personal God who created the universe and you with a goal in mind – to know him and enjoy him in a personal love relationship forever. You find yourself now alienated from this being of perfect goodness and love due to the moral evil that has been so pointedly described tonight. But there's forgiveness and cleansing available if you will but avail yourself of it. And so I would encourage you to do what I did as a teenager seeking for the meaning and purpose of my life. Pick up a New Testament and begin to read it and ask yourself: Could this really be true? Could there really be a God who loves me and who has sent his Son Jesus Christ to redeem me, that I might know him forever? I believe that if you'll do that it could change your life in the same way that it changed mine.^[8]