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SPEAKER_02Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings? What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith? When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere. Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK. And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest. If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well? Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is. Visit kingdom.bankslash speaklife. Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. Well, the dialogue has happened between Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, and in between has been Alex O'Connor. And it was very much the clash of fire and ice that we all expected it to be. And I guess what comes in between fire and ice is Alex O'Connor, I guess he's lukewarm water, in the middle. And Alex O'Connor's presence in the middle was absolutely necessary because these two really don't understand each other very well. Here are some of the things that Richard Dawkins has said about Jordan Peterson. When he talks about religion, I think it's bullshit.
SPEAKER_04I think I think that he's he doesn't make any sense at all.
SPEAKER_02I think I think he's he's impressing people by using language they don't understand. And that difference comes out a number of times in this dialogue. Dawkins says, You're drunk on symbols.
SPEAKER_04Dr. Peterson, you're drunk on symbols.
SPEAKER_02Yes, you mentioned I've I've I've heard your I've heard that comment. Yeah. Dawkins looks across a chasm at Jordan Peterson and sees that he is a man of myth, whereas Dawkins himself is a man of fact.
SPEAKER_04Jordan prioritizes myth, and I prioritize fact.
SPEAKER_02In the bonus half-hour on The Daily Wire Plus, Jordan Peterson recognizes a difference as well between himself and Richard Dawkins. He phrases it like this.
SPEAKER_05It seems to me that one of the differences between us, apart from the fact that I'm more interested in the fictional, let's say, and the aesthetic, is also that I'm more interested in the nature of moral truth than in the nature of fact.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. But I think the person who sees the difference between the two of them, uh, best of all, is the moderator, Alex O'Connor. Here he is on his own podcast interviewing Ian McGilchrist, the uh author of The Master and His Emissary, and a very eminent psychologist and scientist who has talked about two different brain hemispheres, the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. And in conversation with Ian McGilchrist, Alex O'Connor back in May of this year talks to him about whether these two figures of Jordan Peterson and uh Richard Dawkins are in fact emblematic of the right hemisphere, left hemisphere kind of emphasis.
SPEAKER_03He puts it like this: Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins have a conversation about God and religion. And Peterson is talking about sort of narrative and how things are truer than true, and that, you know, it's kind of fiction, but it's a a special kind of fiction, and then Richard Dawkins being like, I want to know if you put a camera in you know, if you put it put a camera in front of the the tomb, would you see a man walk out of it? Like, did it literally happen?
SPEAKER_02Which is exactly the question that Alice O'Connor put to Jordan Peterson earlier in the year, and it panned out like this.
SPEAKER_03Let me put it this way if if I went back in time with a Panasonic video camera and put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, would the little L C D screen show a man walk out of that tomb? I would suspect yes. So that that is that to me seems like a belief in the historical event of the resurrection, or at least of Jesus leaving the tomb, which means that when somebody says, you know, do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, it doesn't seem clear to me why you're not able to just say it would seem to me yes.
SPEAKER_05Because I have no idea what that means. And neither did the people who saw it.
SPEAKER_02So Alex is very used to putting the Richard Dawkins style of question to Jordan Peterson, and I don't think Alex O'Connor was particularly satisfied with the answer that Jordan Peterson gave. So Alex O'Connor is alive to the ways in which Richard Dawkins will not understand Jordan Peterson. He's also alive to the ways in which Jordan Peterson doesn't understand Richard Dawkins.
SPEAKER_03It seems more understandable to me that Richard Dawkins is baffled by Jordan Peterson being asked, Did the Exodus story happen? And Peterson responds, It's still happening. That's his response, quite quite baffling. Um but it seems equally baffling to Jordan Peterson when somebody asks him, you know, do you think it actually happened though? Like do literally, do you think that a man rose from the dead? Do you think that Jesus was born of a virgin? And he's like, I don't even know how to begin answering that question. I I don't have the the requisite uh understanding of the terms that you're using. That seems absolutely baffling. Do you think that that is a sort of a conflict like that? Something like a uh a battle between left brain thinking and right brain thinking.
SPEAKER_02So Ian McGilchrist is about to answer that question, and he's about to do what he does in pretty much every interview, which is to say everything you've heard about left and right brain is probably false unless you've heard it from me. Um and he says that in a very self-deprecating way. Um, but he is alerting us to the dangers that at a popular level we have a very low-resolution understanding of left brain and right brain. And we just think left brain is logical and right brain is big picture. Um whereas it's much more about uh your attention and and spheres of attention and whether you're attentive to the macro or to the micro. Um he says it much better than me. But Ian McGilchrist's uh instinct is is not to reduce things down to such a binary, uh, but he still grants that uh what Alex says uh has some measure of truth to it.
SPEAKER_01Well, I rather resist these rather simple um ways of using the terms, but uh I I I can't uh entirely disagree with you. I think that ultimately when you start unpacking the way in which the right and the left hemisphere see the world, you you can see that there are such differences. I mean in many ways Richard Dor can um reductionists reductionist material. Um I hope I hope I'm not giving him an injustice in saying that he therefore misunderstands the meaning of many things. When it comes to certain things like for example consciousness, the ability to read it to turn it down and to say what it is and where it arises It is almost the wrong way to approach it because it's not a thing like that. It's not a another thing in the world alongside the things that consciousness allows us to be aware of. And God is not a thing in the world in the way that a rock or a stone or a tree is a thing in the world or D3. I would begin to qualify that as well. But but you know, for these purposes, let's say uh a bicycle is a thing in the world, but God is not uh a very complicated machine, he's not a very complicated anything of the the kind that we know, and so to try to approach God in that way is is is is is going to produce uh no insight into what people mean. And you have to be very either a very arrogant or a very confident person to say, well, all these people who think that they understand something that I can't see, they're just wrong because I can't see it. Uh another way of looking at it would be, well, maybe I need to revise my thoughts about what is true.
SPEAKER_02So Dawkins is a materialist, a reductionist, uh a scientist who sees things merely uh in in terms of its component mechanisms. Um and and yet that is an insufficient way of looking at the world. Let's think about love. Uh love cannot be reduced to that kind of analysis, and yet love is real. Love is as real as molecules are, isn't it? And if you can't say that, that's not because you've got the more sophisticated metaphysic. You might have a very naive, uh, a very crude uh metaphysic if your metaphysic cannot involve things like love or or minds, consciousness, or moral truths, or mythological truths, right? If if your metaphysical furniture um is is merely just matter in motion, then um you do not have the sophisticated metaphysic. You do not have the sophisticated view of reality. You've got an incredibly crude view of reality that's reductionistic and that might not serve you well in understanding what reality really is. So here we've got these two different ways of seeing the world. There's the very left brain and logical, and I'm just concerned with the facts, and then there's the very right brain, uh, the very mythological, um, the realm of value. And how are they going to interact with one another? As we'll see, Jordan Peterson very much wants to bring those two things together. Greek culture very much wanted to bring those two things together, logos and mythos. And is there an integration of the two? Um, Jordan Peterson is searching for one, feeling after one, grasping at one. Um Richard Dawkins doesn't seem to even want to have that integration, but I think both of them fall short. And the big question is, is there anyone that can bring the mythos and the logos together? Well, at about the eight-minute mark, Jordan Peterson makes this, I think, crucial point that the world of facts is seen through a story. If you want to have facts, then you need to pay attention to a certain set of facts, because there are a million things that you could pay attention to. Um, but you must only pay attention to a certain finite uh set of facts, and you must plug those facts into a greater narrative in order to understand those facts. Therefore, the realm of value is actually prior to and it conditions all the way we seek after the facts. Here's the way he puts it.
SPEAKER_05The postmodern types seem to have stumbled onto something which I actually think is true. And they're not the only discipline that's come to this realization because you can see it emerging in neuroscience and in in uh in AI and in robotics as well, that we see the world of facts through something that when described is a story, because we have to prioritize our perceptions and we have to prioritize facts. And as far as I can tell, a story is a verbal account of how of how our perceptions and the facts that we encounter are prioritized. So, for example, when you go see a movie, the movie has a hero, and what the writers do is they show you how the hero prioritizes his perceptions, what he attends to, and how he acts, and you derive from that the story of his life and his ethic. And the the idea that we have a story, that we have to organize our perceptions in priority, and that the description of that organization is a story, that's a very revolutionary idea. And I think the postmodernists got that right. I think that's why we have a culture war going on, at least in part, is because the idea that we see the world through a story, or that a story is a description of the structure through which we see the world, I think that's accurate because we have to prioritize our perceptions.
SPEAKER_04So, Professor that's a tricky problem. Well, I would prioritize my perceptions like this. The facts that I care about are the facts that are true and have evidence going for them. And I'm not that interested in symbols. Um I think, Dr. Peterson, you're drunk on symbols.
SPEAKER_05Yes, you mentioned I've I've I've heard your I've heard that comment. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yes. You're drunk on symbols. I think all we're seeing there from Richard Dawkins is just an allergic reaction to something that is trying to take him out of his very left-brained pattern of focus and attention. Jordan Peterson wants Richard Dawkins to be able to attend to the facts and to know the truth. He's just pointing out that the truth is actually an integration of fact and value, and that you can't see those facts without a grid of value to tell you what to pay attention to and how to understand those facts in relationship to it to a wider story. In order to be a person of fact and in order to be a person of truth, you also have to be a person of value, a person of narrative, both a person of mythos. Um to be logical, you also have to be mythological. That's that's kind of Jordan Peterson's point. I'm not really sure that Richard Dawkins actually understands it.
SPEAKER_04Um, I mean, for for example, I've I've um I counted up in your book, um, We Who Wrestle With God, the number of references to Cain. Um there are 356 references to Cain in the book, and 20 references to the descendants of Cain. Um you're obsessed with Cain because Cain is symbolic of uh evil, um, all the evil in the world you you more or less blame Cain for. And um this is Cain, I mean, you you don't believe Cain actually existed, I presume.
SPEAKER_02So yes, Jordan Peterson is indeed uh obsessed with Cain. He seems to be obsessed with Cain even more than Adam and Eve, even though I think Adam and Eve is a far more central story scripturally and and more fruitful. But Cain and Abel is indeed a very early, ancient, primordial story in scripture that explains so much in our world, so I can kind of understand why why Jordan Peterson um is so interested in that. But notice what kind of attention Richard Dawkins wants to pay to that story. Were they individuals? Were they brothers who were born to Adam and Eve? Um and if they weren't, he he's not interested in the story at all, which is a very odd way of treating stories. But how does Jordan Peterson respond?
SPEAKER_05Well, I think of Cain as well. Do you believe Cain existed? I think the pattern that Cain represents is an eternal pattern.
SPEAKER_04And so it's a higher level of existence. That's different. I I realize that.
SPEAKER_05But there are Cain types who exist, and they're just Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04There are Cain types, but Cain himself. I mean, you you give the game away where you say in your book, Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in the natural way. Now that that betrays you as it were pretending you think they really existed, because you wouldn't have said they were born in a natural way unless you were muddling up facts with symbols there. Because you don't think that Cain and Abel existed.
SPEAKER_02I think all that shows is that Richard Dawkins is not used to reading literature, perhaps, uh aside from scientific literature. Of course, Cain and Abel are the first to be born in the natural way in the story of Genesis, right? Um Adam and Eve were created in some quite extraordinary ways. Uh Cain and Abel are born in very ordinary ways. And it just goes to show that Jordan Peterson is able to put himself into the world of the Bible and look around. And Richard Dawkins really isn't able to do that. He's really he is really not able to read the Bible at all. It's not that he's only interested in the facts, he can't even get to the facts because he won't enter into the story. Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings? What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith? When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere. Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK. And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest. If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well? Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is. Visit Kingdom.bankslash speaklife. Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. But let's see how Jordan Peterson responds.
SPEAKER_05Well, I don't what do I think about Kane and Abel? I I said, I think the pattern that they represent always exists. Always exists.
SPEAKER_04A pattern that they represent, the conflict between brothers, the rivalry between brothers, this is a fundamental pattern, which which, yes, it's something that that's there. But I care about facts. I mean, did they exist or did they not exist? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_05Well, I can imagine a situation where when the story was originated, that it referred to two actual brothers. But as the stories propagate across time, as they mutate, as they adapt, let's say, to the to the structure of human memory, they deepen and they become broader. And so then they become emblematic not only of the pattern of conflict that might characterize the original two brothers that the story was about, but about the conflict between brothers as such and then the more fundamental levels of conflict that exist within human beings, which is what you see in more sophisticated literature. It's like the biblical accounts speak of fact in a factual manner upon occasion, but the biblical accounts also speak poetically and metaphorically and allegorically. And people who are sophisticated in biblical analysis have known this for centuries. The biblical literists generally suffer from the problem that they don't even know what it means to be literalist. There's lots of unsophisticated ways of approaching a text.
SPEAKER_02Now, Jordan Peterson is taking the Bible in the way that classically liberal Protestants have taken the Bible. You know, did the Exodus happen? It's always happening. Did the road did the road to Emmaus happen? It's always happening. Did the resurrection of Christ happen? It's always happening. Did Cain and Abel happen? It's always happening. And there's something that's true about that. And there's also something that's right about Richard Dawkins insisting that the historical fact of it matters. The historical fact of it does matter, actually, at the end of the day. And Jordan Peterson, um, the way that you frustrate Richard Dawkins, sometimes you frustrate uh Christians as well, because we are totally on board with you as you want to take the story seriously and jump in with both feet to this strange new world of the Bible and look around and take it on its own terms. That's true. It's also important that that story connects with our reality. It's also very important that not that every story in the Bible is historical, because so many aren't. So many are just song lyrics, so many are just poems, so many are parables that are told by Jesus, so many uh uh just apocalyptic literature. There is so much in the Bible that would not have shown up on CCTV footage, right? And we need to have a much more mature view of scripture in all the kinds of genres in which it speaks. But it is also important that biblical history enters into human history, and especially the history of Christ enters into human history, because at that point the mythos and the logos touch, at that point the world of narrative and the world of fact touch, and it is important for Dr. Peterson's scheme that those two things touch. So it is important that Peterson find a better answer to Richard Dawkins. It really is important that he find a better answer to Alex O'Connor's question. Now it's true that when Alex O'Connor asked Jordan Peterson, would the resurrection of Jesus have shown up on a camera? Jordan Peterson actually said yes, and that he doesn't know what that means. That is very much in the ballpark of the sort of things that a Christian would say. But it's really, really important to be able to say at some point that the narrative touches history, that the world of mythos enters the world of logos and fact. It's so important because we live at the juncture of mythos and logos. We live at the juncture of mind and body. We live at the juncture of value and fact. Even down to our brains, as Ian McGillchrist would tell us. We have the master and his emissary, we have the right brain and the left brain. We are an integration of fact and value. Therefore, we need to figure out how to integrate or we need to figure out what the grounds are for the integration that we live out of as flourishing human beings every day. So, Jordan Peterson, you need to give a better, more satisfying answer to the questions that Richard Dawkins asks. Richard Dawkins, you need to ask a lot better questions, a lot more different questions to the ones that you're asking. Because at the moment, just a pixel it didn't happen approach to every story in scripture is not going to get you very far. But Alex Economist. Makes a good interjection here, and he kind of stops Jordan Peterson speaking, which I think is is one of the key tasks that he has in this video, and he opens up the floor to Richard Dawkins again.
SPEAKER_03Okay, let's see what Professor Dawkins thinks about that.
SPEAKER_04Well, I I I suppose I'm a literalist. I mean, and and you give the game away when you say Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in a natural way.
SPEAKER_05Well, I was speaking allegorically there, within the confines of the text. I mean, what I meant by that was that the way the story lays itself out is that Adam and Eve are created by God. And so they're they're they're not they're not they don't they're not emblematic of the pattern of human beings that exist in fallen history within the confines of the text. The first two people who are genuine, who aren't creations of the divine, are Cain and Abel. And so for me, they're emblematic of the patterns of conflict that rip people apart in the world of history, in the world of normal history.
SPEAKER_03Professor Dawkins, I know you take particular umbrage with that statement that Cain and Abel were the first normally born uh human beings. But I think if I understand Dr. Peterson correctly, there are things that can be sort of true within a story. It's true that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, and as far as I understand, that's maybe what you mean by uh the truth in the matter of Cain and Abel being the first naturally born human beings.
SPEAKER_05Well, in the context of this story, they're the first two spirits or patterns you could think of, patterns of perception and action that that characterize human existence in the fallen world, right? So they're emblematic of what happens in history outside of the whatever is meant by the pre-existent paradise.
SPEAKER_02Which is, of course, what everyone took to be Jordan Peterson's meaning, except Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is very much this left-brained guy who just can't understand people who enter into story and abandon themselves to story and find themselves oriented by that rather than just an insistence that Pixar didn't happen. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_03At the same time, you must know. I know this comes up all of the time when somebody says, But Bitcoin enable really exists. And I know that you want to say that the the story which I think it's a silly question.
SPEAKER_05I think it's like asking whether Raskolnikov existed in crime and punishment. Like it's not it's not a trivial question. Because you can answer yes and you can answer no. You can say, well, there was no such specific person as Roskolnikov. But you it's it's not a helpful question.
SPEAKER_02It is a helpful question, actually. Like Dr. Peterson, you need to be better at answering this question because it's not just like Raskolnikov, because the question of whether the world of value touches the world of fact is at the heart of are we ever going to heal from the Enlightenment? You know, at the at the Enlightenment there was this bursting asunder of what God had always kept together. You know, for for the previous 1800 years, the Christian church had been preaching about the word who was made flesh, about the world of value, the logos, right? Jesus Christ, the God the Son, he entered into our humanity and he took flesh at that first Christmas, and he lived our kind of life, and he died our kind of death, and he rose up to the highest place in the in the hierarchy of value, in the dominance hierarchy, as Jordan Peterson might say, in order to take our history up into that world of value. The world of value has descended into the world of history, and the world of history has been taken up into the world of value, and it's really important that those things actually happened and that they weren't just cool story, bro. Cool story bro doesn't save us. It doesn't save us in that eternal sense. It also doesn't save us from the enlightenment and from the post-Enlightenment meaning crisis that we're all feeling, where fact and value have been torn asunder. How are we gonna get these things back together? It's not just by insisting it's all story, it's all story. There needs to be an anchoring in reality. And so it's it's not just like Roskolnikov.
SPEAKER_05Because the reason that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece is because Roskolnikov was everywhere in Russia when Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. And so Roskolnikov is hyper-real, not not real.
SPEAKER_03Trevor Burrus, Jr. But to be clear, is that how you feel about Cain and Abel? That that is to say, an identified Homo sapiens called Kane's brother.
SPEAKER_05In a sense, it's irrelevant to me because it even if they were real, like we don't know anything about them as a correct figure.
SPEAKER_04Even if they weren't real, of course they weren't real.
SPEAKER_05Trevor Burrus, well, like I said, it could have been the case that where when the story originated, way back when it originated, that the first people that were described by the first person who generated the seeds of the Canaan Abel story were referring to actual people. But it doesn't matter because the the text is being compressed and modified over a vast span of time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, it does matter. It does matter that the world of story actually enters into the world of fact and the world of fact touches the world of value. Um the incarnation really matters because we live at the intersection of fact and value, at the level of our brains, and at the level of living out a meaningful life, not to mention at the at the level of the word who became flesh and he is the center of all reality. It's really important that those two things touch. So, Jordan Peterson, please get better at answering these questions, and Richard Dawkins, please start answering a richer variety of questions. As the conversation goes on, Peterson asks Dawkins about his claims to be a cultural Christian, something that we've uh spoken about here on this channel. When Peterson asks Dawkins that question, I don't think he gets quite the answer he was wanting.
SPEAKER_05You made a statement a couple of months ago that I found very interesting. And I don't claim to understand it, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot with it. You said that you were a cultural Christian. Okay, and so that raised a number of questions in my mind. You know, and the first question was You are changing the subject, you're not sure. No, I'm no, I'm no, I'm not. No, I don't think so. I may be leaping outside of the topic a bit to get back to the question. But I think Professor Dolphins, it also were referring to the predictive power and to the utility of the stories. Okay, so that's actually what I was trying to say. Okay, so that that was the point. Well, it seemed to me that your proclamation that you were a cultural Christian was a recognition and a statement that you had found something in the culture that had been derived from Christianity that you had an affinity with, and that there's some reason for that. And one of the things I wanted to ask you is, well, what do you think that Christianity got right that allows you to make a statement like that? I mean, I know I know that there's differences perhaps in what we both think about the ultimate veracity of the biblical stories. Maybe there isn't differences. Like it would take a lot of conversation to figure this out, but but what did you mean by that? Like, what do you think that Christianity got right that would enable you to make a statement like that?
SPEAKER_04Virtually nothing. Um I meant by that no more than that I'm brought up in the Christian culture. I went to Christian schools, I therefore know my way around the Bible, I know my my way around the Book of Common Prayer, I I know I know the hymns. Um, that's all. I I don't value Christianity as a truth system at all.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so let me let me ask you about that, because maybe that's true, and perhaps it's not. So the first question is like, do you think that there are any marked differences between cultural traditions that would enable you to rank order them in terms of their ethical validity?
SPEAKER_02That's a very good question because Richard Dawkins is not being honest if he says he means virtually nothing by being a cultural Christian. He said it on LBC in the context of Islam being on the rise in the West, and he prefers Christianity to Islam. Peterson is basically saying, look, if you even if you think Christianity is way down here, if you think Islam is even worse, then you must think that there's something up here that rank orders Christianity as superior to Islam. What is that? What is that highest order thing, right? You do believe in a realm of value, don't you?
SPEAKER_05Okay, so for example, we could contrast mainstream UK Christianity with Islamic fundamentalism. Okay, so there's a hierarchy.
SPEAKER_04There is a hierarchy.
SPEAKER_05A hierarchy that points to what?
SPEAKER_04Uh well, in the case of Islam, uh I dislike any religion which punishes apostasy with death, that throws gay people of high buildings, that practices clitoridectomy. Um that that seems to me to place Islam on a lower level than Christianity, but that's not to say anything very positive about Christianity.
SPEAKER_05Aaron Powell Well, it might it might be to say something positive about Christianity. Like I think that question is open because you might ask yourself, what did Christianity get right that led it away from those particular presumptions and towards something that you regard as more ethically appropriate? Like, this isn't a trivial question.
SPEAKER_04It's a very modest claim. Uh there's not very much. I mean, to to be better than a religion that throws gay people off high buildings is not really a very virtuous achievement. I I don't know.
SPEAKER_05I don't know if that's true, because if you look at the barbarism that characterizes the human past, you might think that any progression whatsoever towards something approximating mercy and tolerance is nothing short of a bloody miracle. Well, like people are pretty, pretty ruthless, and so are our chimpanzee cousins. Yes, they are.
SPEAKER_02That is quite the concession. Uh because if DNA neither knows nor cares, and we simply dance to its tune, as Richard Dawkins has written elsewhere, if the universe has precisely the properties we should expect, if there is at bottom no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, if that's the universe we live in, then it is a bloody miracle, as Jordan Peterson says, that we are not just tearing each other apart like chimpanzees. As T. S. Eliot, the poet has said, once we remove from the word human everything that Christianity has given to us, we are left with what is at bottom just a mischievous, clever, adaptable animal. But we're not mischievous, clever, adaptable animals. We are those who can rank order societies and think that death penalty for apostasy and female genital mutilation and things like this are abhorrent practices and we are so much superior to that. Well, superior judged by what? If we are DNA replicators, then Genghis Khan was the greatest example of a human being in history. He was he's the most humane example, right? He's doing the best job of being a human because he's replicating his genes and has replicated his genes more than anybody else has. We we think he's actually way down here. Well, what is it? What what is this rank ordering? What is this value system that we have that we've invested in? Um, that enables Richard Dawkins to say this and it enables him to say, I'm a cultural Christian and I see the benefits of Christianity in the world. Christianity has done something to this world that is absolutely astonishing. It's a bloody miracle, as Jordan Peterson would put it. So Richard Dawkins, if he's being consistent, has just admitted that in his inventory of metaphysical furniture in the universe, that there is a moral dimension and that it is better to have a society that that does not practice female genital mutilation and a culture that does not throw gay people off buildings and a culture that does not have the death penalty for apostasy. It is better. It is better that there is a rank ordering of cultures like that. And I assume that, you know, extrapolating from that, Genghis Khan was not a a better example of a human being than Richard Dawkins is or Jordan Peterson or like if he admits to that, then we are living in a universe in which B. more Genghis is not the DNA replicating drumbeat that we must dance to. But that's a very different universe to the one that he describes simply as a scientific reductionist. Does he really mean that it is better to be a cultural Christian than it is to be a Muslim in that sense? Does he really mean that? Okay. I don't think he's taking that sufficiently seriously, but then he asks the question back to Jordan Peterson, okay, well maybe I need to factor in that realm of value into my world, but what about you, Dr. Peterson? Is the world of story that you live in simply fiction, or is there fact to it? And so he goes back to his questions: was there a virgin birth? Was there a resurrection?
SPEAKER_04What I care about is the truth value. I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the miracles. Do you believe in any of those? Do you believe Jesus was born a virgin?
SPEAKER_05As I said before, there are elements of the text that I don't feel qualified to comment on. My experience has been that the more I like I know from a metaphorical perspective and from a mythic perspective what the story of the virgin birth means. And I accept that. I know, for example, that any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies. And I don't know how that needs to be expressed in a form. Do you mean that you don't know? Well, let me let me ask you about that because truth, this is something I talked with Sam Harris about too. Truth, as we know, is a tricky business.
SPEAKER_02Okay. I don't think it's exactly um the sort of conversation that Richard Dawkins wants to wants to have, but he's doing the thing that he very often does, and you know, I don't even know what mean means, and and and it it can get a little bit um frustrating. I understand why he is frustrated. I understand he is frustrated when very left-brained people cannot understand that we live in a world of value and cannot actually surrender themselves to the greater story and see that that greater truth. Um but he should also understand that he himself is frustrating. Jordan Peterson is a kite without a string at times. There is a realm of value, but how is it tethered? How is it earthed to our history, to our reality, to us? His project so often is a bottom-up project of how we kind of grow towards and yearn towards and evolve towards transcendent truths, towards God, you might say. It's very much a bottom-up kind of project. But does it ever get to this transcendent ideal? Does it ever get to God? Does it ever make uh these transcendent claims in a satisfying kind of a way? And interestingly, Alex O'Connor kind of calls him on this about this mixture of the mundane and the transcendent in Jordan Peterson. And actually, Richard Dawkins kind of agrees with Alex at this point. Um it's a fascinating moment.
SPEAKER_03When you say that this divine spirit behind the Bible is actually just the way that it has evolved throughout the human history, throughout the different manuscripts that we've had, then saying that that is what divinity is, I think for you may drag the mundane up into the realm of divinity. But I think for people like Richard and for many people listening, what it doesn't said is drags the divine down to the realm of the mundane. Very well put, yes.
SPEAKER_02Very well put, says Richard Dawkins. And I think uh Alex O'Connor has indeed put his finger on something that Jordan Peterson does, and that is very precious to Jordan Peterson, that indeed he wants to see how the mundane kind of gets us, is tethered to, ladders its way up to the transcendence. Um there is this, you know, Jacob's ladder, he he talks about at various points. Um, you know, you tidy your room. It's literally written onto his suit. Did you did you notice that if you zoom in on his pinstripe suit, um, those aren't stripes, that's just the letters tidy your room, tidy your room, tidier room, tidy your room. Um whereas Richard Dawkins is is wearing a uh double helix um DNA tie. So um they are beautifully in costume for this left brain, right brain conversation. Jordan Peterson embodying value and uh Richard Dawkins uh embodying kind of biology there. Um but Peterson is constantly thinking about how to um scale up from tidying your room to putting your own house in order to putting your neighborhood in order to then think about the world. Um and he goes from the very practical and the particular to the the transcendent and the divine. Um and that's kind of his his approach to the Bible as well, just as we have evolved according to Jordan Peterson, so the scriptures have evolved, but they have evolved with some kind of spirit that you may as well call a divine spirit. Alex O'Connor says, Well, you seem to think that you're making the mundane into something that's uh actually divine. Aren't you actually making the divine something that's actually pretty mundane at the end of the day? It's just uh a human product. The scriptures are just a human product, and we are just DNA replicators, aren't we? At the end of all things. Now, what what do we say about this? Well, um, it depends which God we're talking about, which divinity is it that becomes mundane? Um, because there are a lot of divinities that have no interest in uh being made flesh, let's say. There are a lot of divinities that that um don't really interact with this world. Um sure, there are a lot of divine myths in which the gods and the godlets uh have their fights and their fracas uh in dream time, but not in our history. Um the god who actually enters into the mundane and who actually takes the mundane and lifts it up into the transcendent is a very particular god. And I think that particular god opens up a real possibility for fact and value actually intersecting and connecting. The project that Jordan Peterson wants to uh have succeed is a project that is God's project, actually. The transcendent one who enters into this world in all its mundanity is a very particular God. It's the God of Jesus Christ, who at his own initiative enters in from on high down to our earth in order to take us in all our particularity and bring us back into his transcendent realm. Um so, in a sense, um Jordan Peterson is wrong because he's trying to do it from the bottom up, but but also Alex O'Connor is wrong in thinking that there's something bad about the mundane being lifted up into the transcendent or the transcendent being brought down into the mundane. That is indeed how fact and value unite. That is indeed what will reunite our culture that has forgotten Jesus Christ and that has therefore struggled for the last 300 plus years to actually integrate word and flesh, right? Value and fact. The kite and the string.
SPEAKER_05We're having trouble at the foundation of our culture. There's no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts. Sure. And that's a fact.
SPEAKER_02And Jordan Peterson puts words to this. In the bonus content, there's uh an extra half hour on the Daily Wire Plus, and they get into a conversation, and the first 10 minutes of that conversation is really fascinating, and the rest of it devolves into pretty much what you see on YouTube as well. Um, but in that conversation, Jordan Peterson um reiterates his great concern for the West that we have broken down our metaphysics does not allow us to integrate fact and value anymore. But if you go back to medieval times, they really knew about the integration of fact and value. Why were medieval people able to integrate fact and value? Because they believed in Jesus. And this is the way that Jordan Peterson puts it.
SPEAKER_05It's self-evident, I would say, that the the uh deities that the deity that's presented, let's say, in the Old and New Testament is a deity that's characterized as a character, as a personality. Yes. And then there's an insistence, this is an interesting insistence, that that personality takes embodied form in the New Testament. Right? Right. Okay, so I now this is an idea that the medieval theologians pursued to a great degree because they re regarded the human soul as a microcosm. And so there's a notion that reality itself is best understood as a personality, and a personality that you enter into relationship with, and that that can be embodied. So like there's there's this notion that Christ puts forward in the New Testament that He is the uh it's the word made flesh. That's exactly the idea. That the spirit that emerges in the characterization of God in the Old Testament across the various stories is given full expression in embodied form by the drama of the passion.
SPEAKER_02I think that's brilliant and backwards, but brilliant as well uh in lots of ways. So the spirit that emerges in Old and New Testaments, um he's talking about God here, um, can be embodied and is best embodied in the story of the Passion, which is a really interesting way of focusing our minds on Christ crucified. Um, it's not just that God reveals himself in the word made flesh, Jesus in the abstract, but Jesus in the concrete, Jesus in the story of salvation in which he comes on his hero's journey and he goes through his ordeal and he gives himself in death and blood on the cross and rises up again. That revelation. Is the embodiment of who God is, right? Now, again, Peterson's language is infused with bottom-up thinking. It's all bottom-up, bottom-up, bottom-up, bottom-up. And as a Christian, I want to think, well, it's only bottom-up because first Christ ascended to become a single cell in Mary's womb and to take our humanity to himself and to raise up our humanity. It is only bottom up because first it was top-down, because first God has revealed himself. There is an initiative by the Father through the Son to reveal who he is to the world, yes, in this embodied way, yes, in the word-made flesh, and yes, in that passion story. That the events, the drama of the gospel and the self-giving love of Christ crucified is what reveals God to us. And here is the hope for a culture that splits apart fact and value. Here is the great hope that in the realm of value, the one who is goodness and truth and beauty, the one who is love, gives of himself and interacts with us so that we, in all our particularity and in all our sin, the kind of sin that requires the passion narrative, the kind of sin that requires Christ and his death and blood, in all our sin, in all our finitude, in all our particularity, in all our mundanity, that love comes and meets us in Jesus and raises us up into his kind of spirit-filled life. Therefore, life in the body of Christ is a life of integration because here we are, integrated in the word-made flesh, given fullness in Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, that we might go out to the nations and spread this realm of value, spread this life of love. There is an integration that is so satisfying that it that is so solid in Christianity. And to take Christ out of your worldview, and then to try and unite heaven and earth, well, good luck. Good luck. And this this is why we see the split in the world. And Peterson, I think, is is far closer to reality because he wants to put words to the word-made flesh. He's trying to do it from the ground up, which is the wrong way around to do it. It's backwards. There's brilliance there, but it's also backwards. So there is Jordan Peterson, he's a kite without a string. He is the right-brained man of value. There is Richard Dawkins, he's string without a kite. He is left-brained, logical, reductionistic. And in the middle, well you might think in the middle there is Alex O'Connor. And there is Alex O'Connor, and he does a good job of uh he tries to rein Jordan Peterson in at times and allow Dawkins to speak. Um and he points out the project that Dawkins is involved with. But he also points out that Peterson is trying to unite heaven and earth from the ground up. And I think Alex O'Connor knows enough theology to know that's not that's not the way it's been traditionally done. And I don't think it's the way that it can be done. And until he can affirm that Christ came in the flesh just without equivocation, I think he will continue to be frustrated and everybody else will continue to be frustrated. But that is the kind of conversation that they have, uh left brain versus right brain, uh logic versus story, logos versus mythos, um, fact versus value. And really it's the conversation that we need to keep on having. Uh it's a conversation that has been made necessary by a 300-year unfortunate divide between fact and value. And we seem to be split across this chasm. Is there anything that can reunite us? Well, I think Ian McGilchrist and that work on our brain hemispheres is really helpful. He he calls the right hemisphere the master, he calls the left hemisphere the emissary. Because there's this idea that the master is the one that sees the whole of the terrain, sees the whole, but then requires the emissary to go out and particularize and to grab, right, the the detail. There's the master and there's the emissary. Well, open up John's gospel, and what do you see? You see in the beginning, there was the word, right? Uh, the the rationality through which creation has come, the true light that enlightens everyone. And then that word became flesh and dwelt among us. So Christ himself is this integration of kind of the rational whole, the the God who made the universe, and the particular man, Christ Jesus. There is that integration in him. And as Jesus keeps on speaking throughout John's gospel, he keeps on calling himself, he is the one sent by the Father. He is the emissary, right? Of the Master, the ultimate master. And it seems like in Christian theology, before there was a universe, there was an integration of master and emissary in the bond of the spirit. In the communion of the spirit, there is sender and sent one. There is master and emissary. There is father and son, right? And then in the fullness of time, that emissary comes to earth his kind of life in our kind of life and to sweep us up into the grand story, into the grand drama, into the grand narrative. So that God became man so that man can become God. That's that's the Christian gospel in so many ways. That we, in all our particularity in history, we have been met by the God of the whole. And the scandal of particularity is that Jesus of Nazareth is actually the doorway into eternity. Jesus of Nazareth, and that might sound very narrow, the exclusivity of Christ. Well, it's it's it's only as narrow as Christ is, and Christ himself is cosmic. And the particularity is a blessing because it means that us in history, us located where we are, us who are flesh, and encumbered with everything that flesh gives to us, we can participate in the grand story. We are invited into the the big narrative. There is an integration of fact and value in the person of Jesus Christ, and he invites you in all your particularity to come to him and to enter into his story. Getting the story right is really important, so don't be a Richard Dawkins when it comes to the story. Throw yourself into the story with both feet. But also don't just be a Jordan Peterson as regards the story. The story really did happen. That tomb really was empty. The camcorder would have seen something. Jordan Peterson's right about that. What that would have looked like, I agree with Jordan Peterson. I don't know what that would have looked like. Many people didn't recognize Jesus after his resurrection. And in fact, as he walks with the couple on Easter Sunday on the road to Emmaus, they don't recognize him either. But you know how he reveals himself to them? He invites himself to their place, and in the breaking of bread, their eyes are open, and they see, and they say, Were not our hearts burning with us when we were walking on the road and he was explaining the scriptures to us? You see, this is the way faith happens. You enter into that story, you you hear the story of the scriptures again. It starts to reorient you and refocus your attention on what is really true. And really, in that story in Luke chapter 24, the couple who are on the road to Emmaus, they're not getting it. They haven't understood about Christ and his resurrection. And it takes the scriptures to reorient them and refocus them on who Jesus is. And Jesus actually says, How foolish and slow of heart you are to believe all that the prophets have spoken. There needs to be that moment of reorientation. There needs to be that moment that I have been paying attention to all the wrong things, and I have been orienting myself to all the wrong narratives. I have been valuing all the wrong things, I've been paying attention to all the wrong facts. But in the story of Christ, I am reoriented, and I say, Oh, how foolish and slow of heart I was. And then Jesus invites the couple to break bread with him. It's like a miniature church service, right? It's this sacramental act, it's communion, and in the breaking of bread, in that very particular action that is very fleshy, very carnal, and in the particular, their eyes see him. And this is how faith will happen for you. And this is how the realm of the particular and the universal gets integrated: the emissary and the master, the fact and the value, the left brain and the right brain. We are integrated in the person of Christ because walking away from him has been the great cause of our divorce of fact and value. So let's make our way back to him. And a great way that you can do that is go to 321cour.com. Have you done the 321 course? You can enter your details, start an account, and you can binge it in a couple of hours or do it session by session. Over eight videos, you can understand who is Jesus. He is the Son of the Father, he is the word-made flesh, he is the answer to the split in this world. Why don't you come home to Jesus? Go to 321course.com. That'll do us for now on this video. What did you make of the Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins conversation? What did you make of Alex O'Connor and his moderation? I thought he did as good as he could possibly do in that very difficult uh situation. What do you think I missed on my analysis? Uh, love to see you in the comments. And if you've got this far, it must be worth a like, mustn't it? And what why don't you think about who you can share this episode with on social media or on WhatsApp or something like that? And please do hit subscribe so we can see you on the next one. Bye bye.