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June 1, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:37:52
Jordan Peterson Debate Analysis!
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All right, good.
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
And I welcome you to your, oh, pinch-punch first day of the month, 1st of June, 2025, freedomain.com's afternoon to help out the show.
Do you guys mind if I start with a tiny smidge of bitterness?
A tiny smidge of bitterness.
Rare for me.
extremely rare, but...
Oh boy.
So, I hope you don't mind.
I'm going to sound with a little bit of bitterness.
Do you know anything about the Glenn Greenwald scandal that happened over the last couple of days, wherein some salacious and, you know, to me at least, I get all of that.
And, I mean, it's private, consensual, blah, blah, blah.
I get all of that.
But, my gosh.
Do people ever rush to his defense?
Like, no questions, no issues, no concerns, no nothing.
It's just like, yeah!
He's the greatest guy ever.
I suppose, I mean, it's funny because I felt a certain amount of bitterness and I also felt a certain amount of relief.
I'm not going to get into the details.
If you want a really spicy take on it, you can follow Milo on X. But, wow.
"Wow.
The degree of rushing to defend Glenn, no matter what, even though—"Just straight up, man.
Just straight up defense.
And I was like, ah, come on, man.
Where was everyone when, you know, I don't have any particularly salacious videos out there or anything like that.
And yet I was just despawned.
And so, yeah, I felt a certain wave of like, So it was a journey of about three minutes.
It was like I was reading about this stuff and seeing everybody's defense, and it was bothering me, and I couldn't figure out why.
And then I was like, oh, yeah, because nobody really defended me.
And I felt this bitterness, then this revulsion, and then this kind of peace.
Like, this is not my world anymore.
Honestly, I mean, I have no regrets about the time I spent there.
It's seriously not my world anymore.
And it is...
There's a certain amount of lack of integrity that I just...
And I think you guys are great.
And I appreciate that and your support enormously.
But my gosh, does it ever...
It's just people pretending to be good and yet having no particular standards or principles which they're willing to sacrifice for.
*sigh*
I mean, and I'm writing a whole novel on status and ambition at the moment.
Oh, it's so good.
It's so good.
I write, and it's a whole breakthrough in writing for me.
That's why I like writing new books, particularly novels, because I'm always aiming to sort of push what I'm capable of creating or what, in a sense, what creation I'm willing to stand aside and let get on the paper.
But yeah, it's really good.
It's really good, and I think this is kind of the fuel for it.
The bitterness fuel or something like that.
So, yeah, it's just not my world.
I mean, I feel like, this is just a feeling, right?
I feel like, certainly when I was younger, a lot of times people would claim to be moral and then I would, and they would say, you know, here are my values.
I claim to be moral, I am moral, and here are my values.
And then what would happen is you would try to rely on their values.
And then there would just be a complete fade-out, a blank-out, and there would be some reason, if it was ever even explained, why those values didn't apply in this circumstance or situation.
Do I have an ETA on my new novel?
I'm 25,000 words in, so I'm probably a sixth of the way done, but because the novel is going to be told in reverse, Months, months, months, I imagine.
So, I mean, I remember in the business world, I remember very clearly, you know, we had people who...
I was chief technical officer, so we really value your input.
You know, you're the guy who makes what we sell.
It really matters what you say.
And then I would give input, and there would always be a reason why it was invalid.
Do you know what I mean?
And it feels like people put forward their virtues and their values in order to Kind of sucker punch you.
You know, in business, you know, we're customer focused, right?
We're customer focused.
I remember in one of my career arcs, I was getting complaints from customers because they found that, you know, I'm not a particularly defensive guy, so people can tell me a lot.
And so what I did was I said, okay, so we want...
And I designed a whole survey which we could send out, and this is sort of back in the day.
It was a survey that you could create, and it would email people stuff, and then it would email back the results, and I could collate it, and so on.
So, this company that was like, we're customer-focused.
We really care about the customer, right?
And then it was like, no!
Not that feedback, right?
Or, you know, in the business world, people say, we want the best.
We only hire the best, right?
It's like, but you only pay the average.
So if you want the best, But you're committed to only paying the average, then you saying you want the best doesn't mean anything.
We want the very best actor for this role, but we're only going to pay, you know, what was it Hugh Grant made for weddings and a funeral, like £100,000 or something like that?
So, yeah, people, they just say stuff to sound good, right?
And then when you try to actually leverage their statements of virtues and values, it just, it's not, it just, it fades out.
There's always a reason why it's not, not going to happen, right?
Not going to work, right?
So, I mean, I remember in a business world, I had to do a five-year plan of where we were going to go in terms of the business and so on.
And yet, when you would ask for sales plans, and I was held to that, right?
And yet, when you would go to the salespeople and say, well, you had these sales projections that only went out six months, not even a year, and you're never held to that, that's just a different thing, right?
Well, sales is unpredictable.
It's like, what, and technology is totally predictable?
Come on.
Come on, right?
And this is why one of the reasons I got out of the business world was just I was really tired of people making claims about their virtues, values, standards, and ethics, and then you would try.
And it's not everyone, but most people.
And so it just wouldn't follow through.
It just wouldn't follow through.
And it just got kind of gross.
And I don't mind.
In particular, that people are amoral.
I mean, that's just a sort of fact of life and so on.
So I don't hugely mind that people are amoral.
What I do mind is that people claim all of this morality.
That's the big issue for me.
That's the big issue for me.
So, all right.
At work, running my shop, wanted to drop a quick skull and have a good day, Steph and company.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
I didn't talk much this morning, and so I'm warming up my voice in the start.
All right, a technical question.
Instead of giving tips here, I was thinking on starting the second description on free domain website.
It's an automated way of tipping.
Subscription.
I think you mean subscription, not description.
Please check.
Please check your stuff before you post it.
This is not a high-quality standard.
Yes, I would appreciate if you would do a subscription.
The lowest overhead way to donate is freedomain.com slash donate.
So, all right.
So, I'll give you a moment to come up with questions if you like.
And if you have questions or comments, we will do that.
Thank you.
Think clearly.
And otherwise, we'll dip into this debate, which I found fascinating to watch and to see.
And we could dip into that.
Or again, if you have questions or comments, I'm happy to go with those.
Oh, gosh, the number of programs that just do pop-ups drives me a little crazy.
Okay, stop it.
Close, there we go.
How to deal with people who are compulsively contrarian.
Well, you would try to avoid dealing with them, right?
But if they are compulsively contrarian, then if you want them to do A and you suggest A and they say, I'm going to do the opposite of A, then if you want them to do A, you suggest they do the opposite of A because they're contrarian, they'll do A. So you can reverse engineer their compliance.
Somebody says, Oh God!
I hate it when you have to do estimates and anything that doesn't align with what the boss wants is thrown out, but they won't tell you what they actually want in the first place.
Just bloody tell me and I'll decide if it's reasonable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, life would be so much simpler if people just had integrity, but...
Instead, it's this race to the bottom of pretend integrity followed by rampant corruption.
I mean, life would be so much simpler.
Alright, let me just see if I missed any questions here.
Yes, the family, right?
Our business is a family.
I love the novel idea, no pun intended.
I really wish Steph would make physical copies of his work.
I miss regular books.
I hear you.
I hear you.
But I have to do that, which is reasonably profitable for the business as a whole, right?
I mean, it's a funny thing, right?
So, this is an example of a wish versus action.
And this is not particular to you.
But this is just how to get things, right?
So, how to get things in your life, right?
This is an important lesson.
I hope that you'll take this to heart and apply it.
But if you want physical copies of my book, right?
Let's say that's really important to you.
Is crossing your fingers.
It's passive.
It'd be nice if.
I'd really like it if.
Wouldn't it be nice if?
So, just as a thought exercise, as a thought exercise, let's say that it was super important for you to get hold of physical copies of my book.
Books, right?
What could you do to achieve that other than type and cross your fingers?
And again, I'm not saying you would do any of this stuff, but let's just do this as a thought exercise because I want you guys to...
What could you do to get physical copies of my books?
You could download Steph's book, take it to the print shop, and they make you a book?
Yep, absolutely.
You could do that.
There are even online services.
Now maybe you'd ask me and I'd say, sure, that's fine.
So yes, you could go and make your own book, right?
Advertise it on social media.
Bring more awareness.
I'm not sure what that means.
Make some.
Yeah, that's possible.
For sure.
Just print the damn books.
I have a hard copy of Peaceful Parenting.
Yeah, you can just print them out as well.
For sure.
Download as a PDF and take it to a print shop exactly.
Buy a printer.
Yeah.
Obviously, the pricing changes in bulk.
These are all possible things.
Now, let's say that you thought that me offering print versions of my books was important not just for you, but for a lot of people.
Let's say that you believed or you wanted to create me or have me create print books for everyone.
What could you do to bring that about?
Copy it by hand on vellum with a quill and ink.
Yes, you certainly could.
He was certainly good.
Thank you.
So, what could you do if you thought it was important for me to sell physical copies of my book?
I mean, I assume everyone has time, because, you know, lots of Netflix and video games and things like that, so what could you do?
Put together a Kickstarter campaign and reach out to you to ensure that it complies with your standards.
Yes.
Yeah, Kickstarter to print bulk books, absolutely.
You could create a business plan and say, listen, I've...
I've got 100 people who want to buy the book.
It's going to cost you X. Here's what your profit's going to be.
That's just the beginning, right?
So you could do all of that.
You could make a business case for me with the numbers of people, right?
You could say, Steph, I'd like to be a reseller of your books.
Will you give me whatever amount of dollars for every book that I sell?
And will you let me resell?
Your books.
All of that kind of stuff, right?
So there's tons of things that you can do to get a print copy of a book other than say, oh, it'd be really nice if Steph had print copies of his books, right?
Makeshop.com says someone sell X copies and the order will be put through.
Yeah.
Yeah, just make the case.
As opposed to just wanting something.
So, and again, this is not about my books, but it's an important thing that if you want something, Just make it happen.
You know, I didn't sit there to, I mean, I was one of the first podcasters, but I didn't sit there to early podcasters and say, man, it'd be really great if there was a more rational and empirical and philosophical kind of podcast, you know, wouldn't that be great, right?
I just don't, don't, don't hope, don't wish, don't ask.
Now, maybe it's not that important to you, right?
So, again, this is not about my books in particular.
This is just a mental exercise.
For you to say, how can I get physical copies of Steph's books?
And in life as a whole, in life as a whole, very important, if you want something, your first thought should be, how can I make it happen?
And if your answer is, I'm just going to ask someone to do it, In a passive way, that's a bad answer.
And it's a bad answer in particular because you need to be entrepreneurial in the world.
You need to be entrepreneurial.
I can't stress this enough.
I can't focus on it enough.
I can't get passionate about it enough.
You need to be entrepreneurial.
Even if you're an employee, you need to be entrepreneurial.
From the very beginning that I was an employee, I was coming up with good ideas, better ideas, some bad ideas about how to improve things, how to make things more efficient, and all of that.
Job in a bookstore when I was, I don't know, like 12 years old.
I used to assemble the New York Times before they tried to disassemble me many decades later.
I used to assemble the New York Times and stock shelves, stock books and newspapers in a bookstore.
And I remember when my friends really got into a particular series of books, I said, you know, all my friends like this book, you should order it.
They ordered this book, they put it on display, it sold really well.
Like just, if there's something that You want to have happen in the world, your first thought should be, always, always, always, how can I make it happen?
How can I make it happen?
That should be your first thought.
Now, whether you do it or not, it's a whole other matter.
but your first thought should be, how can I make it happen?
And that's just the kind of discipline that you need in life, rather than...
It's like, no, no, no, just make, and again, whether you do it or not, that's not important, particularly.
But that should be your first thought.
So, there's, you know, we just had five or six different ideas about how you could get physical copies of my books, and that should be your first thought.
I want physical copies of Steph's books.
How can I make that happen?
Now, maybe it's not worth it enough to you, but here's the thing.
So, just because I've been entrepreneurial now, I mean, pretty much my whole life, but I've certainly been an entrepreneur for the past 30 or so years, and that's just my first thought.
I want something to happen.
How can I make it happen?
How can I bring it about?
And the reason I say that is that They'll say, oh, it'd be great if your software did this.
It'd be great if I had this service or this product or this feature or something like that.
And people will say that.
I mean, it would be the case that I would go out on sales calls, right?
And a customer would say, well, your software needs to do X, right?
Right?
And then the salespeople would say, well, the customer said that it needs to do X, so you should do X, have it do X. And I'm like, but there's one customer.
You know, we had, I don't know, hundreds of customers eventually.
That's one customer.
Maybe it's more, but we can't just go and build something because one customer says they want it.
Because it's sort of like when you talk about the government and all of this sort of wish fulfillment stuff, and I just want other people, you know, everything I don't like should be banned and everything I like should be...
It's like the wish list of no consequences.
And if the customer says, let's say, I remember one, I want to be able to design my own reports.
Okay?
I want to be able to design my own reports.
Okay, so uh, And of course, if you could just snap your fingers and have that feature, sure, why not?
Even though having new features means more documentation, more testing, more maintenance, more upgrades, more stuff to break when the platform changes or the architecture changes.
So more is not always better.
And I used to take away features that were little used.
And because everyone thinks more is more, but that's not the case.
More is more.
And then, of course, when you hire new people, that's more of a code base for them to understand and so on.
So I was always looking at the cost-benefit, and I would poll my customers to say, oh, have you used this feature?
Do you even know about this feature?
Have you ever used this feature?
Do you even know?
So that we could figure out what was there and what wasn't.
Because salespeople just like being able to say yes to everything.
Can you design your own reports?
Yes.
As opposed to the cost-benefit of it.
I would go and talk to customers and say, what are the features that you want?
Right?
What are the features that you want?
And, I mean, that's fine.
And how much would you be willing to pay for them?
Right?
How much would you be willing to pay for them?
Because if, I mean, if it's all cost-free, right?
You can just wish anything you want.
What are you willing to pay for it?
So if you say, and again, I'm not just using you as an example.
I really appreciate you bringing this up.
So this is nothing negative towards you.
But if you say, I really want physical copies of Steph's books, that's a wish and that's nice.
Okay.
And how much are you willing to pay for them?
And how much work are you willing to do to make it happen?
And that's important for yourself as well.
To know if you really want something, figure out what are you willing to sacrifice to get it.
And if somebody says, oh, Steph, you know, I really want physical copies of your books, I'd pay five bucks for one.
I could spend hundreds of hours trying to get all the physical copies for five bucks, which would be very bad for the business, right?
Yeah, the customer is not...
I'd go to the library as a teenager, I would read Harvard Business Review and I read that in my 20s, even when I was still in school.
And I remember, you know, like 10% of your customers are responsible for 90% of your costs, like in terms of customer support.
And you have to learn how to fire customers.
The customer is not always right.
That's just slavish, right?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah, somebody says we could make a poll on here.
I don't think I read this.
Another supporters-only forum to see how many people who've already shown they'll put up money, are willing to buy a physical book, then crunch the numbers to see how much it would cost per book based on the poll results, right?
And then you have to do how much is it going to cost for me to get the covers, because you've got to design covers, and the covers are very specific based upon the thickness of the book.
You've got to order them.
You've got to make the gutters.
So if you open a book, if you're just printing it out, you can have even margins, but a book has to have larger margins alternate on the inside, so when you open it, the tax is not falling into the canyon of the book opening.
Is it hardcover?
Is it softcover?
You've got to get the ISBN number, got to register it.
It's a lot of work, because I used to have physical books in the past.
It's a lot of work to make physical books.
And then you've got to sell them, you've got to track it, you've got to report it, you've got taxes on it.
I mean, it's complicated and expensive stuff.
Yeah, if a customer says they want a feature and they don't want to pay for it, then the customer doesn't really want the feature.
For sure.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
For sure.
All right.
Case in point, Linux file permissions versus Windows.
I don't really know what that means, but in the matter of taste, the customer is always right.
Are salespeople the politicians of the business world?
They just tell people what they want to hear.
Oh, don't get me started on that rant, man.
It used to drive me absolutely up a wall.
Because salespeople would be selling the software that I had designed and managed and created.
And they would just say yes to everything.
Can I do this?
Yes.
Can it integrate with Java?
Yeah.
And I said, look, it's not skilled to say yes to everything.
A skilled salesperson knows how to say no, knows how to be realistic.
Just saying yes to everything does not make you a skilled salesman.
You have to be able to say no in a way that the customer wants to buy the product.
Just saying yes to everything.
Of course, they would get their commission and they'd go up to their cottages and the tech people would be there all weekend trying to make these features work that have been promised by the salespeople.
I mean, I remember in one customer from many years ago, the salesperson just handed me a big giant binder and says, the software needs to produce all of these reports.
What?
We only have the software.
Does it do this?
No.
No, but it needs to be able to produce all of these kinds of reports.
That's not saying, well, you know, we can do this.
This is similar.
Like, just, yes, it can.
Okay, well, you've sold it.
Because you've just said yes to everything, right?
And that's not skilled at all.
And this is the general thing, where the salespeople say yes, they get the sales, they get the recognition, they get the bonuses, they get the money, and then the tech people have to work nights and weekends to make it happen.
I mean, this is, you know, the people who say we should take in all the migrants, and then someone says, like, as a joke, oh, we have some migrants.
They can come to your house.
No, no, I can't.
I have a roommate.
My place isn't that big.
I'm going to be away.
And I have an elderly relative.
You know, I don't sleep well.
And so it's just, you know, it's just most people when they're saying what they want.
It's just a wish thing, a wish fulfillment thing.
All right.
Will it print real gold bullion from straw?
Sure it will, says the salesman.
Okay, now tech guy, make it happen.
Yeah.
It's terrible.
And of course, once the contract is, and then, right, once they sell it, right, so they'd give me a contract to review, and I'd X out a bunch of stuff, and then it would end up in the final contract, and then it would be like, well, you have to make it happen, because it's a contract now.
Bad things are going to happen if we don't fulfill our contract.
So you just get kind of toasted.
Anyway, for more on this, you should check out my novel.
It's free.
The God of Atheists.
The God of Atheists.
And you can get that at freedomain.com.
It's a great book.
You can get print.
No, not print.
You can get a PDF.
You can read it online.
Or the audiobook is really good.
I have a good way to bring it to life.
What does your mug say?
My mug says, I was hoping for a battle of wits, but you appear to be unarmed.
Crazy.
Alright, so let's do a little bit.
I think this will work.
This is a claim that Jordan Peterson has that's very interesting.
And Jordan Peterson's claim is that atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they are rejecting.
You can print audiobooks.
Just print out the wave.
Yeah, so atheists reject God, but they don't understand what they're rejecting.
This is just wild overcomplication stuff.
And I think it's worth listening.
So the way that this works is you have 20 atheists.
They believe that they're debating Christians, although Jordan Peterson very much hedges his bets.
When it comes to defining what he believes, all things to all people, I mean, I'm not saying he's the opposite of Jesus.
That'd be nice, right?
So, maybe we can play Doom after.
Anyway, so, there's a bunch of atheists sitting around, and whoever touches the chair first gets a couple of minutes, but they can get voted off by the other people.
So I'm just going to test something here, make sure that you can hear.
If I go over here, oh, actually, let me just go and...
I'd like to know how to move it, but I don't.
And let's see here.
Good afternoon, Dr. Peterson.
All right, can you guys hear that all right?
I just wanted to check.
Just hit me with the Y if you can hear the video.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Just hit me with a Y. I just want to catch up and make sure that the audio is working here.
Thank you.
Yes, okay.
So this claim here that atheists don't know what they're rejecting.
My background is in studying to become a traditional Catholic priest, daily mass, daily rosary, going on long retreats deep into the magisterium and biblical hermeneutics like I was thoroughly in it.
And it seems like I do know what I'm missing.
Is there something?
And this guy is saying, look, I studied to be a priest.
I've been years and years studying the Bible, studying God.
So, that's quite a big claim, right?
That's quite a big claim to make, right?
Which is, you don't understand God, and this guy says, I'm trained now.
This doesn't mean that he's right.
This is not an argument from authority.
But it's quite a big claim.
It's quite a big claim.
Something that I missed over years of study, both this issue formally and living out religion so deeply?
Well, you obviously feel that you missed something when you were practicing for the priesthood.
Your aim was off then.
So there's always the possibility that it's still off now.
Okay, so he was studying to be a priest and he became an atheist.
So, the idea that if you change your mind about something based upon new reason and evidence, you can never be certain of anything, is a horrible, horrible statement.
and it's a horrible, horrible trick.
Because if you change your mind, of course, I've had this over the years, if you change your mind about something Then people will say to you, well, now you can't be certain of anything.
How could you be certain of anything?
Because you were certain of something before, it turned out you were wrong, and now you can't be certain of anything.
I just don't think that's a good argument.
And what it does is it punishes people for being rational and it rewards people for being dogmatic.
So if you're a dogmatist and you just have these beliefs and you never ever You get certainty?
No, that's just dogmatism.
So people who adapt to new information, new arguments, and so on.
I mean, Jordan Peterson is constantly making arguments that people haven't heard before in order to change their minds for the better.
Does he then say, well, if you've ever changed your mind about something based upon better reasoning and evidence, you then can't be certain of anything?
No.
No, no, no.
That's not right.
That's not right.
What was off about my aim in the first place?
I don't know.
It might take a long time to figure out.
It seems kind of like this no true Scotsman type of fallacy in which you're the arbiter of people's aims and how they understand those aims to be.
How is it that you can claim that people don't know something that you know about their life despite not having met them?
Well, it's obviously a generic claim just like the atheist claim that there's no God is a generic claim.
What does generic claim mean?
I don't know.
I think he's saying that It's not specific to an individual.
But of course, if it's a generic claim, but it applies to an individual, then it is specific to that individual.
If I say gravity affects everyone and everything, I say, but does gravity affect you?
Yes, so that's a specific application of a general claim.
So retreating into the generality stuff doesn't work either.
In your case, it would have to be specified more, and I'm not claiming to understand what was going on in your mind, but my experience with atheists is twofold, is that they have a very reductive notion of what constitutes God.
Ah, the word reductive.
Right.
So, I'm not calling Jordan Peterson a sophist.
I'm just saying that in general, sophistry has to do with overcomplication, just whirling people's heads, getting them a And a reductive notion, well, the whole point of excellence in thought is to boil things down to their essence, right?
I mean, would we say, well, you know, the behavior of matter and energy is complicated.
E equals mc squared or the inverse square law or the second law of thermodynamics.
That's just reductive.
And it's like, no, it's not reductive.
Two and two equals four is not reductive.
Reductive is just saying, well, things are super complicated, and if you reduce them down to any rational essence or any foundational argument, that's being reductive.
That is not an argument.
Say, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they've often been hurt by someone who was religious, or by the religious enterprise, or perhaps by God himself, so to speak, and that's left them with an animus.
Ah, okay, so now this is psychologizing.
Let's just go back here for a sec.
My experience with atheists is that they have a very reductive notion of what constitutes God, let's say, in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
And they've often been hurt by someone who was religious or by the religious enterprise or perhaps by God himself, so to speak.
And that's left them with an animus.
Okay, so they have this curse called...
And then, literally, this is like the feminists.
If you criticize anything about modern femininity or feminism, what do they say?
They say, who hurt you?
Oh, you must have been hurt, right?
So, this is not an argument.
Calling something reductive is not an argument.
saying that who hurt you or someone hurt you is not an argument.
I just, I would really like if people just said, well, we need to define...
But I think that you have a reductive view of what atheism is.
You've defined religion so broadly to include any sort of having aim in life, any sort of cultural archetypes or having a metaphorical substrate.
And atheism to you is a very specific type of like three people in the world that are these Raskolnikov type of, they want to get away with the perfect murder.
It seems like you have the reductive view of what an atheist is.
So now we're arguing views rather than definitions.
And all debates that avoid initial definitions are worse than a waste of time.
And I know I'm playing this, but I'm sort of trying to make this point.
Well, let's start with your claim.
How do you define the God that you're rejecting?
Like, what is God to you?
You studied in the church.
You found that unsatisfactory.
How would you characterize what you rejected?
I think the average Christian believer, when they say that they're Christian and they believe, they mean some sort of God that is all-powerful, all-perfect, is somehow involved.
In the matters of this world, and that we look to them through wisdom and with the logos incarnate in Christ, it also seems like you don't believe in religion in the way that the average Christian says that they believe in religion.
And there are as many gods out there as there are believers, because everybody has mutually exclusive and different views of what God is.
Okay, so I think it started off fairly well, just so you know, right?
It started off fairly well in that he defined God as all-powerful, all-virtuous, that is involved in the natural world to some degree, because otherwise there'd be no point praying for intercession.
And then he says everybody has mutually exclusive and different views of what God is.
I mean, there's certainly some truth in that.
Not the mutually exclusive.
Mutually exclusive is oppositional.
It's win-lose.
And there are a lot of people who believe there wouldn't be denominations if people didn't have I think?
be these things if people didn't have any shared definition.
So mutually exclusive, yeah.
It also has been shown that people brought up in more punitive and aggressive environments that they were sort of beaten as children tend to have a more aggressive view of God as punitive and people brought up in more gentle environments.
Most environments tend to have a more gentle view of God.
It's more New Testament and forgiveness-based and so on, right?
So, an eye for an eye is for the people who were raised violently, and turn the other cheek generally tends to forgive, tends to be for people who are raised more gently.
So, definitely your upbringing has something to do with it.
But Jordan Peterson, to his credit, right, when he says, this young man says, everybody has mutually exclusive.
Well, if everybody had mutually exclusive views of what God is, no one could speak to each other.
The mere fact of communication presumes a commonality of assumption and definition.
And it's certainly not the case that I regard any archetypal manifestation whatsoever as equally religious.
So that's not a real claim.
Let me give you an example, for example.
Sub-narrative in the story of Moses, where Moses is rewarded with a glimpse of God.
And that's one of the ways that God is characterized in the Old Testament stories.
Now, Moses is a faithful servant of God and a good man.
At least that's the case within the confines of the story.
One possible interpretation.
It's the case within the confines of the story.
Obviously.
When we look at the Bible, the Bible can't precisely say anything because there are so many different exegetical and hermeneutic views of this particular book.
And that everybody has disagreed historically on, it seems like, even the most benign detail about a book this big.
Yeah, so, I mean, one of the reasons that I left...
And you can make a case for just about anything.
And I recognized that I was simply trying to hone an ability I already had, which was to make a good case for just about anything.
Like I was on the debate team.
I was vice president of the debate club, traveled all over Canada to debate.
My very first year, I came in sixth or seventh in Canada.
So I was already good at debating, and in debating, be it resolved, be it resolved that, you just get a case, and you just argue for or against it, depending on which side you're on.
So you have to be good at arguing any kind of case, which I'm already good at.
So I felt that the English degree wasn't doing much for me, and I wanted to be in a slightly more objective realm, which was history, which at the time I thought was more objective, though now I'm not quite so sure.
So anyway, so Jordan Peterson's trying to make a case about Moses and the glimpse of God, and he says Moses is a good man, at least within the confines of the story.
Okay, so fair.
And he's saying, well, but there's a lot of subjectivity and so on in the Bible, and people believe different things, so it's hard to come up with sort of facts.
But anyway, let's go on.
It seems like you can only see Because the alternative claim is that he's good.
Right, so this is a false dichotomy.
So Jordan Peterson says Moses is good, and this guy's saying it's really hard to say, and then he's saying, oh, so you're saying he's a villain, and it's like, no, it's just that you can't say anything in particular in detail about the Bible.
Now, he actually might be serving Jordan Peterson's point here that atheists reject God without really understanding what God is.
Because if this guy's saying, well, our knowledge of God, to some degree, comes through the Bible, and the Bible is kind of incomprehensible and complicated and subjective, well, then, maybe that's enough to reject God.
Because we can't talk to those authors.
are going to start with the presupposition that there's nothing I can say about any of these stories that you're not going to disagree with from the perspective that there are multiple potential competing claims, then I can't speak with you.
We also have a short time here, so I want to get to the core of what you're arguing here, and I'd love if we could...
So I'm trying to give you an example of what's being rejected and its complexity.
Okay, so God rewards Moses with a glimpse of the divine.
So this is a definition of the God that atheists are hypothetically rejecting.
A possible one.
I said ah, I didn't say the.
I said ah.
I still don't get the hostility here.
I mean, this is an enjoyable and engaging conversation, and I don't know why the hostility is there, but anyway.
That is possible, yes.
Okay.
So despite the fact that Moses is a stellar character, and he's had a long and difficult life, and can withstand a lot of difficulty and travail, God puts him between two cliffs, so he can just see a crack of what's in front of him.
And when God walks by, he allows him to see his back.
Ah, yeah, this anthropomorphic stuff is pretty wild to me.
God walks by and Moses sees God's back.
I don't know what to make of that, because God is infinite, all-powerful, all-knowing, abstract, conceptual, immaterial, or at least not directly material otherwise.
It's a pinnacle experience.
Okay, so if the divine is fundamentally unknowable, then you can't say anything about it, right?
In other words, you can't call it the divine.
If something is fundamentally unknowable, then you can't apply any descriptive or categorical or conceptual label to it in any way, shape, or form.
Right?
If I said...
It's like, no, the moment you say divine, you're saying there are aspects or characteristics of it that can be known.
Right?
So you can't say fundamentally unknowable and then also apply labels to it.
If I say X is absolutely incomprehensible and unknowable and it's also tall and carries a duck and red.
Well, Then I'm saying it's fundamentally unknowable, and here are some characteristics.
The word divine is a conceptual label that carries a knowledge claim.
So you can't say the divine is fundamentally unknowable, just logically that wouldn't make sense.
That people in their finitude have to be shielded from a comprehensive vision of the basis of reality.
Well, that's not the God that's defined in that manner, right?
It's not a simple personification.
It's not a simple old man in the sky.
It's something that in its essence is unknowable and overwhelming.
Mike.
Thank you.
I mean, for instance, I don't know how many atoms were in the sun three years ago, like on this particular, right?
2022, 1st of June, 1049 a.m.
I don't know how many atoms were in the sun.
Because you'd have to literally freeze time, count all the atoms, because the atoms are, you know, being converted into energy through the fusion process that's going on in the sun.
I think it's fusion.
Is it fission?
Anyway, so you could freeze time and you could count all the atoms.
I don't know the number of atoms in the sun three years ago.
Is that overwhelming?
Nope.
No.
I don't understand Japanese, the language, right?
Is that...
Is that overwhelming?
So, again, the moment you say overwhelming, you're making a knowledge claim about something.
And that isn't, in my experience, the God that's defined by atheists who are attempting to undermine the story.
Now, of course, the only result of something being fundamentally unknowable Because if you're going to say, atheists can't, they don't understand God because God is fundamentally incomprehensible, and therefore they're rejecting that which they cannot define in any real terms, and they're reducing it in this reductive kind of way.
So if you're going to say, Atheists reject God, but they don't understand what God is.
Not because atheists fail to understand what God is, but because God is fundamentally incomprehensible, then all religious denominations would also be false.
Because if something is unknowable, then making any knowledge claim about that unknowable thing, such as this unknowable thing doesn't exist, or that unknowable thing Does exist, has these characteristics, sent his son to be sacrificed and wants to forgive you, but you have to earn it.
Right, so if something is overwhelming and incomprehensible, then the only position would be agnosticism.
Because if atheists...
It's a failure of the human mind, according to Jordan Peterson, as I read the argument.
It's a failure of the human mind to be able to comprehend God in any way, shape, or form.
Like, you can only see through this crack.
You can only see God walking by.
You can only see his back.
It's overwhelming.
It's incomprehensible.
So, how does that translate into any specific belief held by various religions and sects within those religions at all?
If something is fundamentally unknowable, I mean, it's the same claim, for example, that you're a finite creature and that you face something that in the final analysis is unknowable.
And that you have to establish a relationship with it regardless of your inability to perceive or even withstand perceiving the whole.
Right.
So this is just, I mean, this to me is just a word salad, honestly.
So if something is unknowable, then you cannot make any knowledge claims about it.
I mean, that's my definition.
It's unknowable.
You cannot make any knowledge claims about it.
You can't have a relationship with the unknowable.
And he's saying, well, that's the paradox.
It's like, well, the paradox is generally just false, right?
If you say two and two make five, and your teacher says, no, no, no, two and two make four, you say, well, that's the interesting paradox.
It's both.
And it's like, it's really not.
It's really not.
So if you're going to claim that something is unknowable, then you can't make any knowledge claims about it.
You can't speak about it.
You're creating a category called unknowable.
And it's not unknowable like...
Right?
There was a factual number, whatever it would be, right?
But it's just unknowable because it's in the past, we can't count it, and you couldn't even count the ones in the sun at the moment because you don't know what's going on in the internals in any particular detail.
But it is a fact that there is a certain number of atoms in the sun.
We just don't know what they are.
But Jordan Peterson's definition of God is beyond that.
It's unknowable.
Even to mortal beings, it's absolutely unknowable.
Now, human beings, we can determine the universal.
We can determine the infinite.
We can determine the eternal.
We have concepts for those things.
And when we talk about the laws of physics, we are talking about universal and eternal things.
They are true everywhere in the universe for all time.
So, human beings can absolutely conceive of the universal.
And can absolutely process.
Now, can we, I don't know, directly understand infinity?
I don't really know how we would do that, but we have a category for it and we're able to manipulate it.
So, you know, if you do this exercise, I remember challenging my friends to do this in high school.
If you close your eyes and you just try and formulate little dots, you can get to maybe six, seven, eight or so, maybe nine if you do a three and three.
But you can't do much more than that if you could even get that high.
So, we can't conceive of what a million X is, right?
So, we can't directly perceive or understand large numbers, but we have categories for them, and we can still do deals, you know, 44, what was it, 44 billion dollars for...
So we can't conceive of what, 44...
You can't feel 44 billion things.
You can't understand it.
I mean, you've seen these things about the national debt, but the giant blocks of bills, of cash, right?
Okay, but you still...
But we have words for these things and we can still manipulate them.
So, they're not incomprehensible.
They just can't be directly sensually experienced, but we have concepts for them which work.
We know that they work because we can actually send a spaceship past Jupiter, right?
Which is based upon universal principles.
So the idea that God is incomprehensible means that both atheism and religion would be invalid positions.
And it's kind of this traveling the fence stuff that bothers me.
All right, sorry, let me just get to your...
Let me get to your...
Alright.
I see in here, Stephan.
God?
Let's see here.
God has a body of glorified spirit and bone.
So does Jesus.
They make my point for me.
A noble mystery is adopted from Greek philosophers.
See, when you say God has a body of glorified spirit and bone, it's a very powerful poetic analogy, but from a philosophical standpoint, it has no content.
All right.
The line about fundamentally unknowability disproves his entire argument about only He's claiming to understand what is fundamentally unknowable.
Well, here's the other thing, too.
So, if God, like, let's take the Christian argument, right?
God wants a relationship with you.
Jesus wants a relationship with you.
They're both eternal and perfect and all-knowing and all-good.
Well, I didn't start off reading my daughter, Crime and Punishment, right?
We started off reading very simple stories, right?
Big Bad Wolf and Hansel and Gretel and so on.
We started off reading very simple stories which were very animated.
So I adapted my speaking style to the mindset of my daughter when she was very little.
Right?
So, God can make himself known to human beings because God is all-powerful.
And saying that God cannot make himself known to human beings is false.
Because a being that is all-powerful Can absolutely choose to make himself known to limited mortal minds.
Because if you're saying God can't do that, then you're saying God is not all-powerful and God has no idea how to talk to the very beings that God created.
He has no idea how to share his ineffable essence or his make-it-effable-for-mortals essence, right?
So, in the same way that I adapted my reading style and the stories that I was reading to my daughter when she was very little, God can, quote, dumb it down or limit it so that he can communicate to human beings.
And so, the idea that God is fundamentally unknowable is false, because that's saying that God can't make himself known to mortals, which God absolutely can make himself known to mortals.
All right.
There's a lot of that in church.
Contradictions abound, yeah?
Yeah.
Honestly, it all looks like slippery jargon to me.
Yeah.
I mean, the purpose of intelligence, of high intelligence, is to clarify and simplify so that you can communicate.
I mean, the whole point of cell phone is that you don't have to learn how to program in Assembler to get your phone to do something.
You just touch and swipe and this and that and the other, right?
Yeah, the purpose of intelligence is not to say things are ineffable and wildly complicated, but it is, in fact, to simplify things so that other people can understand them, and that's why they're avoiding definitions, right?
I mean, there was a definition at the beginning, which is, you know, God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-good.
Now, that's all gone, right?
Because he made, unfortunately, the young man made the statement about people having contradictory viewpoints and irreconcilable viewpoints and all of that, right?
Okay, is there a problem with that?
I mean, the problem is that when we look at the whole, regardless of your inability, and that you face something that in the final analysis is unknowable, and that you have to establish a relationship with it regardless of your inability to perceive or even withstand perceiving the whole.
Well, of course, God would divvy himself up into digestible parts in order for you to have a relationship with it.
So, since God wants a relationship with people, then God would...
So it's not like you have to go and do the impossible, which is to comprehend the incomprehensible, and as a finite being, truly grok and absorb infinity and all of that.
God would boil it down for you so that you could have a relationship.
Now, if God doesn't do that, if God demands obedience but renders himself incomprehensible to you, that's just totalitarianism.
Right?
That's like, well, there's all these laws I'm not going to tell you about, so the laws are incomprehensible to you, but you're bound by them and got to go to jail anyway.
Like, that's just straight up totalitarianism.
So, if God is going to have rules for you, then God needs to communicate those rules in a comprehensible manner for you, which means God is not unknowable.
Okay, is there a problem with that?
I mean, the problem is that when we look at, famously, when you've been asked, do you believe in God?
The question becomes, what do we mean by God?
And in the Bible, it's not even clear if the biblical authors know what God is, because Yahweh has historically emerged from an early storm God, a deity that doesn't exhaust the category of deity, and that has changed over the Old Testament.
Does God have physicality?
Does God not have physicality?
It seems like, yes, if you define religion to mean anybody that has an aim, anybody that looks at the unknown, anybody who wants to go from chaos to order is inherently religious, then yes.
But also in the same way, I could define atheists as somebody who doesn't dogmatically believe in a religion or somebody who doesn't regularly attend religious services or belong to a denomination.
It helped, especially the audience, kind of like boil this down.
There was a lot of words there that the central claim is that we exist somewhere between the finite and the infinite.
A central claim.
A central claim is that we exist somewhere between the finite and the infinite.
said that we were finite and we had to establish a relationship with the infinite.
We are finite and we have to establish a relationship with the infinite.
Well, that's called truth.
Two and two make four.
That's infinite.
That's true everywhere in the universe and it's true for all time.
It's an absolute fact.
Gravity, mass attracts mass.
That is true for all the universe for all time.
So this idea that it's somehow bizarre and inhuman to Most of our concepts are infinite.
And so, I mean, the better the concept, the more universal it is.
Universally preferable behavior, my proof of secular ethics is true everywhere across the universe.
It's true for all time and so on, right?
So that's an infinite.
So all concepts are a relationship with the infinite.
So saying that somehow it's impossible or wildly complicated or problematic to create a relationship with the infinite, I just, I don't understand it.
I don't think I'm missing anything, but my very first philosophical video was on understanding concepts, so yeah, they're universal.
Yeah, and then in that case, then we're all religious, but then I can do the same thing and define one particular element of atheism.
It seems like we both have a reductive view of what the other side looks like to the point where a conversation seems...
Do you have a problem?
Sorry, you've been voted out.
All right.
So, yeah, saying that, it's a tautology, really.
Saying that atheists don't understand God because God is incomprehensible to man is not a fault of atheists.
It's just saying human beings, if I define something as incomprehensible, human beings can't comprehend it.
And it's like, wow, what a great addition to knowledge.
Knowledge that is, right?
Something is completely incomprehensible and therefore you shouldn't reject it.
Well, if something is incomprehensible, maybe you should reject it based on that, right?
Based upon that basic fact.
Human beings can't logically process two and two make five.
Two and two make five is wrong.
It's incomprehensible because it's a contradiction, right?
Because four is just another way of saying two, right?
And so five equals four is a contradiction.
If you tried to enact it, if you tried to make it real, it would be impossible and so on, right?
You can't have four oranges and then have five and eat five oranges.
It's impossible, right?
So four equals five is incomprehensible in terms of how you would enact it.
Does that mean we can't reject it and say that it's false?
Incomprehensibility, I mean, if you were to put forward a scientific paper, Written in your own made-up language, with your own made-up numbers, that nobody else could possibly understand, would that be true or false?
Would you even bother trying to figure it out?
You would reject it.
I mean, you would reject it.
Now, maybe there's some truth buried somewhere in there, but it doesn't really matter because let's say you write this...
You keep changing the language.
You keep changing the symbols through some metric that only you understand, and then you die, and all of your notes are gone, and so there's just this 2,000 paper with a flow of incomprehensible symbols.
Well, that's incomprehensible.
And would you reject it?
Sure you would.
You wouldn't bother to try and figure it out, right?
So, saying that atheists reject that which is incomprehensible and that's a fault, well, everybody should reject that which is incomprehensible.
And, oh, sorry, atheists shouldn't reject something because it's incomprehensible, but you should neither.
If you can't reject something because it's incomprehensible, you also can't accept something because it's incomprehensible.
You can't have any opinions on it whatsoever other than you don't want to get involved.
All right, so let's go forward a bit.
Tell me everything that you know about the Polynesian deity Lono.
Okay, so this is an interesting argument, and I won't go through the whole thing here.
So this guy's argument is saying there's a Polynesian deity called Lono.
Do you know anything about it?
And Jordan Peterson says, I don't know anything about it.
And then this guy says, so do you reject the Polynesian deity Lono?
And Jordan Peterson won't answer that, right?
Because the thing is, can you reject something that you don't know anything about?
Can you reject something that you don't know anything about?
Well, sure.
Sure.
I mean, other than it's a Polynesian deity called Lono, which is a certain amount of facts, right?
And so, if you're comfortable rejecting the validity of a Polynesian deity called Lono, even though you don't know anything about it, then not knowing anything about it is not a reason to Believe in it, right?
Or disbelieve in it, right?
So not knowing anything about it is not a standard by which you would judge belief or non-belief.
L-O-N-O.
Is this in the universe?
Answer that question once you answer my question, which is, do I reject everything that I'm ignorant of?
Do I reject everything that I'm ignorant of?
Well, of course not.
However, as the atheist position is...
So the atheist position, and I've just sort of run past it here, and it's really annoying to me that these weren't the arguments that were made, is I would say, can self-contradictory entities exist?
If I take the atheist argument, the atheist would say, can self-contradictory entities exist?
And this is Aristotle's basic A is A, the three laws of logic.
A self-contradictory entity exists.
Can something exist that is both a tree and an elephant at the same time?
Can something exist that is a square circle?
Right?
Can something exist that has self-contradictory properties?
Can water exist as ice and steam, the same water, the same molecules, can they exist as ice and steam at exactly the same time?
Can you freeze water above 100 degrees centigrade?
No, it boils away, right?
So, can self-contradictory entities exist?
And the answer cannot be yes, because that is to say that madness is true, that dreams are more real than the real world, and so on, right?
So, it can't be the case that self-contradictory entities exist.
You then can't mark anyone as wrong in a math or spelling.
Maybe the spelling of a particular word is both what you think it is and what's in the dictionary and the opposite of that, right?
So, maybe 2 and 2 is 4 and 2 and 2 is 5. So, the reason you know 2 and 2 is not 5, but 4 is that 2 and 2 is 5 creates a self-contradictory entity, that 4 equals 5 can't be both, right?
It's contradictory.
So, the question is, do self-contradictory entities exist?
And that's all it comes down to.
Now, If you accept that self-contradictory entities don't exist, and a debate has to, because if you make a contradictory statement in a debate, you're caught out and considered to be false.
Or that the statement is false, right?
So, do self-contradictory entities exist?
Goes the atheist argument.
Is God a self-contradictory entity?
If God is a self-contradictory entity, then God does not exist.
Right?
Again, you can make God out of the universe and so on, but we're talking about exist as being within the universe.
Because you can't create an alternative universe where the opposite of true is true, and therefore you're right, right?
So if I say two and two make four, and you say two and two make five, and I say no, and here's the proof, and you say no, no, no, but in an alternative universe where being wrong is being right, two and two make five, and therefore You can't tell me that I'm wrong.
That's just making up an imaginary realm where falsehood equals truth and then saying I'm right.
Honestly, that's not what sane people do.
That's not what healthy people do.
I mean, imagine that as a defense, right?
Some guy kills a woman and then says, no, no, no, but in an alternative universe, it's legal.
And in an alternative universe, she's still alive.
Therefore, you can't prosecute me.
It's like that would be crazy, right?
So, the statement is, do self-contradictory entities exist?
If they don't exist, which they don't, then if God is a self-contradictory entity, then God does not exist.
And there's a couple of arguments, which I'll touch on briefly here, from the atheists, which is to say, God cannot be both all-powerful and all-knowing, because if God is all-knowing, then God knows what's going to happen tomorrow for certain.
If God knows for certain what's going to happen tomorrow, God is powerless to change what is going to happen tomorrow.
Therefore, God cannot be both all-powerful and all-knowing.
And if we say that there's no such thing as consciousness without matter, That all consciousness that exists is an effect of matter.
and then you're saying there's immaterial consciousness, well, all shadows are from...
So, not very well.
A little bit, right?
So, all shadows are the effect of something solid blocking a light source, right?
So, that's a shadow.
A shadow is an effect of something solid blocking a light source, right?
So, if you were to say, like, can you imagine that there were shadows back there doing their thing?
Without my hand in front of it, that would be incomprehensible, right?
I was talking about this with my daughter the other day.
Like, imagine if you're on the sidewalk and you see a shadow with no person attached.
That would be really, really freaky, right?
And so, a shadow is an effect of something solid blocking a light source.
There is no shadow without that.
And there is no consciousness without matter.
Consciousness requires a brain.
Consciousness is an effect of matter and energy in the form of the human mind or the brain of whatever you want to call conscious, right?
So if you're going to say there's immaterial consciousness, then you're saying that consciousness, which is an effect of the brain, does not require a brain, which is like saying shadows can be independent of something solid blocking a light source, which is false, right?
um We know, evolutionarily speaking, that you require something.
Something less complex evolves into something more complex, right?
So you've got these cells that are vaguely sensitive to light, and they can be a value to primitive organisms, and then eventually you build up to the human eye.
But you wouldn't start with the human eye.
Like, evolution doesn't start with the human eye.
It would be like saying that I have a theory of evolution that we start with human beings and hopefully evolve to single-celled organisms and self-replicating DNA in a future soup of chemicals, right?
That would not make any sense.
You start with less complicated and come to the more complicated.
That's how evolution works.
That's how life works.
That's how consciousness evolves.
And so if you're going to say that a god is the most complicated consciousness that can possibly exist, And God did not evolve.
God started off as the most complicated thing.
That would, again, be like saying that the human eye or the human brain is the beginning of evolution, and it evolves from there.
That's not how evolution works.
There would be another sort of contradictory trait.
If you say that a God interferes or has an effect in the material realm, right, then How do you have an effect in the material realm, right?
Well, if I want this SD card, right, this little SD card, if I want it to move, I have to pick it up.
It's not going to move on its own, right?
I have to have, my matter has to interact with the SD card's matter in order to make it move, right?
So, in order to interfere with or have an effect in the material realm, then I have to touch, my matter has to touch the material realm.
Now, if God interferes with or has an effect in the material realm, then God must manifest some material property.
If God doesn't manifest any material property, then that would be an effect without a cause, which doesn't exist in the world, right?
But if God does manifest in material form, then we should be able to measure him, right?
Should be able to notice the materialization and then the, right?
So, I mean, other things like miracles are contradictions.
Human beings can't walk on water because...
So we can't do that, right?
You can't be dead for three days, come back to life.
So these would be the arguments that self-contradictory entities don't exist.
They're impossible by definition.
And so the way that you would deal with this Polynesian God is you'd say, does the Polynesian God have self-contradictory properties?
Therefore, it doesn't exist.
Now, I don't know why that's particularly complicated.
You know, one of the things that I did in the realm of philosophy very early on was I said, look, if an 18-month-old baby can figure it out, philosophy should be able to figure it out.
Right?
And babies understand the nature of matter and energy very well.
All right.
So let's go on a bit more.
Because that's your presupposition that It is a presupposition that you reject self-contradictory entities.
Well, and by the by, by the by, Dr. Peterson, as a professor, would fail people who didn't turn in their work.
Right, so Dr. Peterson would fail people who didn't turn in their work.
Now, he can't read minds, and therefore he doesn't know for sure whether the work was good or bad or done or not done, but he would still fail people.
So...
And also, Jordan Peterson, let's say that his fail was 50%, like anything lower than 50%, you'd fail.
So, he would have to make a judgment based upon numbers.
And somebody couldn't say, well, I got a 25%, but I got a pass.
He'd say, no, no, no, a pass is 50 or higher, and he'd have this absolute certainty of knowledge.
And so, that's just how we live.
My question is quite simple.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's formulated accurately.
Do you believe that Lono exists?
Yes or no?
I'm not going to answer that question.
Okay, do you believe that a Polynesian god called Lono exists?
I'm not going to answer that question.
For the reasons I just described.
You already insisted that if I reject something, that if I'm ignorant of something, I reject it.
Do you think that...
Right.
So, the claim is if you don't know something, you can't reject it.
That's not a valid argument.
I mean, there's tons of things that we know are false because they're self-contradictory or contradict reason and evidence.
I mean, I have not gone out into space and see if the world is a sphere.
Oh, Paris is 70% in college?
Okay, thanks.
I appreciate that.
So, I've not gone out into the world and seen that everything is a sphere.
I've also not done the, you know, take two sticks and measure the sunlight shadow in the different, to figure out if the Earth is a sphere or not, but I accept that it is.
Because it's not self-contradictory.
I mean, I can see the moon.
The moon is a sphere.
I can see the sun.
The sun is a sphere.
When I was younger, I had...
It would end up as a sphere because of gravity and all of that, and so I accept that.
I haven't tested it myself.
I accept that because it collates with reason and evidence, right?
So.
I think in order for your argument to be true, in order for it to be true that...
Now, of course, if Jordan Peterson says it's impossible to understand God, God is completely incomprehensible, then you can't even call it God.
You can only say X, or unknown, or in software programming, it's called a null.
Right?
You don't know what it is.
It could be anything.
It could be a number.
It could be a piece of text.
It could be a graphic.
It's a null.
A null variable.
And so you can't say anything about a null.
A null is, I don't know what type of data it is.
I don't even know if there is data.
It's just a null.
And so if Jordan Peterson is going to say atheists are wrong, then he's going to have a standard of truth.
That is universal and consistent because he's saying all atheists.
He's not saying particular atheists.
He's saying God is unknowable, therefore atheists are rejecting that which they cannot know.
So that's a contradiction.
You can't claim to know the unknowable.
If you claim to know the unknowable, that's a contradiction in definition, by definition.
The unknowable, by definition, can't be known.
So if you claim to know the unknowable, then you're wrong.
So that's a standard of knowledge that's universal.
And he's saying, well, no, you have to be omniscient about anything to make any truth claims.
It's false claims.
But he's making claims that atheists are wrong about God because atheists are rejecting that which they do not understand.
So that's a universal knowledge claim.
And he's saying, well, you can't make universal knowledge claims unless you're omniscient.
But the whole reason he's debating here is he's making universal knowledge claim about the billions of atheists around the world that they're wrong.
I don't know.
It's wild.
We atheists don't understand what we're rejecting.
Then you need to also apply that to yourself and to Christians and to Muslims and to any other person on this earth, where if you don't understand what you're rejecting the belief in, then you can't reject the belief in it.
That's the implication of your claim.
I didn't say that I rejected the belief in Lona.
I said I didn't know who Lona was.
I didn't say anything about rejecting it.
That's because I've asked you several times and you haven't, but let me get to my even greater point.
You're saying atheists don't understand what religion is or what God is in order to be able to reject it fully or completely.
We have someone over here who studied it in their own way.
I've studied religion.
and I have a degree in religious studies, specialty in Christianity and Mediterranean traditions.
And further than that, beyond me, That's because they're more religious than they think they are.
Oh, God.
Oh, that's troublesome.
Oh, that's troublesome.
So, atheists know more about religion, and that's because they're more religious than they think they are.
Therefore, anyone who knows anything about religion is religious.
Atheists know more about religion, and therefore atheists are more religious than they think they are.
I don't even know what to say about that.
That's just, I mean, that's wild to me that somebody would say that in order to maintain their belief.
Atheists are ignorant of God.
Well, statistically, atheists know more about religion and God than most religious people.
Well, that's because atheists are more religious than they think they are.
I mean, you can't win against that.
That's just defining things on their own.
Okay, so there's one other thing that I wanted to get to.
Oh, yeah.
This guy's not too bad, right?
It's true.
When you're talking to me to help you determine whether what you say is true.
Yeah, so what guides you when you're talking to me to help you determine what you say is true?
Now, because my work is not going to be known for...
That's how long it takes for philosophers to steep through the prejudice of the everyday into the future.
So because my work is not going to be known, people aren't going to be able to say, well, what is true?
Well, what is true is logical consistency and conformity with the evidence of the senses.
So that is reason and evidence, reason and empiricism.
That's how we know what is true, because truth is a relationship between concepts of the mind and things in the world.
The idea is logically consistent and conforms with the evidence of the senses, then it is true.
It is valid, right?
Now, people don't have that answer yet because my work is still to be known.
Great-grandchildren might live in a more rational world or Palantir might get their way.
But so, yeah, he says.
Logic, memory, reasoning.
Sensory information.
Okay, so logic, memory, reasoning, and sensory information.
That's not, I mean, it's more of a laundry list than an argument, but that's pretty good, right?
How do you distinguish that from being governed by something that's false?
Okay, so if he says logic, reason, memory, and evidence, then he would say, well, anti-logic, things which memory would prove to be invalid.
Things which go against sense data and evidence, right?
So, if you say this is the standard of truth, then falsehood would just be the opposite.
An interesting question.
How do you know the difference when you speak between what's true and what's false?
So you could imagine- I can infer.
Okay, so then you would say to Jordan Peterson, how do you know that atheists don't understand God?
But he would say, well, because God is fundamentally incomprehensible.
It's like, well, then you can't say anything about it.
You certainly can't call it God.
So people who say something which is incomprehensible is not valid are more accurate than people who say things that are incomprehensible should run my life.
From what principles?
What are you getting at?
I don't like it when people jump out at the argument and say, what are you getting at?
The whole purpose of an argument, you ask questions and you get interrogatory responses, right?
So when people say, well, what's the purpose?
Or what are you getting at?
Or what's the point of all of this?
It's like, no, no, no, just answer the question.
And yet the fact that your conscience guides you.
Is that reasonable?
Conscious is defined by my empathy and my reason are my foundation.
Okay, so that's how I'm defining my conscience.
Is my, you know, my kind of, my conscience is my sense of, you know, Yeah, exactly.
Where does that come from?
Okay, so Jordan Peterson's argument is science cannot provide you with morality, which is true.
Philosophy can provide you with morality, universally preferable behavior.
But again, these guys wouldn't know that particular work because it's only been 15 years, which is a blink of an eye in the realm of philosophy.
So then they go into evolution and empathy and all of this kind of stuff.
And Jordan Peterson scores some great points here.
Jordan Peterson is saying you can't get morality from science.
And he says, well, chimpanzees do this and primitive Conyanderthals do that and so on.
He's like, yeah, precisely, pre-science.
They have morality, pre-science.
And so you get some great points here.
But one of the things that...
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, so people respond to different things with regards to empathy, right?
There's this pretty funny meme about 80s dads, you know, some kids playing with the plug and the socket, and the mom's like, don't do that!
And the dad's like, no, no, let him try, and then you're not going to be doing that again, right?
So the empathy is letting the child suffer so the child learns a good lesson versus preventing the suffering, right?
So people have, men and women in particular, have different responses to empathy.
This is why you can't say empathy is morality, because then it's subjective based upon your particular preferences or your time preferences and so on.
Is there a mediating principle that can tell you one person who's empathic and another person who's empathic that disagree who's correct?
Right, and there isn't.
So, Jordan Peterson, it's a great question.
You can't just say empathy, altruism, blah, blah, blah, that's not morality, because it's subjective.
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's where we'd have to, you know, We do that in real life all the time.
Talking it out is not an argument.
Whether that's a discussion with a friend about the right thing to do in a situation, whether that's a policy discussion about law, right?
That's where we can converse with each other, think about things, explain our perspectives.
Yeah, but that's still not a mediating principle.
You need a mediating principle, which would be philosophy, it would be UPB.
And kind of reach a conclusion, right?
I think that we do that all the time.
So, Elijah, the prophet Elijah, defined God in the Old Testament as the voice of conscience within.
Okay, so, the voice of conscience within.
I'll just touch on this relatively briefly.
I've talked about conscience before.
Conscience is the universality of our preferences and other people's existence, right?
So, when my daughter was about 18 months, I was feeding her soup, and then she grabbed the soup spoon, dipped it in, and fed me the soup, because she's like, oh, I enjoy eating.
My father is a human being.
I bet he enjoys eating too, right?
So we do this all the time with kids.
Like some kid grabs another kid's candy and then you say, how would you like it if he grabbed your candy?
Or you grab the candy away from the kid.
The kid complains and you say, you see, you don't like it when you don't like it when I grab your candy.
That other kid doesn't like it when you grab his candy, right?
So conscience is I have preferences.
I'm a human being.
Other human beings have preferences.
Which I should take into account, just as I want other people to take my preferences into account.
So conscience is the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and it is the universalization of our preferences and our category called human beings, which is why we have higher moral obligations to human beings than we do to animals and so on, right?
So the conscience is the universalization of self-empathy and empathy for others.
Which, again, there's pluses and minuses.
It's somewhat subjective, and there are some people who, either through whatever brain development or usually through child abuse, don't develop a conscience, right?
So that's a big problem in society is the couple of percentage points of people who don't have a conscience.
So the voice of conscience is something that develops fairly automatically among I was talking about this the other day, that when I was a kid, we would play games, and if some kid cheated, we would ostracize that kid until the kid stopped cheating, right?
Because we don't like cheating, and, you know, all we cheat against that kid, that kid would complain and say, well, it's not so no good, not so much fun for you when we cheat, right?
Or another thing that would happen is if somebody was dishing out insults and then got insulted back and cried.
Then we would say, oh, you can dish it out, but you can't take it.
You can be aggressive with other people, and then you can't take it back.
Like, there was this woman who was debating with Andrew Wilson on the, I think it was the Whatever podcast, and she was pretty aggressive, but then when he was aggressive back, she claimed health issues, she started to cry, she had to leave, right?
So, dish it out, but they're cry bullies, right?
dish it out, but can't take it.
So if you're going to say God is the voice of conscience within, then you're going to say that an autonomous process of human development a natural development of the human brain is God.
But that doesn't make any sense, because why would only that one be God, right?
Human beings have a natural capacity to learn language.
This is why if you don't learn language by the time you're sort of 8 or 9 or 10, you struggle with it forever.
And the process where kids are learning language, they learn like 10, 20 words a day, nobody even knows how they do it.
It's incredible, right?
So, why would you say, well, one autonomous development of the human mind called the conscience is God.
But all the other ones are not.
The development of language, the development of the ability to walk, the development of the ability to sing, the development of the ability to roll over.
These are all autonomous developments within the human mind.
Only one of them is God.
Now, we already have the word conscience, so why would you need the word God in that?
So, saying that how the human brain develops is God doesn't make any sense because it wouldn't be specific to any particular development.
That's a definition.
So you're just, you're saying by that definition of God, I So people who are so traumatized and brutalized and tortured that they don't develop a conscience don't have any access to God.
But of course, we need the most morality for the least moral among us, right?
So that wouldn't make much sense.
And Jordan Peterson would know the amount of child abuse and trauma that it takes to produce a sociopath or a psychopath or a narcissist is a huge and brutal amount of child abuse that requires.
So people who are abused as children have no access to God.
They don't have a conscience.
They have no access to God.
Morality has no hold of them.
But that would be to say that God cannot reach those people who were abused as children because it's consistent that if you experience horrible abuse, as particularly as an infant, right?
Your chances of becoming a sociopath with no conscience is very high.
So if particular traumas for children can prevent the development of the conscience, then God abandons those who have the most need of morality and kindness, right?
That doesn't make any particular sense.
And you can't just say that God is all-knowing, all-powerful.
But no, God is just the voice of conscience.
Well, that makes sense.
And this is another reason why people hate UPB if they have a bad conscience, because UPB codifies the conscience.
It kind of goes back to where I'm saying initially.
I'm not defining it.
Elijah defines it.
Okay, so as Elijah defines God.
find that way in Jonah too.
Okay.
I'm sure you know many people who defined it that way.
So, is he saying that people who are atheists have no conscience, whereas people who are religious are the only people with a conscience?
Well, if an atheist, well, I guess Jordan Peterson would say that if you have a conscience, then you're religious, you just don't know it.
And it's impressive.
You're a very knowledgeable person.
I'm not trying to be impressive.
I'm just pointing out to you how God is defined in the Old Testament.
All right.
So to respond to that, And that goes back to my opening statement.
Then how do we specify what we're arguing about?
We use context clues.
Again, nobody has objectively defined God.
And nobody has objectively defined truth, falsehood.
And again, these are not philosophers or someone.
They're thinkers, for sure.
And maybe some of the young guys are studying philosophy.
But it just drives me crazy.
You end up in this soup.
And I watched, I think, about 40 minutes of this, and I was just like, okay, nobody's defining anything.
They're just going back and forth particular terms, right?
So the fact that Elijah and Cardinal Newman defined God as the voice of the conscience within, yeah, okay.
I mean, that is not an argument.
That's an argument from authority or whatever it is, right?
You can have a conscience without believing in God.
You can believe in God and not have a conscience.
And so, it's kind of a cutesy, seemingly interesting and important statement.
But I think this is worth watching.
Again, how far you get is, of course, up to you.
But let me just go back here.
I do think that it's worth watching, at least some of it.
And let me go back here.
If I go solo, yeah, that's back to me.
So, it's interesting, but essentially very frustrating.
It's very frustrating because, I mean, this is why I did the whole 19-part introduction to philosophy series many years ago.
It was all the way from metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics.
And you have to blank slate and start.
As if there's nothing.
Not Elijah said this, and there's a Polynesian God that, and so on, right?
And in order to reject anything, you have to be omniscient.
Because Jordan Peterson rejects students who fail.
He's not omniscient about everything that they think and know.
Jordan Peterson tells people that they're wrong, despite not being omniscient.
So Jordan Peterson rejects certain perspectives as wrong, even though he's not omniscient.
So then he says, well, in order to reject a Polynesian God, I'd have to be omniscient.
None of it really hangs together.
None of it really makes sense.
Any particular sense.
And it is, for me, it's like watching people punch themselves.
It really is.
It should just start with, okay, Jordan Peterson, what is your definition of God?
Okay, and if he says, well, there are many definitions of God, it's like, no.
What is your definition of God?
Like, yours.
Not other people's, blah, blah, blah.
What to you?
Yeah, fdrurl.com slash intro.
So, what is your definition of God?
Because you can't argue.
With a thesaurus, and you can't argue with an encyclopedia, right?
So, what is the definition of God that you accept to be true?
Well, there's a variety.
Somebody defines it as this, somebody defines it as that.
It's like, nope, I can't debate with somebody who doesn't have any particular beliefs.
You have to have particular beliefs in order to debate, right?
And also, you know, say to Jordan Peterson, how do you know what certainty is?
Well, it's complicated, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, oh.
It can't be that complicated, because if it's that complicated, babies and toddlers shouldn't be able to understand it, and they do.
And also, if it's that complicated, we can't have any rules in society that punish people for their bad deeds, right?
If epistemology and ethics are so crazy complicated, how can we throw people in jail for the wrongs that they do?
Well, we need some social rules, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, it can't be that complicated.
And, you know, one of the things that I've done from the very beginning is try to uncomplicate things to make things comprehensible and understandable.
And it has to pass the toddler test.
It has to pass the toddler test.
Toddlers know what things are real and what are not.
Toddlers know what is true and what is not.
If you say to the toddler, we're going to the park, and then you take the toddler to the dentist, the toddler will be upset, and they will say, you lied to me.
You said we were going to the park, and we're going to the...
Oh, you said we were going to the park, but not going to the park.
A two-year-old will know that.
So how can a two-year-old know something, and adults can't define it?
How can we apply moral rules to two- and three- and four-year-olds?
Don't hit, don't grab, don't steal, don't whatever, right?
How can we apply moral rules to toddlers that we can't define in simple and clear ways?
And the fact that we do all of this stuff, we impose rules on people with an IQ of 80. We hold them accountable, we hold them responsible, we throw them in jail.
So if you can't explain your moral system, To somebody who's a toddler, to somebody who's a very young person, to somebody who's not particularly smart, if you can't explain your moral system to them, then you have no right to impose it.
I mean, Jordan Peterson doubtless failed a large number of people over the course of being a professor.
How did he know they were ignorant?
I mean, he's not omniscient.
He doesn't know their secret hearts and thoughts.
And maybe they were a manifestation of the possibility But he has to make his decisions based upon the facts and the evidence and so on, right?
So, if you're going to fail people for not getting 70% or 60% or whatever it is, then you've got objective knowledge, you've got objective failure, you've got objective numbers, you've got objective evaluations, you've got objective judgments.
Because you're not saying, I'm failing you because I don't like the haircut.
You're not saying, I'm failing you because I'm in a bad mood.
You're saying, I'm failing you because I'm recognizing that you don't know the material.
So you have to have a standard of truth and falsehood of knowledge, of a lack of knowledge, in order to be a professor and fail people.
So how is he doing that?
And if he failed someone who never showed up to class and never took the test, he failed that person, and then that person would say, well, you're not omniscient.
You don't own my secret heart.
Maybe my knowledge is ineffable, and maybe I'm like the Polynesian god Lolo or whatever.
He would just say, well, no, that's not valid.
So we've got to build from the common sense stuff.
We've got to build from the common sense.
This is old Anglo-Saxon common sense stuff that kicks in my brain.
If we're going to apply a rule to toddlers, And people who aren't smart, then it has to be relatively simple and easy to explain.
It can't just be ridiculously overcomplicated.
And you can't say, if somebody says, what's your definition of God?
You can't say, well, there are many.
But what's yours, right?
You're debating, so you can't debate, that's hearsay, right?
You can't debate in proxy.
You can't say, well, so-and-so says this, and so-and-so says that, and therefore you have to argue that point.
Because you can't debate with Elijah or Cardinal Newman because they're not in the room.
You have to debate with the person whose beliefs are held in the room so that they can defend their position.
And so, anyway, I think it's interesting and I hope that you find it interesting.
At some point, I'll gird my loins and do the Sam Harris-Jordan Peterson debate where I think they spend an hour trying to figure out what the word is means.
But we'll get to that at some point.
But yeah, this overcomplicated stuff, it just doesn't work and it's not how people live.
It's not how people live.
At all.
So, anyway, I hope you find it helpful, freedomain.com slash donate.
To help out the show, I would really appreciate your support.
Don't forget all the free books, freedomain.com slash books, the free documentaries, freedomain.com slash documentaries, and you can put your call-in requests at freedomain.com slash call.
Thank you, everyone, so much.
Have yourself a glorious, lovely, wonderful day.
I appreciate you dropping by.
I appreciate your support, and I will talk to you soon.
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