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June 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:12
Jordan Peterson: All Atheists Are Wrong
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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 everyone in the world has to know everything simultaneously for that to be valid and true?
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, Parsi is 70% in college?
Okay, thanks.
I appreciate that.
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 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 not just binoculars, but I had a telescope.
And I looked at Saturn and I looked at Venus and they're all a sphere.
And I understand the physics, right, of how things collapse, how matter would collapse.
It would end up as a sphere because of gravity and all of that.
And so I accept that, right?
I haven't tested it myself.
I accept that because it accords with reason and evidence, right?
So I think in order for your question 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.
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.
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, right?
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 or any 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.
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 Lono was.
Did you say anything about rejection?
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.
I have a degree in religious studies, specialty in Christianity and Mediterranean traditions.
And further than that, beyond me, Pew Research studies suggest that atheists and agnostics actually know more about religion and about religious stories, the foundational principles, than believers.
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 mean, that's just absolutely unfounded mind reading.
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.
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