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June 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:34
Jordan Peterson: The Divine is Unknowable and Overwhelming
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Okay, so the implication and implication of that story is that the divine is fundamentally unknowable.
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, here's something called X. X is fundamentally unknowable, and it's divine.
It's like, no.
The moment you say divine, you're saying there are aspects or characteristics of it that can be known.
So you can't say fundamentally unknowable and then also 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.
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.
Okay.
So, if something is unknowable, then it also can't be overwhelming.
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.
efficient anyway so you 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?
Japanese, it's not unknowable, but it's unknown to me at the moment.
Is that overwhelming?
So again, the moment you say overwhelming, you're making a knowledge claim about something.
And that isn't Now, of course, the only result of something being fundamentally unknowable and overwhelming or whatever that would mean, again, sort of contradictory terms, would be agnosticism.
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.
So if something is overwhelming and incomprehensible, then the only position would be agnosticism.
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...
That 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, like, 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, right?
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...
Twitter.
So we can't conceive of what, 44...
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