June 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:15
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| 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... | |
| 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. | |
| 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 because... | |
| 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 time? | |
| 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 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. |
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