Stephen Hicks wrote a paper (Jordan Peterson’s Religious Facts and Vales) for a book on Peterson edited by Sandra Woien in 2022. I downloaded Hick’s paper off of the Internet and intend to quote from it a bit and comment on his remarks about Peterson.
Hicks start off by asking where do we find meaning in life. He writes: “In answering that question, Jordan Peterson is a man with a foot in two worlds. He is a man of science, proficient in the biological bases of psychology and the developments of psychology as an applied science.
At the same time, he is the inheritor of one of the biggest challenges of the modern world, one that says, bluntly, that there is no relationship between the fact orientation in our thinking and the value orientation in our thinking. Peterson often sems to agree, saying that we cannot define value in a physicalist scientific framework. To put it crudely and frustratingly: how can a bunch of atoms bouncing around give rise to the highest aspirations of the human spirit?
And that points him back to ancient myths. Since values and meaning are absolutely important to our human identity and the modern scientific project cannot deliver on those, we need to go back to pre-modern religions to find them.
So Peterson has another foot in the world of religious history and Biblical interpretation, offering a narrative understanding of its myths. Yet Jordan Peterson also frustrates thoughtful people because his normally clear language seems to become more approximate and metaphorical. Anyone can make up stories, including ancient folk who didn’t know much about science, so where are the hard facts to back up these emotionally engaging tales?”
My response: We need science and hard facts, but the world is more than just a physicalist reality and the laws of nature that govern it. I do not know if we can come of with a scientific account for values, an account of the Divine Couple, or the meaning of life, but the world of spirit and values do exist, and must be explained as best we can. And science as part of rational religion is how we will approach binding fact and values together, though our language in places may be metaphorical and approximate. As an epistemological moderate, I posit that it the only way to go forward. This compromised approach will dissatisfy both scientists and religious adherents, but it is the best that we can come up with.
Hick continues: “Thus the problem is a pair of trade-offs: One approach—the scientific is factual and rigorous but sees not able to deliver meaningful values, while the other—the religious—is full of heated significance but seemingly without rational grounding.
What to do, then? Peterson argues that Western civilization is built upon ancient Judeo-Christian insight that must be somehow combined with modern, rational-scientific insights. The project then is not to be either a wishful thinking pre-modernist religious person nor a coldly, robot modern scientific person, but to find a synthesis.
Further, to his credit, Peterson adds a modesty about his progress, recognizing that great minds have been grappling with the fact-value dichotomy problem for centuries, saying in effect he is trying and it’s an ongoing project.
And, even further, Peterson is more interestingly complex because he recognizes that the postmodern cynics and outright nihilists are mounting a full assault on both pillars of Western civilization—religion and science. Jordan Peterson is a moralist against the postmodernists, for he believes there are objectivity better and world ways to live: “
My response: For a pure scientist, atheist, rationalist, and materialist like Hicks, he sincerely doubts that the world of spirit exists. I believe there is a way for scientists and moralists and religious believers to find common ground. Both can be realists that believe in universal principles existing in and governing the world, natural or supernatural—whether they believe in one or both realms. Scientists trust to their powers of observation, intuition, inductive and deductive reasoning to build their knowledge and facts about the natural world.
Religious believers, especially if they are rationalist believers with a deist bent, believe that their faith, their intuition, their experience, their observations, their feelings, their reasoning, inductive and deductive, can give them facts and values about the natural world, and the unseen supernatural world. God is a technician and engineer, as well as an artist, innovator, and engineer, so God’s spirit or Logos or reason is God’s essential organizing structure for creating cosmos or the creation of material and spiritual, chaotic stuff.
Both scientists with their facts and religious believers with their immaterial rationality, can work together to assemble facts about the natural world and the supernatural world—both in existence—and then, in a mode of learned divine wisdom, can assign values to all people and behaviors at work and rest in either the natural and supernatural world. This is how I the moderate envision that these two groups can work together to craft an objective narrative and description of all of reality that is meaningful, factual and value-laden. It is an ongoing project, but we can make progress and the postmodernist cynics need not win the day.
I think modernist religious believers and physicalist scientists like Hicks should enjoy the common ground that they have, and agree to coexist peacefully and respectfully, while united against nihilists, collectivists, true-believers and evildoers.
Jordan Peterson is a moderate: a hard-nosed scientist and seems to be a Christian of some kind too, so he is doing what I am doing in his own way, crafting his rational theology that is not anti-worldly or anti-science.
Stephen Hicks seems really smart and wise, and he understands Peterson and represents him as he is, though Hick the atheist and Randian Objectivist, strongly disagrees with Pteterson.
Here are some key points that Hick attributes to Peterson, laying out Peterson’s moral view:
“Individuality: The cornerstone of Western morality is ‘the assumption that every individual is sacred’ (1999, 261).
Every individual has agency—rather than being merely a pawn of overpowering forces.
Taking responsibility is fundamental-rather than embracing victimhood.
Suffering is built into life, so toughness is essential.
Social life is too complex, so we need honesty and to cultivate listening and openness to alternative views.
Civility and constructive debate must be social fundamentals.
And while we should all strive to improve ourselves and the world, he believes in a strict causal priority: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world’ (2018, 159).”
My response: Both Hicks, Peterson and I seem to be classical liberals, so these conservative values propounded by Peterson above are ones that we would endorse too.
Hick continues: “Peterson advocates these as genuine and universal values, in contrast to the now widespread ‘It’s all subjective’ relativism that comes in both casual and hardcore intellectual versions. Consequently, his urgency is to find a workable synthesis before the forces of chaos prevail. That urgency forces us back to the hard questions about where we get value and genuine meaning from:
Why the deep assumption that science is factual but value-empty while religion is value-filled but without factual basis?
What is Peterson’s alternative?
Does it work?
If it doesn’t work and a hard choice has to be made, in his heart of hearts does Peterson come down on the side of religion or science?
These questions will structure the rest of this discussion.”
My response: Both scientists, moralists, and religious believers, though they have different and competing cosmologies, do agree that reason, universals and objective values are critically important for humans to enjoy the advantages of cosmos, structure and integrated living—civilization in short—to avoid the barbaric decline into bad anarchy, chaos and barbarism and totalitarianism pushed by the relativists and nihilists.
We secularists and scientists must work with religious believers to find values that reinforce cosmos retention and mending going forward.
Hicks continues: “: . . . The point is that Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard are four intellectual giants, and—while two are atheists and two are theists—all four agree that we cannot prove the existence of God or the truth of religion.
Jordan Peterson agrees: ‘The ‘death of God’ in the modern world looks like an accomplished fact’ (1999, 245). He suggests two reasons for that: ‘Our constant cross-cultural interchanges and our capacity for critical reason (have) undermined our faith in the traditions of our forebears—perhaps for good reason’ (1999, 10-11). Yest, we moderns cannot just return to dogmatic faith. We must be willing to recognize when our ‘maps’ fail, and Peterson criticizes those who ‘will go to almost any length to ensure that their protective cultural ‘stories’ remain intact’ (1999, 18).”
My response: We may not be able to prove God’s existence or the truth of religion, but nor can atheists disprove it. If we are to build an objectivist metaphysics between atheists and theists, we will have to build the synthesis between facts and values, while agreeing to disagree with our Randian allies. Remember too that Peterson 24 years ago was more of the atheist than he is today.
Hicks continues: “So again: Where can we get the meaning of life from? Do we have to agree with Dostoevsky’s ‘If God is dead, then everything is permitted,’ as one of his characters in The Brothers Karamazov declared? If the big brains of philosophy and religion are correct, then religion has failed us because humans need order, principles and purpose—but those cannot come from ungrounded, wishful-thinking stories.”
My response: I disagree with Hicks here staunchly: rational religion has not failed us as humans because it has not seriously been tried—it can provide us with order, principles and purpose, with one foot in the world of science, and one foot in the world of mythology, Biblical and otherwise. Hicks defines the dilemma nicely: science cannot give us values, but irrational religion cannot mount adequate metaphysical and scientific responses to the criticism of materialists and atheists.
Hicks then goes on to claim that religion turned pragmatic by the mid 1800s, so it was not important if it was true, but was it socially useful. I would argue that it is true and socially useful.
Hicks believes that God does not exist, and religion might serve as a useful social palliative for the masses needing a father figure to go on living. Hicks believes apparently that Peterson still does not believe in God, but argues that religious belief is socially beneficial, useful pragmatic fiction so to speak.
Hicks continues: “This pragmatism is exactly the territory that Jordan Peterson is working.
Often when asked directly about his religious beliefs—Do you believe in God—Peterson’s response is to say: “I act as if God exists.’ Traditional theists do not like that answer. Nor do traditional atheists. That is because both focus on the question of religion’s truth. But Peterson is signaling that the important thing is action. As a psychologist and as social theorist, his focus is upon religious belief as a personally and socially useful tool.”
My response: It seems to me that Peterson has been coy and cute over the years in answering whether or not he believed in God, and he does believe that religious belief is useful in guiding the believer to right action personally and for the community at large.
My take is that Peterson also thinks that God is good ethically, and that right action is love and living in God’s living image, and that if one is not morally advancing, one is not close to God and does not believe in Go. This stance is like the moral personalism and near absolutism of existentialists, that one must be good and authentic, or one is nothing. This stance is admirable and worth adopting, but it in no way denies the existence of God. I think Peterson went through his near death health crisis and came out the other side, believing in a divinity. It is useful for Hicks to insist that Peterson never came to believe in the truth of God’s existence, but that is a case where the brilliant Hicks is misconstruing Peterson’s religious belief, because Hicks remains an ardent materialist, scientist, and atheist.
Hicks then offers several objections to Peterson’s religious pragmatism.
He concludes that Peterson is a pragmatic Aristotelian; “Jordan Peterson is a man of science, and I want in closing to suggest to argue that Peterson’s views are evolving: from a traditional religion/science duality to a pragmatic account of religion to a kind of Aristotelian pragmatism. That is, the science is slowly prevailing over the religion.
Peterson is a rational realist in practice. But he is a pragmatist in theory: because devising an epistemological theory of truth is hard, he settles for pragmatic workability . . .”
My response: Peterson is always a scientist and is pragmatic, but he evolves into being a religious believer. From that vantage point, rational religion is the only way to bridge the gap between facts and values and that has ben my assertion all along.
Hick concludes: “Values and meaning are biologically and pragmatically based, including a functional role for religious myth individual and socially. And that is the truth, as best he can say now.”
My response: Vales and meaning are biologically and pragmatically based, but even
more deeply and powerfully, they are spiritually based on communications with
the Higher Power.
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