The Atheistic Argument

 

I saw a small clip on I believe what was called Vintusu Instagram or The Formidable Gentlemanon 8/1/24, and it was a clip or Jordan Peterson talking to an interviewer. I will quote the podcast in my own words and then comment on its content.

 

Jordan (for Jordan Peterson): “I think I can demolish the atheistic argument permanently. With the death of God, many other things die. Things you don’t expect, and one of those things is science.”

 

My response: First, I believe that God exists, has not died, likely will never die and cannot be killed by human hands or intent, though religions might die out. If a society entirely transfers its transcendent allegiance, owed to a good deity, to human secular interests and living, then the society has turned its back on God, and God is not dead, but sooner or later those, errant, rebellious humans will wish they were dead.

 

Still, Peterson is referring to a society of secular humanists that have banned God from their midst: in that sense God is dead, and Peterson notes wisely that when God dies, science dies.

 

I have always known that Peterson was some sort of metaphysical moderate, believing in God and that we should serve and attend to God, while Peterson himself is rationalist and a superb social scientist. In short, he lives in the world of the sacred and the secular at the same time, and I believe that is why he is considered to be a philosophical pragmatist, for pragmatists can be ontological moderate if they what is true is what is useful to them, be it double participation in the sacred (yang or supernatural) and secular (yin or natural) realms, and so existing might severely vex the binary cosmologist, denying that such dialectical, contradictory and intermittent blending of both realms is acceptable or even meaningful, let alone desirable as Peterson seems to suggest.

 

I also think Peterson believes in God more like a rational religionist like I do, than as a more typical Christian, and he refuses to tell the Christians how he believes, so they are upset with him, and do not quite trust him as a game-player. He is not a game-player, but he needs to explain more clearly his religious believes as a practicing scientist and psychologist.

 

Jordan: “And no one expected that.”

 

Interviewer: “How so?”

 

Jordan: “Because science as a practice is a religious practice. It is predicated on religious axioms

·      You have to believe that there is such a thing as truth.

·      You have to believe the truth is understandable.

·      You have to believe that understanding the truth is good.

·      You have to believe there is such a thing as good.”

 

My response: I do not know if Peterson is right that these axioms are religious solely or that science could not come up with them independently of religion, but it could be that scientific practice is a religious practice. There is no doubt that the idea of Divine Reason or an intellectual perhaps spiritual vital principle or Logos is an idea that runs through many religions, and a scientist is a creature employing logic, empirical reasoning and induction to make sense of the world through constructing hypotheses to explain nature, hypotheses that he derives from studying nature. Therefore, rationality courses through religious thought and is a core, key tool for naturalists studying the material world. Perhaps that is the source of the connection which Peterson is alluding to as he claims scientific practice is a religious practice.

 

As a moderate deist, a proponent of rational, scientific religion, and as a conservative Unitarian-universalist, I find Peterson’s assertions here appealing and plausible.

 

Jordan: “So, to be a scientist you have to imagine first of all the world is comprehensible to the human intellect, but the more that you investigate the of the material world, you decide that that enterprise will be beneficial. That is not a scientific claim. That is a metaphysical claim.

 

And that metaphysical claim is nested in a story.

 

You know when the Enlightenment types portray the scientific revolution as contrary to the religious substrate, that is not accurate. That is a French Revolution, that is a Luciferian intellectual history. That is not true. The universities grew out of the monasteries. That is where the universities came from. And science as a widespread experience got its start in universities.”

 

My response: I like and agree with Jordan’s account, and already knew that universities grew out of the Church, or the monastic orders.

 

We all have our metaphysical presuppositions for what we believe, even if we deny that we do.

 

I am not quite agreeing with Jordan that evil, Luciferian pride is atheism and secular humanism, though it can be in one of its manifestations. I view Luciferian pride, if I am interpreting Peterson correctly here, not as narcissistic individualistic pride and rebellion against God by seeking to supplant God as wholly self-sufficient, transhumanistic secular humanists and atheists, but as a combination of group pride, secular or sacred, rational or sentimental, that is fanatical and ultraist: for me that is Luciferian pride.

Godly pride is moderate and individualist and is the individual pride, and that celebrates God but does not compete with God, while humans maverize and build their own world.