Decoding the Gurus - Peterson, Murray & Pageau: Transcendent Tableware

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

In this bitesize decoding, a conservative columnist, a religious icon carver, and a tortured ex-psychologist walk into a Daily Wire studio and try to hash out some solution of the meta-meaning-crisis. In an astounding twist it turns out it involves embracing traditional Christianity. Who could have guessed?Join us on Jordan’s religious powered rocket as we consider the esoteric mystery of tableware, how fiction is probably true, and try to uncover what’s the deal with atheist materialists anyway?In a nutshell, it's the same old drum that's being beaten: it only seems like science does better than religion at explaining things, because religion trumps science because God does causality in mysterious non-material ways. Maybe ways that have something to do with symbols and meaning or whatever. Ho hum - this is why it's a mini-decoding and not a full episode. It's more than OK to skip this one if you feel you've already got a handle on Jordan and Pageau's jam. But honestly, it's maybe all worth it to hear Pageau's explain 'vertical causation'. Try to follow the argument there, we dare you.Along the way Matt and Chris will also teach us valuable lessons like how to deal with road rage bullies or aggressive bull sharks and how if you really want to be a Christian it’s ok to go to mass.LinksDouglas Murray and Jonathan Pageau | #290

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are. Welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where we listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown. With me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh. I'm a psychologist, he's an anthropologist, and today we are doing an urgent mini decoding. Is this right, Chris? That's right. A bite-sized treat for all of the listeners.

And I can see, Matt, on the video that you're in explorer gear. You look like the archetypical Australian crocodile Dund dundee your shirt is unbuttoned your stomach you you have a cork hat in the background and your your knife is strapped into your belt oh look there the hat is on i've even got a slouch hat that's right i am going to be canoeing on the noosa river as soon as we are done with decoding it's a busy day and it's going to be canoeing on the Noosa River as soon as we are done with decoding. It's a busy day and it's going to be awesome. Love it. There's mangroves, sharks. It's great.

Yeah, that's the thing, Matt. I thought I warned you about this before, that that body of water within it houses all manner of aquatic beasts with sharp teeth, a bad attitude, and a punch on for psychology professors what are you doing you're you're gambling with your life i'm not worried i'm not worried you know that scene in crocodile dundee where there's a big water buffalo i think it is and he he he does the thing with his hand and he he mesmerizes it puts it to sleep i can do that with bull sharks it's a skill that i've got i've not mentioned it before it's not a problem i find that hard to believe but you know it could be that sounds like something an australian would believe

unwarranted confidence and optimism that is that is our national ethos. Just be careful, Matt. Don't dangle your toes in. And if you see some dark shadow below, you're like, crikey, what's that? I better jump in and have a little tickle. No, no, don't do that. We need you for the decoding. So my brother has been zipping around downtown Tawantin gathering supplies for our canoeing mission.

And as you know, Australia does not have widespread gun ownership. And that's good because you can handle road rage incidents without having to worry about getting shot. And he was driving. He's got quite a small little car. He was driving 50 kilometers an hour. And this guy in his great big SUV behind him thought that was too slow and kept like revving his engine and zooming up behind him

and then beeping his horn and all that stuff. So me, I'm a mild-mannered guy. I would have just turned the other cheek. But my brother being my brother, he stopped his car in the middle of the road got out marched down to this suv and spoke to the guy he was there with his girlfriend wearing a little captain's hat uh saying mate what's the problem what's the problem mate and the guy chris didn't say a word didn't un, didn't wind down his window, just stared fixedly ahead until my brother went away.

So there you go. That's how you deal with bullies. That's how you deal with bullies. Respect to my brother. That's what Jordan Peterson would do. He'd walk up and say, you know, give him a slap. You have to be aware. So your brother is dealing with the bull sharks of the Australian road system.

That's right. In a similar way. So you'll be all right. That's all right. It's the same principle when you ride canary. What are you doing, shark? What are you doing? What do you want want why are you following us so closely that's right you'll just get out and stare him down stare down the bull shark the bull shark will sort of swim away with its tail between

its yeah i'm sorry that's how it'll go so yes old geordie p i bring him up because in the week of our sense making episode i saw today in fact that a new episode had dropped of jordan peterson's podcast with two people that we are familiar with doug Murray and one Jonathan Pajot of Demonology fame. Now, let me allow Jordan to introduce for us what they're going to be talking about. Hello everyone watching and listening. I'm very excited today to bring to you two of my favorite people, I would say, Douglas Murray and Jonathan Paggio. I wanted to bring the three of us together to talk about the underlying metaphysical and theological substrate, if any, that constitutes the precondition for classic conservatism, small-L liberalism, and maybe enlightenment rationality, as well as, let's say, classic Western religious belief,

which is sort of obviously linked to that underlying metaphysic or maybe the substrate for it. So there you go, Matt. That's the topic. It seems like high religion or metaphysics is the potential. Is it a precondition for classic conservatism, small L liberalism, enlightenment, rationality, science?

I wonder what the conclusion of these three individuals will be to that question. The very foundations of Western civilization. I wonder what the conclusion will be. Yes. So Chris, you've listened to this. It came out very recently. I have not.

This is going to be one of those reaction episodes. You're going to play me some clips and give me the gist. But I've got a funny feeling it's going to be exactly like all the other conversations that these three people have. That is exactly what it is. I'm pretty sure I could script this conversation without them being present, and it would be pretty close to what you get. I think anybody who's listened to our episodes with Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray

or the Sensemakers will find this all very familiar. And part of the reason I thought it's worth covering is just to highlight that a large amount of the stuff that we're covering recently, especially evident with Jordan Peterson and the Sensemaking ecosystem, but it really, really is just bog-standard religious apologetics. We need one miracle. Everybody needs one miracle to then lay the world out from that miracle,

whether it's the Big Bang, whether it's whatever it is, you need that first miracle. So give me the resurrection and I'll explain the entire tea of human experience through that one miracle. That's what it is. It's basically saying, here's the reasons why religious traditions are important and why ultimately they're correct and lurching backwards and forwards between metaphorical and physical presentations. presentations but it actually rehashes even lots of very old tired arguments like you know how can atheists have morality without belief in god like these kind of things are presented as if they're novel questions so that's just it's so frustrating because it's so it's so mundane i know jonathan pegeau and j and Jordan Peterson would think that we are just incapable of comprehending, you know, the deep complexities of what they're discussing, but it's, it's really not that deep and complex, but it's really,

really mundane. It's like a blast from the past. These conversations were, were had had have been had for decades yeah so well here's jordan talking he's kind of framing the war that exists between materialists and and religious people and this is how he he characterizes that so you know, the battle between the atheist rationalist materialists, let's say, and the religious types, if it's played out on the battleground set by the atheist materialists, is a battle between the claims that the scientific mode of explanation and the religious mode of explanation are alike in kind, but different in conclusion. And so that you have a description of the world where God's a causal agent, and you have a description of the world where natural processes are causal agents, and the scientists tend to win that battle. But then I think, well, there's a problem with that, because it isn't obvious to me at all that

the way that God is conceptualized in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and maybe more universally, is as like an analog of a material cause. If I look through the biblical canon and the way that God is characterized as a character, let's say, in some sense as a fictional character, and I'll return to that idea, his essence is something more like role model and spirit to emulate. It's something like a mode of being. It's an enacted mode of being in the world rather than a pure causal agent.'s a story chris and aren't stories important when you think about it don't we need something to aspire to don't we need a legend a mythos to tell ourselves to give this shallow two-dimensional world some structure and meaning this feels like just feels like jordan peterson's jam like hasn't

he been saying this since forever and ever just rehashing the same point of view right he has and it's this is you know it's a metaphorical interpretation of religion which which is, you know, a more modern contemporary take, which is more about allegory and metaphor and patterns of being than truth claims. But, you know, as we've seen with Pajot in other contexts and Jordan, they want to walk this line because they point out about, you know, to walk this line because they point out about, you know, this supposed conflict, supposed conflict between a scientific approach to the world and looking at the world through a religious lens and the conflicting creation stories that they tell and all of this. But they kind of hand wave that like, oh, only idiot materialists would believe that there's any fundamental crepency in those worldviews or any inherent contradiction. But the thing is, it isn't just scientists that argue there's a contradiction there.

It's a large amount of religious people. amount of religious people. There are lots of people like Jordan who will happily, you know, interpret things in more vague, abstract ways. But there are also a lot of literalists. And there are people who do directly say the, you know, the claims of science are contradicted by what's in religious texts or what religious beliefs say and therefore are wrong. And they act as if that is just, you know, that's a very minor thing in the world. But it isn't. It isn't a minor. There's lots of people who are literalists and it's had a big impact on societies, including Western societies throughout history. So it's like this convenient retreat to act as if it's only the materialists and scientists who try to posit this conflict when that's not the case.

There has been a lot of religious people who recognize a contradiction in their beliefs. And there are plenty of religious people who don't, who make them compatible. But it's just that denial that there is any contradiction now because there is, depending on how literally you take your beliefs. is depending on how literally you take your beliefs. Yeah, isn't Jordan Peterson's view and these other sense-making types,

isn't it kind of, in some ways, a logical extension of the non-literalist progressive? You know, often Anglican priests and stuff tend to do this, which is that it's all, you know, we shouldn't take the Bible literally. It's all very abstract and messages for humanity and so on. I mean, they've got their own spin on it, which aligns with this sort of anti-woke reactionary conservatism. But isn't it kind of the same, Chris, this sort of modern version of christianity that's reasonably popular yeah well it is but as we'll see when it gets to like discussion of the resurrection i feel it's very much having your kick and eating it because there comes the point where you know

if you ask for clarification about whether the resurrection literally occurred or didn't, that there's lots of ways to dance around that. But ultimately, you know, Orthodox Christians cannot deny that that occurred. And so, yeah, it's interesting to see that dance. And like to give an example that, you know, Pajot is like pretty fundamentalist Christian to my perspective. But he's also, as we've covered in the demonology episode, like very, very good at presenting things

in this complex abstract language when necessary. And here's him doing that about his version about discussing this contrast between the enlightenment and religious values. One of the problems that happened in the story of Christianity is something like the enlightenment and modernism, which is that as the world was moving towards this notion of mechanical causation and the interest in mechanical causation, there came to be a misunderstanding of the way that traditional Christians believed the world actually existed. And so there's a difference between the material causes and something like the vertical cause of

something. And the vertical cause of something is exactly this hierarchy that Jordan is talking about. And I would push what Jordan is saying even further. That is, it does actually affect, to a certain extent, even the is, because we can't perceive an is without a hierarchy of attention, and without a hierarchy of perception. Because the world is indefinite in detail and in quantity. And so for even to be able to say this, to point to something to say that,

is already in this hierarchy of something we could call vertical causation. So this glass has millions and millions of aspects to it. But we nonetheless are able to see it as one. And the fact that we see it as one is a total mystery to scientists. They don't know how to account for it. They use words like emergence, and you could just use the word magic and it would be the same. It's like this jump into unity. That is the type of causation that we talk about. I'm reminded of Ray Comfort holding up the banana

and saying, this is the atheist's nightmare, shipped to fit human hand, designed for grasping. And you can't see here, but, you know, Jonathan Pajot is holding a glass, right, like from the table. And so there's this notion of apprehension of identities and realizing that those identities have to do with the fact that they're bound up in a value judgment, even though it's not necessarily moral. It's just a value judgment about how good something is. Because if I see a glass, I am always asking, is it a good glass? Even if I don't do it consciously, necessarily, because I know that it's there to grip and to drink from. And it's the same, even with like, even scientists are doing that because they have to focus their attention on something because they can't study everything at once. So the fact that we comprehend this, this collection of atoms and forces as a solid object, as a glass, isn't that just magic?

Explain that scientists, magnets, how do they work? Yeah. I mean, as soon as we perceive a glass and we put it in the category of glass and we assign it the property of glassness and separate it from the rest of the world, then our subjective perceptions are interacting with the material world. So, you know, that leaves all kinds of space for God to get involved, clearly. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It's been said before, but these guys lean hard on this social constructivism and relativism that has been associated with the academic humanities and has been routinely attacked by people like Jordan Peterson. And it is so interesting how really their objection to the kind of stuff that you would see in critical theory, critical sociology, and so on, is not so

much that it's an unscientific way of viewing the world. It's not so much that it's projecting a particular narrative on the concrete historical events and so on that happened and seeing it through a particular lens. It's that they don't like that lens, this liberal socialist progressive one. They've got a different lens that they want to funnel reality through and they like that one a whole lot better so yeah it's um yeah you were trained as a post-modernist as well when you were an artist so what why did you return to the source and what has that done for you but it has to do with something like what we're talking about like Like postmodern art has become a kind of caricature where it is a comment

upon a comment and upon a comment. It almost gets reduced to propositions and getting the joke and this type of inner language that is actually not connected to reality anymore. And so looking back in time, I realized that, wait a minute, traditional arts were arts of participation. They were arts of celebration of one's own world, whether it is your culture, your tribe, but ultimately a celebration of God. And I realized if I want to make something real, something that isn't just some strange comment upon something else. Something ironic. Yeah, something ironic and satirical. Then the only

way to really get back to that is to engage in liturgical art. So by making things for churches. Yeah, so making things for churches is possibly the realest thing an artist can do. It's the reasoning that's so similar. And, you know, as we saw with the sense makers there's there's this absolute love with metaphor metaphorical discussion or kind of getting into the weeds about specific examples right and and this holding up of the glass it's not a metaphor but but let's just hear how much mileage j gets out of, you know, reflecting on the nature of perceiving a glass? Well, I would say in a specific sense, because if you were a photorealist painter, you could spend a month painting all the reflections on that glass. It's a very complex thing to perceive, but you perceive it as a unity, and we know this neuropsychologically, we know this scientifically,

you perceive it as a unity because you can grip it, and because you can raise it to your lips, and because you can drink it, and because you need to drink water to survive, and you are willing to drink water to survive because you believe emotionally and motivationally and perhaps rationally that survival is a good, and that's dependent on your belief that human existence in some sense is a good, and that it's striving towards some sort of higher unified order. And you might think, well, you don't need all that to perceive the glass. And the answer is, yeah, as a matter of fact, you need all of that to perceive the glass. And if you lose some of that because of various forms of cortical damage, let's say, you enter into the realm of all sorts of bizarre blindnesses.

And so that point you make about the is being dependent on the ought is also extremely interesting, because if the world is infinitely complex, which seems to be the case, or close enough, the hierarchy of attention you bring to bear on it, and so your intent, determines in no small part the array of manifestations that that infinity will produce in your field of apprehension. And that does determine to some degree at least what elements of the object you have access to. My God, my God. It's amazing, isn't it? You know, like they're talking about object perception,

They're talking about object perception, ontological categorizations, and that kind of thing. And from that, Jordan sets off on his religion-powered rocket into the stratosphere, flying around all his imaginary castles. It's, it's, you go from, you go from object perception to affordances to evolutionarily derived needs and desires to, to God. And so you need God to perceive the glass. Well, it's just, I mean, apart from it's so stupid on so many levels, but explain how I can perceive Saturn then, pictures of Saturn, right? Yeah. You don't need to drink fucking Saturn. I don't need to drink fucking Saturn.

Checkmate, Jordan Peterson. How can I even perceive Saturn? Explain that. You need God, Matt. But it's just the way that Jordan has this habit of basically talking as if he's demonstrated from his tone. That is, you tone that his conclusion follows from his premises, and it doesn't. There's just an outright statement of his sincere belief that he thinks you need to have this commitment to life as a higher order being of good in order to perceive a glass as an object.

And you don't. Or he hasn't, at the very least, he hasn't demonstrated that you need that. He's just stated it. But again, this is all jumping off Jonathan Paggio holding up a glass and using the fact that we can perceive a glass to explain what the limitations of rational science is like. Explain this, scientists.

And oh, my God, Matt. It's like this shouldn't be. I mean, I understand why it's persuasive. understand why it's persuasive because it sounds like they're saying something very philosophically deep and and and raising these important scientific facts but they're not they are ray comfort wiggling a banana at you and saying explain this if he is why is it shaped in the way that you can grasp with your hand that's what they're doing just with more words yeah yeah it shouldn't be persuasive i guess the the confidence and the eloquence with which someone like jordan can zip through all of those steps i guess that's the that's the principal element of the persuasiveness isn't it um yeah and so let's move Matt from one fairly banal, convincing argument to another one.

So here's Jordan, and this is a point that he's made many times before, but he'll never stop making it. So, you know, people say the Bible isn't true. You know, Maybe it's fiction, but let's think about fiction for a while. Well, the reason I would throw a word in here for fiction, I mean, we would have to retool our understanding of what fiction is. And so that's part of the problem. But when I read something like a novel by Dostoevsky, I think, well, is this true? And the answer is, well, those precise events never happened. So on that basis, it's not true. But then there's something wrong with that description because the characterizations in Dostoevsky are so true that in some sense they've never been surpassed. And so, and I do think,

to elaborate on Jonathan's point, is that imagine that human beings, like any other object, have a being and then a realm of possible becoming. And I would say our attempts to characterize the spirit at the top of the attentional hierarchy is an attempt to flesh out and to discover the realm of human possibility. And so it does bring it into being to some degree, even though it's And so it does bring it into being to some degree, even though it's implicate in the order. And that would be the logos of the world, right? It's like, what's the Bible about? Well, it's about people, clearly.

And so everything that's detailed out in those stories is about the nature of humanity. Now, how that's related to the nature of the divine is something we're trying to puzzle out. But it's clearly about people and is it true well it it has this weird sense of being true that we just described which there's also a reality which is that so is dostoevsky's true matt he Matt. There's universal truths about human nature in classical fiction. So isn't fiction actually truer than this simple meaning of true? Like, did it actually happen? Or is it an event just described in the novel?

Yeah. Like, how is it different, say, from the history of World War I? It's very unclear, isn't it? They're both about people, Chris. That's undeniable. Just like the Bible. We know it's about people. Yeah, this is right.

I mean, in some, I would make a joke about Ultraman, my son's chosen fascination at the minute, this Japanese TV series about these kind of powerful robots fighting kaiju. But ultimately, Matt, that's about people. And there are heroes and there are villains. And so is it true that there are kaiju and giant robots stopping around Tokyo, destroying things, you know, maybe not in everyday life, but, you know, there are social problems and this story is getting at what it means

to be a good person. And I'm like, fuck off. It's a different meaning. Nobody's confused that classic literature has things which speak to the human condition in it. What people are talking about is the events didn't happen. They didn't happen. They're fictional events. That's a different thing. Gordon and Pajot and all of them, they're just endlessly, endlessly trying to expand the definition of words to incorporate so many different things to create this obfuscation cloud where, you know, you're able to say, well, there are truths in fiction.

And so even if the Bible is a fiction, isn't it true? And you're just like, the sophistry of the most obvious guy. Yeah, the base motivation here is to avoid these unpleasant discussions about whether or not, say, Christ was really resurrected from the dead and was wandering around talking to people and so on after being clinically dead for several days. Now, that's something that, you know, yes, no answers to are a pain in the ass for Jordan Peterson and Pajot, just like demons. Yes, no answers to that. So all of that stuff, you say Chris is just a way to obfuscate and dismiss those literal minded questions because there are different kinds of truths and who knows what what's true really

and aren't the moral lessons that are involved in Dostoevsky or Ultraman like truer in a sense than the you know meaningless mess that was World War one of course uh you know it's i know i don't like the the thing about it is as well like get another book stop talking about dostoevsky i've had it up to here with that guy lex friedman never shuts up about him jordan peterson evokes him constantly like okay we get it we get it all right like reference some more books you know why they they really like dostoevsky because he's dostoevsky had the same kind of oh like revelatory metaphysical gnostic christianity you really wanted to be religious as well right right? Like he grappled with that. Struggled with it.

Yeah, that's right. I guess there's a long tradition of that in that part of the world. So yeah, I understand why they like Dostoevsky, but for God's sake, move on. So look, Matt, you know, as we said, Peugeot is more direct about endorsing the reality of religious stories than Peterson is. but there is one part it's only

one part in this episode where murray seems to like break a little bit or kind of offer pushback and it's it's the most obvious pushback but he he subsequently completely folds as as jordan and and jonathan go off on like uh waffle rocket, but you'll hear it here. Here's Peugeot talking about the same kind of thing, like whether the Bible events are true or not. And just listen to Murray's pushback as well. And so what we're asking of scripture is not only not the right questions, we're not understanding what type of descriptions that they are. And so I do believe that the stories in scripture happen,

but I don't believe that the people who recorded them had to do it in a way that accounts for our forensic nature, let's say, the way that we think that something happened in the world in terms of a scientist would describe phenomena. I think that they're doing it in a manner to show this very pattern in the story of what it is that was happening in the world. Yes, I'm wary about some of this because we need to get down to brass tacks, as it were. And John has done one, but Jordan, you talked about it again as a story.

And as you say, I mean, Dostoevsky, obviously, if you say is Dostoevsky true, you need to say in what sense. But then, I mean, the issue with the Bible, the issue of Christianity, the issue of faith is that it's obviously different. It must be in a different realm. It's clearly in a different realm because it claims different things for itself. Dostoevsky doesn't demand that we believe that Raskolnikov lived. The Bible, if you're going to be a believer, you have to be able to say, in the words of the creed, that you believe in the virgin birth, but you believe, most importantly, in the resurrection. And as you well know, Jordan, many of us can walk 99% of the way there in terms of belief in the truth of the story, or as Betjeman puts it, but is it true is it true and then stumble on the last thing

well i mean at least douglas murray is offering some pushback right chris that's that's good yeah he folds he folds quite quickly after this there's a part in it where he basically says after this that i'm i'm really glad to live in a society that values Christianity and for the people all around me to be Christian and we all agree, you know, we should be doing religious ceremonies and all this kind of thing. But I wish they wouldn't ask me, you know, well, do I have to endorse belief in the resurrection? Putting my cards on the table, I would be relatively happy for Jonathan's view to be dominant in my society and for me never to be asked whether I literally believe

in the resurrection, to dodge the question. I'd be relatively happy for that to be the situation, because there is the place where we get into an awful lot of problems. But that there is virtue and good in what he's describing. We could leave it as a mystery, unless our age happened to be leaning on this because it needed to know whether the story was literally true, more than Dostoevsky, more than the great poetry, that it was the thing that we relied on more than anything. You would need to know that in that situation. And it's kind of remarkable because it feels to me like, for God's sake, man, like all three of you,

at least Peugeot is a Christian, right? Like at least he's somebody carving icons and presumably going to mass. But like, if you really want to go to mass that much, just go, just go to mass and be a Christian. Like my parents do it every week and they don't have this massive song and dance about the existential angst this causes and oh the metaphorical jesus as the hierarchical competence avatar and all this like jordan strikes me as a someone with like deep religious convictions who who is wrestling with his belief and and douglas murray now seems to be heading in that direction i just think like you know why is it why not why don't they just go do what the vast majority of the

world is and if like if you want to be a christian with doubts like go be a christian it's it doesn't require as much hand-wringing does it yeah yeah i mean douglas murray obviously has common cause with these guys because he's a cultural christian yeah yeah absolutely absolutely loves the the cultural legacy of christianity and would see that as fundamental to what makes europe and the west great but uh yeah it's it's interesting to hear them have this little struggle session with the literal belief or not. Well, I'll get us towards the end of this, but I have to play a clip relating to the resurrection waffle. And in this one, you're going to get Jordan and Pajot discussing the resurrection. you're going to get Jordan and Pajot discussing the resurrection. And we've heard Jordan on previous content on the episode we covered discuss the resurrection issue at length.

And here he goes again. This is just a small portion of what he says, but let's see how clear they are on this issue. So I do think, so you look at the death and you say, well, is the death more real and the hell more real or is the resurrection more real? And obviously, in some sense, I'm speaking symbolically, but it seems to me it's the same idea, you know, that it's ancient mythological idea that you could go into the belly of the beast and rescue your father. And you know, you're trying to do that with your book, The War on the West, right? It's like you see the assault on these values, and you're attempting to resurrect those values. I see that as the same pattern. Yeah, but I think, so I think, Douglas, I understand your question. Like, I understand your question. The answer is, is the grave empty? Something like that. Like,

was the grave empty? And this is, I think, where maybe it's the most difficult for many materialists to understand. And I know that my ramblings about the glass and about the good and about this might seem like it's going all over the place, but it's actually supremely important to understand that if you change your perception about the manner in which the world exists, focused based on the idea of a good, of an ethic, that it's what underlies even the factuality of the world, then that which will convince me of the truth of the resurrection is not about a bunch of material facts. It's about the imposition of that story at being so real that it overwhelms everything else. And it shines a light on everything else. Through the image of the

resurrection, we're able to see everything through it. And so if you ask me, like, what is the mechanical cause of the resurrection? Like, how is it that this body could have, I would say that is obfuscated not only in the text, but also in the creed. The reason why in the creed it says he rose again according to the scriptures is because nobody wanted to try to give you a mechanical description. And in the text itself, when the disciples encounter Christ, they don't even recognize him. What is going on there? And so it continues.

Yeah. And so it continues. Yeah. It's kind of, you know, that it's simultaneously endorsed as real. And Jordan Peterson in an earlier clip talks, as we've heard him before, about he doesn't know what's possible when people fully ascend the competence hierarchy. Maybe they can do amazing things that seem like miracles to us, and blah, blah, blah. And this is sort of the ultimate question of the resurrection, is like, how do you revivify your faith in life? And the answer might be, it might really be, by the radical acceptance of the malevolent tragedy of life, but even more than that,

by the radical embracing of even the hellish aspect of life. And that if you did that radically enough, well, who knows what would happen? I mean, we know clinically, look, we know clinically, if you find what people are avoiding and are afraid of and are disgusted by, that's blocking their pathway forward. And you get them to confront that voluntarily. They get courageous and better. It's clearly the case. And it looks to me like the passion representation and its mythological substrate is exposure therapy on a cosmic level. And you know that the more deeply you grapple with the fundamental issues of life, the wiser and broader you get.

And then I guess I would ask, if everyone did that to the utmost, what would it be that we might be able to conquer? And I don't know the answer to that. Life would radically transform. I mean, I see what happens because people write me all the time. But Peugeot here is at once saying it's not about the biomechanical reality of the event. Also, it did happen. And that's even the wrong question. Being concerned about whether it happened, it's the wrong question. And the fact that the texts are vague about it or don't give scientifically satisfying descriptions, that's all intentional because the whole Bible anticipated everything that people needed to know, and it gives you exactly what you need. And you think, well, you have to be aiming at something transcendent and eternal

and that contains the infinite in the finite. And why wouldn't that be incomprehensibly weird? And isn't it possible that the emphasis on phenomena like the virgin birth and the death and the resurrection and the word at the beginning of time and the sacrifice of the lamb aren't all part of that language that nails down the finite to the infinite in a way that isn't amenable to the mere disruption of reason. Like music isn't amenable to the mere disruption of reason. It's got to be something like that because look what we do in the cathedrals. They're stunningly beautiful. They take hundreds of years to build. They're full of music. They're full of strange practices and gothic symbolism and death. Yeah, it's so tedious for, I imagine it's tedious for the listeners to listen to these amateur theologians discuss these mysteries and in resolving the apparent paradoxes purportedly coming up with some deep new

understandings of religion. I mean, there's nothing new in any of this. Theologians have been arguing about transubstantiation for hundreds of years. They've been arguing about the mystery of the Trinity and whether God is indivisible or not and the nature of the Holy Spirit. And they've been doing this for hundreds of years, and it's just so boring. It's so boring. Counterpoint, Matt, is that Jordan and Kou say that this conversation

is extremely important and meaningful. So counterpoint. It's like we know the quality of a meaningful experience. It's engaging, it's engrossing, it activates positive emotion and enthusiasm. It makes people more creative, it quells anxiety, and it's an analgesic, probably mediated by opiate mechanisms. And then the phenomena of meaning seems to emerge on the axis between chaos and order. And so let's say that we fall into a deeply meaningful conversation

like the one we're having now. And the reason it's meaningful is because our nervous systems are signaling to us that we're inhabiting a structure that we comprehend and that's secure, and that we understand what's going on. So we're not anxious and upset, but we're moving new information into that structure at an optimized rate. And our nervous system signals to us that that's deeply meaningful and that regulates our positive emotion and quells our negative emotion. But I think all of that's occurring in relationship to

this entire hierarchy of attentional priority that we described. And so the more deeply meaningful something is, the more it's associated with every level in that hierarchy, all the way up to the level of divinity itself. This conversation itself is divine. It's evidence for the divine that they are evil to find it so satisfying. How can you argue with that logic, Matt? It's airtight. I don't get upset so much by the just silly religious navel-gazing and blather that's going on. Like Bernard says in Black Books, whores will have their trinkets. But where it is upsetting is that Jordan Peterson peppers that

with these references to neurophysiology and so on. Well, you know, we know because of the neurons and so on or evolutionary biology. And it functions as nothing more as just this stupid little science-y placeholder. He really shouldn't do that. Like, you can't. I know, I know. And I have to end with two things that I think are explanatory, but like one last thing to add a coda here is, you know, the way we noticed that the sense makers were kind of reinventing standard religion.

Like they were basically saying you need to go and have ecstatic experiences with other humans and your family and say grace before meal and stuff. See if this rings a bell. family and say grace before meal and stuff. See if this rings a bell. So one of the things I've really learned from talking to Jonathan, I think he's helped me understand the stress on something like communal celebration and worship. And I've experimented this with this in my life with Tammy, these religious practices. And, you know, practice makes perfect. And so, well, what's the opposite of resentment? Well, it's something like gratitude. Okay, so maybe you could practice being grateful. And what's the opposite of deceit? Well, it's truth. So maybe you could practice telling the truth. And the opposite of hate is love, etc. And you can practice these. And then at least you

could say that what happens when people are going to church is that they're attempting to point themselves towards the highest good and to practice. He's got a gratitude practice. He's experimented. And, you know, like, again, Matt, for God's sake, just go to fucking church. Like, my God. If you want to pray before mealtimes, by all means, do it. If you want to tell these stories to yourself to add the meaning and the flavor and the texture to the world because you feel like it needs that, then by all means. But maybe, like, you don't need to do all of the pseudo-philosophical,

pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual. Those trappings are unnecessary. Just be religious. Just be religious. Millions of people in the world are religious. Coming from a Catholic background, I will also say people don't just go to church to orientate themselves towards the numinous.

For all their understanding about tradition and culture and stuff they just don't seem to put into their the religion adult minds that people just do things for convention and without deeper purpose and because it's you know comforting and because there's communities attached to it and so on like it isn't always this hyper theologically abstracted thing. They're just, they're unwilling to address just the mundane realities that people find masses boring. Priests are annoying. Like it's, it's related to what you grew up with and saying creeds and donating money to religious institutions.

Like they're not actually down in the weeds with the believers or the ordinary people. They're up in the air with the elite theologians flipping around their glasses and waffling about how the light prances off the glass presents, you know, the reflections of the angels. And you're like, that's not what any of my religious family are doing. That's what the like, bizarre holy joes that you know, everybody looks askew at are doing. So yeah, that's, that's where they are are that's what this is about and i i just wish they knew themselves a bit better peugeot is peugeot is okay in this respect because he's overtly you know just he's a religious guy but a lot of the other ones they just i wish they knew themselves better yeah yeah i've known a few religious people who also felt the need to do this kind of

philosophizing at times. But I don't need to tell you, Chris, as a student of religion, that the metaphysics and the philosophy is kind of the smallest part of religion for most people. And it does provide social psychological benefits of all kinds. It provides nice, comforting routines and rituals and a way for communities to get together and see each other once a week and like a whole bunch of stuff. And it's not, it's not the cosmic thing that these guys are presenting it as. Okay, I promised you I'd wrap it up. So I have the very last points to make. And I think it's a little bit, I'm going to argue like a good sense maker or a good IDW person that this might give

us the key, Matt. This might give us part of the explanation for what's going on here. So I just have these two clips to finish with. And I think it highlights something about why they might be preoccupied with this topic. So here we go. Here's clip one. Like you, you encounter a phenomena that you've never seen before. And that phenomena is screaming at you like, am I dangerous? What am I? What is this? And then there's a manner in which we're able to bring it together and to give it a name and to identify it. And that's already meaning.

The identification of things, especially if we understand that it necessitates a hierarchy of attention, is always meaning. It's actually harder to live without meaning. In the very, you can't move without meaning. Right, right. You can't point your eyes without meaning. You would just lay in bed and wait to die without meaning. Like nothing would exist in the, nothing would have light in it. I completely agree. I mean, and I think it's one of perhaps the biggest questions of our age of where you

can find that, as it always has been. The meaning crisis, right? The, you just lie in bed with nothing if you didn't have a commitment to a purpose, right? A greater purpose. You just wallow in existential dread. Yeah, yeah. Yep, as an atheist, there's a little voice in my head saying,

why not commit genocide? Just why not, Matt? Maybe just go for it. You know, why not become a communist? So Douglas Murray makes this point, Matt, for you to finish. Here's Douglas Murray doing that thought experiment for you. It's the cause of demoralization in our society. The single greatest cause of demoralization in society

seems to me not just the issue of not having a story, not having a structure, but the sense that nothing matters and that other people don't think it matters and what you do doesn't matter. So why would you bother doing anything? Why would you bother setting sail into the wind and trying to discover new things? Why would you bother with any endeavors? I mean, what's the point of even prolonging life if it's just another 10 years sitting on the couch watching Netflix? Like, what's the point of any of this? And there's so little.

I mean, you're doing it a lot, of course, and Jonathan's doing a lot, and I'm doing a tiny bit, but there is so little in our society saying to people, here is something worth finding your way towards. Yeah, yeah. They're lost boys, Matt, lost boys. You know, you should have got through this existential dread in your teenage years like the rest of the i oh man i you know you're going out sealing today

matt like how you managing that as an atheist what's the point why why not just stay here and watch netflix yeah good question just jump in the water seal tied to the bottom of the sharks and dive into the belly you know live your life like ah how have they not grasped that if there is just one life if there is no eternal deity granting you purpose, suddenly, actually, it becomes very important, this life, because what you do in this life is, that's it. That's all you get. And if you want to sit and watch Netflix, maybe that's not so terrible.

Maybe it's okay to have moments of enjoyment. And, you know, like, yeah. How have they not heard this argument that having only one life or, you know, not believing in afterlife or metaphysical beings actually makes life precious? Yeah. Yeah. life precious. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, Murray there is at least consistent because, as I said at the beginning, what they really care about is the stories that people tell themselves. And they feel very strongly that Christianity is the best possible story that you can tell yourself. Stories are super important and you need those stories in order to even just get off the goddamn couch. But

as you say, Chris, they neglect the fact that there is a wealth of stories to choose from. It is a brute fact that there are so many people out there in the world who are telling themselves stories that give their lives all kinds of meaning, which has nothing to do with Christianity. And they actually work, you know, like even what the Apollo mission and landing on the moon, you know, giving humanity this sort of bigger purpose, you know, building pyramids or something, you know, you could do all kinds of stuff and say, this is a cool thing to do. You know, you don't need to subscribe to the resurrection of Christ specifically. You know, what do they think that chimpanzees get up in the morning? You know, what do they think that chimpanzees get up in the morning?

You know, like, why are they... How do the chimpanzees get up in the morning? This is why they masturbate and fling shit so much, Chris. Or, you know, our precursor, like, the whole homo... I forget what the clia or whatever. Like, it's just... It's like they're stuck in this. You know, I get it, Matt. I get why they have a longing for this religion-shaped hole in their lives.

Lots of people have it. And lots of people, you know, the existential dread and angst, it's a real thing. But like you say say there's no requirement that that means the universe is full of demons and fairies and like kindly gods that are actually there to comfort us and it also doesn't mean that the only powerful narratives that exist are the only values that you can orientate yourself towards that have any meaning are inherently religious. Like they're not, they're not.

There's plenty of things that you can orientate towards that don't require ascribing a divine or metaphysical component to reality. And it's just beyond Jordan and Pajau and seemingly murray to some extent that that could be the case and it's it's so it's so boring matt philosophers have discussed this for hundreds of years already and theologians have probably told them for hundreds of years that actually they're wrong and there's nothing to be it's like yeah fully automated luxury space communism that's the thing that fills my hole chris an odd sentence to say but yeah so uh look we're godless heathens and that's fine but i don't need to yeah just each to their own but my my god it's

it's just it's a strange thing to hear in 2022 people being like you are an atheist but you also have morality checkmate yeah yeah yeah yeah this is an undergraduate theology students well chris i can only thank you for not asking me to listen to this. I'm sorry to our listeners for having to listen to the small amounts of it that we did play for them. It's same old, same old. But hey, good on them. I mean, whatever, they're finding meaning in what they're doing.

So good luck to them. That's it. They're probably still talking about that goddamn glass. It's going to come up again. That's another one for the archives. But yeah, so it's been fun. We now understand more than we ever possibly could have imagined. And the sense-making ecosystem continues to deliver.

This is a crossover of a lot of different guru worlds. In a way, you've got the sense-making Jonathan Pajot, you've got IDW hero Jordan Peterson, and you've got classic conservative Douglas Murray coming together in an unholy alliance to praise Jesus. But listeners, we're going to give you a break. We're going to give you a break from these people. You've had your fill. You've put up with more than you should have. So thank you for your patience. We've got other fish to fry.

D'Angelo is on the grill getting roasted as we speak. All right. Well, that's been fun, Matt. I'll leave you to go battle with your aquatic predators. And good luck with that. Do your best. Become the man you were all supposed to be. I'll keep my wits about me while I'm out there.

Thanks, Chris. See ya. Ciao. Thank you. In that chaotic deep that God confronts, that horizon of potential, in the biblical language is a strange amalgam of the psychological because it's confusing and off-putting and strange and mysterious and potentially awe-inspiring, but it also has this material element which is symbolized by water or the darkness or the deep. And, you know, we refer to that automatically when we speak about

what scientists are doing, especially great scientists, because we say things like, well, they think deeply or they've encountered deep phenomena. I mean, we refer back to that symbolic language axiomatically and don't notice the metaphorical structure of our own utterances. Yes, definitely. If we just look at science as a process instead of what science comes up with as a model of the universe, then we see the same patterns as what's described in the Bible. In fact, if anyone today that has more of a scientific mind wants to understand

the story of Adam and Eve, you should read it as a scientist.