Truth Unites - Why Dawkins and Peterson Miss Each Other

Episode Date: October 26, 2024

Gavin Ortlund explores why Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins misunderstand one another about religious questions. See the original dialogue: https://youtu.be/8wBtFNj_o5k?si=DJyIwsNotZUw86l3 Gavin on the fine-tuning argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iVuMRwi5Wg Trent Horn on the fine-tuning argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jgh9M2z8n0 Richard Dawkins on the fine-tuning argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apWOkC7krfQ Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson had a dialogue recently. I find it fascinating, watching these two different ways of approaching reality and two different mentalities about religious questions sort of clashing. You have a psychologist and a scientist, an emphasis upon myths and symbols versus an emphasis upon facts and data, the right brain versus the left brain and so forth. Unfortunately to me, and I don't think I'm alone in this either, it felt like they were on different wavelengths and they didn't quite get close enough. You know, any conversation you want to have some differences and some similarities. If you're totally different, you can't connect it all. If you're totally similar, there's no interesting clash. But here, they just were approaching things in such a different way. Jordan Peterson is going on and on about memes and stories and psychological meaning and so forth. Richard Dawkins is just sort of saying, I don't know what to do with that, you know, and even in the discussion, they're sort of recognizing we just think very differently. The way that Dr. Dawkins and I look at the situation are really quite different, and at many, many, many levels.

I think we just have to agree that we have different kinds of minds, and you're interested in symbols, and I'm interested in facts. God bless Alex O'Connor for moderating a discussion like that, not an easy task. It seems to me that the best way to pursue truth will involve humility about these kinds of differing temperaments, especially about religious questions. Some of you watching this right now may relate more to Jordan Peterson,

others to Richard Dawkins, others to neither. but whatever our approach, I think we do well to ask, what can we learn from looking at these alternative ways of sort of approaching religious questions? So real quick, fun video, let's take four lessons here that we'll work through. Number one, those of us like myself, I'm a Christian, who want to defend religion need to be willing to extend into the left brain territory of rational analysis. The facts matter. Questions of of historicity in the Bible matter. Many people right now are drawn to faith because of Jordan Peterson's approach, and there's so much, you know, I really enjoy listening to him. I've learned a lot

from his discussions about different symbolical aspects to the biblical stories and so forth. But when you're talking to our Richard Dawkins, we have to go further than just that. And at times, whether it's intentional or not, other people experience Jordan Peterson's answers on religious questions to be evasive. You know, you get the sense that times people are just sort of saying, just give me a straight answer. I think there are a number of questions which Professor Dawkins has asked quite directly that we still haven't really heard an answer. Okay, okay.

And Professor Dawkins is asking about the virgin birth. You started talking about metaphor, you started talking about myth. I think anybody listening to this conversation will understand that maybe a society that doesn't believe in the virgin birth won't work. Maybe that's the predictive power that you're talking about. But I think you must understand that when Professor Dawkins is asking you, do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin? He means something like a biological fact.

And by the way, saying I don't know, or saying, you know, I'm not qualified to comment, is an answer to that question, but is that your answer that you don't know? This comes up in the discussion as well when they're talking about Kane and Abel. You must know. I know this comes up all the time when somebody says, but did Kane and Abel really exists? And I know that you want to say that the story which they... I think it's a silly question. I think it's like asking whether Raskolnikov existed in crime and punishment.

But there's a difference here because crime and punishment, is a work of fiction, and the Bible portrays itself as on some level, certainly more than Dostoevsky interested in history. So it makes at least some historical claims. Now, not everything in the Bible is literal or historical. There's poetry and so forth, but at least there's some history in the Bible, and that makes it different from Dostoevsky. Two of the issues that come up in this dialogue are the Virgin Birth of Christ and the Resurrection of Christ. These are two core Christian doctrines. They're in the Apostles' Creed. They've been believed on by Christians all throughout our church history, and they have huge implications for the right brain, but it's also fair to ask from a

left brain standpoint. By the way, the right brain, left brain, everybody knows this, right. Right brain is more imaginative, interested in questions of artistry and the aesthetics and value. Left brain is more rational and hard-edged and so forth. Although people question this all the time, It's kind of disputed, so let's not get to, don't nail that down too much. It's kind of controversial, I guess. But the point is, it's fair to ask questions from a left brain analysis about these religious beliefs, these historical events. And this is what Dawkins is doing. That has nothing to do with the truth value.

And what I care about is the truth value. I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the miracles. Do you believe in any of those? Do you believe Jesus was born a verse? As I said before, there are elements of the text that I don't feel qualified to comment on. My experience is being that the more, like I know from a metaphorical perspective and from a mythic perspective what the story of the virgin birth means, and I accept that. I know, for example, that any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred

dies. And I don't know how that needs to be expressed in a form. Is it true, though? Do you mean that you don't know? So they go round and round on this about the virgin birth for a while, which we'll come back to at the end of the video. But watch this clip. Ultimately, Alex is kind of helpfully pressing Jordan Peterson a bit again, and finally a clear answer emerges. I was dealing with a factual question, which is, did Jesus have a father?

And you won't answer it. It's a different kind of question. Father and a heavenly father, like almost all mythological heroes. So he wasn't born of a virgin then? So you're saying that Jesus was not. not born of a virgin. I said, first of all, that I don't know how to mediate the fact-value dichotomy in that case. I said the same thing about the resurrection. It's not a value. It's a simple fact. I mean, did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus? That's a factual question.

It's not a value question. You must understand what you're being asked here, that even if you think that, say, the author of the biblical texts intended much more significance than a simple scientific analysis of events, Professor Dawkins is interested in scientific truth. That's the kind of truth that he's interested in. And even if you think it's irrelevant to the point of what the gospel authors were getting at, that first needs to be clarified before you can then begin actually uncovering what the stories are about. So I think Professor Dawkins is asking from a scientific perspective, and maybe you think that that scientific approach is wrong. But if you just take it for a moment, maybe this is how we find out that it is.

wrong, let's take a scientific approach, ask the question, did this occur? I think that it's inappropriate to use a question like that to attempt to undermine the validity of the entire, what would you say, deep mythological enterprise. I think it's foolish. Suppose we were asking out of interest. Suppose that we were all here devout Christians, maybe even Jungian Christians, and we thought, this is interesting over dinner. Do you think it really happened, like scientifically?

Would your answer just be, I don't know? Yes. Now we'll come back to the virgin birth, but first here's a second lesson, kind of going in the opposite direction. People who want to attack religion and reject religion, if they want their attack to be compelling to others, need to be willing to enter into the realm of right brain values. I know this is basic, but this doesn't happen a lot. And again, these conversations happen on different wavelengths a lot because we're coming from different standpoints. and so we're not really listening different ways of approaching these questions. And this dialogue, Richard Dawkins rejects belief in miracles as just preposterous. It's just ridiculous. It's just like

his dialogue with Ion Herssey Ali, where I did a video on that, and he's constantly saying, it's obvious nonsense. It's almost sort of endearing. You just see very clearly where he's coming from. So in this dialogue, he's repeating this, and he's saying, you know, I'm interested in truth. I'm not interested in that. I care about if it actually happened. I want evidence and facts and so forth. But as I see things, this mentality is at best a failure to consider alternative right brain ways of looking at the world. And at worst, a form of prejudice. One of the things that I think Jordan Peterson gets right in this dialogue is that there is no purely evidential fact-based approach to reality. None.

We are all finite. And so values will always organize which facts we focus upon and how we interpret them. we see the world of facts through something that when described is a story, because we have to prioritize our perceptions, we have to prioritize facts. And as far as I can tell, a story is a verbal account of how our perceptions and the facts that we encounter are prioritized. So, for example, when you go see a movie, the movie has a hero. And what the writers do is they show you how the hero prioritizes his perceptions,

what he attends to, and how he acts. and you derive from that the story of his life and his ethic. This is a point that Kierkegaard, by the way, made really well constantly against Hegel. He has a simple principle that's so profound and so relevant, and that is the way we know things is determined by the fact that we're existing individuals. And, oh, man, let's not get into that too much, but it's relevant to this. The very idea that we take a fact-based, more left-brain approach to reality is itself. not a fact, but it functions more like a story with certain values. I think of Richard Dawkins was

honest and consistent. He would admit that his own approach to truth isn't purely fact-based and evidential and so forth. I've read through the God delusion, his book, I know what he has to say in response to the fine-tuning argument, and that is he appeals to a multiverse. A multiverse also takes us away from the empirical realm from truth that can be tested scientifically. He also has very strong moral convictions, which also take us out of the realm of fact and into the realm of value, and that came up in this dialogue. Do you think that there are any marked differences between cultural traditions that would enable you to rank order them in terms of their ethical validity?

Yes, I do. Okay, so for example, we could contrast mainstream UK Christianity with Islamic fundamentals. Yes. Okay, so there's a hierarchy. There is a hierarchy. A hierarchy that points to what? At that point, Richard Dawkins goes on to list a bunch of the vices that he perceives in fundamentalist Islam. But that really misses the point.

What Jordan Peterson is asking is not just what are the bad things. Can you mention them? But why are they bad? You know, there's a value system being put forward here. This is not an obvious fact. Not all human beings have agreed upon that. It's totally fair for Jordan Peterson to ask a hierarchy that points to what. So the point is just simply that it's harder to stay in the land of left brain rational analysis and think, oh, the virgin birth, obvious nonsense.

Once you see that this also is going to endanger things like the humanitarian values that you just take for granted. And discovering that makes you a little bit more open. And so the point is, simple point, but I think it's needed. The right brain approach and the left brain approach, even knowing that's a clumsy way of articulating the difference and we don't even want to assume everybody's in one of those two. But these different approaches need to listen to each other more in the quest for truth. More humility and more dialogue and more like Atticus Finch in the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, realizing there's different ways of looking at the world. Lesson number three, the meaning and the miracles of Christianity cannot be separated.

So stepping back and looking at the picture, the big picture here, we might say that Jordan Peterson is more interested in the meaning of the biblical story, and Richard Dawkins is more interested in the miracles and whether they really happened. And I think a takeaway from this discussion for me personally, a lot of this is just me reflecting for myself, is that you really can't separate the meaning and the miracles. Those of us who agree with Peterson that there's a transcendent meaning to the biblical story must simply make peace with the fact that that will involve embracing the miracles as well. It's a package deal.

You can't just pluck out the meaning and leave the miracles off the table or say, I don't know about those, I'm not sure, but I want the meaning, but I don't want those. And I think we just need to make peace with the fact that the Richard Dawkins of the world will maybe sneer at us, and that's fine. We just embrace that. We embrace the miraculous element. This was the whole argument of this book, Jay Gresham-Machens, Christianity, and liberalism a hundred years ago addressing a similar thing.

The liberal Protestants at that time who were saying we can remove the miraculous elements of the Bible and still retain the meaning of it, and he was saying, no, when you do that, you lose what is actually at the core of the religion, what makes it distinctive. And his great insight that I think is so profound is that that actually turns Christianity from a religion of grace into a religion of liberalism. It makes it from the imperative mood, or makes it into the imperative mood, what you have to do, rather than the triumphant indicative mood. And the reason for that is if you lose the miracles, you no longer have this core message of a God who comes down in the person of Jesus Christ to save us and to bring love and forgiveness. That's what

Christianity is. That's the basic core gospel message. There is a God. There's been a problem in our relationship with God. Jesus came to fix that problem. Putting it in colloquial terms, that's a basic idea. If you lose the miracles, you lose that narrative. Basically, what you're left with is a set of ideals. And so at that point, it does become something to strive after, not something that has been done for you. You lose the gracious character. of this religion. And that is something I see you, I think you see emphasized in Jordan Peterson's emphasis upon responsibility and building our way to heaven and so forth. My hope for Jordan Peterson, God bless him, is that he'll keep moving as he's thinking and basically come to fully embrace

the historicity of what he's exploring, as well as come to understand its gracious character. It's not us building up to God. The ultimate truth is God has come down to us, and that's what Jesus is all about. Lesson number four, this is the appeal to anyone I would say who's thinking this through and wrestling with this. It's rational to believe in the miracles. I'm not saying it's rational to believe in every miracle, but just to believe in the possibility of miracles. It's very rational. A great case for this comes in C.S. Lewis's older book, Miracles. He's doing a great job in this book, Evening the Playing Field. What he's basically showing is that the question of miracles simply kicks back to the question of whether there's anything supernatural, such as God or gods

or anything like that. He says, if we decide that nature is not the only thing there is, then we cannot say in advance whether she is safe from miracles or not. There are things outside her. We do not yet know whether they can get in. The gates may be barred or they may not. This mentality seems to me to be very reasonable and more just sort of open to truth. So then we just, and then what he's doing in that book is making a case against naturalism, which is the idea that only nature exists, and in favor of supernaturalism, which means we should just follow the empirical evidence, however, it leads. And this seems to me to be a very reasonable way to think that if God exists, miracles are possible, and the question of God's existence has some pretty strong testimonies, like the fine-tuning argument.

Therefore, we should be sort of open-minded about miracles. And if you come across a miracle like the resurrection of Christ, which seems to have some pretty compelling historical evidence that makes it at least plausible, then it's rational to believe that. Even if you think that's just a possibility, it is worth exploring more. If you're interested more in the fine-tuning argument, by the way, I did a video on this over the summer. You can check out. Trent Horn did a video on this recently on his channel. You could check out. There's some good dialogues that Richard Dawkins himself has been a part of on that argument. You could also check out. I'll put a link to those three things in the video description. What did you think of the dialogue? Did you come away with something completely different

than me? This is basically my way of, this is my personal takeaway is, okay, wow, two very different approaches to questions of religious truth. Okay, what do we learn from that? And those are my thoughts. What are yours? Also, by the way, did you know that Truth Unites as a website? This is my YouTube channel, but it's also a broader ministry that I do a lot of things. I got posts on there. I got a speaking request form. I got lots of things on there. If you're interested in learning more about Truth Unites, that's a great place to go. All right, thanks for watching everybody. Have a good day.