Jordon Peterson: The Great Equivocator?
I hope this will be my last post on Dr. Peterson for a while. But after my prior posts I stumbled across this fantastic video by prominent atheist Alex O’Connor. O’Connor has done a tremendous amount of research into Peterson’s various statements about God, Christ and the Bible. And his findings are devastating to anyone who thinks Peterson is anything other than a garden variety atheist.
To cite just one example of many, at 11:40 in the video, O’Connor shows a video in which Peterson says: “God is the ultimate fictional character, and . . . then we're trying to characterize his nature as that which should be emulated that unites us psychologically and socially.”
To which O’Connor reasonably responds: “So in my view this is the proof. Jordan Peterson is an atheist. He’s just described God as a fictional character whose existence is simply a characterization of value made by the human mind for the purpose of uniting us psychologically and socially. This is exactly what atheists say. God does not exist except as he is invented by the human mind and the reason why the human mind invents God is to provide some psychological and social stability. If this is not atheism then what is?”
Much of the rest of the video consists of O’Connor catching Peterson out using religiously charged language to describe perfectly secular phenomenon in a way that makes him sound like he is a believer (or almost so) when he is not.
At 40:50, O’Connor concludes with this: “I think that we should stop allowing Jordan Peterson to get away with the vagueness of language that we wouldn't accept in any other context. He's so loose with definitions and meanings when talking about religion, that, as Muhammad Hijab points out, he begins to sound like a post-modernist.”
To those who have pushed back at me I say, look, I get it. Peterson has said so many profound and wonderful things. In the last several years, perhaps as much as any public intellectual he has championed reason and sanity in the face of the relentless attack from the Cultural Marxists. For this, we (including Christians and other people of faith) owe him a great debt. Sadly, however, he is not one of us and he shows no signs of wanting to become one of us. And this is deeply troubling because it means that he has no more basis for prescribing a transcendent “ought” than any other materialist. All honest materialists admit that their premises completely preclude objective morality. For materialists, the ship of objective morality must always founder on the shoals of Hume’s is-ought problem.
When Peterson uses religiously charged language, is he intentionally obfuscating and equivocating? I do not agree with O’Connor about much, especially the most fundamental things, but on this matter, we are in accord.