Dr. Jordan Peterson: Richard Dawkins Always Kicks The Hell Out of Religious People
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/14
The Bible is a story. Is it true? Well, it depends on what you mean by true. People say, “That’s weasly.” It’s like, “No, it’s not.” If you ask a profound question like that, is the Bible true? You can’t assume true and then cram the Bible into that. You have to make both sides of the equation open to question. This is why people like Richard Dawkins always kick the hell out of religious people when they’re debating them. It’s because Dawkins comes armed with a conception of the truth. And it’s not trivial. It’s like the scientific conception of the truth. This is a big club. Before he even begins, the whole structure of the debate is predicated on the fundamental acceptance that that definition of true is valid and complete. So, the religious people just lose because they’re up against the might of science. It’s like, how are they not going to lose that?
Dr. Jordan Peterson, ““Richard Dawkins always Kick The Hell Out of Religious People”” — Jordan Peterson”
Dr. Jordan Peterson has acquired something a dual existence in Canadian popular culture with fame on the one hand and infamy on the other. People seem highly divided by him. I find him a mixed figure.
If you look for signals of gifted and talented people, one signal for identifying gifted and talented youth is the phrase “it depends.” It marks a reflective and thoughtful grounding of a person.
Peterson is a thoughtful person in this regard, when reflecting on definitions of true. Yet, what most mean in the contemporary period amounts to what Dawkins aims, which is both a logical and an empirical truth, that’s the truth. It’s a close approximation to objectivity.
It’s not that Dawkins has set the bounds of the debates. It’s that the bounds of the discourse have been set by contemporary modernity within the hammerblows of the scientific revolution wrought on religious discourse or claims to truth about the world, except in abstract senses.
That’s something Peterson, though smart in some ways and not in others, simply misses in the debates Dawkins has with other intelligent interlocutors. Dawkins comes armed with a conception of truth in a manner similar to the ways in which contemporaneous comprehension of the world comes with a derived conceptualization of truth.
To come armed with a conception of truth makes it sound as if out of whole cloth and brought from nothing, when, in fact, this conception of truth comes after centuries of hard work and sacrifice by some of the most intelligent analytical intellects ever to exist.
Peterson has claimed it’s easier to defend the Christian worldview implicitly rather than explicitly. In this admission, he sets the truth of the general crusade he has set forth in the modern period. Because he is focusing on criticizing atheism and its disparate communities of secularists.
Duly note, he doesn’t critique the Christian here. He acts as a critic for the atheist Dawkins. In this sense, he is the quiet Christian who wishes to throw rocks at atheist house while pretending to be a neutral party. He’s not, admittedly.
The understanding of the scientific method is validity, certainly, based on informing premises for soundness. However, the completeness is not something necessarily within the ouevre of science, but, rather, incompleteness as there is always more data to garner about reality.
In that way, Peterson misrepresents both the meaning of the scientific method and Dawkins as a scientist. Religious people of that sort aren’t being set up to fail. They’ve simply failed.
It’s not that the debate was rigged in framing for them to lose; they simply lost and should take — as per Peterson’s self-help advice — personal responsibility for their failures, as he should for his misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
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