Are Male Ambitions Responsible for the Evils of History?

Is there something uniquely masculine about the greatest evils in human history? Dr. Craig responds to Jordan Peterson's tough words.

DR. PETERSON: Accusation number three: The prime contributor both to the tyranny that makes up the oppressive patriarchy and structures all of our social interactions past and present, and the unforgivable dispoiling of our beloved Mother Earth, is damnable male ambition: competitive and dominating power, mad, selfish, exploitative, raping, and pillaging. You might think that I'm overstating the case. Think again, sunshine! We in the West are facing an all-out assault, at the deepest levels, on what that old joker Jacques Derrida deemed the phallogocentric conceptual structure of civilization itself. To take that apart, that's a society centered on the encouraging, adventurous masculine spirit, and that "privileges," that hated word of all things, the Divine Logos. And what should we worship and celebrate properly, other than that, deconstructionists? The words of that mass murderer Karl Marx? And it is precisely those young men who are deeply conscientious, capable of guilt and regret, who have come to believe, in pain, that every deep impulse that moves them out into the world for the adventure of their life, even that impulse drawing them to women, is nothing but the manifestation of a spirit that is essentially Satanic in nature. This is not only wrong theologically, morally, psychologically, practically, and scientifically; it is literally anti-true. It's not a mere misstatement about the nature of reality, a minor conceptual error, but something that literally could not be farther from the truth. And something that distant from the truth comes from a place that cannot be distinguished from hell.

DR. CRAIG: Wow, strong words. Now notice that Peterson doesn't deny that there have been terrible abuses, tyranny, oppression, slavery, exploitation. He doesn't deny all of that. But what he's denying is that this is uniquely male; that there's somehow some sort of a connection between this and being male as opposed to female. And there I think he's absolutely correct. There's no reason whatsoever to say that the abuses that have been perpetrated by men who have been leaders of countries and so forth are due to their being male. That seems to be quite unprovable and wrong. And then he also draws attention to the good things that the male spirit has connected with it: adventure, exploration, great exploits, and daring, and those are aspects of, I think, the masculine character that are worth celebrating. Now, again, you look at this from a Christian perspective and it's so different. From a Christian perspective, Adam (created male) is in the image of God, and Eve (created female) is in the image of God. God made them as compliments to one another. And just as the woman is suitable to fulfill the man's need, so the man is there to love and protect the woman. And so in a Christian marriage relationship it's not one of domineering tyranny; it is a relationship in which the husband loves his wife and gives of himself for her on the model of the way Jesus Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. So it's a completely different model of the relationship between the sexes based upon the character of God and the example of Jesus Christ, who was, after all, a male and exhibited the kind of courage and strength and fortitude that is associated with masculinity but without the sort of abusive power impositions that are rightly decried by the left. The left often is able to identify the problems but without the proper solutions, it seems.