Jordan Peterson's View of God

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, Jordan Peterson has shared the platform with you, and we’ve discussed that interaction on a previous podcast.^[1] Check that event on YouTube. He is the author of the well-known book 12 Rules for Life. He is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Recently he has been wrestling with “his beliefs about Christianity after pondering them during a prolonged illness.”^[2] I want to reflect back to 2018 when that event occurred with Rebecca Goldstein and Dr. Jordan Peterson. You still get reactions from that, don’t you?

DR. CRAIG: Oh yes. I think that's a fairly popular YouTube video because of his prominence. He attracts a lot of viewers. We had a really great dialogue, I thought, on the meaning of life. If I think back on that, the difference between us was primarily that I was asking what is the objective basis for meaning in life where I think he was more concerned with how do we find meaning in life. So I was concerned with whether or not there really is an objective meaning out there to be found, and he took the approach, assuming that there is such a thing, how do we find it? As you can imagine, those two approaches are quite complementary. So I tried to encourage him to look for the foundation of objective meaning in life in theism.

KEVIN HARRIS: He just did a podcast interview with Jonathan Pageau^[3]. Professor Peterson said,

What you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived, plus a myth, and, in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things. The problem is I probably believe that, but I’m amazed at my own belief and I don’t understand it.

What do you think? Is Jesus a union of an actual person and myth?

DR. CRAIG: It is hard to know what Jordan Peterson means by the word “myth.” One is tempted to have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to this and say this is old Bultmannian New Testament criticism where the historical Jesus has been overlaid with legend and mythology so that the Gospels are not a reliable account of the life of Jesus. This perspective has been completely abandoned in contemporary New Testament studies which has come to see that the proper background for understanding Jesus and the Gospels is not Greco-Roman mythology but rather first century Palestinian Judaism. Jesus was a Jew. The disciples were all Jews. It is against the backdrop of Jewish culture, not Greco-Roman paganism, that Jesus is to be properly understood and interpreted. In that sense it's just quite mistaken to say that Jesus is a sort of fusion of history with myth. But the interesting thing is that Jordan Peterson says, “I probably believe in it, and I'm amazed that I believe in it, but I don't understand it.” And that suggests perhaps a more sympathetic interpretation of myth. What he might mean by myth here is something like what C. S. Lewis meant – some sort of deep, common meaning that underlies historical events and infuses them with a greater existential significance. In that sense one could say that Jesus wasn't just a historical person but he was the embodiment of, say, the union of the divine and the human. In this sense you could say it involved a union of myth and history. Given that he doesn't define his terms, it's not exactly clear what he means, but a sympathetic interpretation I think would suggest that this is something that he finds himself believing.

KEVIN HARRIS: This article continues,

But, he continued, on the verge of tears: “It’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.”

Several people have commented on Jordan Peterson tearing up when he's talking about Jesus. I've seen that on social media. He's using words like “amazed” and now he's saying “terrifying” – Jesus is a terrifying reality.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Again, if I could advert to C. S. Lewis, I love the line in The Chronicles of Narnia where the children ask, Isn’t Aslan a tame lion? And the reply is, Oh, no. He's not a tame lion, but he is good. I love this idea that Jordan Peterson has here. Jesus is a terrifying reality. This is God in the flesh in all his holiness and awesomeness and his authority that he has upon us. That is terrifying. If we domesticate Jesus so that we don't fully appreciate that then we've lost something. It's remarkable how this apparently non-Christian professor can bring insights to us about who Jesus is.

KEVIN HARRIS: I want to mention that we are reading an article by Megan Dent with the Church Times which is a UK publication. She continues in this article,

Professor Peterson noted that, when asked in the past whether he believed in God, “I’ve answered in various ways, ‘No, but I’m afraid he probably exists.’”

So we have “amazement,” we have “terrifying,” and now we have “afraid.”

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I love this. I remember talking with a non-believing professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds, and he said something similar. He said whenever people are dismissive of theistic ideas and say, “Oh, well, that would be too awful to be true if that were the case,” he says, “Then I begin to suspect it probably really is true.” When people say this would be too horrible to be true he thinks then it probably is. I said to him, “You must really love the idea of hell,” and he said, “Oh. Yes. I think that could well be true. We must not be too quick to dismiss these things just because we don't like them.” And so, again, I love what Peterson says. He says, “I'm afraid God probably does exist and that's going to mean he has a claim on my life and it's going to affect how I live.” It can't be ignored.

KEVIN HARRIS:

He continued: “There’s no limit to what would happen if you acted like God existed. . . It may be it’s not reasonable to say to believers, you aren’t sufficiently transformed for me to believe that you believe in God or that you believe the story that you’re telling me. . . the way you live isn’t sufficient testament to the truth.

This gets a little sensitive here. He continues,

“And people would certainly say that, let’s say, about the Catholic Church, or at least the way that it’s being portrayed, is that with all the sexual corruption, for example, it’s like ‘Really, really, you believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and yet you act that way, and I’m supposed to buy your belief?’

DR. CRAIG: This is the saddest commentary in the article, I think. He looks at Christians and says, “If you really believe what you say you believe, your lives would look different.” That is a scandalous indictment. Now, I have to say, Jordan Peterson isn't naive. He surely must understand the difference between nominal Christianity and what we might call practicing Christianity or devoted Christians or we would say born again Christians. Certainly there is a kind of cultural Christianity that does not live in accord with the teachings and the example of Jesus, but it would be wrong to brand all Christians with that broad brush because there are plenty of wonderful Christians in the world who live loving, sacrificial lives and who are not merely nominal believers but clearly believe what they say they believe and whose lives bear it out.

KEVIN HARRIS: He tends to include himself. You are right; he is not naive about this. He says,

It seems to me that the Church is actually quite guilty on that account [the scandals], because the attempts to clean up the mess have been rather half-hearted, in my estimation. Christians don’t manifest this — and I’m including myself, I suppose, in that description — the transformation of attitude that enables the outside observer to easily conclude that they believe.

Is it reasonable to expect the kind of transformation that he says Christians should possess? We certainly want to represent Christ well.

DR. CRAIG: Absolutely. For those who are genuinely born again and who are regenerate Christians, indwelt with the Holy Spirit, there has to be a life transformation that occurs or that type of faith is empty and futile. You know, the apostle James in his letter in the New Testament says faith that has no works (that doesn't manifest itself in works of love) is futile. He says it's dead. So while granted there is this nominal cultural Christianity that does not bear testimony to the transformation Christ brings, for those who claim to truly have experienced the regenerating power of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will experience a life transformation over time as they're gradually conformed to the image of Christ.

KEVIN HARRIS: I didn’t know that Jordan Peterson recently suffered some physical and mental ill-health, but the article points this out (quoting Peterson):

The fact that I’ve been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem cruel, I would say, and so I have no idea how to reconcile myself to that. I mean, I’ve reconciled myself to that by staying alive despite it, you know.

Is it possible to have joy despite pain?

DR. CRAIG: I know it is. I do not here speak from experience. I’m not saying I have had joy in the midst of pain. But there are plenty of wonderful saints who have. I think, for example, of the story of Mabel that Tom Schmidt relates and that I share in some of my talks on the problem of evil and suffering. A woman who was blind and almost totally deaf was left alone and strapped into a wheelchair in a nursing home with no one to talk to. And Tom began to visit this woman and found that she was a radiant Christian full of joy. He went in one day when he was so busy he scarcely had time to think and he asked himself, “What does Mabel think about lying here all day long, unable to talk to anyone, unable to see?” He went and asked her, “Mabel, what do you think about all day long as you lie here?” And she said, “I think about my Jesus.” And Tom said, “I thought how difficult it is for me to think about Jesus for just even five minutes.” And I said to her, “What do you think about Jesus?” And she said, “I think how good he's been to me. I've had a pretty good life, you know.” And then she began to sing a hymn about how Jesus is my life, my joy, my all. It was the most inspiring example of someone with tremendous profound joy in the midst of pain. Tom reflected that here was a woman who in the midst of her suffering, unable to speak, unable to move, unable to talk to anyone, had incredible power. So I know it's possible.

KEVIN HARRIS: I wonder how he's defining joy (j-o-y). If you look at some of his videos, he talks a lot about the pursuit of happiness and how to be happy and content. I've been taught that there is a difference between joy and happiness – that there's a nuance here. I just wonder how he's defining it.

DR. CRAIG: I do not know, and I wonder why he says that the fact that he's been living in constant pain makes the idea of joy seem cruel. Is he saying that he feels guilty because he has felt joy in the midst of his pain and that seems wrong? Or is he saying that joy seems to be a will-o-the-wisp that cannot be obtained and therefore to hold out hope of joy is cruel. It's just not clear from what he says. But, as I say, the testimony of so many saints has been that there is a deep-seated joy that can be found even in the midst of horrible suffering.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article continues,

His book 12 Rules for Life: An antidote to chaos . . . has sold approximately five million copies.

That would give me a lot of joy if I were to author that.

Professor Peterson has gained prominence as a public intellectual for his confrontational style and views on gender . . .

He doesn’t hold the current party line. He is a little more traditional.

In articulating his vision of masculinity and personal responsibility, he has relied heavily on the example of Christian morality, and particularly biblical stories. In a series of lectures on the Bible, in 2017, he said that the Flood demonstrated that, with upstanding behaviour, people could survive chaos: Noah had “put himself together and his familial relationships were good”, which allowed him to triumph over his circumstances. Cain met his downfall because he lacked a “grateful and inquiring posture”, whereas Abel’s contrasting temperament led to his personal and social success.

Can the Bible be read this way? Is it possible God is illustrating universal moral principles through biblical accounts? It seems to me that is what he is seeing there.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, and I think that that is quite definitely the case. Many people have told me they have found Jordan Peterson's reflections upon these Genesis narratives to be more meaningful and more helpful to them than sermons that they've heard preached on these narratives. Even if we take these stories not to be literally true, for example the story of the Flood. Suppose that the story of a worldwide flood that completely wiped out all terrestrial life on this planet is not literally true. Nevertheless, as Peterson says, there are genuine lessons to be learned from the story of the Flood. It can embody deeper theological truths in it that God has to teach us. So quite definitely, just as God can employ poetry or parables – that would be a paradigm example, parables – they don't need to be literally true in order to convey some moral or theological lesson for us.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article continues, the author says,

Despite these interests, and a Christian following, religious narratives have functioned mainly for Professor Peterson as a means of grounding his Jungian psychological ideas in the history of morality and ritual.

You pushed him a little bit in your dialogue saying that theism offered the best explanation to basically everything he was trying to say. So, come on!

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. Exactly. I think that trying to have recourse to Carl Jung’s depth psychology and these sorts of forays into psychology aren't ultimately going to get us to the philosophical question of the foundations of meaning in life and objective moral values and truth. Those I think need to be grounded in a transcendent realm in God and not simply in Jungian psychology.

KEVIN HARRIS: This article continues,

While some Christians have embraced Professor Peterson’s writings, others worry about his conflation of Christian and secular ideas. Dr Justine Woh, a senior research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity, said in an interview with ABC News, in 2019, that Professor Peterson had secularised the idea of taking up one’s cross, “which is pick up your own heavy cross, the heaviest load, and carry that, and it will make you strong. He is dealing with a kind of Christian ethic, but he’s channelling it into a self-responsibility, self-actualisation message.”

I wonder, despite these warnings, many Christians do appreciate Peterson’s respect for biblical stories. They say he is opening up the Christian message to those who might otherwise resist it. What do you think? Is he secularizing the Christian teaching?

DR. CRAIG: I fully support learning what we can from him. I think it's great that Christians are gaining new insights into biblical truth through him. But we do always need to remember that we're dealing here with someone who apparently as yet is not himself a Christian and therefore is going to interpret the Bible through secular lenses. There's obviously much, much more to it than that. So we always need to be critical. My philosophy professor in college was famous for saying, “All truth is God's truth.” Regardless of where it comes from, whether it's expounded by Jordan Peterson or by Billy Graham, all truth is God's truth. So we can learn truth from Jordan Peterson, but we always need to be critical to weigh what he says against the teaching of the Bible.

KEVIN HARRIS: We have just a paragraph here from another article on Jordan Peterson^[4] Peterson has responded positively to Stephen Meyer’s book The Return to the God Hypothesis. He has been writing about it and sending tweets out and things like that. In an article for Evolution News, Elizabeth Whately says,

Of course, Peterson was trained with the same assumptions of naturalism and materialism shared by other evolutionary thinkers. This has tended to make him reach for naturalistic explanations of everything by default. He has shown respect for theists, but like Carl Jung before him, he generally frames their belief in psychological terms, where “God” is a product of our own collective unconscious rather than a distinct, personal, creative entity. It’s not that he closes the door on traditional theism. He just hasn’t yet felt comfortable opening it beyond a crack, at least not publicly.

In conclusion today, it seems that Jordan Peterson, whether we can ascertain it publicly or not, is on a quest for God. He is leaning, it seems to me, toward Christianity. He has not closed the door. Do you have some concluding thoughts on how evaluating his views particularly as it has been presented in these articles? I sure like the way you said all truth is God’s truth and there is a lot to be learned from him.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Exactly. I would want to say in response to this last paragraph you quoted that we should not play off psychological explanations against ontological explanations. Even if it's true that we have a kind of God archetype deep in our psychology that prompts us to believe in God, that says absolutely nothing against the objective reality of a creator and designer of the cosmos for which I think there is good evidence. So we must not think that by providing a psychological explanation of, say, belief in God that we have thereby done anything at all to undermine the objective ontological reality of God for which we have good arguments.^[5]