On belief in God

A few comments.

It’s a long video, but interesting. I don’t agree with everything in it, of course, but it’s interesting.

This position sort of comes down to recognizing that, regardless of whether the Judeo-Christian religion is empirically true in all its details, it is at least philosophically, psychologically, and archetypically true, and maybe even necessarily true and foundationally true for human nature and existence and flourishing. It’s at least real in the way that Plato’s forms are, real and fundamental to the nature of the universe, or humanity. Something like them must be true to make sense of reality and ourselves.

There are three levels at which you can argue for the reality of something. There’s the sort of reality by which you mean something that shapes and defines your experience. A story can be real in this way. It’s real to you. And that’s the postmodern sense of real. Then there’s the empirical sense of real, the modernist sense. That’s the sort of reality that you can prove because its going to affect your life whether you believe in it or are aware of it or not. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in buses. If one hits you, it’ll still flatten you. It exists physically, independently of your relationship to it.

There’s also a more exotic third sense, the premodern philosophical sense of real, which is a bit of both. Real, but immaterial. Real because it’s fundamental to how the world and the human mind or nature works. Real like math and the laws of logic, or Plato’s forms (truth, justice, beauty, etc), real like the human self/soul/mind, real in the way information is real and has definite properties and obeys certain defined laws despite not existing in a physical place.

Peterson seems to be arguing that religion is true in the third sense. He’s not sure what that means as far as the second sense. He’s not ready to commit to it. There are many reasons I could speculate as to why. He’s a natural skeptic. He’s also painfully aware of what a scary prospect it is if it’s true in a literal sense. If God really is that real, then that inverts the structure of reality. We aren’t studying God, he’s studying us.

If the transcendent reality we admit as symbolically real is, in fact, immanent, if it’s personal and actually historical/empirical and has entered the story, it’s a really really big deal and the claims it has on us are almost terrifying. We aren’t the ones who get to interpret and criticize him and how much he matches our expectations and preferences, we are the subjects; we are the ones who must bow, by necessity.

But anyway, Peterson isn’t sure that God exists, but he’s afraid he might. He believes in God, in a way, as an intellectual and psychological truth (and ideal of goodness and beauty). He’s just not sure what that means ontologically, if that also means he’s literally, historically real.

Arguing that something seeming to be psychologically or philosophically necessary or true or good or beautiful is a strange thing if it isn’t actually isn’t completely compelling. It’s still possible that the alternative explanation is true, that it’s all just a joke, a delusion, the idiocy of an overdeveloped chemical, biological machine. It all might mean nothing, it all might be chance and foolishness and meaninglessness and delusion, a cloak over the reality of physical and biological processes with no real goal or purpose or objective value. You can’t prove that that isn’t the case. More on that later.

I think you can categorize his beliefs about religious truth as being fundamentally objective, that they map correctly onto reality as it is and has to be understood and experienced by creatures like us, but still be agnostic about how literally or historically true they are, in much the same way the connection between the world of human thought and mind and being and the world of bare physical processes is not clearly understood. There’s a matching gulf between both, and it’s strange that its hard to say what it means or know how to bridge it, and there is a consistency, if also a conflict, in admitting that fact, even though the two don’t seem to line up perfectly and we are not sure how they bridge together.

How do electrons moving around in some matter add up to a mind and a will and identity? That’s a problematic contradiction of frames of reference, but it’s one we have to live with. Probably it would be less of a contradiction if scientific knowledge weren’t so loaded with lots of reductive philosophical assumptions that often make nonsense of its own findings, as well as of the creatures who did the finding and the means they found them by.

Epistemologically and existentially speaking, the philosophical/psychological reality we experience ultimately comes first. We live in the world of experience and selfhood, not the world of electrons, and all our experience and knowledge of that world depends on it. Without the concepts of self and other and the laws of logic and math and information, which all exist in no clear physical place but are fixed structures and places within the mind and the human existential experience, we would have no way of knowing about or understanding anything else, any other levels of being, what we call the merely physical (whatever that means, as even the best scientists admit there’s a decent chance all of reality is merely a hologram, which raises even more questions of what you mean by reality or hologram, and in what sense anything exists outside its consistent presentation to us as the objects of consciousness, according to rules and laws which are not, themselves, physical objects, whatever a physical object is, since at some level it really just reduces to a definition of descending and ascending levels of organization and behavior of objects in experience according to certain rules, which is at least partly why the hologram question, and the questions of what is meant by reality, persist).

All we know of the world is, ultimately, a description by the posessors of consciousness of the behavior of the objects of consciousness according to rules we apprehend. All of those three things are fixed, but they are not actually, in some objective sense we can grasp or prove from outside our conscious experience (because that’s what we are and what we must be to grasp them), strictly “physical”. They are all entities of the mind.

So the philosophical level of analysis is actually much closer to being the trunk of the tree than it is the branches, and any fruits that we find at their ends that contradict or undermine or reductively eradicate the reality and the validity of the trunk are inherently self-defeating, because they defeat the only possible means by which we reached them or will ever reach them or can converse about them.

You may claim that the bare, reductive, physical reality is ontologically prior to the epistemological psychological means of cognition, but you only know that and make sensible statements about it by using systems of logic and meaning to communicate your conscious experience to other presumed holders of consciousness, none of which exist in that bare, physical, reductive sense.

And in the end, for all the power and understanding we gain that convinces us that the described, reductive material world is the real reality and the rest is just an illusion, a side effect of the workings of the “real world”, that subjective experience of mind is all we will ever have. Minds using logic and meaning reaching out to other minds. That is the actual “real world” and the only one we will ever inhabit.

So that’s a short primer on theories of reality and levels and orders of truth and the necessary limitations of human thought and experience.

I think you could take Peterson’s view of God and be skeptical. You could admit the claims of philosophical and religious and symbolic truth as being valid for beings like us, as being true of the world as we experience it and still be skeptical about whether there’s any way to bridge the gap between it and materialistic or scientific or literal conceptions of fact and reality. The two just don’t connect and can’t.

That’s a problem, to be sure, and a strange one, and in many ways the different positions aren’t really different answers to the problem, which is inescapable, but are largely attitudes of response to it. The divide in the universe of being is there, or at least the philosophy of reductive materialistic science tells us it is, that all reality can be reduced from the level we live and know at to another. One person says, no, there is hope, both can live and be real and are wedded and reconciled, the second says they both live and are real but it is uncertain how they could coexist, the third says they’re both real but can’t coexist, and you just have to deal with it.

Anyway, the point is, you could hold Peterson’s basic position and be either a believer, an agnostic, or a skeptic. There are of course two further positions possible: extreme acceptance of one side of reality and rejection of the other. Complete rejection of scientific or material/empirical knowledge in favor of religious/psychological/philosophical knowledge, or complete rejection of non-empirical knowledge, collapsing all truth down to material and scientific truth.

You can actually get by on the first, if you guard it well, simply because that’s where people already naturally live. You might miss out on some valuable technical knowledge and some very good things that could really help in the quest to help and better humankind. But it’s doable, and is actually the foundation (sometimes done well, sometimes badly) of most past and and future lives.

I’m not sure you can actually honestly live a completely skeptical and materialistic worldview, or at least it wouldn’t be much of a life, or much like one we can recognize. We still have to live in the world of human experience, even if our beliefs based on science make a mess of much of it. But there are various attempts that have been made, both by philosophical skeptics like Camus as well as scientific skeptics like Bertrand Russell. People at both extremes tend to see their position as heroic, when in reality it’s more of a cop out, an unwillingness to deal with the complexity of life and reduce it by an act of rejection to something more manageable and consistent, which I would contend it isn’t.

I think Peterson thinks his beliefs about religion are fundamentally grounded in and justified by scientific fact. God might just be code for nature itself, in a way, but that doesnt mean all truth can be collapsed from philosophical into scientific. Rather, philosophical and religious truth is scientific and empirical reality expressing itself at the level of human consciousness and understanding and being (artistic, story/meaning-bound, practical, moral, emotional, intellectual, physical, ritualistic, social, etc).

Philosophical questions reach higher than scientific ones, because they ask about purpose, meaning, and what would be better or worse, who we want to or should be, not just who we are. But that doesn’t mean the two aren’t connected. But in any case, Peterson thinks religious/philosophical Truths are supported by scientific Facts, but he’s not sure if that entails religous/philosophical facts being actual.

It certainly is odd that religion contains so much truth. From a purely materialist viewpoint it’s not clear in any way why blind physical processes should give rise to something as bizzare and non-physical as mind and information. Biology and it’s adaptations, the very actions of evolution, are meant to be blind processes in a universe devoid of law or purpose. Yet somehow the way that meaninglessness manifests itself is in the appearance of the most spectacular brilliance and design.

There’s no logically necessary reason for physics to be what it is, yet somehow it’s tuned perfectly to allow for the world of amazing complexity and order and growth and for things like us. The genius of many biological adaptations is so astounding, their complexity so dense, they have only barely begun to become visible to us. The answers they give to the problems they solve are so elegant and purposeful that it’s bizzare that a system of no purpose or goal but of mere chaos, time, and change should find constant expressions in such a way.

Why is chaos and unintelligence so ordered and purposeful and brilliant? The whole concept of life is dependent on two non-physical properties: purpose and information. That is how life differs from unlife; that is the incredible divide between them. The nature of life fundamentally comes down to just those who things: purpose and information. And one necessitates the other. No purpose means no need for information. But if there is a purpose, then information is needed. Specificity. Communication. Identity. Motivation. Striving. An idea that something specific IS, of what that something is for, and how to achieve that goal, instructions for order and deliberate structure so that goal can be achieved.

The desire to be, to be a specific thing, not undifferentiated matter, to have identity and purpose and growth, and failure and success according to those purposes, is implicit in all life. In a meaningless, mindless, purposeless universe of physical processes, we find a haunting. Information and purpose. And information and purpose are built into all living things at the level of DNA, an astounding information storage system, a design of almost infinite complexity and flexibility, supposedly arising accidentally (not out of design) to define purpose in a purposeless physical system by means of Information in a mindless, meaningless universe with nothing to say.

So chaos somehow gives rise to order by creating information out of meaninglessness, demonstrating brilliance in a process of mindlessness, so purposeless matter can operate according to intention. That’s straight up bananas. The whole idea of information presupposes purpose. So the whole biological world is already infected and haunted with something that shouldn’t exist in it. Life is defined by it, by mind and meaning and intelligence and purpose (Plato’s fourth cause that philosophers of science later decided to drop as a silly metaphysical haunting; such questions were only for philosophers and saints, not scientists).

And the only reason we know about any of this is because we live in an existential universe of purpose and meaning and mind and information that we are able to experience and interpret. The whole universe is metaphysically haunted, and we’re what’s haunting it! We ourselves, and all life, are no less bizzare and supernatural a thing in this world than any spiritual reality a philosopher or saint might posit. We cannot reduce what is behind the universe to mere blind physical processes because we cannot reduce it in ourselves!

So, enough of that.

C. S. Lewis actually held a sort of similar view to Peterson about religion being a source of unified philosophical, psychological, and archetypical truth, until Tolkien suggested to him that the message of Christianity was that yes, all that stuff was true in those ways, but that Jesus was also the actual historical embodiment of the archetypes. Word made flesh.

And that’s what makes the gospel a big deal. Because if it is true in an empirical sense, then it solves a lot of the problems Peterson brings up. In particular, the problem that humans are so incapable of actually measuring up, that no one is good but God, that there’s this uncrossable gulf, the weight of the law, the inescapability of the human condition, our ability to see the highest good but our complete inability to actually follow it. Our fundamental brokenness.

The law, and knowledge of it, might help us survive our fate, the human condition, for a while, might help us survive psychologically, might help us thrive more and live together in more complex ways and continue our species better. But it can’t solve the problem of humanity itself, of this world and what we are in it. It can’t solve it because it’s not only a philosophical problem, it’s an actual, human problem, a historical and personal and practical problem.

Human suffering and evil and failure is real, not just an academic or philosophical proposition (unless you’re a committed reductive materialist or spiritualist, then it’s not really that significant of a problem). Existence, as well as its end in death, hits us like a bus. So a massive (and actual) solution is needed for such a massive problem.

A massive bridge is needed for such a massive gulf. Something like the form/word/meaning of the story coming down into the the story itself and dying to change the ending and bridge the divide and bring peace between the two parts of ourselves: animal/finite/physical/historical and spiritual/transcendent/timeless/ideal. The uncrossable gulf gets crossed by him on our behalf. The terrible trap of a mind of meaning caught in the merciless jaws or a blind, ravening universe that grinds us all to dust beneath its ceaseless, uncaring, meaningless wheels.

Those uncaring physical processes and their meaning are enumerated and understood in Ecclesiastes. Even without modern science the most ancient books had already grasped fully the problems we face, and have always faced; it’s not like the ancient people didn’t have the same concerns and struggles, they just framed and expressed them differently, with different players taking the roles of the forces of chaos and mindlessness and meaninglessness. They too struggled against them, often because they experienced their consequences very directly and often in their difficult lives; in fact much of ancient literature was centered around finding the strength as an island of order sadly arising and isolated in a sea of cruel and arbitrary chaos, to struggle against the dragons of chaos and survive and prevail and grow

Kierkegaard argued that it was part of the nature of reality that, although the archetypal truth might be readily apparent to most people who put the work and time in, eventually everyone will run up against a failure to escape the human condition, a failure to empirically prove that the meaning they hope for isn’t just a story and that life isn’t just a terrible, brutal, cruel joke on a poor animal who is sadly capable of becoming aware of the futility and fragility of its existence. And that was where our freedom lay. Because if the empirical reality of what we perceive as philosophical truth (God, for example) were inescapable and could be proved in this life, it would remove choice and faith. We wouldn’t have to wager anything or trust anything. Instead, that revelation is reserved beyond death. In life, only faith can bridge the gap between the two. The confidence in what we perceive to be real, but is unseen. Faith is what bridges the gap between those who say yes to life and the truth and meaning they perceive in it, despite their failure to prove it empirically, despite being trapped in the vale of shadows. Kierkegaard made a distinction between faith and belief; for him belief was trust supported by direct evidence. I always sort of disliked him because he popularized the concept of the “leap of faith” (even though he himself never actually put it that way) and that led to the popular idea of faith as being nonrational or even anti-rational and only based on such a leap. But I’m sort of starting to see what he meant. You literally can’t cross that gap. You can’t make belief (or disbelief) necessary. There’s always this gap left. Meaning and truth are sitting on the other side, but you’re stuck on the side without it, in chaos and meaninglessness, and you can only cross it by placing trust in something you can’t directly access (and to some degree everyone who isn’t a thorough existentialist is already making such a leap). The point of existence, in his view, wasn’t to affirm the existence of God, but to love him. His leap is more a leap of action, of trust, of love toward something, rather than a positional statement about placement within a doctrinal or social or historical structure. It’s an act of will, because although the heart and the mind may give good reasons for loving and believing in what lies on the other side, they cannot carry you across; the gap cannot be crossed before you by a bridge of unshakable evidence to make it compulsory and so obviously safe. God requires not your assent to the inevitability of his existence, but your embracing, your love, of what he represents and gives and wants for you. All life is either a leap of love toward him or a hurling of oneself away from him. Faith can’t be reduced to an intellectual test, but to a decision, an act of freedom and will and a decision of identity. I’m still not sure what to make of this myself, but I’ve started to see his point. He wasn’t trying to make faith anti-rational, as many have argued; he was trying to recognize the limited nature of both the world and ourselves and our perceptions and the conflicts and lacks we find within it and within ourselves. We aren’t God. And we aren’t dead, unconscious matter either, or mere protozoa or automatons that have no choice and follow first their passions or programming. We’re caught in a trap between them and have choose which we will love and embrace as our destiny. We are trapped by what we are and also trapped by what we wish or imagine or know we could or should be. And if God is real and is seeking to raise beings like himself to freely choose to participate in becoming part of the world he is making, then this is exactly the sort of situation that would seem to be necessary. So in the end, no matter how much you advance your knowledge either materially or philosophically, you still won’t be able to bridge that gap. You may make it easier to make the jump one way or the other, but only ignorance will mistake those reassurances for inevitability. In the end, only faith and love can bridge the gap between the dust and the divine. And only we can choose them.

Final tangent alert…It’s a bit like the problem of the anthropic principle in astrophysics. Why the universe is the way it is (stable, orderly, etc) isn’t clear, there’s no reason it has to be how it is, and how it is seems infinitely finely tuned for the existence of things like us and the sort of world we inhabit. That seems almost infinitely improbable, but then c,onsidering there is a universe that has things like us, then the world must be this immeasurably improbable, insane place because it does actually have us in it. So the infinitely improbable, by nature of the world we find ourselves in, is something we are obligated to believe in. Which sounds silly. But it’s either take it or leave it. If you can’t accept it, then nothing makes sense, you can’t accept the reality you’re actually presented with. If you can, if you must, to make sense of things, then you have to make a leap and live with the knowledge that the impossible is not only possible, but actual, and inevitable. That’s not a rational leap, and you’re not even given a choice about whether to make it, unless you just want nothing to make sense.

Anyway, the point is there’s no safe place, no place where everything is just inevitable and unconscious, the way life is for an animal. That’s the human condition. It’s a trap, it’s hard. We’re caught in this material universe, but we transcend it and are aware of it, and of the contradictory and strange nature of our own existence. We can’t just sink back into animal unconsciousness. But we can’t rise above it to godlike perception beyond the limits of our finitude and particularity in time and space and abilities. We’re stuck in the middle between earthly realities and heavenly ones, and we can’t bridge the gap