This week on the Sunday Special, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is back to discuss his latest book, “We Who Wrestle With God.” In today’s episode, Jordan describes what it means for man to be created in the image of God, and what the Bible can tell us about our capacity for both tremendous sacrifice and tremendous folly. He also reflects on his writing process, and why he believes it is good enough to conduct himself as if God exists. Grab your copy of “We Who Wrestle With God,” available everywhere on November 19th—stay tuned and don’t miss this episode of the Sunday Special with the inimitable Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. - - - Today’s Sponsors: International Fellowship of Christians and Jews - To give to IFCJ, visit https://benforthefellowship.org/ Collars & Co - Get 20% off your first order when you use code BEN at: https://collarsandco.com
Chapter 1: What does it mean for man to be created in the image of God?
It's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is, is beyond categorization. God is outside our category structures. Now, does that make him real? Well, I would say God is hyper real. God is the reality upon which all reality depends. That's a different kind of category. It's an atheist game. Is God real like a table is real?
Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner. God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space. And so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible.
This week on the Sunday special, I'm excited to welcome back Dr. Jordan B. Peterson to discuss his latest book, We Who Wrestle With God. Jordan has lectured on biblical symbolism for years, including with us here at The Daily Wire in his groundbreaking seminars on Exodus and the Gospels. After the success of his previous bestsellers, Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order,
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Well, Jordan, it's great to see you. Great to see you, Ben. Thanks for the invitation. Yes, let's talk about your brand new book. Obviously, it's burning up the bestseller charts already. Yeah, that's the one. That'd be the big one.
Yeah, I'm very happy about it. I'm also perplexed.
So tell me about your perplexion.
Well, I don't know what people are going to make of it because... See, I tried to do two things in the book. I tried to make a case that was scientifically and theologically unassailable. And, you know, people might be skeptical about whether or not, let's say, psychology qualifies as a science. But it does if you triangulate with enough precision.
So the arguments that I'm making, I think, are, what would you say, they're viable arguments. at a psychopharmacological basis. So with regards to brain chemistry and brain function, and also with what we know about perception and clinical practice. And then they also make sense from a literary and religious scholarship perspective. Now that's what I think.
That's a lot of fields to cover and refer to, you know, and so am I a master in all those areas? Well, I suppose in each of those areas, there are people who know more than me. But across the areas, I'm not doing too bad. And so I figured out some things that are very fundamental, I think. And we'll see how people respond. Like I figured out, for example, that
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Chapter 2: How does sacrifice relate to our perception of reality?
I hate to get political, and I'll try to avoid that as much as possible, but I think part of the reason that a radical progressivism is eternal is because there's no difference between rule by whim and power and immaturity from a psychophysiological perspective. They're the same thing. And so any immaturity is going to find its political expression.
I mean, in many ways, that's what you see in the story of Exodus with the worship of the golden calf, right? What happens when...
moses departs from the israelite polity right and they have the habits of slaves and all that's left for the israelites to attend to is the political voice that's aaron and the political voice without a connection to the divine let's say without being subordinate to what's properly highest reverts to a a mirror, a mirrored populism and just offers the Israelites, let's say what they want.
But that isn't what happens is that what happens is the worst of the Israelites rise to the top and demand their immediate gratification. And the Israelites end up partying naked partying naked in the desert in the midst of an orgy in a manner that makes them, you know, contemptible to their enemies.
And if that doesn't echo for you with regards to the modern situation, you're not really thinking very hard. And I think that's eternally the case, is that it makes perfect sense structurally and psychophysiologically, because if the
If the form of order that unites us most thoroughly collapses, so that would be something equivalent to the disappearance or the death of God, then what happens is a war between competing underlying motivational states emerges. And one of the things I've been thinking through, I'd like your opinion about this, is that... What is to be expected in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God?
What's to be expected psychologically? Well, the most dominant subordinate motivational forces will vie for supremacy, and that would be sexuality, so now we have Freud, or power, and that would give us, say, Nietzsche or even Alfred Adler to some degree, or the postmodernists or the Marxists.
Hedonism and power go hand in hand because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power because you can't get people to cooperate voluntarily. Or the collapse of everything into a nihilistic mess. And I also don't see any... Like, how else could it possibly work? If you lose the highest uniting value...
Things could collapse utterly, and that's where you get a kind of nihilistic depression, or the next most powerful forces will emerge. And I think it's inevitable that those are something like hedonistic sexuality and power. I mean, what else? What the hell else would rule when you remove, let's say, sovereign self-sacrifice as the highest order principle?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of storytelling in our lives?
Now, you could play with that, like you could play with the witch representation by having a witch who was witchy in all regards, except she lived in a penthouse, you know, and that would be an interesting twist. But you have to stay within the realm of the symbolic representations in order for the portrayal to make sense.
And so, and I think I asked one of the world's top neuroscientists flat out, can I remember his name off the top of my head? Anyways, it'll come to me. I asked him if every perception was a micro narrative and he said, yes. right? And so that's very interesting.
This is revolutionary because, of course, the atheist reductionist materialists like Dawkins assume that there is a self-evident fact level somewhere and that you can reduce everything that's value predicated to this level of incontrovertible self-evident fact. That level doesn't exist. It's interpretation all the way down. Now,
The weird thing about that is that, in a sense, that's what the postmodernists have been claiming. But what they got wrong was that that interpretation level itself, the weighting level, also has a structure. And one of the things I tried to tell Dawkins was that that's the structure of the meme world. That's a good way of thinking about it.
Like the world that we've abstracted up in linguistic representation and imagination, it has a structure. That's the Jungian collective unconscious. And that's the consequence of the competition between memes across... hundreds of thousands of years.
And so one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins, and I had spoken with Brett Weinstein in some detail before that, was that Dawkins' meme idea is way more significant than he thinks, but he won't take that step because if he steps beyond, like he said, a meme is a backwards baseball cap. It's like, Jesus, Richard, really? I mean, come on, give yourself some credit.
You're talking about the manner in which abstract representations war for supremacy in the space defined by abstract human cognition. You can do better than backwards baseball cap. You know, I tried to let him know that Mircea Eliade, who's a great historian of religion, has mapped out something like the structure of the war between gods in heaven across multiple cultures.
And it's a very calm, it's a very stable pattern. You get a polytheistic interpretation of the world. which is something like the narrative embodiment of different value structures. And then they vie for supremacy. And that probably happens as isolated tribal groups come together in larger civilizations.
So there's actual war on the ground, but there's also conceptual war in the space of imagination. And then that tends towards the emergence of a monotheism across time, if the culture manages to unite itself. And then that monotheism has certain properties. You know, like in Mesopotamia, for example, a god named Marduk rose up out of the polytheistic, out of the realm of polytheistic combat.
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Chapter 4: How do biblical narratives illustrate human sacrifice?
And so, but there's, we also have to understand for the religious types that are listening, especially the more literal minded religious types who are propositionalized beyond belief. The God in the Old Testament and the New, for that matter, is ineffable. He's beyond category. And so to say, is God real?
In some ways, it isn't a genuine question because God doesn't have the same order of reality as the profane things that are littered about us. The landscape, God isn't real the same way a table is real, right? And this is, I'm not inventing this up and out of whole cloth. There's an insistence that's continual.
And I think it's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is, is beyond categorization. right? This is why even Moses can only get a glimpse of God. So God is outside our category structures. Now, does that make him real? Well, I would say God is hyper real. God is the reality upon which all reality depends. That's a different kind of category.
And it's not exactly comprehensible. It's certainly not It's an atheist game. Is God real like a table is real? Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner. God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space. And so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible.
That's clear. I mean, it's clearly in the Hebrew text. I mean, the text, you know, the name of God, which in Hebrew, you know, as a religious Jew, I'm not actually supposed to even spell it. The letters would be Yod and then Hay and then Bav and then Hay.
Um, but the, what, what that, what that encompasses in the Hebrew is meaning that in Hebrew, that means what was, what is, and what will be right or united in the name of God. Right. And then when the description that God gives to Moses at the burning bush is, Hey, yeah, I share. Hey, yeah. Right. I will be what I will be. Right.
Like that's the best description that God can give to a human being is like, I am what I am basically. And I will be what I will be. And you know, you're just going to have to deal with that, which is the answer at the end of the book of Job as well, which is, You can't understand me because we're of a completely different kind.
And that insistence by God is also then baffled by the biblical text in which God takes an active role in history, is talking to people. Yeah. God is too mysterious for any of these categories that are attempted for God.
It's why I think that some of the Neoplatonic arguments, they do some solid work in terms of establishing a logical predicate for believing in God, but they don't do all the work in the sense that a Christian or a Jew would want them to do, or even a Muslim, that God is active in the world, that God has perspectives, that God does things, that a sort of Neoplatonic God that floats above everything and doesn't have any intervening impact
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Chapter 5: What are the underlying themes of sacrifice in culture?
So imagine that the divine in the story of Abraham is conceptualized as the spirit of adventure that impels people forward into the world. So that would be the same spirit that makes your child exploratory and courageous, even on a playground when he has to meet new people or when he's mastering a new skill. And you're trying to foster that as a good father.
Okay, so now imagine that that spirit of adventurous exploration leads to the... is the best pathway forward to the expansion of the child's character. Okay, a genuine character in the most positive possible way. Well, then you'd say that the instinct for development is the same instinct that fleshes out possibility most... thoroughly.
Well, the counter proposition would be the spirit of adventure that drives a child to explore has no relationship with the psyche or society or the world. Well, that's a stupid theory. Obviously, that can't be the case.
Okay, so now imagine that the world is structured so that if you followed the voice of adventure fully, which is the spirit you would encourage as a good father, and of course, Abraham is the archetypal father as well, then you would entice or invite people down the pathway that makes them a blessing to themselves, that helps them establish something permanent, that
makes their name renowned among other people for good reason, and that does that in a way that brings benefit to everyone. Well, how could it be, given that we're social creatures, how could it be that our deepest instinct for developing ourselves and moving into the world, how could it be other than aligned with what brings the optimal social order?
Because it would mean that we're maladapted to the social environment, right? Well, that's just obviously not. Now, That doesn't mean there isn't a niche for psychopaths, for example. You know, I mean, once you establish a playable and productive game, people can take the role of parasite and scavenger and they can eke out a pathetic cane-like existence.
By doing that, they have to be wanderers in the land of Nod. But you can do it. But that's... the perversion of the postmodernists is that the path of Cain is the only story that rules. Well, no, that doesn't, no. And, you know, I detail that out quite radically in the book too, not least from talking to people like Franz de Waal and knowing the work of people like Jacques Panksepp.
Power doesn't even work to structure the social relations of chimpanzees. Even in chimps, you see the emergence of something like a reciprocal ethos. At least you see that in the behavior of the chimps who establish relatively stable and peaceful reigns and troops. They're not power-mad, chest-thumping Hitlers. Those chimps meet a vicious end.
And that's part of that, the self-defeating nature of a game that's predicated on power.
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