Jordan Peterson Questioning Sam Harris | THIS Is Missing! (Analysis & Reaction)

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There's so much there's so much resonance between what I think is true and the kinds of things

00:05

Jesus said right my own my my issue my my issue with organized religion every organized religion is just that I declare parlay

00:24

I declare Bankruptcy What up, everybody nate sala here back with a brand new video now

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Some of you are like when are you going to do more debate stuff in evangelism? I absolutely am going to do that But there's just something about the conversations that jordan peterson is having right now that holds

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Um the interest of a lot of people and I think rightly so, uh for good reason I think we truly benefit from wrestling with these conversations with what they mean

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With how we should respond especially as christians. So I did a jordan peterson reaction to his conversation with joe rogan about the bible, but now

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Looky here, uh peterson just spoke to sam harris on his podcast So literally a few days ago, so let's just go ahead and do one more spin on the merry -go -round

01:09

Shall we so I was standing with my wife the other day on the dock of this cottage We have up north and it's very dark up here and so when you look up you can see the night sky well enough to see the milky way and actually to see galaxies if you use the corner of your eye and and so And one of the things that's associated with that is an experience of awe and it's not surprising because there you are confronting what's essentially infinite as far as you're concerned as as much as it might be for us and I so I I hate to step in so quickly, but I hope that if that's where we're going here.

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We're going to talk about awe That we define it That we define it and perhaps identify where that comes from and and what its function is designed for right that Uh from both a christian and non -christian perspective

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I think that would be a fascinating topic of conversation thought a lot about the experience of awe One of the things and it's also produced by music quite regularly one of the things that happens when you experience awe is that a vestigial pylo erection

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Mechanism kicks in and that's the mechanism that makes prey animals Puff up you see this with cats.

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They're quite funny when they do this They puff up so they look bigger in in in this when they catch sight of a threatening predator and so they perhaps subjectively experiencing experience the more terror stricken end of awe

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But that awe is very very deep. It's not it's not a rational Response. It's way underneath rationality.

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It's an instinctual response and It seems to me as well that it's associated very tightly with our instinct to imitate and it's strange to think that you could look at the night sky and that could catalyze a

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In an instinct to imitate but we're very We're very good at using abstraction us creatures and it's not exactly obvious what we can imitate and what we can't

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So I think that's an example of this idea that you're putting forward that the domain of religious experience, let's say a spiritual experience has a uh biological underpinning a deep biological underpinning and You know part of my question is what's the what are the implications of that exactly if that if that happens to be the case?

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So right and there it is You know and it's a great question. What are the implications of this feeling or sense of awe?

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because It appears to be ingrained in our very biology. Well, it seems to me that there are two ways to go here, right?

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You either turn inward for the answer or you turn outward the non -christian turns inward

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And the christian turns outward if you turn inward then you'd probably say something like well

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You know the feeling of awe originates out of our biology As some kind of byproduct some kind of reaction to the world around us, but the location of the experience

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Never leaks out or connects to something transcendent out there

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You know outside of our own selves. It's locked inside us so that the full essence of our experience

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Is all taking place inside ourselves It never originates from the outside it never transcends we're just having a physiological reaction of sorts

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Okay, if you turn outward you would probably say something like awe Is the soul resonating with something not inside ourselves, but something out there there is a

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Thread of our experience that breaks through the wall of ourselves and connects to something real

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That is on the outside But see this requires that there is something about us that is not material

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And can sense that connection with something else that is not material outside of ourselves

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Which is god and by the way christians have a word for this connection It's called prayer, but somebody might push back and say well, wait a second

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You're already starting out with an immaterial soul. You're already starting out with a spiritual dimension to reality

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Okay, fair enough, but the critic is doing the same thing, right? They're starting out with no soul and they're starting out with no spiritual dimension to reality.

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That's their starting point So I guess what i'm getting at is let's talk about starting points, you know, because that's the root of the issue here um, that's how we can get to it because if not if we don't do that, we're probably going to hear a

05:39

Wonderfully eloquent conversation about looking inward as if that's the only explanation for awe first I'd like to know if you agree about that discussion about awe and the is and ought thing and then

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Anything else you'd like to add i'd like to hear Yeah, well, you've opened many doors there. That's a

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I see a 10 -hour conversation, but treating just those topics, but um

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Well to start with the is ought bit yeah, but you're in very good company most people in science and philosophy as you know believe there really is a a disjunction between is and ought and to follow hume's

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Really cast aside remarks. I mean he didn't go into it deeply but but at one point, uh, He wrote that uh, you can't derive

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An ought from an is right? There's no description of the way the world is they can tell you how it ought to be. So um

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And he was he was decrying the fact that so many scholars and in general so many theologians in his time would move smoothly from is to ought without Acknowledging that they had had committed a logical error

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But I do think there's a trick of language lurking at the bottom of this is an odd talk that is uh misleading

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I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating when you're having a conversation with someone about christianity religion atheism metaphysics, you know what

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I mean, whatever it is and You ask questions to seek to understand someone maybe also you're trying to identify points of disagreement

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It's really a bad idea to ask more than one question to ask even perhaps a multifaceted question

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Why is that the case? It's because the person that you're talking to probably won't remember everything you ask

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All right, and then consequently you won't get an answer for everything that you asked and now look what's happening here

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Harris isn't answering the question about awe he's focused on the is odd problem and it's it's difficult to spot and you know

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I believe i've spotted it and and but I I do, you know, the people who don't agree with me don't agree with me I mean their intuitions don't pass through You know the point where i'm i'm trying to shove them um

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And you know, it's somewhat analogous to um You know, the philosopher wittgenstein made a point when he was criticizing freud

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He was criticizing freud's notion of the unconscious. He didn't he thought this reification of the unconscious was

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Was fallacious and you know, we can leave that aside. I don't you know, that's Uh, i'm not sure I agree with him there

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But the the point he was making about the power of language was interesting. He said imagine if instead of saying

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Uh, I saw nobody in the room We said I saw mr.

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Nobody in the room. Imagine a language that forced us to say I saw mr. Nobody, right? just just Imagine what confusion would be born of that convention of language.

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That's something he said in his I think was in the blue book And there are many places in our thinking about the world where language

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Plays a similarly confusing role where we have reified something Which is not probably happens with free will.

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Yeah. No, so I think it's a confused. It's confused us about free will it's confused us about about Death for instance.

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I mean, I think that well, that's an interesting little aside there What do they mean by that are they suggesting that we reify certain aspects of our freedom

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That don't really exist like in terms of ability or capacity. So what's underneath that are we talking about compatibilism here?

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Are peterson and harris compatibilist is that what's going on here? I mean It makes sense for someone like harris to be a compatibilist.

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I mean based on the things that he's he has said But what about peterson, you know, if you're an atheist who doesn't believe that anything happens after you die, right if you think

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Uh, there's there's no rebirth, you know There's no reincarnation and and that eastern picture of karma and rebirth is probably not true

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And you think there's no heaven or hell and if you really think you get something like a dial tone when you die well

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Many people are left expecting some kind of oblivion some kind of positive nothingness some some some permanent loss of experience where and so this notion of not of of oblivion um

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Is a kind of reification Uh, but if you if you think about it more clearly, that's precisely the kind of thing you would not accept

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I mean if it's simply the end of experience, well, then You're not going to be experiencing the end of experience, right?

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This is not you didn't experience an absence before you were born, right? Well the idea that so when harris talks about reification as far as I understand the term

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He means taking something that is completely abstract and making it real

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Uh, and I take it he means making something real that should not be Uh real so when we talk about like experiencing nothingness or however, he said it a second ago

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We're talking about something that can't be experienced because nothingness is the state of non -being And experience trades on being right?

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So when we talk about this, it seems like we've made nothingness into something concrete When it isn't that's what it seems like he's suggesting is going on with issues like the is -ought problem

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Although I think he he needs to do some more work to make the connection more clear there You would experience is implicit in the way.

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The question is framed, right? Right, so there's nothing you're going to suffer. I mean, this is something that epicurus pointed out um

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Through lucretius that you know death is nothing for us You know where we are death is not and where death is we are not right like there's just there's non -overlapping

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Sets of facts whatever those facts are if in fact death is the end of experience So which is to say there's nothing to worry about really if if uh, if death is is just the end of anything

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That's a big if and so how do you think that relates to the is -ought problem? So to come back to to is and ought

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I just think Really what we have I mean forget about morality forget about questions of good and evil forget about uh, any value judgment

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What I And try to return your mind to something like the primal circumstance of consciousness, right?

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I mean just just imagine waking up from You know a 100 year sleep And you've forgotten everything about yourself and now you're just a mind in a world um

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In some sense we're all in we're all potentially in that position In every moment in our lives, you know just seeing

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Creation afresh right seeing this moment of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching Thinking for you know as though for the first time, you know clearly

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Do you know that have you ever heard? Of the neurological case.

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I think it was a man who had bilateral hippocampal damage and he was in the psychiatric hospital

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And he woke up like that every second. Yeah His wife would come in the room and he'd say it's as if it's as if i'm seeing you for the first time

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He lost that right. He lost the imposition of memory on his perception. And so every perception was fresh and new

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Yeah, well, so and i'm not recommending brain damage to anyone as a way of freshening up experience, but there's a there's a non

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Neurologically compromised way of of grasping this intuition, which is it just in this moment you know experience really is potentially totally fresh and totally new and But for the fact there's this there's this ever -present layer of our thinking about it our

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Remembering what just happened are expecting the next thing that's going to happen That's really the conversation we're having with ourselves in each moment and meditation is a way of breaking that spell and actually being vividly aware of the present moment in a way that that frees you from this automaticity of just Of viewing everything through your through your concepts and your discursiveness.

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There's something about this that's very Buddhist, I don't know if i've mentioned this before but I was taken with buddhism before becoming a christian myself.

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And so there's a philosophy within buddhism that that sounded

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It sounds an awful lot like what harris is saying here But it's kind of fuzzy because there's a bit of a communication issue in that these guys are not speaking as directly as they could

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Be in my opinion And that's just because they're on a whole other level of genius You know what?

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I mean? These guys are obviously very intelligent I've met guys like this before and when you're on that genius level, you tend to have your own kind of language

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You know what? I mean, but it sounds like harris is saying the only thing that is real is what is and anything else that we derive from that in terms of oughts is just It's an attempt to reify what is and I suppose if we wanted to be very buddhist about this

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I mean I could take it even a step further than that and say that all of our suffering comes out of the enterprise of sort of Responding in the wrong way, maybe misunderstanding in some deep sense what is actually is, you know

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All of a sudden i'm bill clinton. It depends upon what the meaning of the word is I don't know harris enough, but do any of you know like is he friendly to buddhism?

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Can somebody tell me that in the comments like because he certainly sounds a bit like a buddhist here that actually harkens back to the is ought problem, right because Right there you said and i'm not denying the validity of anything you've said so far, but right there you said that Without agreeing on the validity of evidence, let's say

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There's no Agreement about what is and there we've got a frame problem there, right?

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We have that value that you need to even determine what is well The question then is well, where does that value come from and you can't say well it comes from what is in some easy manner

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Because you just said unless you have a value of a certain sort You can't derive what is and that's partly why this ought is is ought problem just doesn't seem to go away

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Yeah, but it's so but it goes away because it goes so I mean if i'm understanding what peterson is trying to point out

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This is why you Me every single person needs to wrestle with what's called the problem of the criterion

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There's a great little book you can get it by roderick chisholm i'm a professional I think I have it actually Yeah, look at this here.

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Here's uh Everybody see this the problem of the criterion. It's very it's very tiny book like it's not a big read, right?

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But you got to read it, you know Um, if you're going to keep up with this particular conversation and and the issues that are going on here

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You got to read that book And then you got to reread it again There is in principle always a mystery at our backs

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You know, this is true experientially. I mean I say I would say this is true experientially with respect to the nature of consciousness

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But it's true conceptually with respect to even those fields that pretend

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To be most directly in contact with the nature of reality I mean, so even physics, you know when you're talking about the most rudimentary laws of physics, right?

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There is still There has to be a first brute fact or a or a brute axiom

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Right you accept That doesn't that need not prove itself This is totally correct

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Okay, but what are those brute facts that you take as your starting point to begin to shape your noetic structure?

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You see this touches on what peterson was trying to explain to joe rogan. What was it last week about the bible we can

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Reason very eloquently through lots of different things as thinking creatures, but we don't just begin with a tabula rasa

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There is no such thing as a blank slate when it comes to beliefs We have to start out with certain beliefs that we take for granted

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Or else we're just going to get lost in the endless requirement of justification for our beliefs See at some point in the enterprise of epistemology.

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You can't keep playing the game of based on what? Right, like you can ask that question about any belief that you have based on what what's that belief based on?

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Okay, what's that belief based on but if you keep going and you never stop you slip into a vicious regress

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Like if your thoughts were a plane it would never be able to get off the runway So at some point you have to begin with some brute facts something that is axiomatic that you take for granted

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That's just how this game works. And by the way brute means there is no explanation needed Okay, this would be this one's talking about your starting point

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To begin the process of understanding the world around you. So when sam harris recognizes that good for him

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But the question is what are his brute facts that comprise his starting point because his brute facts

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May be different than jordan peterson's brute facts and they're definitely different than mine as far as I can tell.

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So, what are they? Yeah, so there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and it's its connection to suffering

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And one is at the level of thought itself, right? So you can you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts, right?

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And you can you can get some you can triangulate on your your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself

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Uh and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right? And that's you know, then yes incognito Like a six -year -old for example and start thinking like a 30 -year -old, right?

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Right, and what's more a 30 -year -old that actually has good intentions for you, right? Like you could a friend. Yes, right

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You can make your mind your friend. Yeah. Yeah loved one even yes. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine that?

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so imagine that so that's that's a that's a totally legitimate way to To climb out of of the the great hole of of suffering

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That people find themselves in did you hear that? I don't know if you caught that harris said that your internal Mental process is a totally legitimate method of climbing out of the hole of suffering, right?

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In one sense a christian can agree with that Okay, because the christian way of dealing with suffering is to Bend the knee at the throne of god and ask him for strength to endure the suffering, you know, ask him for perhaps

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Release from the suffering if it be his will and ask him for peace, right? And there's all kinds of biblical examples for this jesus the night

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He was arrested and eventually crucified asked the father to let that cup pass from him, right?

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But jesus said nevertheless not my will but thy will be done You know the apostle paul asked the lord to alleviate the thorn that he suffered from but ultimately he submitted to god's desire to Make his power perfect in paul's weakness

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And then of course the great formula for achieving peace found in isaiah chapter 26 verses 3 and 4 and 12

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And the only reason I know that is because i've been teaching that at my local church here It all comes down to acknowledging that you are not in control

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God is in control And so the christian would say that a lot of suffering comes out of human beings simply wanting to play god

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And not let god be god Which is a denial of reality ultimately So that internal mental processing of coming to that place of submission to god's control of the world

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Is definitely important and I can affirm like i'm gonna reframe it a bit But I can affirm what harris is saying, but that's the only thing that harris is saying

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Okay, as if the only thing you need to do is look inward and Rearrange the furniture of your mind

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And so now we're back to the difference between harris's starting point and the christians There there are two experiences people tend to have when they when they have sought out a peak experience like that If they're lucky

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They really have something like a moment where they're lifted out of themselves and they they can just Have something like this breathtaking encounter with nature, right?

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and then all too often That lasts, you know a second and a half And then they're just talking about it and thinking about it and trying to get back to it

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But they're they're still just jabbering to themselves It's so interesting to hear this conversation and I encourage you to go back and watch the full thing

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I mean, obviously i'm looking at clips here some of the highlights in my opinion of what this is But but and sort of talking about it, but you got to listen to the whole conversation

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I think it's like two hours or something. It's definitely worth your time just to think about what they're saying Because even here sam harris is talking about having a breathtaking encounter.

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But the question is with what? With what is he having a breathtaking encounter, you know?

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He says nature, but is that all? That there is right. It's just so interesting this exercise

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In having a super precise and technical conversation that can never zoom out And see the forest for the trees in my opinion because that's what's going on here, you know

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There are so many things that harris and peterson are talking about that. The christian absolutely affirms and acknowledges

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Why because the human person? In the christian worldview is an ensouled embodied creature

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We are both body and spirit The christian and a lot of religious folks agrees with what paul gould says when he says the whole world is haunted

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Right. It's haunted by a spiritual dimension that is deeper than matter and it's deeper than materiality

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That is the best explanation for the way things are so to say that everything must be explained

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Molecularly, it's far too reductionistic and it misses the forest for the trees So I mean any conversation about the physiological effects of the body.

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It's great Okay, because we can understand more and more about the body's functions Especially in light of these topics like uh suffering

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Sensing awe, etc But to only focus on the body And try to use the body to explain what is happening on the spiritual side of things is a huge mistake

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And i'm not sure like what is going on with peterson But that is ultimately missing from this conversation and it's the immaterial realm if you don't allow for the immaterial realm

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This is what conversations can look like There's so much there's so much resonance between what

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I think is true and the kinds of things jesus said right, my only my my issue my my issue with organized religion every organized religion is just that clearly

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What we're really talking about are deeper universal truths about the nature of of mind, right?

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Maybe you know, whether we don't limit it to human minds or just mind itself. Okay, there it is again, right?

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Harris's starting point is there is no such thing as an immaterial realm. There is no such thing as a soul

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There is no such thing as god That's what he begins with in order to then make sense of the bible

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Well, if that's your starting point, then it makes total sense what he's saying Okay, I could totally agree with what he's saying

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If I agree with the starting point if he's correct in his starting point the bible and all ancient religious texts are simply an exercise in revealing the

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Psychological development of humanity, right? And so there's no culture. There's no religion.

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There's no provincial uh cult that has

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The full story and what we really what the really the burden on us in in in every present generation, you know but certainly now in in the 21st century where there are all the barriers to to to um

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Uh Universalization All the barriers to you know, getting information and translating from other languages all of that's broken down We have we have access to everyone's ideas, right?

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There have been a hundred billion people and a bunch of them have had good ideas a bunch of them have had bad ideas and we have access to to thousands of years of human conversation

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My only argument out what those ideas were my only argument is that We should only care about using the best ideas uh, and we should and we we no longer have the right to any deep

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Serious sectarianism right now. We can be that's not to say that you can't be especially taken with With jesus and the tradition that has grown up around him uh, and You know, you're not you're kind of bored with socrates and so you don't spend as much time with him and that's all fine

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But the the problem i've had traditionally with organized religion is religion

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Historically is the only corner of culture Where people begin saying to themselves and to their children?

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We're playing a totally different game over here This is not just this is not a matter of just ideas and human beings and human conversations and ordinary books

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No, no, these books were written by god or inspired by god, you know, and uh, they can't be edited and Every I think it seems to me that laying

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The danger in that i'm not disagreeing with you as a product of post -enlightenment thought which

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I think harris is Harris would never survive, uh pre -enlightenment

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Like the you know, the medieval period or you know before that danger in that is that it it actually

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Minimizes the problem of atrocity that's associated with sectarianism because and Perhaps you know

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I'll agree with you. You can heap as many atrocities as you want on that side of the balance. I will agree with you well, okay, so this is what i'm pointing to though because we were having a

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Discussion in some ways about sacred things and so and then we're talking about the issue of religion

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And so there's a couple of things I want to say about that. Well, hold on a second. I hate to keep jumping in I'm, sorry, but I take it peterson won't clarify what he just said, right?

27:28

But I think it's important I think what he was saying there was If you have a text that cannot be altered, right if that's what?

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Harris's problem is here that the sacred text cannot be altered But if you have a text that cannot be altered that kind of does safeguard

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Against tyrants and other types of evil folks to come in and alter the text to justify committing atrocities against other human beings

27:47

So if you say the bible is the word of god And so therefore the established attitude is we cannot alter god's words

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Then even if a tyrant wanted to come in and do certain things And justify it by changing the bible.

28:00

They wouldn't be able to now that doesn't seem to stop people from trying to Interpret the bible in advantageous ways

28:07

But it minimizes potential atrocity. I think that's what peterson is getting at dostoevsky had it right to some degree in the grand inquisitor

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Because the do you remember that story the grand inquisitor? Yeah, I'm sure it's been been many okay

28:21

Now several decades. I've actually read the book. But well the remarkable thing about that story is christ comes back to earth

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And he does some miracles and it's the church himself that puts him in jail and then the head of the church comes to the jail and says

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What the hell are you doing back here? The last thing we need is you we've got everything sorted out We know what's going on.

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It's like we're going to put you to death tomorrow And then christ kisses him on the lips and the grand inquisitor turns white

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And then when he leaves the grand inquisitor, he leaves the door open and that was that's so brilliant and you know dostoevsky was writing at the same time as nietzsche and Had quite an influence on nietzsche as it turned out

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And but because dostoevsky was writing fiction he could go places That dostoevsky couldn't go as a philosopher and one of the things he was trying to point out was that Despite the proclivity to totalitarianism that you can lay at the feet of sectarian religion

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The door is left open And you know all of us have to come to terms with the fact that our institutions

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Religious and otherwise tend to ossify into these totalitarian structures that are analogous socially

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I think in some ways to the default network that you just described They're trying to point to something beyond that but you know, they degenerate and ossify and then but but then we have to go underneath that too if we're going to get our criticisms right because as terrified as It's reasonable to be about religious sectarianism and totalitarianism

29:56

It's also necessary to remember that chimpanzees go on raiding parties Right.

30:01

Yeah and and kill the neighboring tribe so to speak and they're not motivated by religious concerns

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And so yeah, I mean this is the point that peterson brought up when he talked to harris before in Vancouver or wherever that was like if harris's concern is that there is some kind of inherent feature that leads to human atrocity the question is is that feature of Creatures or of religion and so peterson bringing up the chimpanzee thing is simply to suggest it's not a feature of religion

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This is how human beings in the pursuit of their own glorification ruin religion to put that at the feet of religion even implicitly

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I think is I understand why That's an impulse but it doesn't

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Face the problem deeply enough and it also obscures a potential solution I think because it tends

30:55

It tends to throw the baby out with the bath water. I know you're trying to regain the baby. Yeah No, i'm trying to save the baby.

31:01

Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that baby Um, yeah, I love that baby too again peterson's baby is religion, right it is christianity and so This is just a very high brow exercise in challenging harris's contention that the problem is religion

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The problem is not religion. The problem is people see if you just hold these two categories in mind very clearly and then you go back into history and try to use those two categories as like explanatory grids

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To make sense of those events in history one grid has way greater explanatory power than the other

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Okay We are the problem And our base natures infect everything including our pursuit of god

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That's a true statement Which by the way pointing that out says nothing about whether or not god exists at all.

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It just shows That at the end of the day humanity very often sucks. Yeah, I mean for me the

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The crucial variables that make um religion

32:03

Itself so problematic are one The religions and and this is true of the the abrahamic ones in particular

32:11

The religions that are focused on a text right that can't be edited now religious moderates and religious liberals will

32:20

Disagree with me and they'll say that the whole tradition is a matter of you know reinterpreting and grappling with the the the contradictions and the um, and there's that's all a very rich discourse and blah blah blah, but the the real problem is the books themselves

32:39

Betray their merely human origin On almost every page, you know, there's just like, you know

32:46

It's true of the plays of shakespeare. It's true of the iliad and the odyssey. It's true of of Virgil it's true of dostoevsky and it's true of the bible right in all its parts, right?

32:58

So there's just there's and The you know, if you just imagine

33:04

How good a book would be could be if it were truly written or dictated by by an omniscient being

33:14

I mean, it's it's just it's trivially easy to imagine that This would be so much better than they in fact are it's really not that easy to translate the sorts of Experiences that you're pointing to into words.

33:26

No, no, no, I know I know but it but you can you can do it better and worse Well, but you can do it.

33:32

Okay. Okay. Let's talk about that for a minute better. I got it. I got it I got it. Look harris completely sidesteps peterson

33:39

And just picks back up his original claim, which is the problem is the sacred text can't be edited

33:44

Okay, I really do think that is not a great answer to the real problem that I think harris is trying to pinpoint

33:51

Which is man's inhumanity to man Maybe if I can characterize it that way, you know the the lowly behaviorism of our creatureliness that we find in the history of Some religious expression like you would you would have to do a lot more work to say

34:07

Well, the problem is the sacred text can't be edited, you know, then just simply say that I mean, I suppose harris means that They should be edited in order to reflect new and more enlightened ways of thinking

34:19

As humanity evolved over time or something. I mean just again to me

34:24

This is a very sophomoric response to the problems with humanity And I think it betrays an underlying

34:32

Chronological snobbery on the part of harris which is to say that you know Well, all those people in the past were idiots and we're better than they are because we understand more than they did right?

34:43

With regard to the bible in all its parts as was his quote, right? That is his attitude

34:49

I challenge you To read just about anybody that comprises the great works of our history uh the canon of our western society, um

34:59

Those who wrote things down as a snapshot of their particular moment in time and harris brought up some of these people, you know shakespeare uh, dante

35:09

Dostoyevsky, you know, maybe I can add like augustine or aquinas, right? Look at what they were saying and writing and ask yourself

35:18

Are we as a people now smarter than these people were then is it really that simple to suggest?

35:24

Of course It's not and guess what all these individuals stood on top of in order to inform and shape their own beliefs and writings the bible

35:32

Look, I love conversations like these. All right in one sense because it provides us the opportunity to You know be a fly on the wall when the greatest of minds can get together to chat, you know

35:42

Maybe before the internet maybe before youtube these kinds of conversations would be happening back in like the uh

35:49

The lounge or something at a university where the professors get together between classes, you know what

35:55

I mean? And now we get to be in on these kinds of conversations. It's great And even if you disagree with some of the things that you heard there's no question that peterson and harris

36:04

Their credentials in the area of the mind are stellar. All right So a lot of this is just super fascinating and interesting and I actually agree with a lot of what was said

36:14

But the real issue that I have with this conversation comes down to really two things number one

36:19

Harris begins with a very specific starting point that is never identified completely and it is never really questioned

36:27

You know a lot of what he says does cohere together As a framework of understanding the world the problem is that what this framework stands on top of that's where a lot of the mistakes

36:38

And the errors creep in and this is absolutely what needs to be questioned the things that are taken for granted that are axiomatic

36:46

Okay, because if not then harris gets to wax eloquent about lots of things that do cohere

36:51

If and only if you accept his particular starting point And one of his starting points is or it seems to be materialism is true and immaterialism is false if you don't get that straight

37:04

And you don't question that and get squared away on that you'll have a two -hour conversation about things that both materialism and immaterialism can explain from their particular frameworks and never solve the issue of which view is actually true and which one is actually false

37:20

You see that right and the other thing is peterson should have been more direct in his challenges to harris

37:25

All right, even though peterson is probably not a hundred percent in the christian camp from what i've heard him say previously

37:32

I mean He's certainly a lot more friendly to christianity than harris is So he could have been more challenging in some of the things that harris said

37:40

And you know you you get into the weeds of style here a bit, right? Like i'm sure peterson wants to take some time to affirm harris in order to maintain a strong rapport

37:50

But on the other hand, it's very clear that there already is such a strong rapport. So it's actually okay to challenge more

37:57

The best reception that people have to challenges come from their good friends

38:02

Okay, remember that there are just tons of Leading questions to ask your friend that can directly challenge the flaws and assumptions that they make

38:12

But still maintain the bond of friendship It's really a lot easier than you think well,

38:18

I hope this exercise blessed you in some sense What did you think of this exchange? How would you have responded to harris or how would you have responded to peterson?

38:27

During this conversation a lot of claims were made a lot of things were said. Where are you in this? Let's keep the conversation alive in the comments below.

38:34

I would love to uh, To hear what you are thinking through yourself in these particular areas as always