I like listening to Dr. Jordan Peterson, and over the months and years I’ve heard little things here and there that seem to indicate (to me, anyway) why he is having such an obvious and public struggle with the existence of God.
I make the case that a lot of the recurring elements in his lectures add up to a psychological case for God. I don’t know if Dr. Peterson is aware of this argument, and I don’t know if he would endorse it, but it seems that these ideas are rumbling around in his brain, and leading him in a certain direction.
Here’s my attempt to put it all together. The audio is about 27 minutes. It’s nothing fancy. Just me talking.
I wanted to get this out of my head and out of the way, because it’s been a bit of an obsession recently, and I need my brain for other things.
What is more perplexing? Sitting in English class, thinking about that situation as an outcome of blind cosmic forces, or thinking about it as the outcome of the Divine Will. In the first case you are are just left with the unsatisfying answer: “It just happened.” In the second case, you go down one rabbit hole after another, entertaining a series of hypothesis of about: Why? Just consider all the people you have known who are absolutely convinced that their hypothesis about that question is the right one, and it will get crazy really fast.
To me there is a difference between “blind cosmic forces” and “blind material, mechanistic forces.” “Blind cosmic forces” could include things like panpscychism — or some other way to inject qualia. The idea of a mechanistic, clockwork universe producing the rich experience of sitting in English class pondering such things seems quite ridiculous.
When I called such forces “blind,” I meant “devoid of any consciousness.” I take this to be obvious, but I suppose other people understand words differently. Moreover, this would exclude a panpsychic understanding of these forces as I understand the terminology. If the forces are not conscious, they are not psychic (“soulish”). Most people I talk with understand the terms in question in this way. But anyway, the question is whether you are better off in English class thinking that your being there is just a result of the Big Bang, or you turn on your Crazy Brain and entertain all kinds of whacky hypotheses about why a Divine Power put you specifically in that time and place.
Another problem I have here is that you move from values to ethics as if they were the same. Aesthetic values, for instance, are not ethical values. But a lot of what we “value” is just something we desire, and nothing more.