The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
04 - Religion, Myth, Science, Truth
A discussion about Religion, Myth, Science and Truth. It was originally recorded by Transliminal in November 2015.
Find the original video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Ys4tQPRis&t
- 0:00 INTRO: PETERSON'S JOURNEY
- 9:45 RELIGION: CROWD-CONTROL, NAIVE SCIENCE, OR NEITHER?
- 10:08 "They're straw man arguments"
- 11:45 Multiple motivational systems, different levels of thinking
- 13:32 Fundamental presuppositions
- 14:13 Dawkins vs. Christianity: like a "smart 13 year old boy"
- 14:44 SCIENTISTS MISREADING RELIGION
- 15:52 Different systems of thought, different purposes
- 16:00 More than one basic assumption is possible
- 17:13 ENTER: DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES
- 17:19 What's real is what's persistent across time
- 17:33 Dominance hierarchies and lobsters
- 17:58 We're evolutionarily adapted to hierarchies
- 18:14 HIERARCHIES, RELIGIOUS THINKING, AND SUBJECTIVITY
- 18:42 "Being" as not reducible to material reality
- 19:12 The road to nihilism and authoritarianism
- 19:57 DETERMINING THE TRUTH OF A THEORY
- 20:07 Newton or Darwin? Choose one. You can't have both.
- 20:20 Nietzsche's "Truth serves life" is a Darwinian idea
- 20:38 No idea if our knowledge will help us survive over deep time
- 20:50 Answer to: "But look what we've built with it"
- 21:20 Crossing Ebola and Smallpox: some science is clearly insane
- 22:30 Check your assumptions about reality
- 23:45 Darwinism: truth is what enables survival within chaos, period.
- 25:03 Dawkins is a Newtonian not a Darwinian
- 26:09 Reductionism leaves things out. This has consequences.
- 27:27 The pragmatic problem: truth for what?
- 28:09 DEEP DARWINISM & RELIGION
- 28:15 Religion as evolved knowledge about action
- 29:40 American Pragmatist philosophers: the true Darwinians
- 30:17 Godel, the stock market and reality
- 31:02 TRUTH AS ACTION
- 31:44 Truth from the bottom up: lobsters, wolves, humans
- 34:27 Ethics: evolved patterns in dominance hierarchies
- 39:23 Dogs, chimps, and humans: hierarchy navigators
- 44:45 From dominance hierarchies to archetypes: ancient Egypt
- 52:36 The soul
- 55:50 Jung on Christianity, truth and speech
- 59:07 Truth versus the lie
- 1:00:52 THE INTELLECT
- 1:00:52 The totalitarian intellect
- 1:02:43 Have you made thinking your God?
- 1:03:38 Attention trumps thinking
- 1:04:11 EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS OF WESTERN RELIGION
- 1:04:33 Christ as a metahero
- 1:04:43 The deep roots of myth
- 1:07:00 Chaos monsters
- 1:08:55 Myth as behavioural truth
- 1:09:37 "Darwin trumps Newton"
- 1:10:02 "Dawkins is a rationalist...not a darwinian"
- 1:10:07 Darwinian time, Darwinian truth
- 1:13:57 Mesopotamian myth as successful behaviour blueprint
- 1:17:36 FROM NATURE TO HERO MYTHOLOGY
- 1:19:33 Religious stories model being as a field for action
- 1:21:13 Our religious task
- 1:21:47 Religion as hero mythology
- 1:22:30 "You...don't know that you know the story."
- 1:23:58 PIAGET AND PRE-RATIONAL MORALITY
- 1:25:16 We learn to act before we learn the rules
- 1:26:18 Moses the Judge: observer of emergent moral patterns
- 1:27:54 "Opiate of the masses" as naive industrial era thinking
- 1:28:43 METAPHORICAL THOUGHT
- 1:29:11 Hyperactive agency detection module: it goes deeper
- 1:31:00 The brain as archetype detection organ
- 1:32:08 Women are nature
- 1:33:48 Metaphor, myth and science
- 1:36:00 SCIENCE AND MORAL TRUTH
- 1:37:52 Are all scientists devoted to the truth?
- 1:39:44 How do we judge if science is ethical?
- 1:42:57 Evil as archetypically real
- 1:44:06 The reality of good and evil
- 1:45:09 Science and mythology: which is embedded in which?
- 1:48:17 EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND DEEP TIME
- 1:49:13 RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS: OPTIONAL?
- 1:49:20 Is God an old man with a beard in the sky?
- 1:51:12 Hurricane Katrina, corruption, and poverty
- 1:52:12 The significance of the bible
- 1:53:43 The genius of the sacrifice
- 1:55:50 INTERLUDE: TRIANGULATING MEANING
- 1:58:02 END OF RELIGION?
- 1:58:02 On new atheists' claims of a secular rational future
- 1:58:29 On new age spirituality
- 1:58:49 New atheist rationalist optimism so absurd it must be motivated
- 1:59:18 REDUCING RELIGION VS. EXPANDING EVOLUTION
- 1:59:40 "[The Jungian alternative]...is terrifying [for people]"
- 1:59:57 "[Jung's work]...puts enlightenment thinkers to shame"
- 2:00:17 "Which ideas have you? ... We're like playthings of the gods
- 2:01:09 JUNG: STUDYING INFORMATION, NOT MATTER
- 2:02:23 "If you study religion properly, it'll demolish your personality"
- 2:08:16 METAPHOR VS REALITY: NOT OBVIOUS
- 2:10:11 Ancients: phenomenologists, not scientists
- 2:12:24 Religion as spatial
- 2:13:24 HUMANS: EFFICIENT COMPLEXITY MANAGERS
- 2:13:48 Reality in terms of resolution
- 2:15:52 There's lots worse than death
- 2:16:46 On Becker's "The Denial of Death": smart but mistaken
- 2:19:40 Death's not the problem, it's complexity
- 2:21:06 THE MULTICULTURAL DIMENSION
- 2:27:35 FROM THEORY TO ACTION
- 2:28:40 Fixing what bugs you
- 2:29:30 Overcoming the lie
- 2:31:54 Peterson's experience with truth
- 2:34:45 The most powerful thing we can do