My response to Cosmic Skeptic's video on Jordan Peterson
The video is linked bellow, but here is my response:
For Peterson, I suspect it's not merely that the highest place is God, but what is 'treated as God'; but that God i.e. the thing truly worthy of being called God, is not merely what we call God (for we might call something God when it is unworthy of the name i.e. we might make idols) but God is rather that thing which, when 'placed' at the highest of our hierarchy, results in an integrated set of values, and therefore which allows us to do all we do with all we are i.e. allows us to put the most effort into things. More to this though, when Peterson says that in the highest sense, God is the 'ultimate fictional character', we are left wondering what exactly it is that Dr. Peterson means by 'fictional character'; and in this case I don't think he means it in the sense that you would take it i.e. as something not real, but something conjured by the mind of man; rather he means it in that old sense of a 'myth' i.e. a story, but 'myths' in the old sense, did not inherently mean 'falsehood', but were rather meaningful stories whose truths were considered unclear to those who held ot them; they could be true, they could be false, but in some sense their truth or falsehood 'didn't matter' (on that level of analysis) because they had a practical realty, they were 'useful' so even if they were false. Peterson, as I see it, is an constantly switching between theism on the one side, where he holds (with the likes of C.S. Lewis) that Christianity is the 'true myth', and on the other side, he is an agnostic or negative atheist (whatever your preferred term) who is simply uncertain that theism is true; though he seems to lean more towards the theism side lately than the atheism side. Peterson seems to have a very strong sense of the mystery of philosophy; he realizes (if in different terms) that conceptual analysis (a key philosophical task) is something which takes time, and can at times be quite surprising, revealing deep connections that you hadn't expected to find ahead of time; and since he intuitively appreciates this fact, he is wary of committing to strongly to this or that way of saying something; especially on a matter as practically significant to so many things and so many people as God; as such when he does speak on other things like the bible, he's simply not yet sure if these things are true, and is not yet sure whether he personally believes them, and he doesn't come out and say that he's not yet sure about these things, because (and I'm speculating here but) because he's not yet sure about whether those two uncertainties have some deep logical and metaphysical tie and connection, since he's not yet sure of the philosophical ramifications of them being true if they are true, and in turn, of the God depicted in these stories being real if he is real, which he would be if they were true, because said God is in fact depicted in said stories; though as regards all of this he may at times think he is sure, and so be more sure than he is at other times; and so you'll sometimes here him say something like 'I can't believe I believe this' or such like. All of this might be thought of as (for lack of a better term) a kind of meta-uncertainty and a fluctuation in the degree of meta-uncertainty i.e. it is uncertainty not only about a certain fact, but even about one's own psychological state as it relates to the fact; in this case, due in part because one is uncertain about what the fact in question says about one's psychological state, if anything; so that one becomes unable even to articulate even one's own psychological state with fullness, clarity, and certainty, but rather in the process of attempting to articulate it, one feels as though one has to give up some aspect of it due to the meta-uncertainty i.e. one has to sacrifice clarity and/or certainty for fullness, certainty and/or fullness for clarity, clarity and/or fullness for certainty, and so forth, since to try to have all three in articulating one's own psychological state would be to assume that one knows more about the matter than one is certain that one in fact knows i.e. it is a kind of complex admission of ignorance, not so much of the truth or falsehood of a sentence, the historicity or fictionality of a proposed story, but more a hesitance about presuming certainty about the 'logical, psychological, and metaphysical implications' of the truth or falsehood, historicity or fictionality of a proposed sentence or story (and indeed, even the very coherence and meaningfulness of said sentence and story; for it may be so complex that it is hard to track it's consistency, so that where sometimes it may seem inconsistent, it may later seem to show itself meaningful; as often happens in particularly deep and well written narratives.) (So when he asks something like 'what do you mean by secular then' he's pointing out that he doesn't trust that the naturalists is on the same page as he is given the sorts of reductive statements he's inclined to make 'alongside' his claim to being secular; for there is a sense of secular that even a religious person can accept, and then there is a sense of which at which the religious person cannot; but then as one who is meta-uncertain about religion, he is inclined to think that you're presuming more certainty about a religious matter that he himself would hold for it, and so naturally goes directly into the properly philosophical approach to things i.e. he engages in the socratic method, he seeks from you, a specific conceptual analysis of the concepts you are using, since as you use them, you are presenting yourself as someone wiser than he considers himself on the topic, and so he, like Socrates, engages in that way of approaching such claims which is most fair i.e. it is skeptical of the claim, but open to it; which is why he asks the question in the first place, just as Socrates would do so to the people of Athens when seeking wisdom.) Regarding the 'deism' bit, I think all of your critique is answered by the fact that Peterson doesn't say you have to be deistic full stop, but that you have to be deistic 'in some sense', that qualifier indicates his meta-uncertainty, he's not trying to impose deism, he's trying to 'point at' a series of logical relations that have a non-negligible relationship to deism, and whose depth of relation and significance he is personally hesitant to presume to know. Peterson strikes me as a person reasonably wary of self-deception, so when he's not yet certain of a matter, but thinks the matter is still important enough to speak about despite his uncertainty, he will qualify his language so as to indicate his caution, but will none the less still be willing to speak with it as a matter of courage. One may perhaps argue that he isn't being cautious enough, and so is not courageous when he speaks, but foolhardy, but one could equally argue that he's being too cautious, and should rather fully commit to the position, os that he's not being courageous, but cowardly; others may not care much, and would just prefer that he either be silent or speak without qualification, that either would be better than his manner of speaking; perhaps one of these is the case, but I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt on such matters. And in light of that benefit the doubt, I'd say that there's a good chance that he's being as precise as he possibly can be, as regards to his opinion on these matters.
Here's the video link:
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