I watched this, I supposed you could call it a debate, yesterday. I was fascinated by how one sided it was. I'd heard another conversation between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, a sort of impromptu meeting at a university, and Dawkins had come off much better than Peterson. Each was respectful of the other but Dawkins had no patience for Peterson's inferences about meaning in recurrent mythological symbols in disparate cultures. This time, though, it was almost like a Jordan Peterson lecture in which Dawkins occasionally spoke to say that he wasn't interested in what Peterson was speaking about. And yet, by the end, incredibly, Peterson seemed to bring Dawkins around.
Peters expresses something I've long thought needed to be brought across to hard line atheists who tend to be so dismissive of religion as to see it as comical. Peterson articulates, and I think finally manages to convince Dawkins of, the importance of religion as an anthropological subject and in many ways a constructive phenomenon, regardless of whether or not one literally believes in a divinity. Peterson finally drags Dawkins into the epiphany via memes and how religious ideas are kinds of memes, which seems like a bit of an appeal to Dawkins' ego. It's basically pointing out to Dawkins that he is interested in the thing because he's most famous actually for rephrasing the thing.
I was a little shocked by Dawkins' admission that he knew little of scientific history and the relationship between Christianity and the development of science as a discipline. It made me wish I were there so I could show him the connexions between the Reformation, the Puritans in England, and the development of the Royal Society, all a continually refining process to find the methodology for determining observable, objective truth to the absolute best of human capability. But surely he must have read all this at some point? I simply can't believe that his education never encompassed that. Hell, if he'd just watched Cosmos, he ought to have some idea. I guess it goes to show atheists are as capable of selective perceptions as anyone. I've often thought that people who believe themselves most immune to unconscious bias and selective memories are the most susceptible to them.
Both Dawkins and the moderator try to get Peterson to definitively answer whether or not he believes in the miracles described by the bible, such as the virgin birth. I'm not the only one who clearly understands why Peterson avoids directly answering the question--I see even some of the commentators on the YouTube video picked up on it. He doesn't want to alienate his Christian fans. But he's certainly not being deceptive when he says such questions are kind of irrelevant, particularly the question as to whether or not Cain and Abel actually existed. As Peterson puts it very well, if Cain and Abel were real people, the characters described in the bible we have to-day would likely bear very little resemblance to them for all the changes and revisions the text went through over the centuries. It isn't important that those two brothers were real, it's important that they represent an obviously real, observable phenomenon in human behaviour. It is really strange that Dawkins, a man who came up with the concept of a meme, wouldn't be interested in stories that survive the centuries due to their enduring utility.
I don't think Peterson's interpretations are as inevitable as he seems to believe they are, though. I think the real debate ought to have been about how religious texts can just as well be utilised for twisted, oppressive interpretations. At the same time as scientific thought was developing in 17th century England, Galileo was imprisoned in Italy for his heretical observations. It was an interesting conversation but strange for a number of omissions.
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