Navigating Belief, Skepticism, and the Afterlife | Alex O'Connor @CosmicSkeptic | EP 451
In the early church, there was a debate around the physicality of Jesus's resurrection. Yes, so the canonical tradition ends up stipulating that Jesus physically resurrects, and you must believe that; otherwise, you're a heretic. And that's part of the Catholic particular emphasis on the Divinity of the body. A lot of the Gnostic tradition says that the thing that that's being gotten wrong is the idea that there was this literal resurrection. Right? No, no, the kingdom of God is here and now. The resurrection is inside of you, and you attain it through gnostic knowledge. I mean, the Gospel of Thomas doesn't even mention the resurrection, doesn't mention the crucifixion; it's a list of sayings. Yeah, and the very form of that collection shows that these people believed that the thing that's important is not what Jesus did but what he said.
So I'm here today speaking with Alex O'Connor, who's flown in from London. I'm in LA. He's known also as Cosmic Skeptic, and he runs a podcast called "Within Reason," which you can subscribe to and listen to that podcast and watch it on YouTube. Alex was recommended to me by a friend of mine, John Verity, who is a professor along with me at the University of Toronto. I've done a lot of different public events with John, many conversations, and Alex has interviewed many of the people that I'm interested in, including Richard Dawkins. He is very interested in religious matters, although he's not a Christian, and we believed jointly that it would be useful for us to meet and hash out our differences in viewpoint and similarities and see if we could get together, move somewhere valuable and enlightening.
And so that's what we're trying to do. That's what we try to do with the conversation. It focuses mostly on the nature of belief; I suppose that's probably the easiest way to sum it up—what it means to believe something, what it means to have a religious belief, what it means to be committed to a belief. We talk fair about, too, a fair bit about the distinction between, let's say, the distinction between fact and fiction and the idea that fact reflects the real, but so does fiction. So welcome to the discussion of all that.
So first of all, thank you for coming here. It's a long way from London; we're in LA, and that's a long way. And so, in so far as you're going to disagree with me, I'm pleased that you're exhausted from the flight because that'll slow you down, and that'll be helpful. So anyway, seriously, thank you for coming.
Of course, let's start with this: Cosmic Skeptic. Right, okay, so how do you come up with the name and why the conjunction? And what's the advantages, if any, in relationship to the emphasis on skepticism?
I'll give you the official and the unofficial story. The official story is that "Cosmic" sort of implies the universe, space, big thinking, and "skeptic" situates me within a tradition of people who are interested in interrogating their beliefs to their fundamental grounding, in so far as that's possible. And "skeptic" is spelled with a K because most of my American listeners are American. The unofficial answer is that when I was younger, I knew a guy who was a musician and started a SoundCloud account with the word "Cosmic" in it. I thought, hey, that sounds like a cool word, and I was starting a YouTube channel. I wanted something that sounded cool, and I thought "Skeptic" sounded cool next to it, and I spelled it with a K because I got it wrong.
I see, okay, okay. Well, who knows the actual derivation then? It's a good combination, though, because it's catchy, so that's nice from a marketing side, but it also has this interesting illusion to the combination of revelation and critical thinking that actually makes up actual thinking. Right? Because the problem with being concerned with a vast plethora of ideas is that many ideas are misleading and wrong, and so you have to learn how to combine that openness and curiosity with the capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that's the utility of skepticism. I mean, it can degenerate into a kind of argumentative nihilism; that's the downside. But properly applied, it separates the wheat from the chaff, right?
And the purpose of that is to keep the wheat. Well, skepticism can only ever be essentially destructive because you're being skeptical of something somebody's putting something forward, and you're sort of responding to that with skepticism. And so for a lot of people, if skepticism is the thing that you do, then you sort of end up chipping away and ending up with nothing. Whereas skepticism is really supposed to be a tool that you use. It is destructive, but in the way that you might sort of carve a piece of marble. You're intending to get a statue out of it.
Yes, yes, well, that's the thing to always keep in mind—is skepticism in the service of something? Exactly, yeah, it's a tool. It's a methodological tool. You mentioned, too, and so I'm interested in your progression in your thinking in relationship to that because you mentioned just before we actually went on air that had you come to see me a couple of years ago, you might have been more inclined to—I'm putting words in your mouth to some degree, so correct me if I'm wrong—to strive for a victory or to make your point, something like that. And you alluded to the fact that your thinking around that has changed to some degree. I suspect that's probably a consequence of experience.
So what's changed? In part, it might have something to do with becoming a podcaster and speaking weekly to people, and you can't keep up that energy. You can, but it becomes totally unwatchable, and nobody wants to engage in that all the time. I think there are times when it's worth doing, and to be clear, I still like to disagree and do so essentially unapologetically and bluntly, and that can still come off as quite rude. But I think that the way that I would think about a conversation is that, well, what are we about to do here? A debate? We're about to debate an issue, and I'm going to try to win.
And that's not even, I mean, maybe there's sort of an element of pride in there. You want to win for that sake. But also you really think, well, I want to win because I think I'm right about this. And if I don't, then you know, I must have just not expressed myself properly. What I probably meant when I was saying that is that I would have had more of that cap on than now, after having so many conversations with so many people, and realizing that not only is it more constructive for myself; I've learned a lot more. You know, now I'm here like, hey, I might learn something today. That would be great, even if I just learn something about what your worldview is.
But also, people listening just unanimously say that they prefer it. It's a much better discussion. So one of the things you learn as a therapist, for example, is that being right is not very helpful, especially when you're trying to help someone, because whether you as the therapist are right has very little to do with the positive outcome for them. You still want to maintain skepticism, and one of the ways of doing that in a manner that's helpful is that if I'm talking to you and you say something I don't understand, that's the right place to be skeptical because if I don't understand what you said, well, it might be my ignorance, but it also might be a lack of clarity and pointedness on your part.
And so one of the advantages of disagreeing with someone is to point out to them in a positive way where they're lost in the fog, because if you're sufficiently lost in the fog, you tend to run into sharp objects, and that's not very pleasant. So, but the skepticism—and this is obviously what you alluded to—I would say as a consequence of learning from the podcast is the skepticism should be in service of rectifying your ignorance rather than in service of making your point or winning the argument. The problem with winning a bloody argument is that the victory can seduce you into thinking that you were correct.
And you're never sufficiently correct, right? Yes, and so I don't like debates fundamentally. I've never really enjoyed them. Probably when I was really young, before I was, I stopped doing this when I was about 23, I would take a certain amount of pleasure in being able to obtain intellectual victory. You know, it was also a way I defended myself when I was young, and it was effective. But it's not the optimal way to conduct a conversation. This is one of the reasons why people like Rogan are so successful, because Joe will push his point, but he always does it in the service of learning. Yes, he doesn't do it in the service of victory.
Yeah, I think you probably put your finger on it there. But what you were saying a moment ago about precision, about sort of thinking clearly and understanding somebody else clearly, I think the reason why I’m excited to speak to you today is because you're someone who celebrates being precise in your speech, and I've always appreciated your desire to make sure that you're really understanding what somebody else is saying. I've made attempts in the past to, I mean, my channel is mostly focused on the philosophy of religion. Yes, and I've made attempts in the past to try to understand your worldview, your religious worldview, and I made a video essay.
Some of the things I said there, I think at least one thing in particular, I'd probably think I was wrong about. But what I was trying to do there, I've seen that people would ask you on interviews and podcasts, you know, do you believe in God? Do you think that Christianity is true? And it was sort of you would sort of struggle to answer the question. And I thought to myself, well, people come at the question with a prior commitment about what they think truth constitutes. Yeah, that's a big problem there. There must be something important that's being left out of the sort of precondition of that question or conversation if it’s so unimaginably difficult to answer.
Well, I'll give you an example. I watched that essay this morning, right? And I also wanted to talk to you about your discussion with Dawkins. Yeah, so people say, ask me, for example, do you believe in God? And I think, well, I don't know what you are driving at with that question because I don't know what you mean by believe. Most modern people believe that a belief is a description of accordance with a set of facts. Sure, right? Well, I don't think that's what belief means in the religious sense in the least. So I just think that's a non-starter.
It has something to do with what you act out, right? It has to do with what you believe is what you're willing to die for fundamentally, is what you're committed to or live for. If you think about it as life in the most extensive manner, it's a matter of commitment. So I understand what you mean in the religious context. Religion is a big topic. Religion is a mighty area to be talking about. But when I talk about belief in a more mundane sense, like I believe that this chair exists, yeah, like that is a belief that I hold. I sort of can't help but that belief.
I can see it. Well, that's a place where your action and your statements align exactly. You believe in the chair and you're sitting in it; it's like fair enough. Which is why I totally agree when you say that what you believe might really be what you act out. But I think when people are looking for essentially definitions—and just a second ago you said, well, what is it to believe? And you said, well, what you believe is what you're willing to die for. Yeah, I'm not willing to die for my belief that this chair exists. Maybe, maybe in a broad sense. If not believing that the chair existed required me to sort of give up my trust in my sense data, right, then I might literally die by accident, by sort of walking off a cliff because I don't trust my eyes anymore.
So also, not something that you'd forgo given your role, let's say, as a rational skeptic, right? Seriously, like it's a commitment that you've made to a certain view of reality. But you understand surely that when somebody asks, do you believe in God? Although they’re asking, the sort of subject of the belief is a much more grand entity. The word belief itself for them, at least in their question—even if you think it's an inappropriate question—they mean something much more mundane. They mean, do you believe in...
Well, it's hard to know. It's hard to know what people mean. You know, like one of the things I've noticed, for example, is there are no shortage of Christian trolls, right? I mean, there are atheist trolls, and there's engineering trolls; there's lots of trolls, but there are Christian trolls. And the Christian trolls, when they ask that question, and it's often the Christian trolls who ask that question, what they mean is, are you in my club? Exactly, right?
And my answer is, I'm not even sure you know what club you're in. So there's a trap in the question, which I don't appreciate because I don't like questions that have traps in them. Now, not everybody who's asking that question has a trap, but many people do, and so I find that off-putting, let's say, because it's manipulative in terms of that descriptive belief. That's something we could go into; I think we should do that because it does get to the core of the matter that you were attempting to untangle, let's say, in your essay.
Yeah, I mean, my understanding of—and I had to sort of piece together different things you'd said in different interviews—and I suppose the reason I had to do that was because I didn't have you in front of me, so I'm grateful to have the opportunity now. It seems to me that when you speak of God, you mean something like that which is at the—I don't know if you'd rather say the basis or the top, the basis or the top. Both metaphors of a value hierarchy, and it begins with the recognition that anything that anybody does requires some kind of value, even just to do something as simple as sitting in a chair or picking up a glass. Well, you don't do anything without it being oriented towards a value.
Exactly, right. So even to perceive the glass, it's something you've spoken about before. You know, why do I see the glass as one object even though it's got multiple parts? It's got a side and a bottom and top. I see them together in a way that I don't see the cup and the table as one object. Well, you said before, it's because I can grip it. It's sort of functional. It's because I can use this cup, and the reason that I see it in that way is because I can then drink from it, and the reason that I want to do that is because I sort of value my health.
And there's sort of a value regress that goes on, and more broadly, this comes out in the question of like, you know, why you're writing an essay. To get a good grade? Or why do you want a good grade? To get a good job? Why do you want a good job? To get money? And you keep going back and back; it has to terminate somewhere. That's right, because otherwise, there would be nothing to sort of lend that value.
Well, otherwise you'd always be in an infinite regress, right? You just die? Question infinite, yeah, you literally—you know, it's the kind of regress in which the value that you have for A actually borrows the value from B. You don't value A at all without B, so it doesn't get it without B, and B doesn't get it without C and get it without—so that went on infinitely, there's nothing to give the entire sequence value in the first place. And so there's got to be something at the basis here. And then you said, at least on one occasion, that we'll call that place whatever's at the top there, we'll call it the Divine place.
And you said, we'll make that Y. Now, I'm kind of fine with this, but it seems to me that what you're doing is you're giving a definition of God that makes Him, or makes it Him, whatever, unavoidably exist and also makes it a quite different entity to the entity described by a great deal of, for instance, your Christian listeners, who will say that God is not the basis of a value hierarchy; God is an omnipotent, omniscient, agential being with consciousness that intentionally brings about human beings and sent down a physical man to sacrifice his life in order to save us for our sins.
Now, that means that when someone asks you, does God exist? And you say, well look, I think that's almost an inappropriate question. At times, you sort of imply that you don't even believe in atheists because you sort of act as if you believe in God if what you mean by God is just, well, we can call that—he, she, or it. The thing is, it's difficult though because here's the challenge, right? So you've got to understand that the physicality of God is an interesting question.
Yeah, in the Old Testament tradition, it seems to evolve as far as I can see. If you look at some of the earlier descriptions of God, you've got a God who walks through the Garden of Eden. Yeah, you've got a God who has a council of angels and the accuser; you have a sort of—it's being at least conceptualized as a much more physical being. And as time goes on, God becomes less localized, and I've heard a lot of theories as to why that's the case. I've just done an episode on my own show.
Yeah, I'm not sure that's true exactly. I don't think there's a clear historical progression like that; there is a constant tension between God as ineffable and God as manifest in a manner that's comprehensible. Right? And Eliade mapped the consequences of this out to some degree. So he was very interested in Nietzsche's proposition that God had died. Most people, including Nietzsche, regarded that as like a unique historical event; there was a religious tradition, the Enlightenment arose in consequence, we became skeptical about God, and in 1850, the philosophers decided that he was no longer necessary or real.
But Eliade, who is a brilliant historian of religions, has noted that this has happened many, many times, that God has vanished, disappeared. And one of his explanations for that is that a God that's too ineffable, so that's completely outside of the categories of time and space, let's say, and who doesn't make himself present as a being who doesn't have a heavenly council, who has no hierarchy between the pinnacle and earth itself, tends to float off into space, becomes so abstract that you can't have a relationship with him, and then he disappears.
In many ways, this is what Christianity provides with the New Testament and the figure of Jesus, and that's why I think for a lot of Christians, the more important question for you, and the question that they're interested in—and you're quite right that a lot of people are like, I want to get you on my team. I have no dog in this fight; I'm not a Christian, but I know that a lot of Christians are frustrated when they begin asking about Jesus, who's a much more physical entity, right?
It's a real human being; it's someone in flesh and blood; it's someone who's physically crucified by the very different questions. It's a very different question. And then, and then, is seen as a physical entity, at least according to the canonical tradition, by his disciples after he died. Yeah, so when somebody asks you, do you believe that that happened? And — when I've seen you asked about that question, you tend to still speak in terms of the psychological and the mythological.
I think the frustration is that, as you've just said, that Christians want to know about that regard either. Because the truth of the matter is, with regard to the gospel accounts, that the mythological and the historical are inextricably cross-contaminated. Sure, there's no pulling out the historical Jesus, right? That just—that's a non-starter. And why that is, I don't know. It's very mysterious; it's very hard to understand, as is the accounts of the Resurrection.
Okay, so what do I think about that? Well, I don't think that denying the historical reality of Christ is—I think that's just a fool's errand. I don't know why anybody would bother with it. So, a man exists called Jesus; we know that much. Now, Christ—there's a claim that is attributed to Christ, that he is the embodiment, or the incarnation, the fulfillment, let's say, of the prophet and the law. Yes, I think that's true.
Uh-huh, yeah. What does that mean? Well, you know, what did—I think it's in the Gospel of John. I think the Gospel of John closes with a statement that something like, if all the books that were ever written were written about the gospel accounts, that wouldn't be enough books to explain what all the things that Jesus did. Yeah, yeah, and it's—and there's a truth in that.
The truth is that profound religious account is bottomless, and the biblical representations are like that. There's no limit to the amount of investigation they can be, not least because the text in itself is deeply cross-referenced. So there's like, there's an innumerable number of paths through it. It's like a chessboard, and so it's inexhaustible in its interpretive space. That's true, and that's a problem, too, because it means it's also susceptible to multiple interpretations, including potentially competing interpretations.
I think a lot of people interpret Paul, for example, the earliest New Testament source, as saying that if Jesus did not literally rise from the dead, if there was not a man who stopped breathing and then started breathing again, then your faith is futile, and you're still in your sins. That is, Christianity is undermined. Now, that means that—and Paul doesn't say sort of believing that that's false is really bad; he says if you do not believe this proactively, then your faith is the problem.
I have to ask if you don't proactively believe that yourself, then I think when a Christian asks you, you know, do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus? Are you a Christian? I think you must be committed to saying no, at least under that interpretation of Paul. And even if you're not sure, I mean, it's fine if—I say to you, do you think that a man physically rose from the dead? And you say something like, well, I don't know; I mean, I wasn't there. But I think it has a lot of mythological significance, or I think that maybe it happened in a different sense, or it happened in the sense that good fiction happens, you know.
Then fine, but it needs to begin with that caveat of the simple sort of historically speaking, I don't know. And I know you don't like to pull out the historical Jesus. That's a good objection; it's an important question. No, of course, it's a very good question. So, I just did a seminar on the gospels with a crew of about eight people, and it was the same crew that walked through Exodus with me, with a couple of variations, and we spent a lot of time on the resurrection accounts, for example.
And of course, that was the toughest, let's say; that was the toughest morsel to chew and digest. The thing about the resurrection accounts is that they're all—look, so I could say something like this, which will just annoy people, but it doesn't matter. I believe the accounts, but I have no idea what they mean. When you say you believe the accounts, do you mean—and I hate to be sort of pedantic here; it seems pedantic, but do you mean you believe that these are things that happened such that if I, if a—I know you don't like that.
Let me put it this way: if I went back in time with a Panasonic video camera and put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, would the little LCD screen show a man walk out of that tomb? I would suspect yes. So, that to me seems like a belief in the historical event of the resurrection, or at least of Jesus leaving the tomb, which means that when somebody says, you know, do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, it doesn't seem clear to me why you're not able to just say it would seem to me yes.
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I mean, I suppose one—look, look, here's—let's approach this obliquely. Let's say the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Yeah, okay? People will say, well, do you believe that happened literally, historically? It's like, well, yes, I believe it. Okay, okay, what do you mean by that that you believe that exactly?
Yeah, so you tell me, you're there in the way that you describe. What are the fish doing exactly? The answer is, you don't know. You have no notion about it at all; you have no theory about it, sure. So your belief is—what’s your belief exactly? I think a Christian might say something like, my belief is that I have no idea looking at those fish what I would see in the process of them being converted into enough food for the 5,000 to eat. I have no idea what I would see, but I do know that what I would see is the fish end up being spread amongst the 5,000.
In the same way, if I opened up the water jar, what would I see when the water became wine? I have no idea. Does it sort of blend from one color into another? Does it suddenly snap? Does it disappear and then reappear? I don't know. But what I do know, as a Christian, is that I would see something at some event in which when I look at the beginning, it's water, and when I look at the end, it's wine. And I mean actually, I don't mean that Jesus turning water into wine is some kind of, you know, inextricably mythological story and the question of whether it happened sort of doesn't matter.
Or maybe it happened in a meta manner, or maybe it happened in a hyper-reality sense? I'd be as a Christian more inclined rather than to believe, I'm more inclined to understand, and then when I hit the limits of my understanding, I think I don’t understand that. Now, do I believe it or not believe it? I think often, especially with regard to biblical matters, let's say I just—I have a suspension of belief and disbelief.
Yeah, that's fine, too. I think part of the reason that I've been able to be an effective interpreter of the biblical texts and a relatively scientific interpreter is because I approach the texts with respect, the same respect that I would approach a lab animal. It's like I don't know what this is like. I seriously don't know, and I'm not going to come at it with axiomatic assumptions that are unquestionable. I'm going to try to see what's right in front of my eyes.
I'm going to try to see what mystery reveals itself if I take this phenomenon seriously. This is one of the things that I find puzzling, for example, about Dawkins, because Dawkins formulated the idea of a meme, which is, by the way, the same idea as an archetype. It's exactly the same idea, except he just stopped. It's like, okay, there are memes; they're selected for. Okay, selected on what basis exactly? Does that mean there's a hierarchy of memes? Are the memes more likely that are—the memes that are conserved more likely to be, what would you say, viable organisms?
And if they're viable organisms, are they microcosms? This is really interesting in terms of the survivability because there's a point—I’ve spoken to Richard Dawkins, well, a number of times but twice on my podcast. And the second time, somebody pointed out to me that there might be a point of agreement between you two that has been overlooked, which is that I don't know if you’ve ever come across the evolutionary argument against naturalism or the argument from reason, the idea that if you're a materialist, you can't trust your reasonable faculties.
So Alvin Plantinga formulated this very well, very brilliantly, I think, in saying that if you believe that evolution by natural selection happens materially, what does natural selection select for? Survivability, so if you're a materialist, that means that the very rational faculty that you're using right now evolves not to be sensitive to truth but to survivability. Yes, that's right. And if that's the case, then why do you believe in the truth of evolution?
Well, because you’ve been rationally convinced of it, but the thing that you just assented to, the belief itself has just undercut the process by which you—that belief. There's a whole—New England pragmatists figured this out in like 1880. Now, I think this is fascinating. I think it is. It's exciting, that's for sure. That's for sure. It's actually a point where Darwin and Newton do not come together.
How do you mean? Well, the Darwinian definition of true and the Newtonian definition—so, here's the thing. Here's the thing. You had a conversation with Sam Harris. You've had a number, but one of them—I don't think it was a live event; I think it was before that. You're talking about truth. Yeah, and the first or second talk I had with him, it was extremely—I mean, do you know? It was awkward to listen to because it felt very much like—and I remember at the time thinking, you know, what is this?
This Jordan Peterson talking about, like, truth is like—Darwinian truth is about like survivability? What do you mean? Truth is true? True the way an arrow flies? Yeah, right. And now I asked Richard Dawkins about the evolutionary argument against naturalism. I said, well, how can you know that what you believe is true? And he said, because believing true things makes me more likely to survive.
Hey, boy, watch where you go with that at the time, but I thought to myself afterward—it was one of my commenters on Patreon, actually, had mentioned he was listening to Rich. And I said, but you know, but okay, maybe—but sometimes it's at least possible that something that's false helps you to survive. You know, the rustling in the bushes, believing that that's a lion every time or a tiger, even if it's not—that helps you to survive because that one time that it is, you're still going to run away.
And it costs you nothing to run away when it's not a tiger, so believing it's a tiger, even when it's not, is going to help me. That's why we have a negativity bias. Yeah, and D says, well, yeah, of course, there are some circumstances where believing something false could be beneficial to survival. And I said, well, how do you know that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is not one of those?
And it seemed as though he was—he was just saying that believing that would not be advantageous to our survival, which might well be true, but if that's the case, then suddenly I'm listening to what you're saying about truth being more sort of Darwinian and related to survivability, and I think maybe you two would agree there. And I think, well, why is it that when you sit down with Richard Dawkins, you find it difficult to have a conversation with each other?
And well, I think it's partly because we don't know each other very well. That's right. And so—and also, there are things he knows that I don't know, and there are things I know that he doesn't know. Now, I would say in my defense that I—what would you say? I'm more aware of the things he knows that I don't know than he is of the things I know that he doesn't know, right?
So, for example, as far as I can tell, Dawkins doesn't know anything about the Jungian tradition of literary interpretation, and that actually, if you're going to talk about religion, that's actually a fatal flaw, right? So—you know, he's called me, for example, drunk on symbols. It's like, well, the imagination is a biological function, and it has a structure and a purpose, and it has its own logos, its own intelligible order, and if you're not aware of that order, that doesn't make me drunk on symbols; it just means you don't know what you're talking about.
Now, that frustration that you appeal to there when you hear Richard Dawkins, I think Terry Eagleton said that listening to Dawkins on theology is like listening to somebody who wrote a book about biology whose only knowledge of the subject is having once read the Great British Book of Birds. Okay, fair enough, but that actually turns out to be a real problem, and it's a problem with regards, even to the meme idea because you don't have to extend Dawkins' work very far to understand that religious stories are memes.
Sure, right, yeah. Well, and there's a hierarchy of memes, and some of them are very functional, but then, here's the thing: like that frustration that you're sort of throwing in that direction—I think people throw it towards you. And when you say, well, religion—you don't have to look very far to see that religion is a meme. Well, without further clarification, and of course, this is going to be it—you can understand why to somebody first listening that sounds almost atheistic or—religion is a meme? No! Religion is not a true historical account of, you know, the history of the universe.
It's not a true historical account; it's a meme. Now, when you say that, when you say that the resurrection of Jesus, well what does it mean historically that the spirit of God brooded upon the primordial waters? Like what does that mean? Historically? No one—no one knows what that means; historically, I think. I don't think that at least most of Genesis or parts of Genesis are supposed to be—I mean the Bible is a library, right? It's not a book. And that means that it's going to contain different genres, that's for sure. And so when when some of them are more historically accurate, and some of them tilt more towards words, that kind of elusive—I don't mean elusive in the—I mean A-L-L-U-S-I-V-E, right?
That elusive and symbolic form that characterizes Genesis one. So because there are different genres here, it depends on what story we're talking about. And I think what I often observe you doing is we might talk about Christianity, and if you aren't comfortable committing to a historical ideal, you'll start talking about the spirit moving over the face of the waters, which is obviously a much more mythological ideal. And not quite equivocating them, but moving between them too quickly and not delineating them enough.
So if I asked you, you know, do you think that the spirit moved across the face of the waters? And you said to me something like, I think it's still happening. Right? What I would say is, hey, fair enough; yeah, that makes sense. It always happens; it happened at the beginning of time, and it's always happening. When somebody says, did the Exodus story happen? Did the Jews enslaved in Egypt break free of their slavery and move to the promised land across the desert for 40 years—did that happen?
You have also said of the Exodus specifically, it's still happening. Now, to me, that's far more inappropriate than saying that the spirit is still moving across the face of the waters because I think what people mean there is, do you believe that these people in that time period actually did this in such a way that, for instance, might show up in an archaeological report?
Well, I think that the simple answer to that is probably sure. And that's fine, too. But then—but we don't know. I mean, like to the degree that there's been archaeological investigations into the kinds of biblical narratives that you've described, the archaeological evidence tends to fall on the side of historical accuracy in relationship to the Bible quite surprisingly often.
Clearly, you spent more time in Exodus than probably any person I've ever met in person, right? Clearly, the story sort of captivates you, and you think it's really important. And can a lot of, of course, it's an infinitely deep story. I think most people speaking to you already know that you think that, right? And so when they ask you a question, when they suddenly say to you, but do you think it really happened? Well, what the hell does that mean?
You must know that what they mean is what I was talking about a second ago, which is that sort of—what? Okay, so fine. So it's easy just to turn this around. It's like, okay, what exactly happened in your historic account when Moses encountered the burning bush? I don't need to know exactly what happened. What I need to know is I'm not asking you specifically or attacking you for that.
What I need to know is that if I sort of went to the Egyptian desert at sort of the time that this story is alleged to have taken place in history, would I see a mass movement of Israelites from Egypt into the promised land? Would I see people with feet walking through the desert, leaving foot? Well, let's take it part rationally. So—but you also understand that when someone's asking that, and you want—like, even if you don't like the question, you must understand what someone's asking.
I understand many of the things that they're doing simultaneously. You must also understand that when you then say it's still happening, people just go, what are you talking about? Yeah, well, I would say that's not my problem. But it becomes a problem when you understand that someone's asking a quite banal historical question. Yeah, but you don't get to do that.
But why not? Because the stories that you're dealing with aren't banal. I agree, but like, take a piece of trivial fiction like "Forrest Gump," right? We say, like, okay, did that happen? Now, I think that what you probably say is something like, well, I don't think the events literally occurred, but I think that they obviously get at something that's sort of perennially true about human nature.
Suppose I said, is JFK—the, like that part of that specific part of that story—is it is it true that JFK was the president? Right. And you would probably just say, yeah, yeah. You wouldn't say anything more complicated. And even though the subject as a whole of like, is "Forrest Gump" true? Is "Hamlet" true? That's a complicated question. Very. But specifically, when I say, ah, but interestingly, there's this—there's this little point I want to make in this broader discussion: do you think that JFK was actually the president? You would say yes.
Why do you think it matters to people? Like, I don't know. These are ancient accounts, let's say. Maybe that's the biggest problem. Maybe that's the biggest problem that you have with the people who are asking these. It is why—what is the point you're trying to make here? The point is—I know what the point usually is: people who are asking the question believe that "true" in their mind means objectively happened in history, like the things that we're seeing right now happen.
It's like, well, no, that's not how—that's not what those stories are like. For me, some of it is. But for a Christian when asking you that, it's probably because for them they have an understanding of Christianity that requires believing in that kind of truth. For me, and the reason why I hope that me asking these questions will be less frustrating to you is because I have no desire for that. I don't care about that.
I'm genuinely just interested in what you think. And so my desire to know whether you think Exodus historically happened goes no further than a point of interest about your beliefs. So there are elements of the—especially the setup to the Exodus story that strike me as very, very plausible historically. So, for example, the Jews before the Pharaoh of that time were under the guidance and protection of Joseph and the previous Pharaoh, and they regarded the Israelites as benefactors because they had—Joseph had helped save the kingdom and his people were welcome, but that was forgotten.
And so the new Pharaoh and the new Egyptians regard the appallingly successful Jews as destructive interlopers, and they make them slaves. It's like, well, can you believe that? It happens all the time; it's happening right now, so it's very—this particular case, saying it's very plausible is like saying something like, well, yeah, it could have happened. I don't know.
Well, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows. So when somebody asks, did the Exodus really happen? That word really—when they say "really" is the—is the—if I said, did the Exodus happen? And, and I'd understand why you would then say, well, you've got to understand what kind of story this is. Fine, but then if somebody says, yeah, but did it really happen? Which parts of it? Even if they're not expressing it very well, like what they're getting at there is they're trying to emphasize the historicity; they're trying to say, but did it historically happen?
Probably is what they mean by the word really there, right? But the thing is it speaks of their—see, they have a—the problem is is that Christians who ask that have a metaphysics that's not Christian. It's a nonstarter, the question. It's like you're asking me the question that a materialist atheist would ask, and you want me to give you an answer that bolsters your faith, but the presumptions of your question are Enlightenment atheistic.
So it's like, I don’t know how to play that game. So do you think that to be a Christian, you don't need to believe in the historicity of the Exodus or the resurrection of Jesus, for example? Well, I think those are separate issues, actually.
Okay, yeah, that's probably right as well. And interesting, you know, I spent last night—is a bit of a time delay, so it feels like longer, but last night, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. I said, you know, I'm speaking to Jordan Peterson tomorrow. I was thinking, how can I prepare for this? And we ended up—my friend, Sheen’s his name—we ended up having a conversation about whether Hamlet is real, right?
And that was probably better preparation than anything else I could have done. What I realized—question—so take—if somebody asks me, you know, was Hamlet a real person, sort of naively—I say, have you heard the story? Oh no, is that a real person? I would say no. However, there is a sense in which—and I'm trying to understand what you're saying here—there is a sense in which there are a lot of characters, infinitely many characters that Shakespeare never wrote about, right?
Those characters seem to exist less than Hamlet does. Yeah, even if Hamlet exists less than Jordan Peterson or Alex O'Connor do in the—in "Hamlet," might exist more than me and you. Well, okay, one of the things you pointed to in the analysis that you did of a talk I had with Jonathan Pease is my somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment that God is the ultimate fictional character, yes? Right?
Which I think is a hilarious line, by the way, yeah. But which, by the way, I think I misunderstood. Now that I’ve been watching that back, that's the thing I say. I think I might have misunderstood, and maybe that's what you you're about to tell me. I should interrupt. Let's walk through that. Yeah, because people see—and this is part of this underlying materialist atheist Enlightenment ethos—people think that fiction and fact are opposites.
It's like no, they're not. Okay, not at all. Okay, so let's use an analogy to begin with. What's more real, things or numbers? Okay, now I'm not going to make a case for either of those positions. I'm just saying that's an actual question. Yeah. You talk to mathematicians—they think, well, numbers are way more real than things. Things are evanescent; they disappear; they flash in and out of existence. Numbers are permanent.
And then you could think about it biologically. It's like, well, how useful is numeracy to survival? Like, very. Right. When you become numerate, you're powerful in a way that the mere grip you have on the individual facts doesn't afford at all. So there are forms of abstraction that are clearly more real than the things from which they’re abstracted, or at least as real, I would say. More real, sure.
They're so powerful. Well, fiction is an abstraction. Sure, right? And so Hamlet—did Hamlet exist? It's like, Hamlet is the pattern of character that existed in multiple people over a very long period of time. And so Hamlet is an abstraction, like Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment." Did Raskolnikov exist? It's like Raskolnikov existed in the soul of every Russian from like 1850 to 1990, right? And so is it real? It's like it’s hyper-real.
Yeah, fiction is hyper-real. It’s a meta-truth, as you put it. Is that real? Well, when someone says is that—if they've listened to what you've just said and understood it, then if they still ask the question, but is it real, you must understand that what they mean is like, you know, did a woman—did Aliona Ivanova get hit in the head with an ax? Right, like yes, or did that happen?
And again, you could still resort to saying, you know, it happened in the heart of every Russian who's ever thought about it. To that specific, no, right? No is the answer. And so—and we can say no with confidence because we know that that Doki sort of thought this up.
Yeah. With something like the Egyptians walking through the desert, we can't as confidently say something like no, that didn't happen. But we'd have to be more humble in saying something like I don't know. But the comparison I made in this video, I put two questions side by side. You were asked by Douglas Murray, you know, did Raskolnikov exist? And you say, well, I think that the events literally didn't happen, but that kind of misses something. And there's something more to talk about.
And then you asked about Cain and Abel, you know, the story of Cain and Abel happened, like a famous—you know, the question did that happen? You know, begs the question if you've got to—You've got to—what’s the word? You’ve got to—a way that it seems strange to me that the ease with which you were able to say of Raskolnikov and Diki, well, no, that didn't happen, of course. But you've got to understand that there's another sense in which we've got to talk about the truth of the story.
Well, the Cain and Abel story is quite complex. Sure, you could imagine easily that there was a fratricide at some point in the past that was of sufficient emotional magnitude to have stories aggregate around it, to have an account aggregate around it. So it's easiest to presume that there—for—because why not? It's perfectly plausible that a primordial murder of that sort happened in the memory of that tribal people and was represented in that manner.
As the account, and Eliade has done a very good job of pointing out how this develops too—you could think of an idea of mythologization of stories as an extension of Dawkins' idea of the meme because Eliade discusses in great detail how an account mutates to what would you say to be maximally memorable across time. So it mutates; you can take—there was a core that's true, let's say, in that—in the narrow historical sense, but the account mutates to be optimally adapted to the structure of memory that characterizes the humanity, and that comes out in a story like that, like the story of Cain and Abel.
Right, and you get a maximally memorable story. Now that's a meme, is it true? That’s a hard question because you see I think Cain and Abel probably belongs more on the sort of brooding over the face of the waters category than it does the Exodus category, for example. Like, I think we—well, there’s very little detail in it that would make it a specific historical event, right? I mean, because it’s two generic brothers and there’s a generic murder, but it’s—it’s interesting too, because even in the case of a specific fratricide, let’s say, that actually happens in the world, well, there are all sorts of principalities involved in the background, right?
So, for example, I spent a lot of time looking at Dylan Klebold's accounting of his mental state before shooting up the Columbine High School. Yeah, well, you know if you read that, it’ll make your blood run cold. He’s obviously possessed, whatever that means. Whatever that means—is it being happy to accept the words? Possessed? Well, look what he did, knowing—in part, I don’t take this the wrong way—knowing that I’m speaking with you, I’m not going to take that as literally as I would if I was speaking to a non-literal reader.
Well, it’s a very hard thing in a circumstance like that because he invited something in, and it wasn't pleasant, and it had its way with him, right? And the results, although dreadful, were nowhere near as dreadful as he was hoping they would be. Right, it’s dark. And is that real? So what happened there? It’s like, well, one way of describing it is that, you know, an alienated young man shot up a high school.
Another way of representing it—which may be more true—is that it was another, what would you say, punctuated episode of a cosmic drama that's been going on forever. It isn't obvious to me at all which of those two accounts is more real. Well, it depends on what specific question is being asked for example, right? Now suppose that you were a witness to this crime and the police pull you into questioning as a witness. Yeah.
And they say, we’re trying to gain information to try and you know catch the suspect’s suppose that there’s no suicide involved; you know the suspects at large. They’re trying to get your help, and they say, so Dr. Peterson, what happened? And you say, well, I think what happened was the continuation, sort of a punctuation in the long paragraph of, of the cosmic drama that is our human existence. And they go, well, that’s not what we meant, okay. But like, come on, help me out here, man.
And I think that's—that’s to do with the real question. Well, that's a level of analysis, so we went back when we started this discussion, you talked about the infinite regress for purposes for writing an essay—right? So what are you doing when you're writing an essay? Well, you're making horizontal and curved marks with a pen. Sure, right. But, but there is a—a cosmic tree of events in every micro event, right?
And when people, when they're looking for eyewitness testimony, they're asking you for something like the highest possible level of narrow resolution you can manage in Miguel Chris just, uh, yeah, right? Well, I just spoke with him, and unfortunately, I think we lost about half of the footage, so I'm not sure how, how much that will be seen in the world. But he brought to my attention I’m sure he said it was John Ruskin who talked about having a—you see, in the garden, you see like a square, and you think it's a—you think it's like a white square in the garden inexplicably.
And then you go a bit closer and you see—it's actually a page, it's a book. And then you look a bit closer and you see it's got words on it. Then you a microscope and you see actually it's got like ridges, you know. And then you go a bit closer and you actually see atoms bumping into each other, and you go a bit closer and you see sort of waves and energy, right?
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Right, well, and the thing is, is that that hierarchy that you just described is the cosmic tree of life. This is Idriel. It’s like you have got the quantum level, and the atomic level, and the molecular level and so forth, up to the phenomenal level—that’s not where it stops. I started to understand this when I was thinking something very peculiar, this is decades ago. I thought people will go to a museum to look at Elvis Presley's guitar.
Yeah, it’s like, what the hell are they doing? So you can imagine that you have a—a display case and you have Elvis's guitar in it, and now you take that guitar out, let's say it's a mass-produced guitar just for the sake of argument. You replace it with an identical model from the same year. Yep. Okay, now is that Elvis’s guitar? And people will say—and you can think this so strange—people would say, well, even if I couldn't tell the difference, I would rather look at Elvis’s guitar.
Yeah. And then you think, well, what is that? Some kind of delusion? Like, what the hell’s going on here? No, the answer is—this is what Duchamp was on about when he—I think it was Duchamp who put the urinal in the art gallery, right? What he was pointing to—and it was brilliant—was that much of what we perceive as concretely real is actually dependent on a hierarchical context that isn't part of the apprehension of the object.
So when you go to see Elvis’s guitar in a museum, the perception is informed by the context. It’s like, well, you’re an Elvis fan and you know a lot about Elvis's history and you know that this is Elvis's town and the object itself partakes in that higher order unity. That’s the unity that extends off to Heaven. Every object partakes in that embeddedness above—like for the reductionist types, you’d say, well, what’s this made of? Right?
It's like, well, it's molecules, and then it’s atoms and then like quantum, whatever the hell exists down at the quantum level—that’s what this is made of. It's like, wait a second, it’s on this table, it’s in this room, it’s of this time. That’s all this thing, you know, and that’s—the problem with the reductionist view is it doesn’t take that into account and that’s a big problem.
I think it's true that, you know, looking at Ruskin's book, the piece of paper—it would be silly to always say, well, what’s that in the garden over there? Oh, it’s a bunch of atoms bumping into each other. Right? That would be ludicrous. Well, that's also—so back to our discussion of Darwinian utility. It’s like, well, it's the wrong level of functional analysis. Surely it would also be inappropriate to do the opposite.
That is, to always think at a higher resolution than people are obviously sort of practically trying to. So for example, if I was close enough to see and I was interested in in what paper is made of and I said, what is this? And someone said, oh, it’s a white square in the garden. Yeah. So, well, that’s inappropriate; you’ve gone too focused down, right?
And I feel like where you might criticize the reductionist materialist for going to go to too high a resolution, you go too wide on issues of religious historicity. Well, you want to hit the target squarely, right? And that’s hard. So in "The Sermon on the Mount," Christ addresses that to some degree. So his injunction for paying attention properly takes local and distal into account simultaneously.
He says, okay, this is what you have to do—first of all, you orient yourself, so this is the highest level of orientation, right? So this is the divine orientation. It's the thing at the top of Jacob's Ladder. It’s the value at the pinnacle of the value hierarchy; you put what's properly highest first and foremost in the theater of your imagination, right? And then you align that with the belief that other people have the same intrinsic value as you and that are a reflection of that infinite value. You start there; then you pay attention to the moment.
Yes, right, Tolstoy wrote about this in his confessions. He was, he sort of, he was—I love it. It’s like 100 pages long; you can read it in one sitting. Yeah, it’s a great book. This wonderful account of essentially him trying to battle with his reason and his faith, and he eventually concludes that he was looking in the wrong place—he was looking amongst intellectuals.
And he found that he looked—and he quite dismissively called like the simple people, your everyday person, working man. And he found that it was something about sort of, you know, if you take someone who’s starving and you bring him, and you tell him to sort of take this metal pump and just pump it up and down and don’t tell him why, and he does it, then the water starts flowing.
It’s like you have to actually do the thing; you have to live out the thing, and then you get to see why it works. So it's, you know, I understand that. I think that's probably true. He also says in that same account that he found that there was an exactly inverse correlation between the specificity of an answer and like the importance of the question. I can tell you exactly how many molecules are in that glass of water, but who cares, right? It’s not relevant.
And the more the question becomes about, you know, humanity, human life, the important stuff, the less specific the answer necessarily has to become. So I understand there is a—you’ve alluded there to—or indicated the relevance of value for perception, right? You nailed it with that observation because, as you pointed out, any phenomena can be analyzed at a multitude of levels of the hierarchy that it exists within.
Okay, so what makes the choice of level of analysis appropriate? Well, it’s something like, it’s something that’s akin to Darwinian utility. It’s something like that you can think about it less abstractly—it’s that you want the level of resolution that gives you maximal functional grip in relationship to your pursuits.
Okay, so what’s your pursuit? Well, two questions: what is your pursuit and what should your pursuit be? Well, your pursuit's necessarily nested inside a hierarchy of pursuits. And when I said that God is the, what would you say, the ultimate pursuit that sits at the apex of the progression of pursuits, that is Jacob's Ladder—that's what that’s indicating in that vision—is that every act of perception unites earth and heaven.
And the perception itself is invisibly dependent on whatever it is you’re worshiping. Like, here’s one problem, right? Because I think I see what you’re saying, and I hope you know what I tried to do in making that video essay about your religious views. And I suppose I wasn’t—the main thing I was trying to do was sort of offer an interpretation, trying to get to grips with it. And I hope that you feel as though at least I’m making an effort here to intuitively—to really try and get what you’re thinking at.
One problem is that, you know, in the early church, there was a debate around the physicality of Jesus's resurrection. Yes, so the canonical tradition ends up stipulating that Jesus physically resurrects, and you must believe that; otherwise, you're a heretic. And that's part of the Catholic particular emphasis on the Divinity of the body.
Which has a real wisdom rather than a disembodied soul. You're also—you also have like the Gnostic tradition, broadly speaking. The Gnostic tradition in early Christianity is so popular that Valentinus nearly becomes the bishop of Rome. He's nearly the Pope. And I talked about this the other day, and I should have looked it up; I can't remember which Church Father it was that was telling the church community—the early Church community—when you go to a new place, don't ask to be taken to the Christian church or to be taken to the Catholic church, because otherwise, you might end up in a Gnostic church. It was so popular.
Right, right. And a lot of the Gnostic tradition says that the thing that’s being gotten wrong is the idea that there was this literal resurrection. Right? No, no, the kingdom of God is here and now; the resurrection is inside of you, and you attain it through gnosis.
I mean, the Gospel of Thomas, which is probably the most famous non-canonical gospel and could have been written at the same time as the Gospel of John, this early text doesn't even mention the resurrection, doesn't mention the crucifixion. It’s a list of sayings. Yeah. And the very form of that book—as one scholar whose name I've forgotten, unfortunately, has pointed out—that collection shows that these people believed that the thing that’s important is not what Jesus did, but what he said.
The thing that’s important is the knowledge. The thing that’s important. And so this resurrection stuff sort of doesn’t matter. Now, the thing is, in that early church community, somebody who said, well, this question of like the resurrection as a physical, you know, historical event—that you’re kind of missing the point. The thing that matters is like, you know, the resurrection that takes place inside of every person.
It sort of sounds a little bit like the kind of approach that you would take now if that’s true. That would mean that in the early church you’d have been condemned as a heretic. So when a modern Catholic says to you, you know, Jordan Peterson, are you a Christian? You know, what do you think about Catholicism? I think that the reason that they’re interested is because if it’s true what I’m saying, then they would have to say, oh, I suppose at least according to my understanding of Catholic, that’s a count you number.
So I think that’s probably why people are interested, and I wonder if—well, that’s a genuine form of inquiry for sure. And I wonder if you feel like you’re—I mean, I don’t know. One of the things I really like about the bodily tradition of the resurrection is that it—I see what it does that’s so remarkable is that it doesn’t desacralize the body.
That's very, very important. You know, the—I think the fundamental problem with Gnosticism is that it becomes very easy for it to become a doctrine that’s contemptuous of the body and contemptuous of the material world. A great deal of the Gnostic tradition literally believes that the material world is created by an evil demiurge. Right, exactly.
Exactly, exactly. Jesus to save us. The insistence on the bodily resurrection is a medication against that, and it’s an effective one. I would really love to ask about Genesis. This might be a bit of a tangent, and tell me if it's uninteresting to you, but there's one Gnostic text called the Testimony of Truth that was discovered in the Nag Hammadi library, and this is buried probably around 300 AD, so it must be earlier than that.
It's a fairly early text, and this text identifies the serpent in the Garden of Eden with Christ. And this is fascinating to me because when I read this, it leads to illumination. Yes, tradition that makes the serpent a higher God than the original God because he’s the agent that calls to conscience.
Yeah, now of course, the serpent doesn't—is never identified as Satan or the devil except by Christian tradition. It’s just the serpent. Now there’s so much interesting about this when I first read the Genesis. Well, even the classic Christians often regarded the fall as the—I would say the faithful but heaven-sent error that made the incarnation of Christ both possible and right.
So there's—it's very interesting because there’s a gloss on that where even in traditional Christianity, it becomes—that's right, it gives you Christ. And Jesus makes himself quite clear; that's one of the passages, actually. Sorry, I don't want to derail you from your tangent, but that’s one of the passages that I’ve concentrated a lot in this new book that I’ve just finished. We who wrestle with God, because that equation that Christ manages with his identification with the serpent in the desert—that is so stunningly brilliant that I cannot possibly imagine how anyone could have thought it up.
It's to identify him with the source of the poison, that to gaze upon what would you say redeemed the Israelites in the desert. It’s so—there's so much in that that it’s—it’s really a kind of miracle that serpent on the stake—that's the same symbol.
Yeah, that just in itself is something stunning. There is something amazing that I think—well, obviously I’m not going to go as far as saying that I can’t imagine that was thought up maybe not by somebody. It’s complicated with the Bible, of course, and there’s a lot to say there. I mean, the author of the Gospel of John is obviously a sort of theological genius in the way that the authors of the synoptic gospels at least weren’t as much.
So you know it’s believable to me that that could be the case, but that's another complicated thing to talk about. But when I first—I it wasn't the first time, but the first time I really tried to read the Genesis account of the garden of Eden, and I was doing it in the service of sort of producing a video, I was, I want to make sure I want to revisit the story, make sure I sort of understand it properly.
I'm reading this text, and God says, you must—you can eat of any of the trees, but not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And immediately you think to yourself, why not? You know, why wouldn’t—and some people like to say, oh, it’s because that’s actually by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you get to dictate morality.
It doesn’t read like that to me; it reads to me like knowledge of good and evil—let’s just take it at face value to start with—it’s like why not, God? Why not? Well, we’re not told, but don’t do it, because in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. Yeah, now the serpent comes along, and the serpent is described as more cunning than any of the animals that God created.
Yeah, I don’t speak Hebrew unfortunately, but where it says more cunning than any of the beasts that God had created could mean of all of the beasts that he created or more cunning than the beasts that he had created, almost as if this is a being in the garden that God himself didn’t actually create or God isn’t sort of connected to in the same way. Because why is the serpent there in the first place is a question that’s worth asking, you know?
Okay, that’s for sure. So you have the serpent, and that word cunning, I thought to myself, what does that mean? So I looked it up, and it’s the word like arum or arum, I don’t know how to pronounce it. But I looked elsewhere in the Old Testament, and it’s used in a few different ways. You know, it means cunning; it means subtle. Subtle, yeah, throughout Proverbs it's used to—it’s used consistently to mean sensible.
What do I mean? Prudent. And so there’s one reading of this, you know. Now, now the serpent was more sensible than any of the other beasts of the garden of Eden. And he comes to Eve and says, did God say that if you eat of that tree you’ll surely die? And she says, yeah, that’s what he said.
And he says, you will not surely die. In the day that you eat thereof, God just knows you’ll become like him, knowing good and evil; and he doesn’t want that. So Eve looks at the fruit, and she eats the fruit. And does she die in the day thereof? Well, again, a complicated question, but on face value, no, she doesn’t die. She gives them to Adam; he doesn’t die.
And what does happen? Well, God says to them, or God says now they have become like us, knowing good and evil. They must be banished from the garden so they do not outstretch their hand and eat from the tree of life. So it seems to me that you’ve got this serpent who could plausibly be described as the most sensible of the animals telling Eve.
The people who regard Milton's Satan as what? An admirable revolutionary tend to have the same attitude towards the serpent in the garden. And it's a complicated—it’s a very complicated issue because even to the degree that the serpent is an agent of Lucifer, which I think is an extraordinarily profound reading and overlay on that initial story, I think it's remarkable. Lucifer is the bringer of light, right? The spirit of Jesus himself is referred to as Lucifer at one point in the— in the gospel, which is quite a fascinating, well side note, I guess. The question is, like illumination to what end?
I do think that the interpretation that you rejected with regard to the consumption of the fruit of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil is moral presumption; it’s the sin that Nietzsche suggests to everyone as the medication for the death of God. We have to define our own values. It’s like no, we can’t. But it’s knowledge of good. You know, yeah, but it’s more than that.
It’s the consumption of the essence of moral knowledge itself. It sounds to me that like—I can never, you know, contradict exodist. Sure, like that might be the case. But if I read this text naturally, if I just say, well, like how does this naturally read to me? Yeah, it reads to me like you have—and when I—that’s why I brought it up because you consider this Gnostic tradition, right? The evil demiurgic creator of the universe.
And like you have—and the author of the testimony of truth says, you know, what God is this that that firstly condemns man for wanting to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and secondly lies to him about what’s going to happen when he does? And and recognizes—and we’re missing like 50% of the text; it’s ripped to shred these Gnostic texts; it’s fascinating. I think the Gospel of Judas spent about 30 years in a safety deposit box in New York City and nearly destroyed the whole thing. It’s a fascinating story.
But so we don’t know for sure. But there’s a point where it seems to identify this serpent with Christ. And reading that, I’m like, that makes a lot of sense to me on a surface level, the ambivalence about the human rise to self-consciousness, right? Is that a good or is that something good or something evil? Because why does God then say, now they’ve become like us, knowing good and evil? They must not be allowed; we must banish them lest they reach out their hand and eat from the Tree of Life, and sort of then guards Eden with the with the cherubim, with the flaming sword.
It seems that God is saying, you know, because we’re told that because of the fall, now man can’t inherit eternal life, and Jesus must come to must come to save him. But as soon as they eat of this tree, God banishes them. They don’t—they don’t—God banishes them. I don’t have an interpretation problem with that part.
Yeah, that’s—I don’t know what sense to make of that. I should ask Jonathan Pesso because I suspect he’d have something to say about that. Yeah, I think that the one way of interpreting the account of the Fall is that it was the inevitable consequence of Adam and Eve’s overreach, sure.
And so they end up banished not so much because God wants them out of the garden, but because in their pride they threw themselves out of the garden in their overreach. And I wrote about this. It’s very hard for me to generate the entire interpretation on the fly. I wrote about this extensively in this new book that I’m publishing in November trying to take apart that particular issue because what seems to happen in the Adam and Eve account is that you have an illusion to the function of male and female consciousness.
First, you have Adam who names and subdues and orders, right? So he’s an extension in some ways of the logos, right, in human form. And God’s curious enough about that to bring everything to Adam to just see what he’ll name, yeah? But the command is for Adam to put everything in its proper place in this hierarchical organization with its proper name, and Adam can do that if he’s an adequate and faithful reflection of the logos.
Then Eve is created as the counterpart to that, and it’s something like, well, there’s an ordering tendency, and there’s the order that that produces, but then there are things that are on the margin that aren’t accounted for by the divine order, and they need a voice, and Eve is the voice of—you think about this biologically. What does a woman do in the context of a family? She brings the attention to that which is vulnerable and has not yet been properly incorporated.
So, well, what do you mean by that? Well, imagine that you have a well-constituted family and there’s a new baby. Well, the baby doesn’t fit. The baby is an anomaly, the baby is an individual that has its own idiosyncrasies, and the mother who’s sensitive to the needs of the infant, she’s going to be the voice of that. She’s going to knock on the door of the ordering principle and say, you need to make some adjustments here so that what can’t fit does if it’s felt.
Yeah, and again, I’m trying to be to who understand what you’re saying and trying to be charitable, it does seem to me that this is an unnatural interpretation in that sort of—it seems like maybe it’s too much like—I don’t know. That’s—you can make that work, right? You can make that work, but there’s always—this is the kind of objection that Sam Harris had to the sorts of things that I said.
He said, well