Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson Debate "Cultural Christianity"

You made a statement a couple of months ago that I found very interesting, and I don't claim to understand it. I'm not trying to put you on the spot with it. You said that you were a cultural Christian. Okay, and so that raised the number of questions in my mind. You know, and the first question was...

You are changing the subject.

No, I'm no, I'm not. No, I don't think so. I may be leaping outside of the topic a bit to get to cultural Christianity, but I think I have questions that you wanted to ask, and that is one of them. But I think, Professor, you were referring to the predictive power and to the utility of the stories.

Okay, so that's actually what I was trying to on. Okay, so that was the point. Well, it seemed to me that your proclamation that you were a cultural Christian was a recognition, and a statement that you had found something in the culture that had been derived from Christianity that you had an affinity with, and that there's some reason for that. One of the things I wanted to ask you is, well, what do you think that Christianity got right that allows you to make a statement like that?

I mean, I know that there are differences, perhaps in what we both think about the ultimate veracity of the biblical stories. Maybe there aren't differences; it would take a lot of conversation to figure this out. But what did you mean by that? Like, what do you think that Christianity got right that would enable you to make a statement like that?

Virtually nothing. I meant by that no more than that I'm brought up in a Christian culture. I went to Christian schools; I therefore know my way around the Bible. I know my way around the Book of Common Prayer. I know the hymns. That's all. I don't value Christianity as a truth system at all.

Okay, so let me ask you about that, because maybe that's true, and perhaps it's not. So the first question is, like, do you think that there are any marked differences between cultural traditions that would enable you to rank order them in terms of their ethical validity? Okay, so, for example, we could contrast mainstream UK Christianity with Islamic fundamentalism. Okay, so there's a hierarchy.

There is a hierarchy that points to what? Well, in the case of Islam, I dislike any religion which punishes apostasy with death, that throws gay people off high buildings, that practices clitoridectomy. That seems to me to place Islam on a lower level than Christianity. But that's not to say anything very positive about Christianity.

Well, it might. It might be to say something positive about Christianity. Like, I think that question is open because you might ask yourself what did Christianity get right that led it away from those particular presumptions and towards something that you regard as more ethically appropriate. Like, this isn't a trivial question.

It's a very modest claim; there's not very much. I mean, to be better than a religion that throws gay people off high buildings is not really a very virtuous achievement. I don't know; I don't know if that's true because if you look at the barbarism that characterizes the human past, you might think that any progression whatsoever towards something approximating mercy and tolerance is nothing short of a bloody miracle.

Well, people are pretty ruthless, and so are our chimpanzee cousins.

Yes, they are, right? So we move forward into the light with great difficulty, and the fact that we can take that for granted now, and that it seems self-evident and deserving of faint praise, it's not so clear to me that that's a reasonable proposition.

Okay, let's grant the faint praise, but that has nothing to do with the truth value, and what I care about is the truth value. I see no truth value in the claims of Christianity—the Virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles. Do you believe in any of those? Do you believe Jesus was born a virgin?

As I said before, there are elements of the text that I don't feel qualified to comment on. My experience has been that the more I know from a metaphorical perspective and from a mythic perspective what the story of the Virgin birth means, and I accept that. I know, for example, that any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies.

And I don't know how that needs to be expressed in a form true, though. Do you mean that you don't know?

Well, let me ask you about that because truth—this is something I talked with Sam Harris about too—truth, as we know, is a tricky business. Do you think there are differences in the truth claims between different writers of fiction? Like, is Dostoevsky more profound than...

No, well, I wouldn't call fiction truth claims anyway. I mean, he's a...

Then on what grounds do we rank order the fiction in terms of quality? Like, Dostoevsky is a profound purveyor of fiction on the philosophical front—unbelievably deep and profound. There's something true about what he's writing about. It's nothing to do with the truth the truth that science is concerned with. The truth of science is the truth that gets us to the Moon.

I mean, this has nothing to do with whether one writer of fiction has a sort of insight into human nature; that goes without saying. I accept that.

Okay, so how do we deal with the notion that on the purely factual side, how do we deal with the idea—let's take the—you talked about clitoridectomy; let's talk about the oppression of women.

Yes, we make a scientific case that that's inappropriate, or is it a case that we're making on some other grounds? Like, I see in the Judeo-Christian tradition one of the earliest pronouncements is that both men and women carry the image of God—both—and that sets a certain tone to everything that follows.

It is a remarkable proclamation given its radical age that both men and women carry the image of God and are to be treated as something with intrinsic value outside of the domain of power in politics. And it isn't obvious to me, having thought about this a lot, how we deal with that in the pure realm of fact because one of the facts is, if I can oppress you, why the hell shouldn't I?

Yeah, my job is to keep things on track here. I think there are a number of questions which Professor Dawkins has asked quite directly that we still haven't really heard an answer to.

Okay, okay. And Professor Dawkins asking about the Virgin birth, you started talking about metaphor; you started talking about myth. I think anybody listening to this conversation will understand that maybe a society that doesn't believe in the Virgin birth won't work. Maybe that's the predictive power that you're talking about.

But I think you must understand that when Professor Dawkins is asking you, do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, he means something like a biological fact. And by the way, saying “I don't know” or saying “I'm not qualified to comment” is an answer to that question. But is that your answer that you don't know?

I said earlier, and I would hold to this, is that there are elements of the text that I don't know how to—I am incapable of fully accounting for. I can't account for what the fundamental reality and significance of the notion of the Resurrection is. My knowledge just ends, sure.

But I know that whatever happened—whatever happened as a consequence of the origination and the promotion of the Christian story was powerful enough to bring Rome to its knees and demolish the Pagan enterprise. So there's some power in that story; that's remarkable.

As for the Virgin birth, well, the Virgin birth results from a mistranslation of Isaiah. You know that. I'm like, these sorts of questions—they don't strike me as—they're not getting to the point.

Has a purpose?

Well, and look, I understand that there's perfect reason to debate this. I know that, and I know that your question is more than valid, but it's beside the issue, as far as I'm concerned. And it's partly because, well, when we started this conversation, I said, for example, that it appears to be the case that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. We see the world through a story, and so that's a remarkable thing—that's a remarkable discovery.

It has emerged probably in the last 60 years in multiple disciplines because we have to prioritize our facts, and so we prioritize them according to a particular pattern. There are patterns that seem to work and to propagate themselves properly and to orient cultures towards life abundant, and there are other patterns—the pattern of Cain, for example—that lead to absolute bloody devastation.

And I don't know exactly how to construe that sort of truth, but we talked about the oppression of women, for example. It's like how do you make a case on purely factual grounds that women should be treated as equals? It's a moral question.

And I know that's exactly what I was dealing with—a moral question, which is did Jesus have a father? And...

And a Heavenly Father, like almost all mythological heroes.

So he wasn't born of a virgin, then?

So, you're saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin?

I said, first of all, that I don't know how to mediate the fact-value dichotomy in that case. I said the same thing about the resurrection. It's not a—it’s a simple fact. I mean, did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus? That's a factual question; it's not a value question.

You must understand what you're being asked here—that even if you think that, say, the author of the biblical texts intended much more significance than a simple scientific analysis of events, Professor Dawkins is interested in scientific truth. That's the kind of truth that he's interested in, and even if you think it's irrelevant to the point of what the gospel authors were getting at, that first needs to be clarified before you can then begin actually uncovering what the stories are about.

So I think Professor Dawkins is asking from a scientific perspective, and maybe you think that that scientific approach is wrong. But if you just take it for a moment, maybe this is how we find out that it is wrong. Let's take a scientific approach; ask the question, did this occur?

I think that it's inappropriate to use a question like that to attempt to undermine the validity of the entire, what would you say, deep mythological enterprise we were doing.

Suppose we were asking out of interest. Suppose that we were all here—devout Christians, maybe even aeons Christians—and we thought, this is interesting over dinner. Do you think it really happened? Scientifically, would your answer just be, “I don't know”?

Yes.

And you wouldn't consider it... I mean, it's not an inappropriate question to ask just on a point of interest, right? Did this really occur?

And I think so often people are asking you that, and especially given the context of this conversation. We've heard everything that you're saying about metaphor and myth, but because the question is still then being asked, “Did it really happen?” You know that's what you're being asked, and the way you just so easily said yes. I wonder why you struggle to do that in so many other circumstances.

I think because I don't look at the situation the same. The way that Dr. Dawkins and I look at the situation are really quite different on many, many, many levels.

You know, so even on the meme question, for example, I know the literature on the history of religious ideas. I see how these ideas have battled across millennia in a manner that is very reminiscent to me of the same sort of claim that Dr. Dawkins is putting forward with regards to memes.

I know that literature; Dr. Dawkins doesn't know that literature, and it's very difficult for me to communicate from within the confines of that literature because it's extensive and deep. We're dealing with things that we don't understand—the relationship between metaphoric truth and value-predicated truth and factual truth. We don't understand that. It's a big problem.

We cannot—there's no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts. Sure, and that's a fact, and it's a fact that's been detailed out in great detail in the last 60 years by people from a variety of different disciplines. We have to prioritize the facts—that's a value hierarchy.

There may be true and false ways of prioritizing facts, but you can't determine the truth or falsehood of the way that you prioritize facts by making reference to the facts. That's a big problem.

Okay, let's talk about that as perhaps a slight detour here because I think we do need to come back to this Christ's Resurrection thing. But, Professor Dawkins, would you say that underlying the scientific enterprise is a fundamentally unscientific assumption?

You can make scientific investigations in the world, but in order to do so, you need to choose what to prioritize. You need to choose what to investigate. You also need to value the truth. You need to have a value and a motivation for doing it in the first place. Those kinds of things cannot themselves be scientifically justified.

And so, does the scientific enterprise have an unscientific assumption at its base?

I suppose it does. I think we—I think that maybe just be Jordan and Richard, but by the way, I think that Jordan prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact. I think myth is kind of vaguely interesting, but it's not the spine end of my life.

I think it's somewhat secondary to scientific fact—the sort of facts that tell us how old the universe is, how old the world is, the history of life, the engineering achievements of landing a spacecraft on a comet. These are the things that science can do, and as I said, the predictions of quantum theory, to come back to that. But predictions of quantum theory, which are verified to a sufficient number of decimal places that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one hair's breadth.

Now, that is, however difficult quantum theory is to understand, that is what you can get from quantum theory. Now, the mysteries of the Bible, if they are mysteries, aren't in the same league. I mean, they just don't cut it.