Jordan Peterson, God, & Christianity | Kaczor & Petrusek | EP 212

52m read

·Nov 7, 2024

Why this book? What's the motivation?

Well, I followed closely your lectures on Genesis, and when I was listening to them, I was really fascinated because again and again I saw themes that I had read earlier in the church fathers, people like Augustine, Chrysostom, Origen. You were reading scripture according to what's called the moral reading of scripture where you're looking at the story of, say, Cain and Abel, and your primary question isn't was there actually two brothers, someone named Cain and someone named Abel. You're not so much looking for the historical facts, you might say, in terms of Cain and Abel, but rather you're looking at that story in terms of what universal lessons the story has for us today.

That moral reading of scripture is something that is very, very common in the Christian tradition of biblical reading, and so I thought that was super interesting. Then I also thought it was interesting how you were bringing to bear all kinds of other resources when looking at these stories. So you would bring in evolutionary psychology, you'd bring in Russian novels, you'd bring in all these things that would seem to be foreign to the biblical text. But in a way, that too was something that was very traditional. In other words, if you look at people like Augustine, he'll say that all truth is from God.

So bringing in any truth from any field is perfectly legitimate in his view in terms of trying to understand scripture because he thinks that God is the ultimate author of two books: the book of revelation, scripture, but also the book of creation. So everything in creation can help inform our understanding of scripture, and scripture can help inform our understanding of creation.

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Christopher Kaiser and Dr. Matthew Petrucc. They're both working at Loyola Marymount University, and they recently co-authored a book called "Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life," which is definitely a title that I would never have imagined existing. So I decided to talk to them today to see what sort of useful discussion we might have about that book but about Christian issues more broadly, religious issues more broadly, cultural issues.

Dr. Kaiser is Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of the Word on Fire Institute, which we'll discuss a little later. He graduated from the Honors Program of Boston College and earned his PhD four years later from the University of Notre Dame. He was a Fulbright Scholar who did postdoctoral work as an Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fellow at the University of Cologne. He was appointed a Corresponding Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life of Vatican City and William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. The winner of a Templeton grant, Templeton funds research into the intersection between religion and science. Among other things, he's written more than a hundred scholarly articles and book chapters and is also the author of 16 books, including the one that I mentioned earlier.

Dr. Petrucc received his M.A. in Religious Ethics from Yale and a PhD in the same field from the University of Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Theological Ethics and serves as a Word on Fire Institute Fellow as well. In addition to numerous articles, he has authored, co-authored, and co-edited several books. He's bilingual, English and Spanish, and lectures broadly on topics in ethics, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the intersection between Christian theology and philosophy. So welcome, gentlemen! Thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me today and for your careful work as well.

So I guess I'd like to start by asking you, as I mentioned in the intro, I never had really envisioned being included in a book like the one that you just wrote. I've noted that a variety of religious thinkers have commented on my lectures and work, and I'm wondering why you felt compelled to put all the time and effort into this. I mean, it's a major undertaking to write a book. So why this book? What's the motivation?

Then, well, I followed closely your lectures on Genesis, and when I was listening to them, I was really fascinated because again and again I saw themes that I had read earlier in the church fathers, people like Augustine, Chrysostom, Origen. You were reading scripture according to what's called the moral reading of scripture where you're looking at the story of, say, Cain and Abel, and your primary question isn't was there actually two brothers, someone named Cain and someone named Abel. You're not so much looking for the historical facts, you might say, in terms of Cain and Abel, but rather you're looking at that story in terms of what universal lessons the story has for us today.

These lectures, I really enjoyed them and it seemed to me that what you were doing in a certain way was, uh, re-invigorating again in a new and fresh way the insights that were found in these older thinkers, and the fact that so many young people, especially young people who call themselves atheists or agnostics, were fascinated by your lectures and drawn to them. You know, so many comments in on YouTube would say things like, "I thought the Bible was a kind of stupid old collection of naive stories totally meaningless for contemporary life, but after hearing your lectures on Genesis, now I see how these stories have perennial significance and are extremely important and insightful for navigating life."

So, for me, what I wanted to do in the book is both bring out these resonances with these earlier figures but also to try to show how these earlier figures actually, in my view, develop and enhance some of your own insights and move them further down the road, as it were. So I thought that it would be useful to bring these reflections together in the book.

Yeah, I have the same, uh, intellectual reasons as well for, for engaging your work. Basically, I think we're trying to speak to two audiences at the same time. One is to your massive audience to speak to them through your work that the ideas that you've been engaging with such verve and such power and such clarity not only resonate with the biblical context, but in fact, this is where from our point of view, they find their fullest expression.

And so to that audience, we want to say, look a little bit deeper, look a little bit broader. We're also speaking, though, to Christian audiences as well to see, look at the work that Jordan Peterson is doing. Perhaps he doesn't see it this way, but he's a serious theologian, and he's opening pathways and opening modes of communication that can help us more clearly communicate some of these biblical truths as well.

I also have a personal reason for it. I began watching you. Actually, Chris introduced me to your work, and I began watching your work online, everything you put out. What I found so fascinating is from my point of view, you exhibit a lot of the Christian virtue of courage. People were attracted to that; they were attracted to hearing truths, including very hard truths. I thought, I wanted to dig deeper to see what this phenomenon, what's been called the Jordan Peterson phenomenon really is.

Yeah, this is a strange thing for me—there's the popularity of those biblical lectures. I mean, it came as a shock. You know, I joked with some people when I first rented the theater in Toronto to put the lectures on. I thought, I said, if I had gone to a bank for a loan and told them that my business plan was to do 15 two-hour lectures on Genesis, mostly to young men, and that I was going to charge them to come to a theater and sit through that, they would have laughed me out of there because it's such a preposterous proposition.

And yet, it seemed to work, and the lectures have been quite popular online and they seem to have attracted attention from religious and non-religious people. But basically, in the religious vein, right? Even the atheists who've been watching are pulled in by what is essentially the religious content.

I guess part of the question is, you know, exactly what is that religious content? That's something we could talk about in depth. I mean, the fact that my thinking is influenced by these church fathers, the church fathers and other historical figures that you discuss, I guess I get that secondhand in some sense, right? And probably primarily through Jung. Carl Jung, see, was unbelievably educated and I saturated myself in his work, and he was, of course, incredibly influenced by the thinkers that you talk about in the book.

And so, you mentioned Dr. Kaiser that you know I was putting old ideas into a new package, and you know that it's very important to note that that's true—that truly original ideas are very rare. So much of what we think of as original is built into the structure of our culture in ways we don't understand and then manifests itself within us. And that's certainly the case with these biblical stories.

I wanted to make another comment too about truth. You know, Dr. Kaiser, you mentioned that I engage in a moral reading of scripture, say, rather than a literalist reading. And maybe we should have a talk about that because it isn't easy to read a book like the Bible literally because it's full of literal contradictions, and whatever it is, especially the really archaic stories in Genesis, whatever it is, it's not history the way we think of history.

And so that's hard for people. It's hard for people to see how that might still be true. If it's not literal, how can it be true? This is a discussion that I tried to have with Sam Harris a lot because the atheist types, the rationalist types, there's something they miss, and what they miss is that fiction isn't false; it's not a lie, right? It's not literal, but it's not a lie. Great fiction is true, but it never happened.

So how can it be true? The answer to that is something like, well, there are patterns in things—deep patterns, deep recurring patterns. You know, human nature—the fact that we're human—that humanity itself is a recurring pattern. It has a characteristic shape, and great fiction describes the shape of that pattern.

And the greater fiction becomes, the more it is religious in nature. And that's not even a claim about the nature of truth; it's more a claim about the nature of experience. You know, when we say something is profound, what we mean is that it's moving and that it has a broad influence—it's capable of having a broad influence on the way we think and see and act.

So if you read a profound book, like one of Dostoevsky's books, you could say of that book—and people often do—that it changed my life when I read that book. And a story that can change your life has a power that is best described as religious. And so religious is a kind of experience in some sense, rather in addition to a claim about what constitutes truth.

And then those stories in Genesis—Cain and Abel, I think, and the story of Adam and Eve—because those stories are so deep, that it's almost unfathomable. They get at the most profound of patterns, and so to say that they're literally true is actually to massively underestimate how true they are. Because you could tell me what you did this morning that would be literally true, but like who cares?

Whereas if you read the story of Adam and Eve, it's so true that it applies to everyone, always, and mere literal truth can't do that. And we don't have a good language as scientists, let's say, as psychologists, or even as citizens. We don't have a good language for that kind of truth.

And so, well, I guess I'd like your thoughts about that idea.

Yeah, so the literal sense of scripture is sometimes misunderstood by people, and I think the right way to think of the literal sense of scripture is what the original human author intended to convey to the original human audience. And so if we're looking at Genesis, I think that we need to put Genesis back in its context. If you read Genesis as if it is a contemporary textbook on science, I think what you're doing is wrenching it out of its original context, and therefore you're bound to misread it.

And that's true of not just Genesis; it's really true of any work that, to understand it, we need to understand its genre and we need to understand its context. So what is the original context of the Genesis story? Well, the original context it was written in terms of rival stories of creation: other stories that were circulating in the ancient world, and it was meant to be an answer to those.

It uses poetry; it uses imagery, and that was what all those stories did. And the poetry in the imagery, I would not set that against truth as if on the one hand you have truth and the other hand you have poetry, imagery, and story. I think that one kind of truth is scientific truth—the empirically verifiable—but I think it's too narrow to say, well, the only kind of truth is the empirically verifiable.

I think truth actually is broader, and in fact that claim that the truth is empirically verifiable—that's the only kind of truth—that is itself a self-defeating statement, right? There's no empirical evidence that the only way to get the truth is through the empirical method.

So if we put Genesis back in its context, what do we see? Well, we see it is a story telling us about, in contrast to the other stories—the other stories in the ancient world were stories in which there were multiple gods that engaged in a warfare and violence. So you think of the Greek myths, or like this where, right, Zeus overthrows his father, and there's all this violence. And Genesis is meant to answer these other ancient myths, and it's saying things like there's only one God; there's not multiple.

Secondly, that creation is not a matter of violence, but that the creation is reasonable speech. And this was something that you talked about in your lecture which really struck me because I obviously I'd read that story before, but I never really thought of it that well. Creation arises from reasonable speech. God says, let there be light, and there was light.

And what is reasonable speech? Reasonable speech is orderly, right? The difference between random sounds you make and reasonable speech is that there's a kind of order to it. So if creation arises from reasonable speech, the creation itself is ordered; it's intelligible; it makes sense. And that gives rise, centuries and centuries later, to the belief that creation is orderly and makes sense, which gives rise centuries later to science.

But to read Genesis as if it's failed science makes about as much chances as to read Genesis as if it's for or against iPhones. I mean, imagine somebody reading Genesis, and they're like, well, should I buy an iPhone or not? I'm not going to read Genesis to determine this.

Well, clearly the original author of Genesis wasn't addressing that, and the original author of Genesis wasn't addressing for or against evolution. So I think that these readers who want to make it for or against evolution are just utterly misreading and taking the story out of its original context and therefore necessarily providing a really bad reading of Genesis.

There's also a really important theological point to make here as well, and that's, philosophically, what's the condition for the possibility of something being literal in the first place? What's the condition for the possibility both of it being recognized, spoken, and then apprehended? There's a certain orderliness that's necessarily presupposed in the act of knowing and in the act of communicating that knowledge that, itself, as Chris said, can't be empirically verified.

So when we, as Catholics, say that we recognize from the New Testament that Jesus is the truth, that would include, in a literal historical sense, but also the condition for the possibility of anything being intelligible and literally understood and communicated at all.

So I think one of the frustrations I've found in finding contemporary debates on these questions is that secularism, oftentimes, isolates and identifies the literal, the empirical, as if this is a freestanding epistemic platform that belongs to them and everybody has to compete in order to be on their territory. And I just don't think that's philosophically the case; it presupposes a lot of things that they can't give an account for.

Yeah, I mean, so one more little point.

Yep, please go ahead.

No, I just was just going to add one thing. So, imagine somebody was reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, right? "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date."

So imagine somebody reads that, and they're like, "Okay, Shakespeare's a meteorologist; he's a weatherman, and I'm going to look up in the almanac to see if May had rough winds." And it turns out there's no rough winds in May. "Oh, Shakespeare? He's lying about the weather."

Well, I think that's, obviously, a radically radical misunderstanding of Shakespeare. He's not trying to tell us the weather. And then failing to tell us the weather. And so I think Genesis is not trying and failing to give us scientific truths; it's just doing something totally different.

And that's part of the reason I appreciate your lectures is that you highlighted the reality that the author of Genesis is trying not to—he's trying to communicate very important truths but not truths that are in the scientific discourse. They're true, but not scientific truths.

The problem with the empirical approach, the problem with totalizing it, is that the empirical approach tends to be mostly descriptions of things and the way they interact and the way they can be manipulated. And that's fine, but it doesn't tell you—doesn't provide any real insight into how to live, how to act, how to take your next step, how to produce a hierarchy of values, and how to determine what's most important and what's least important.

And all of that is so difficult that we actually don't know how to do it completely explicitly, which is why we need poetry and drama and literature. We need that whole domain, so we could call that the literary domain. And then I think you could consider it—this might be an empirical proposition—is that the religious domain is at the base of the literary domain.

And as literature gets deeper, it becomes more and more like religious writing. And so that by definition, in some sense—and I've swiped this in part, I would say, from Jung—is almost by definition that the sense of profound engagement that the most profound literature produces is what constitutes the religious. And that's a domain of experience.

You know when you're captivated and in a movie theater, when you're captivated by a story, when you're taken outside yourself, none of that has anything to do with logical argumentation. It's a whole different issue, and to me, it's tied very, very deeply to our ability to imitate and mimic.

And so we're really good at that—way better than any other animal. We mimic; language is mimicry; we use the same words, and so we're mimicking each other. But I can't mimic every person separately; I have to extract out from each person some essence of being that's admirable.

And I do that person after person, and I try to imitate that. And then that core thing that's admirable that I imitate, that's, as far as I'm concerned, that's psychologically equivalent to Christ.

Whatever else Christ is, Christ is—that's why he's sometimes described as the King of Kings. It's like if the king is the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy, and then you look at all hierarchies and you take the thing that's at the top of all hierarchies of value, then that figure, when you see reflections of that figure anywhere, it produces awe and respect. And that's because that pattern constitutes the appropriate way to act.

Just as when you see the opposite of that pattern, which might be in its most fundamental essence satanic or demonic—it's something that's ultimately evil, that produces revulsion and terror—and that's all instinctual. It's not in the domain of rationality, precisely; it's way, way deeper than that.

And then there's another problem that the atheists have never come to terms with, I believe. And you guys tell me what you think of this: if what is rendered, if what is properly rendered unto God is rendered unto Caesar, then Caesar becomes inflated to God. And when that happens, all hell breaks loose—that's the genesis of totalitarianism; that's subservience to an idol.

And so—and this is a case I think the church needs to make, particularly the Catholic Church, in the most strenuous of ways—is that if we don't segregate off the religious instinct and give it its proper attention, which I suppose you do in part with ritual and church attendance and so forth, then every single thing we do starts to become inappropriately contaminated with religious longing.

And that's why you see the rise of extremely powerful political ideologies and the division of people, you know, for trivial reasons into moral camps. It's that that religious instinct hasn't got a grounding in it; it's searching for something to attach itself to, and it picks up second-rate substitutes.

You know, people like Dawkins, they seem to think that if we all just abandoned our religious superstitions, we'd all become, you know, rationalists, like, well, like Isaiah Newton, who was an alchemist and not a rationalist, by the way—that great genius.

And so one of the things I think that the Catholic Church in particular isn't doing a very good job of is warning people how dangerous it is to lose the proper theater of expression for our religious instincts. They don't go away; they just get perverted, and they show up all sorts of places they shouldn't.

That's terrible; it's not good.

So, yeah, that theme is one that Augustine talks about in "The City of God." He talks about two loves, and he talks about the love of God, and it creates a certain city, a certain organization. And if you don't love God, if God is not your ultimate love, well, you're going to love something.

So it could be power; it could be pleasure; it could be money; it could be status. But Augustine thought that if you love, say, power the most, well, what that's going to do is it's going to shape you and ultimately distort not only you but also your relationships in your society.

So the Christian view is that ultimately, God is perfect truth, love, and beauty. And so not only is it the case that worshiping anything other than that is going to fail to give God what's due to God—and that's what religion, in a sense, is about: it's a binding of oneself to God, giving to God what's due—but also it ends up making the person ultimately unhappy.

So you can't think about this even from a psychological perspective—that people like Martin Seligman would say things like love is at the core of human flourishing. And if we don't have that, if I love money or power more than I love God and more than I love my friends and more than I love my family, well, that's going to deprive me of the source of my flourishing.

I'm going to end up harming myself and characteristically also harming others when I love power or money or whatever too much.

And so, yeah, for Augustine at least, this is a perennial temptation to replace God with something else. That's perhaps the warning at the end of Genesis with the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel. You know, because the Tower of Babel is people get together, and they try to build an edifice that's absolute in some sense, right?

It's a building that's under the control—it's an edifice that's of human manufacture, and it becomes larger and larger and larger, and then it devolves into a kind of chaos. And so with the flood story with Noah—the flood—that's one form of danger that emerges as a consequence of deviation from the proper path, let's say, orientation toward whatever the highest good is.

And the Tower of Babel is a secondary one that has more to do with the danger of egotistical human construction. And it is something like the worship of these idols.

So imagine we can think about this technically and psychologically in some sense, is that in order to act, you have to presume that that to which you're moving is more important than where you are, right? So you make a value judgment: moving in this direction is appropriate. And then you have to move in a lot of directions over the course of your life.

And you know maybe you search for friendship, and you search for love, and you search for money, and you search for power, and so forth. And if there's nothing integrating all that, then you're pulled in all sorts of directions, right? It's like the devil's pulling you apart because you don't know what's more important than what, and that's very, very confusing and off-putting.

And if the wrong thing takes control, then you get demented and bent. And so what you see in Christianity is this struggle over thousands of years to specify the thing that should be at the top of the hierarchy.

And one of the things that really opened my eyes to the depth of these works was this strange proclamation that the Word that existed at the beginning of time that brought creation into being was the same as Christ, which is an unbelievably bizarre proposition.

I mean, I'm not speaking about it precisely religiously; I'm thinking about it more conceptually. It's like people who had that revelation or intuition are making the presupposition that there's something about the emergence of reality into conscious being.

Because reality without consciousness doesn't really seem to exist, right? So when we talk about reality, we always presuppose a conscious viewer and that the conscious viewer that makes order out of chaos is most appropriately the perfect being that's manifested in the figure of Christ.

And so that we participate in that process in some sense, to the degree that we're attempting to embody that mode of being. So I know that's going out there in some sense, but it struck me as such a brilliant idea that it was hard to account for.

I don't know if I've made myself clear with that.

Well, I think it cuts in many different ways at the same time, but it also cuts directly to the previous question that you asked about the right domain of religious expression. And in a sense, it solves that problem.

Why? Well, if Jesus Christ is the logos, on the one hand, there means that there is a logos, there is a truth, there is a way of existence that is real, which gives us a standard to be able to identify false ways of being both individually but also important politically.

So it establishes a groundwork for there to be an intrinsic limiting principle politically speaking and morally speaking to life, and that is there is a truth of the matter. And if you're not living according to the truth, you're deviating from it. So that establishes a kind of ground and sealing for the proper expression of what it means to live morally individually and also political power as well.

You only have right political power insofar as it conforms to the truth. But the logos is also Christ. That means Christ is also the person, the historical person that, as Catholics, we believe is literally real and literally raised from the dead, and that shows that the political life is not the sum totality of life.

The moral life isn't even the sum totality of life. The sum totality of life is love in relationship with God who has made himself incarnate.

So on the one hand, you have the foundation of truth to structure and limit human life, and then its ultimate transcendent tale or purpose.

Dr. Kaiser, you got some comments about that?

I did. I wanted to circle back to what you said. If I heard you correctly, that reality doesn't exist without consciousness. And I think that's true if God exists. But then if God doesn't exist, then it's not true.

So, human beings of course haven't been on planet Earth since the beginning of the universe. The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. So say 12 billion years ago, there were no human beings at all, and presumably there was no consciousness at all.

So there was reality; there were the beginning of stars and things like that, but there was no conscious beings anywhere that, you know, was able to understand that unless God exists.

Now, if God exists, and if it's true that God is the logos, well then he would say, from all eternity, there was consciousness. There was a mind—a divine mind. And so on that view, there actually would be an ultimate unity, you might say, in terms of the divine essence and the divine mind ultimately being one.

So consciousness and existence have this fundamental ground in God. But if God doesn't exist, then I think what you said would not be true because again, 12 billion years ago, there's no human beings around, presumably, unless there are aliens.

There's no one around to be conscious, and so there would have been reality, say, 12 billion years ago, but there wouldn't have been consciousness.

Yeah, so I want to go out on a limb here too because I have a problem with that. I can't shake this—the supposition that our scientific cosmological theories have an implicit conscious observer nested inside of them even when they claim not to.

So for example, when you talk about 13 billion years ago, there's—there's— I don't know how to say this properly—the concept of 13 billion years seems to me to require a conscious observer to formulate it, to begin with, because I don't understand what duration consists of in the absence of something experiencing duration.

It's like how does something last 13 billion years? In some sense, it all happens at once if there's no conscious observer.

Like there's—I know, well it would depend, it would depend, right, on the nature of time.

So the view you're talking about was actually put forth by a guy named Berkeley, and he said to be is to be perceived. So in other words, if you don't have a perceiver, there just wouldn't be any being at all.

But I don't think that that is—that's right. I mean, I think you're right that the idea or the concept, the human concept of time obviously can't exist without human beings. But before there were any human beings, it seems that all available scientific evidence suggests that there were things—there were carbon molecules and there were stars, and there was all kinds of things that existed before there were any conscious human perceiving them.

So it is true, of course, that all of our evidence for the Big Bang and all of our scientific investigations presuppose conscious observers that are, you know, taking the measurements and things like that, but I'm not sure it follows from that logically that therefore we can't with good reason hold that things existed before there were any human or, for that matter, any kind of conscious observers unless we think Berkeley is right—that to be is to be perceived.

Well, there's something in Berkeley's objection that seems to me to be hard to skate around. Like when we imagine time before consciousness, and we imagine the existence of objects before consciousness, we imagine them as if a conscious observer was there even though there wasn't one.

So we think like we see a star from a particular level of resolution, right? We can't see subatomic particles; we can't see atomic structures; we can't see molecular structures. That which exists before there's a perceiver is all those levels simultaneously at once with a duration that doesn't—with a temporal sequence that doesn't involve duration.

And so whatever was there before there was a perceiver is, in some sense, unimaginable without the projection of a perceiver back into time. And I think that warps our perspective on what it was that's there and perhaps our perspective on the role of consciousness in the genesis of being.

So, anyways, here's another way of thinking about it, and I don't know what your view would be. So let's say God forbid there's some sort of plague that strikes humanity and all human beings die.

On my view, there would still be lots of things that continue to exist: like the sun would still exist, the earth would still exist, there'd be all kinds of things that exist. Now there'd be no human beings in that terrible scenario that were there to perceive it, but they would still continue to exist.

Or maybe you have a different view.

I just—imagine that consciousness was eradicated, say, not just human beings. Just to make it cleaner in some sense, I can't understand how to conceptualize what it is that would be if there is no point of reference because everything is—all things at once in some sense without a limited—without a delimited observer.

And so I don't know what it is for there to be something when everything is everything at once. There's no differentiation as a consequence of a limited observer.

So, but we can— we can leave that part of the argument. I'm pushing this at least in some part because I've also seen, I would say on the part of the more dedicated modern atheists this necessity to devalue consciousness.

Consciousness seems to be—it's a mystery, let's put it that way. And it's an unexplained mystery, and it's given such pronounced status in the biblical writings. It's part of what gives human beings dignity, is the fact that we share this logos consciousness that's integrally tied up with the structure of reality as such.

And, well yes, I'll just leave it at that; that's enough exploration of that as far as I'm concerned.

One of the other things that we might talk about briefly is that there's also a tendency in the modern culture as we move away from our religious heritage, as fewer people go to church, let's say, and are even familiar with the traditional church writings to swallow this story that science and religion have been at odds with one another throughout the course of history.

And Dr. Petrucc, you made a case earlier in this discussion, I believe it was you, that the proposition that the world was ordered by something that was akin to a comprehensible intelligence or an intelligence or a consciousness that we could have a relationship with was the deep-felt sense that we could understand things if we investigated them.

And that's meant that the religious proposition of an orderly, comprehensible world amenable to the investigations of consciousness was actually a precondition for the dawn of science.

And that's what Nietzsche claimed. Nietzsche claimed that Christianity died at its own hands by emphasizing the primary importance of truth. And so the exploration of truth, at least in part, developed into the empirical domain, and then the scientific worldview produced representations of being that seemed to contradict the traditional representations.

And because our minds had been trained to value truth to such a great degree, at least in part as a consequence of our religious education, we were forced, by logical consistency in some sense, to experience this existential crisis that the apparent opposition between the empirical and the religious has put us into.

So that's a different reading of the relationship between science and religion. It means it's a problem we have to solve instead of a battle between two opponents, one of whom has to win and the other whom has to lose.

Yeah, well that completely contradicts the, certainly the Catholic understanding of the relationship between science and religion. There's a historical question here, which is how did science emerge into its current form? And even on those grounds, it's inaccurate to say that Christianity and specifically Catholicism has ever been opposed to science.

The historical record just doesn't show that. Then there's a conceptual and philosophical question of, again, using the philosophical language: what's the condition for the possibility of there being an empirical investigation insofar as it's cognitively and epistemically possible?

And then the motivational question of why in the world would you carry it out unless you have the belief, either explicitly or implicitly, that the world both is knowable and that that knowledge is somehow real—that presupposes not only any generic metaphysics, but I would say a specifically Christian metaphysic in particular.

So it's a meme, I would say, that science and religion are somehow opposed, but it's a false one. The idea that science and religion are opposed arose really in the 19th century. There was a guy named Draper, and he wrote a book that they basically put forward this thesis. And before that, the thesis wasn't held, and there's no real good historical grounds for holding that.

So if you look at many of the prominent scientists in the history of science, many of them were faithful, believing people. I mean, Newton was a faithful Protestant. You have people like Descartes, who was Catholic. You have Blaise Pascal, a great mathematician. You have Gregor Mendel. You have George Lemaître in the 20th century, who was one of the founders of big bang cosmology.

So all the way from the beginning of science to today, you have prominent people of faith that are scientists. Even right now, I think the head of the—what is it? The head of the National Institute for Health? I think Francis—I forget his name. But anyway, he's a prominent believer, and the church as an institution also supported science.

So the cathedrals were designed in the 17th century to serve also as solar observatories. Catholic universities all around the world have departments of science and promote scientific investigation for their students. The Pope has a Pontifical Academy for Science; he invites scientists from all over the world, scientists of all different faiths and no faith, to come to the Vatican for these scientific meetings.

So I think it's really quite unfair to say the church is opposed to science.

Yeah, I just have very, very briefly: it's not a biographical peculiarity that these great people of science who are Catholics—they didn't practice their scientific craft in addition to believing in God and practicing Catholicism; they did it precisely as Catholic, working from the framework of faith and reason there. And that's always been the case.

So, let's delve into this faith issue a bit too because faith is a very complicated term, and it's often parodied by the rationalists. To have faith in God is parodied as a primitive and superstitious belief.

But my psychological investigations convinced me that there's no action without faith because we are always stepping into the unknown. We have to take a leap of faith to exist, to do the simplest of things, to literally to move. And that has to do with what I said earlier—is that we're trying to move from a place of less value to a place of more value.

So we have to make some assumptions about what constitutes value, and then we have to believe that our actions are going to have the outcome that we desire. And we do that without evidence.

I mean, that's partly why to be human is to be riven with anxiety. It's because there's no certainty, and so you can't act without faith. And so then the question might be, if you accept that proposition, you can't act without faith, and I actually believe—I don't believe that that's a disputable proposition—unless you view people as deterministic in the way that clocks are, you know?

So that we're just stimulus-response machines, it seems to me that instead we're moving into the unknown, and we do that in dread, in some sense, dread and hope. And we do that because we have faith. And when we lose that faith, our lives fall apart, and we don't know which way is up or down.

And so then the question is, well, if we have to have faith, what is it that we should have faith in? And then the answer seems to be something like, well, we should have—if we have to make a decision about that, maybe we try to have faith in what in—in the idea that the best should be pursued and will prevail as an organizing principle.

And then the question is, well, what is the best? And the answer is, well, that's a really hard question. And so we need cathedrals, and we need Bach's music, and we need the stories in Genesis, and we need the world's great literature, and we need all that theater and drama and art and aesthetics to help us understand what the best is and to determine how it should prevail.

And I don't see that technically as any different from—I think it is the same thing psychologically—as the worship of Christ. I think it's the same thing because, again, I'm trying to speak psychologically to think about what Christ represents.

I'm not thinking about him as a historical figure—that's something we can get to later. That image, which is seen, for example, laid out on these massive cathedral domes—Christ as logos, as generator of the world—it's the idea that the proper mode of being is brought into existence by consciousness that's operating according to the highest possible principles.

And like, why wouldn't—and that is the kind of faith that's maybe got some courage associated with it, right? I'm going to act as if this is the case. We're all going to act as if this is the case.

Now, that begs the question: Does that make it real? Well, that's a harder question.

Yeah, Saint Anselm thought about God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. So he thought of God as the highest perfect good, and Aquinas too thought of God in a similar way as absolute perfection.

And I would say that this kind of faith, though, can be reasonable. It's not, in my view at least, a kind of blind shot in the dark that you're just wandering around and you just kind of make things up. I think there's actually good philosophical reasons to think that there does have to be a first cause. There does have to be a necessary being, and Aquinas puts forward these arguments.

People have—I myself have talked about these things to my students and online; it's not just a shot in the dark as it were.

So, but I think you're right that people do need faith in some sense just to live, just to move forward. But I do think that a specifically theistic faith is something that's very reasonable. You think of people like William Lane Craig who has devoted a considerable amount of his time to exploring the Kalam cosmological argument.

And I don't know if you're familiar with that argument, but it's quite simple. It just says that—oh, you're not?

No.

So, it says that whatever begins to exist has a cause—that's the major premise. And then the minor premise is the universe begun to exist. And therefore, the universe has a cause.

And by universe, what's meant in the argument is all time, all space, and all matter. And so if the universe has a cause that's prior to time, it must be something that is timeless or you might say eternal. If the cause of the universe is the cause of all matter, it must be prior to matter; it must be immaterial. If the cause of the universe brought the whole universe into existence, obviously, the cause of the universe has to be immensely powerful.

And so you have, say, in the cosmological argument, an argument, a reason to believe that God exists. And, you know, we can talk about whether that argument works, but you also have other arguments like the fine-tuning argument.

And I read online that you were looking at the God Hypothesis, and as you know from reading that book, there is a lot of very solid evidence that the universe is fine-tuned. And then if you're going to explain that fine-tuning in terms of chance, the likelihood of that is unbelievably unlikely—it's much more unlikely that the universe could have been brought about by chance and still been able to have life in it.

So I think that to believe in God is very much a reasonable faith; it's not just a random, arbitrary, wishful thinking kind of view.

Yeah, I would add that I think I'm hearing two different kinds of faith at the same time that ultimately I believe can be, in fact, the teaching of the Catholic Church that they are united.

And that's we call faith. One faith could be defined as what must be in existence and true in order for there to be anything else in existence and true.

And as you were putting it, Jordan, how do we make any kind of decision based upon any kind of evidence whatsoever, whether it's in terms of empirical matters, whether it's in terms of moral matters? There's so many presuppositions that we can't make arguments about but that must be true in order for us to make arguments about anything. So that's the horizon, as it were, of faith.

And we can't not have faith in that sense, but then as you put it, then, it raises the question: What do we have faith in? Well, the Catholic answer to that—and the Christian answer to that in its broadest possible sense—is you have faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the logos, is the totality of who God is, that horizon of meaning, the horizon of intelligibility, and that whom you can ultimately trust.

That's the second meaning of faith, which is not really an epistemic category; it presupposes an epistemic category which is belief, but it's multiply about trust—who do you most trust?

And it's—the options there are really quite limited. Either you're going to trust something in the world, you're going to trust yourself, or you're going to trust God. And anything in the world and yourself? You'll be let down guaranteed. You'll be let down disastrously, in fact.

So the third option is you trust Christ, who, through revelation, we see loves you infinitely. So in that sense, Christ, once again, solves the problem of faith both at its beginning and its end.

Okay, so let's delve into that again. So I mentioned that earlier when we were talking that you could conceptualize Christ psychologically as the representation of all things that strike us as admirable. So here's an example, you know.

When I used to watch my kids play house, my son would play the father and my daughter would play the mother, and she would act out being a mother. And you might say, well, she was imitating my wife, but she wasn't because, you know, my wife would walk across the kitchen in a particular way and pick up a plate and bring it to the table in a particular way.

To copy that is to duplicate it exactly with your body, right? Which I could do if I was imitating you; something you'd find very annoying.

Anyways, what the child does is something quite different. They watch the father across time, and they watch the mother across time, and they extract out those elements of perception and action that can be imitated that constitute the spirit of the mother and the spirit of the father, and then that's what they manifest in their play.

And so they're doing that at a very early age. It's not direct mimicry. It's as if they've, they're working out the story of what it's like to be a father and they're acting that out.

Now, they use their observations of their actual father to fill in that play space, that imaginative space, but they also get information from movies and television and all the books they've been read, and all of that is feeding their embodiment of the father.

And this isn't something that's rational exactly. So let's say the child, as a consequence of this felt sense of admiration, focuses on a particular attribute in a book and watches the hero of the story and is compelled to incorporate that into their representation.

And so they're trying to act out what's admirable and then faith, in that sense, is what is it—is a willingness to act out the proposition that what we find admirable will, in fact, be the most appropriate guide to how we should act in the world because you have the child acting out the father.

But then there would be the set of all fathers, and then there would be what was extracted out of that that would be the ultimately admirable ideal, which is, like, God brought to earth.

If God is that which no greater can be imagined, and then that's embodied, which is the Christian idea, then what's most admirable is embodied in the figure of Christ, and that's the thing to imitate.

And the faith isn't belief that that's real; I don't believe that. The faith is a willingness to act out of the world—that's a different thing, because we make this propositional too much.

I don't think it is.

Yeah, because the imitate is the imitation of Christ—not only propositional.

Oh, sorry, everyone, there's a bit of a lag on our connection, so that's why we're awkwardly interrupting one another. So please go ahead.

I think I would say that it's not only propositional, and in fact, on a final analysis, the propositional components of the faith may be the least important, I would say; they're necessary but certainly not sufficient.

But as you're describing your conception of faith, the word that really stuck out for me is that this will happen—that I act according to a belief or to an intuition that if I act, a certain and according to a certain kind of pattern, that I will realize the nature of the pattern itself.

I think that's certainly part of it. From a Christian perspective, it absolutely is. It has to be because it's metaphysically the case that God created all things good, and so this pattern is embedded absolutely everywhere in creation, including in the human mind, including in the human soul.

However, there's the problem of sin, right? We live in a world that is radically fallen, starting with the broken natures of our own selves. And so the will there is not just the question, "Do I have any reason to believe that my acting according to this pattern will actually bring about the desired outcome that I hope for?"

And that's where Jesus Christ moves from being the teacher who not only gives the pattern but instantiates the pattern to the Savior. Because the reality is no, you will—I will not—I will fail and again fail disastrously.

So it is only because this archetype of moral truth and goodness is actually willing to reach into my life, into our lives, that that will actually can have any meaning and really command any kind of belief. That's why I believe is because it's not just a pattern that I'm seeking to conform to; it's a person who's reaching out to me.

It's both.

So if that's the case, then why is it necessary for us to strive to be good? Like, what role does our moral striving play?

Because it's the same reason I would strive to be a good husband. And not only in a generic sense that I have a certain set of criteria that this is what defines being a good husband is, and so therefore I'm going to act to it. Sort of duty-bound, say again, duty is necessary but not sufficient.

I act out of love, so I seek to be good because I love he who loves me. And again, at that point, duty is— it ruins the story; it ruins the relationship. I am loved, and I wish to love, and I recognize I will fail time and time again, but I love because I love he who loves me.

And conversely, that's also what leads to my ultimate happiness.

So I think an important distinction here is what's necessary and what's most important. They're not always the same thing. So what's necessary in order for Catholicism to become Catholicism, it must have a set—must have dogma, right?

Or else it's not anything whatsoever. So in so far as the Catholic Church has dogma, we have a set of propositions that we believe in; many sets of propositions that we believe to be true in every way that something can be true: historically, metaphorically, literally, morally—all these things we believe to be true.

So that's necessary, but that's necessary for any group. It's necessary for any individual in order to have any kind of unified personality. So in that sense, it's absolutely necessary. Is it the most important?

No.

But that, again, the most important is that these dogmas, as Chris has been put, become alive—become alive. As Saint Paul also puts it, without love, you are like a gong that makes no sound whatsoever.

And so one of the critiques that I've—that has really hit home that you've also made in previous videos is that Catholicism is not calling its people to be heroes. That sticks with me; I think that's right.

And we have within our faith what's called the doctrine of the saints, which in a very basic sense just means that we believe that there are people just like us who have lived in a way that exhibits what it truly means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

And if you look at the different kinds of saints, what you will find is vastly different kinds of personalities—vastly different kinds of interests. But two things will also be present: one, courage, and two, fidelity to the truth.

So I do think that this is a time for courage, and again, that's one of the reasons that I was so attracted to your work. Because of the pushback that it's received—pushbacks, perhaps, the most diplomatic word I could say—but you remain consistent, and I see that. That's courage, and that's a model for us as well.

So, a couple of comments on that. So, optimally, you want the optimal pattern of action to be part of your personality, and then you want the story of your life to be concordant with that pattern of action, and then you want the propositions abstracted from that story to be concordant with the story.

So then you have the intellectual—and let's call it the literary and the behavioral—existing in harmony with one another. And I suppose a fully developed religious system would flesh out all three levels.

And you see that in Catholicism—you have the patterns of action; you have the stories; and you have the propositions. So I agree with Dr. Kaiser that the dogma is crucial, and it's partly too because the rational can undermine faith.

You know, and we always think as modern people— we think, well, if faith can be undermined by rationality, then it should be. But as a practicing clinician, I see how devastating that is.

So I had a client, for example, who was an extraordinarily creative person, brilliant person, and fundamentally a good person. But he had a very critical rational mind, and it was always digging at his roots. And as long as he—he was an architect and an artist.

And as long as he was engaged in creative activity, he could live. But as soon as he started to think, his thinking killed him. It was so brutal; everything was up for grabs, everything was questionable. You know?

And you should say, well, you don't take anything on faith. You know, it's like, well, try to live like that and see what happens. It—that doesn't get at the problem that the untrammeled rational mind can be unbelievably destructive in its ability to go down to the depths and undermine and destroy.

And so the protective structure that a functioning religious system offers is some protection against that element of untrammeled rationality. And that's also something I think the rationalist atheist types—they just maybe they haven't had enough experience with, say, seriously depressed people who've been driven to the depths of despair by a mind that just won't stop uprooting and destroying.

And, you know, that's not only a personal thing in some sense because it's easy for you—me, anyone—to become possessed by these destructive ideas, and they're very powerful.

And once they're part of us, we need an answer to them, you know? And we need an answer to our nihilistic doubts. And what Catholicism offers, I wouldn't say uniquely but definitely, is the consequence of thousands of years of effort at keeping that terribly destructive destroyer of necessary faith at bay.

And that's also a good way to communicate it, I think, to young people. It's like, look, you're going to be plagued by these existential catastrophic existential doubts. What the hell's the point of it, anyways? And that's particularly the case when things aren't going well and you're suffering, suffering unjustly.

It's like what are you going to do then? Well, here's how people have solved that problem: you know, it's possible that we're akin to deity in some sense; that there's something transcendentally important about consciousness, that you play a crucial role in the structure of existence.

It's like no one can say that for certain, you know, because what the hell do we know? But it's the best we've been able to manage in terms of what was it Milton—didn't Milton write "Paradise Lost" to justify the ways of God to man?

It's a hell of an ambition in some sense. That's what this entire religious endeavor does, the literary endeavor as well. What's the point of all this? What's the meaning of this?

And you know, when you think about that in too propositionally—and this, I also saw this in my therapy practice—it's like, well, what's the meaning of life?

And I could easily get off on a nihilistic argument with some of my more intelligent clients. They had a rejoinder for every proposition about why life was valuable. But then if you said to them, "Don't be so sure that that part of you is your friend. Look what it's doing to you."

It's so destructive. And it has all of its self-justifying arguments, and they might even be coherent. But look at the consequences.

And then contrast that with your own experience: like when does that sense of nihilistic despair disappear? You know, for some people, it's when they're with people they love; they're with friends or family. Some people find it in creative activity. Some people find it in charity.

There are various sources of meaning, and that's not propositional. You see it in your own life, right? You can literally in therapy have people track that.

It's like, well, you're nihilistically depressed; let's watch your life for a week and see how that ebbs and flows with what you're doing, and then see if we can get you participating more in what makes it ebb than what makes it flow.

And that's empirical in a sense, right? I'm not asking you to believe something; I'm asking you to watch the structure of your own reality to see where meaning manifests itself.

And then you could say, in some sense, the sum total of where meaning manifests itself—that's where God resides. And that relationship with God that you described as—the what would you say?—as that has to be maintained by our good behavior, I suppose.

That's that desire to live in that space of meaning. And then you can propositionalize that. You can say, well, that's associated with love, and it's associated with courage. It's associated with these classical virtues, and it's not these things that we've learned to deem as evil.

And that's where you— is that—is it reasonable to say that that's where you find God if you're searching? Is that the—is that an appropriate way of looking at it?

I think so.

I met a guy one time who told me he went to a lecture, and the lecture was on God's existence. And the guy who was lecturing—and then after the lecture, my friend came up to him and said, "You know, everything you say is a bunch of malarkey; there's no God."

It's just your lecture is just meaningless. And the guy said, "Okay, what I want you to do is for the next week, I want you to treat everyone that you meet as if they were Jesus in disguise."

And the guy left the lecture and he went home, and you know, he gets home and you know, mom's there doing the dishes. And he thought to himself, well, if this were Jesus in disguise doing the dishes, I'd probably go up and like help my mom do the dishes.

And then dad came home from work, and rather than ignore him, he said, "Hey, Dad, how was—how was work? How's everything going?"

And you know, because if that were really Jesus in disguise, I would do that. And then they're eating dinner together with the family, and there's one hamburger left, and he turns to his brother and says, "Hey, why don't you have this?"

And the guy told me his life was completely transformed by literally one week of acting in this sort of way. And that's not really surprising. Pope Benedict talked about this in one of his encyclicals, that one way to God is to act in this sort of way—to act as if God exists, right?

To act as if other people are Jesus in disguise. And you know, Mother Teresa talked about that too—that for her, the poor and the leper and the destitute were all Jesus in disguise, and so she served them as if they were Jesus.

And so that is one way, it seems to me, to move towards God. I don't think it's the only way, though. And the reason is that I know a philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, who mentioned to us in class one day that he was an atheist until he carefully studied the arguments for God's existence.

So there are at least some people—at least one person, Alasdair MacIntyre—who really did come to God through that way.

But I think the more common way is through lived practice, lived action.

Yeah, you brought up the case of severe depression, and you know, it is the case, of course, that you can make profoundly coherent arguments for why your life is meaningless and why meaning there is just a vast nullity to all existence. But the question isn't are they coherent; the question is are they true?

The question is, are the premises right? Because anything can be coherent within false premises. The question is, is it the case that your life is worth nothing?

And the answer has to be no. That's a false statement. It's a false apprehension of reality.

Oh, look what happens if you act that out. Of course, but even then, you could say, well, no, I'd be doing a sum if—within the grips of depression, you'd still be thinking that I am acting according to a good, given the premises that I have about the meaninglessness of my own life and of all life.

So I think the foundation—it keeps going back to the same question—the foundation of truth must be there. But then the next thing to say is not that you are wrong about your life being meaningless as a false statement, but that you're also loved.

You are loved. And it's, I think that's the kind of thing at least my own experience that can take you out of the darkness—that your life is not about you and your own thoughts. It's not about you and the systems that you are building; ultimately, you are in response to something much greater than you.

And that thing that's greater than you is looking at you and calling you out and saying, "I love you."

So it's not an either/or; it's not, well, what's true propositionally about the nature of existence? And is there a soul? It is that, and I'm calling you, which is a universal call for us as Catholics.

This exercise that you described, Dr. Kaiser, I believe that when we see other people, except under very extraordinary circumstances, we see an illusion that we project upon them.

Mostly it's a simplifying illusion; we don't see the whole person, partly I suppose because we couldn't tolerate the complete vision; it would be too much for us.

So our doors of perception are three-quarters closed, and exactly why that is isn't obvious. But I do believe that the more accurately you perceive a person, the more you perceive them in the manner that you described—you see this eternal, recurring conscious hero striving against the darkness.

And when you treat people like that, of course, they're compelled by that. It's a compelling way to be interacted with.

Although I don't know what it is, is that maybe it's not obvious how much of that you can tolerate, which is a very strange thing too.

You know, I'm thinking about this. Most of what we perceive is our memory. And sometimes that is stripped away and we see what's there.

But seeing what's there is awe-inspiring; it's gripping, and it instills terror. And I think that's the same as the burning bush. In some sense, everything is a burning bush, but you're blinded to it.

You see what's there—I think—when you really love someone—a child, you really see that in a child if you're a parent, right? You see, you don't see a generic baby; you see that actual person.

So that memory that pushes generic baby into your field of vision dissipates, and you see what's actually there. And that love drives that.

I imagine it does that. Love seems to—like I always saw when people fall in love with one another, they see the perfection that could conceivably exist.

It's like the curtains of illusion pull apart momentarily, and you see the paradisal state that could be there hypothetically if everything was done properly.

And that drives the love. And then maybe if you work across time, you can achieve that to some degree, you know? Because other people think about themselves as deluded when they're in love, and that's a very cynical way of looking at it.

It certainly doesn't apply to the love between a parent and a child.

Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I know in my own life having children has been such an unbelievably enriching experience. And I think about, you know, especially when kids are little and they're asleep, you go in there and they're just sleeping, and you see their little chest moving up and down—there's something painfully beautiful about that.

I mean, you just wish it could go on just indefinitely. And for me, that is something that taught me something about God's love, right? If God really is God the Father, well then, you know, that's sort of how he looks at us, and he sees the good; he sees the effort.

And of course, there's imperfections too, but I don't know; for me, having children is a kind of—I try to sometimes tell my students, most of whom don't have kids, what it's like, and it's very hard to describe.

So the best way I came up with was, remember when you were a little child, you're like six, and you thought, oh, boys have cooties, girls have cooties, and the idea of romance or kissing someone is just repulsive? And then, you know, you could imagine trying to explain to a six-year-old, "Look, at some point you're going to look at someone else and just find this person unbelievably captivating, and you're going to want to kiss them."

And you can say the words, but a little kid's been like, "No way!" That's hard to describe.

And I think becoming a parent is similar to that in that, yeah, it seems to me that it is so enriching that—and has given so much, at least to my life, including calling out something for me that would have never been elicited because there's kind of sacrifices that you'll do for a kid that you'll never do for, you know, an adult.

So that's interesting; that ties in with this idea that you brought forward of treating everybody as if they were manifestation of Christ.

You see that meaningful fragility in your children, and it's beautiful. And maybe if you're—if you've been warped and hurt, you get resentful about it and jealous of it, and that can lead to all sorts of terrible things.

But to the degree that you can—that you're privileged to see that, that calls you to be a better person.

And you can think of that, you know, biologically. Well, you have these fragile creatures that you're responsible for. Of course, that's going to call you to a higher mode of action because otherwise they're not going to live.

You know? So it's very practical. But so then—but what you see there is if you view someone with love, then it's incumbent upon you to treat them as if they're valuable.

And then the more you treat other people as if they're valuable, the better person you are. That just comes along for the ride in some sense.

So none of that seems questionable to me; that seems solid. And so then maybe the more love you view other people with, the higher the moral demand that's placed on you.

And then I would say too, well, then that's another reason why it's so important to be truthful and, in some sense, to be good.

Because it isn't obvious to me that you can withstand that moral load if you're compromised by too much sin. It's too much.

And then that's another thing that we're not very good at teaching young people about. You know, we shouldn't do that. You know, it's like there's a sanctimonious authority that goes along with that.

That's the wrong tone. It's more like, you know, I don't know how you lay it out properly, but you tell people that you love how to avoid the road to hell.

And you don't do that because you're shaking your finger at them or because you're a moral authority. You do it because you don't want them to burn.

And I think there's too much of the moral authority still in the church and not enough of the—you know, the love that helps people avoid the fire.

I assume.

I think that you've just beautifully described is the unity of the love commandment—that you love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and you love your neighbor as yourself.

The love—the love of God identifies the pattern, and then they interplay between the love of the neighbor and the love of the self—they're inextricable. They're differentiated but inextricably intertwined.

And so to love the neighbor is to see the neighbor as he or she actually is and to respond to the actuality—not to your desires, not to what you want this person to be in a utilitarian or instrumental sense, but to the reality of that eternal soul right there.

And through that, then you see who you are. That's a commentary on the Ten Commandments, right? That's Christ's summation of the Ten Commandments.

So that's another illustration of that abstraction: proper behavior, the story on top of that, the propositions that would be the Ten Commandments, let's say.

So then Christ is challenged on the Ten Commandments, something like rank order these if you're so wise, right? Exactly, because you're going to say something heretical, and Christ does this unbelievable sleight of mind and extracts out two superordinate principles.

And it's done in such a compelling way that the interlocutor, who's basically a prosecutorial mind, like an inquisitionist in some sense, is reduced to silence.

That's a very powerful story—it's one of those stories you read that you think it's not obvious how someone could have made that up.

There's a lot of genius; there’s an immense well of moral genius in that story. And the idea that that's some sort of casual false construct, you know, produced for the purposes of power—it's like, well, you try to write a story that short that is that wise.

See how far you get with it? So, yeah, those stories are all over the Gospels.

I mean, think about the story where the woman is caught in adultery, and they say to Jesus, "Well, you know, the law says we should stone her to death. You know what do you say?" And they're trying to trap him, of course, because if he says, "Well, don't stone her to death," then they say, "Well, you're against Moses, huh? You're a religious heretic."

And then if he says, "Go ahead and throw the stones," then he's going against his message of mercy. But Jesus, of course, says very famously, "Let whoever has the first sin cast the first—or whoever has no sin casts the first stone."

And, you know, everyone has to drop their stones and go away. And then he says to her, of course, "Go and sin no more."

So that kind of story, you think, yeah, you'd have to have quite an imagination; be a kind of literary genius to come up with this. And I think it's important, in part, because Christ combines both, right?

That is to say we have the command, and the commandment, say not to commit adultery is there for a reason—I'm sure you know from your clinical practice that that can cause unbelievable problems for couples and families.

But he also has the mercy, so Jesus combines the high commands of justice and with this high mercy.

And in a way, that's what the church is seeking to do now—always imperfectly because we're imperfect—but both need to be there. There needs to be the moral, the high moral calling, but also the great mercy.

Both, because I think one without the other is going to be unbalanced. And the high moral calling, again, is for our own good. The law is a form of grace.

This—this is how we flourish; this is how we become happy. Now, of course, we fail, which brings in the mercy component.

But that's another terrible misconstruction of religion broadly and specifically Christianity and Catholicism, is that somehow these rules were premised on control or power as their motivating reason for coming into existence.

It's the exact opposite. It's to liberate—it’s to liberate us from ourselves.

I guess it's the other thing that seems to have worked in my lectures is like a lot of this, a lot of the work I've done was motivated by my attempts, I suppose, to understand hell.

And then more than that, how is it that you become an active contributor to hell? And you might say, well, hell isn't real. Well, and I would say that, well, you haven't looked enough.

If you think that's true, you're fortunate enough so that you can believe that's not true. It's like you know nothing about history, and you've been unbelievably sheltered in your own life if you don't believe that hell is real.

And, you know, maybe only someone cruel would wish that that ignorance be stripped away from you. But if you study history as a perpetrator—well, then if you study history as a perpetrator, then you see how your own inequity contributes to that.

And then it's not unreasonable to say, well, if you love people, you would try to guide them away from that. And when I did my Maps of Meaning lectures at the university and in public, that's always in the back of my mind.

It's well—look at what happened in Germany, and look at what happened in the Soviet Union, and look at what happened in China. And how do you act so that that happens?

Well, I wouldn't make that happen; it's like if you say that, then you would because you don't know enough.

You'd—because if you do, you'd say, yes, I could contribute to that, and I probably am, and I should be terrified enough to stop if I only knew how.

And then these guidelines to love and to tell the truth, they are, in fact, protection against exactly that kind of catastrophe.

Yeah, and I think it's true not only in those very dramatic examples of hell like the gulag, but I think it's true in a really everyday sense.

I mean, yes, hell can start here on earth in a very everyday sort of way. So I think if somebody actually—that I know on my block—and this person is incredibly angry at everyone, even people that try to help this person.

She's always angry at them, and she's filled with hatred, and bitterness, and everything's bad. And so for this person, I would say she is already living in hell—the beginning of hell, at least, here on earth.

I mean, her life, as far as I can tell, is just really, really hellish in every respect. And then people in contact with her, she makes their lives polish very often.

And the reverse is true too. There can be people, here and now, who are already living in the beginnings of heaven. They're filled with love for God; they're filled with love for other people; they love themselves.

They're living this heavenly life because, at the end of the day, at least on the Catholic view, what is heaven? Well, what heaven is is perfect love of God, perfect love of other people, perfect love of yourself.

And what is hell? What's the opposite? It's a lack of all that, right? It's lacking love of God, lacking love for other people, lacking love for yourself.

It's being filled with hatred. So heaven and hell, I would say, really begin right now, and in the life to come, they say they're intensified; they're deepened.

So—and this is the vision of Dante, right? That, you know, heaven or hell is something that all of its punishments are meant to show that the sin is its own punishment in some respect, right?

All the punishments that say that people in hell experience are

Jordan Peterson, God, & Christianity | Kaczor & Petrusek | EP 212

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