An analysis of Jordan Peterson’s lectures on the stories of the Bible

In this lecture on the idea of God, Peterson says the Bible is a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands of years. He’s basically saying the authors of the books in the Bible are sociologists and psychologists who are merely trying to extract meaning from man’s existence. There are many problems with this idea. For one thing, although there are many stories in the Bible, they’re much more than stories. They’re stories that contain objective truths about right and wrong, who God is, who we are, and how we’re supposed to live. Also, they aren’t made up stories. They really happened, which means they weren’t made up, as Peterson believes. If they weren’t made up, then they didn’t have the purpose he ascribes to them.

He says the Bible is mankind’s attempt to extract patterns of behavior and represent them in a way we can understand. That’s simply not true. It’s God’s revelation to us about Himself and about us, not our revelation about ourselves to ourselves. That’s an atheistic view of the Bible, not a Christian one. He also says he sees in the Bible stories our struggle to rise above our animal forebears and become conscious of what it means to be human. If that’s all the Bible is, particularly the OT, then there’d be no need to follow and worship Jesus, since we were already on our way to figuring out what it means to be human. If the Bible was made up, then there’d be no reason not to discard it, since we’re still evolving and could simply become more enlightened and no longer have any need for those stories. He should ask himself why this book, but no others, has inspired so many people and continues to do so. If it was just a creation of man, it would be inevitable that man would eventually come up with another series of stories and books that either disproved the Bible or updated it. And yet after all this time, that hasn’t happened, and people continue to be drawn to the truths of the Bible. I think this proves more than anything that it contains divine truths and that we’re drawn to it like a magnet because God gave us an inherent desire to know and love Him, which the Bible enables us to do.

He says certain psychedelic drugs and even brain stimulation can produce religious experiences, which proves that there’s something more to our existence than the merely biological. But it’s the other way around. Those experiences don’t prove anything about God or religion, they just prove that certain actions and substances can mimic truly religious experiences in some ways, but not in the most important way, which is that they don’t bring us into contact with God, and they don’t reveal anything about Him or about us, despite what people might say.

Peterson says we’re more evolved than chimps, and proof of this is that we figured out everything we currently know. By giving us all the credit for our advancement as a species and giving God no credit, he’s making us gods, which is ironic because he says that that’s what Nietzsche did, and thought Nietzsche was wrong to do that. He doesn’t even realize that he’s following in Nietzsche’s footsteps.

Why there was so much violence in the OT:

As he started talking about the OT, I realized for the first time why there was so much seemingly arbitrary and ruthless killing and violence in the OT. I think the reason is threefold: 1)It was God making it clear that justice must be done for the crimes of humanity against Him, which were rampant at that time. Mankind fell into deep sin, and God was actually being merciful by killing people who never intended to turn to Him because it helped the people who were still alive to wake up and realize they needed to turn to Him. Also, He probably killed people who were on the edge of being saved or not being saved, and by ending their lives, He spared them eternal damnation by preventing them from committing mortal sins that deserved that punishment. 2)It was to confound people in later centuries, especially us, who think we’re so advanced and enlightened that we can know the mind of God. So when we read these stories that contradict what we think we know about God, we’re forced to either allow our pride to take over and say that the stories aren’t true, or humble ourselves and say that they’re in the Bible and they must be true, and that we can’t know God perfectly, so we should be content with not understanding everything in the Bible perfectly. 3)The people back then were more primitive, so they needed very direct messages from God and stark reminders of what was right and wrong, otherwise they’d just keep living sinful lives, which is exactly what the Israelites did when God didn’t intervene. They were God’s chosen people whom He appeared to in various ways, and they still were stubborn and refused to follow Him with their whole minds and hearts, so imagine how much more sinful the pagans of the time were.

Peterson talks about dreams and says that they reveal that there are things inside of us that are controlling us, and that’s scary. He says that they’re more than random firings of neurons, but he won’t say that these unknown aspects of ourselves prove the existence of God. So he’s left in an intellectual and philosophical no man’s land. He won’t commit to being an atheist it seems, but he won’t commit to being a Christian either, which leaves him with no suitable answers to the biggest questions we face in life.

He calls dreams “revelations”, because we don’t control them and they came out of nowhere. The ironic thing is that he’s attributing to dreams what’s right in front of him and what his lecture’s supposed to be about, which is the Bible. I think what drives him is the fact that there are things he can’t understand and control in life, and he wants to understand those things so he can control them, because he, like everyone to varying degrees, hates not being able to control things. But the bigger one’s ego and ambition is, the more one hates feeling powerless and unable to understand things.

He says the Bible came from somewhere between our dreams and our articulated knowledge.

Peterson says we can’t know if God exists or not because that question is beyond our intellectual capacity to answer. So he refuses to answer it. That’s nothing more than a dodge of the question, and he does so, whether intentionally or not, because it disproves his claim that the idea of God is “the abstraction of a human ideal formalized over millions of years of human development in the myths and teachings of any religion”. You can’t say God is a human invention and then say “we can’t know if He exists”. By saying the former, you’ve already answered that question with a definitive “no”.

Christians answer this question in the exact opposite way by saying that God gave us the ability to reason precisely so that we could come to know God. But our reason can only lead us to Him. It’s divine revelation and His grace working in our lives that first draws us to Him in the first place and then enlightens our mind to understand what we’re not capable of understanding on our own. God isn’t unknowable because He made Himself known in the Incarnation. You have to reject both the Incarnation and the Resurrection to hold Peterson’s position, which not only rejects the authenticity of the Bible, but also flies in the face of much historical evidence.

Peterson elevates the concept of archetypes to the divine, and in doing so, he places man on the level of God. He kicks God off of the pedestal that’s rightfully his and replaces him with man.

This article sums up Peterson’s approach the Bible, God, and religion better than any I’ve read:

More likely, however, Peterson is fostering our cultural Gnosticism. Consider his understanding of God, what he calls his first hypothesis: God is the abstraction of a human ideal formalized over millions of years of human development in the myths and teachings of any religion. Does an actual transcendent deity exist? Peterson leaves this “floating up in the air” (his words, in lecture one), something unfit for rational investigation.

The idea of an unknowable, trans-cosmic God eluding any rational or scientific investigation is a classic Gnostic construct, but you can see why it’s the only way to understand God in today’s intellectual climate. Yet, as Saint John repeatedly emphasized in his writings, an unknowable God undermines the central tenet of the Christian faith. Instead of Christ “up in the air,” God has tented on earth and entered our history, becoming quite knowable at a rational level.

Of course, rationality understood as Peterson does cannot entertain any possible case for the tenets of the Christian creed, even though the creation, the incarnation, and the church most certainly are rationally defensible. What is the first cause? How do you explain 500 people witnessing a resurrected Christ? How do you explain the beneficial societal effects of the Christian faith wherever it goes?

Peterson comes awfully close to reckoning with these realities, but because of his a priori understanding of rationalism and psychological emphasis, he prepares the soul more for Gnostic spirituality than Christian orthodoxy, leaving the true power of Christianity — faith — just beyond his comprehension. Peterson also runs a risk with his psychological case for the transcendent. So long as there is no real, rationally grasped, objective transcendency independent of human involvement — the very thing Christ provides — any rational grounds for the transcendent must be tautological. The Jungian formulation articulates this: the archetypes of myth are transcendent because transcendency is defined as what an archetype is”.

This classic petitio principii is constitutive to Gnostic epistemology as well as most attempts at morality in our day. The knower just knows the truth. How do you know it’s the truth? Because the knower just knows it is. He’s special that way. He’s woke. He’s the one Cretan you can trust when he says “All Cretans are liars.”

The psychological angle also explains the pagan inclinations of Peterson’s thought. Paganism is ultimately a religion of psychic projection. Archetypes developed over eons translate into psychic energies — what the ancients called daemonic — which by force of human projection animate the various gods and goddesses of myth.

Idolaters didn’t really believe stone was divine. Idols were totems objectifying aspects of the self they divinized, the whole process being a way of placing the mysterious ways of the self in a mythical, and therefore cosmically meaningful, context. It’s what we do all the time with our modern media archetypes and icons. It’s what a good marketer does with ads. It’s all part of the systematic theology of the self.

On these terms, Peterson’s theology of scripture is a paganization of the biblical narrative, a transforming of biblical characters and themes into psychic projections of our collective unconsciousness. Peterson’s easy willingness to cross-reference his conclusions with archetypes from other world religions and pagan mythologies support this conclusion. The archetypes are real; the religions are mere passing forms”.

This is exactly right. Peterson says that life is suffering and that we have to learn how to bear it properly, but then he says the ideal position in life is to find the balance between order and chaos. But that’s entirely based on one’s ability to control one’s life and the conditions you’re in in order to prevent yourself from reaching the breaking point. The problem with this idea is that our lives aren’t in our control. They might appear to be, but they never were. It’s a utilitarian idea because it says that we can only be happy if we have the ability to find that happy medium in life. Many people, such as the poor, disabled, mentally ill, etc, don’t have that ability. So Peterson’s advice is useless and meaningless for them.

Peterson’s entire message is focused on the self. It’s based on what we can do to make our lives better. This is the antithesis of Christianity, which is based on the idea that we have to surrender to God because only He can make us better, regardless of what’s happening in our lives and the world around us.

He says the entire store of Moses and the Israelites is a mythological story. If that’s the case then we might be able to learn some lessons from it, but the lessons we’re learning aren’t based on objective truth, they’re just our attempt to extract meaning from a meaningless story.

Peterson says when you’re trying to make peace, you’re trying to understand what peace is, but you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just doing whatever it takes to make peace. He says you need a set of principles to understand how to make peace, but the principles are whatever it takes to make peace. That’s a description of moral relativism, which is at the root of Peterson’s worldview, whether he realizes it or not.

He calls God “an abstracted idea” and “a representation of a pattern of being”. He says God is nothing more than mankind’s attempt to represent the concept of power that first started with one person and then was articulated by a group of people. If that’s true, then another group of people could come up with another abstract concept that could replace that one at any time, and who’s to say that one group’s concept of power or set of moral principles is any better than the other’s. If that’s all the Bible is, how come it’s the one that has influenced more people than any other religion or ideology? How come no theologian or philosopher has ever been able to come up with something that’s more appealing to people? If the teachings and principles in the Bible are human inventions, then Christians don’t have to follow them, and if that’s true, the entire foundation for Christianity would crumble. Either Christians are right, and the events in the Bible really happened, and we’re supposed to believe the truths it contains, or Peterson’s right, and it’s all a myth. There’s no in between. That’s why I think it’s important that Christians don’t join his cult and make it clear to other Christians and nonbelievers alike that he’s twisting the Bible and Christianity to fit his worldview, and isn’t even remotely portraying it accurately.

If I could have a conversation with Dr Peterson, here’s what I would say to him: Do you really believe Jesus was just a man who called Himself God? If you believe that, then you shouldn’t be using His teachings as a means to improve your life or the lives of others, because if that’s true, then Jesus was either crazy or a liar, and it would negate all of His teachings. However, I think the teachings, and all of His words in the Bible refute the idea that He wasn’t God because they’re obviously so far beyond anything man could come up with on his own. Indeed, they were radically different from anything mankind believed up til then.

Furthermore, if everything in the Bible is a myth, how come the central event, the Incarnation, is unlike anything that had imagined up til then? Before Jesus came, no mere mortal would’ve or even could’ve imagined that God Himself would become man. Think about it. If you were God, the creator of the universe, would you become the creature you created? What kind of god does that? A god whose love and very being is infinite and thus infinitely beyond our intellectual capacity to understand it. Up til that point, in every culture, the idea of a god or gods was nothing like Jesus. They ruled mankind with iron fists and did whatever they wanted. They demanded that we serve them. The God of the Bible condescends to us by coming down to our level, and serves us. Not only that, but He even suffers and dies for us. This is why most of the Jews had such a hard time believing Jesus was God. Even in the Old Testament, God didn’t reveal Himself fully, so their idea of God was of a just God, but one who would never go so far as to die for them. He was too holy, too far above His creatures to do that.

Jesus allowed Himself to be born as a baby in a manger. That’s mind-boggling when you think about it. The creator of the universe was at one point a baby in Mary’s womb, and was born into poverty. That’s something you just can’t make up. Even a person with the wildest imagination couldn’t have come up with it because it completely destroyed man’s idea of what it means to be God. This God wasn’t just an idea or a principle, He was and is a man. To deny this reality is to deny everything else Jesus taught, because everything He taught can only be true if it came from a man who had the authority to teach it as truth. The only man who had that authority was also God, who is truth itself. So with all due respect, you’re contradicting yourself when you say some of Jesus’s teachings and words are profound and good advice to live by and then reject His divinity. You can’t have it both ways. Either Jesus is God and everything He said is true and must be followed in order to have eternal life, or He’s not God, and therefore nothing He said was true and had any authority behind it, and thus shouldn’t be followed.

I find it ironic that in his first lecture on God and the Bible, Dr Peterson says his goal is to try to figure out what’s at the bottom of life and civilization, and if there’s a deeper meaning to it all. If that’s the case, then it’s really the blind leading the blind, it’s just a more educated blind person leading less educated blind people. The Christian already knows what the meaning and purpose of life is because God has revealed it to us. We start from that reality and branch out from there. Dr Peterson starts out by questioning this fundamental truth, but without realizing it, he’s trying to reach it, it’s just that he has to start out by rejecting it and then working his way backwards until he arrives at the truth we’ve already received. That’s assuming he ever arrives at it, which I hope he does.

He says he views humanity as a collection of subpersonalities and that those subpersonalities are alive. To be honest, I think this is a sophisticated way of saying nothing. There’s no such thing as a “subpersonality”. It’s a concept psychologists have made up to help them understand psychology, therefore it can’t be alive. He says he takes seriously the idea that we’re a loose collection of spirits. He then goes on to quote the Old Testament verse that says “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” and compares it to the Greek idea of humans being the playthings of the gods. He says these are basically the same idea. That shows he lacks a fundamental understanding of the Bible, because the God of the Old Testament is nothing like the Greek gods, although it may appear that way if you only read the OT at a surface level. God in the OT is a just God to be sure, which explains why He has sinful and corrupt people killed. But there’s a reason for His justice. It’s not just because He’s toying with people for His own pleasure. Beyond that, He’s merciful and loving. It’s these attributes of God that secular people miss when they read the OT, either intentionally or not. All you have to do is read the Song of Songs to see these attributes of God. The Book of Job shows that God is allowing Satan to cause Job great suffering, but it’s for a purpose, and in the end, Job is rewarded tenfold to make up for everything he lost, and in reward for his faithfulness to God. In other words, his suffering isn’t meaningless, and God always has a plan to bring the greatest good out of our suffering. That’s nothing like the Greek gods and their meaningless and cruel punishment of people.

By saying that both the Greek gods and the God of the OT are figments of man’s imagination, he’s essentially saying our subconscious minds are our gods, and to a large degree, they control us rather than us controlling them. He later references Nietzsche and says that we need to civilize these impulses, but if they can be civilized, then they’re not gods, and they’re not that powerful or mysterious after all, thus exposing another flaw in his logic.

I found it comical when Dr Peterson was describing the postmodernist critiques of great literature and the Bible. He was saying they say you can’t develop a canonical interpretation of the Bible because it’s too complex, so how can we know what’s true in it and what’s not, and how to apply it to various problems in the world and in our lives? He says this is a good question, and I thought “It is a good question, because it describes your worldview as well”. Both Dr Peterson and the postmodernists are moral relativists who don’t believe in objective truth, so by definition, their differences in belief about the Bible and other things are subjective and thus irrelevant.

He says the problem with the postmodern critique of the Bible is that it leaves you with no truth and that leads to chaos, which causes anxiety and problems for us. But he doesn’t have an answer as to why this is the case.

He says we need to have a noble aim because life is so painful and difficult, and without such an aim or goal, we’re not strong enough to withstand life’s hardships. The problem with this philosophy is that it’s purely utilitarian. He’s saying it’s good to have a noble aim, which is to “confront chaos” and make the world a better place. In other words, the aim is a means to an end. This again is the opposite of what Jesus taught. He taught us that our aim should be to love God and neighbor with everything we have, and by doing so, we become holy and will be rewarded with Heaven. For the Christian, the aim is the end, not the means to the end.

He implies that we subconsciously reach for this noble aim because we’re trying to justify our wretched existence on this planet. Imo, that’s just psychobabble. The Christian believes that nothing we do can justify our existence here because we didn’t merit being here. God created us out of His love, so only He can justify our existence, and He did by sending His Son to die on the cross for us in expiation of our sins. It doesn’t matter if we feel justified or not, what matters is the reality of what Jesus’s death and resurrection did for us, which was open up the possibility of eternal life in Heaven with Him.

Peterson then starts talking about how to create order out of chaos and find balance in life. He says we can’t avoid all pain, but we should try to limit it so that we don’t experience more than necessary. But what’s more than necessary? That’s entirely subjective and utilitarian. He views pain as a necessary evil, but if the meaning of life is centered on avoiding “unnecessary” pain, we’ll end up miserable because we can’t control events that cause us that much pain. Peterson doesn’t realize it, but he’s setting up a paradigm where he’s trying to control life as much as possible. Every Christian understands that this is delusional because our lives were never in our control to begin with. The more we try to control things, the more it becomes evident that by trying to do so, we often end up suffering even more than if we did nothing at all to avoid pain and suffering. That leads us to a deeper question, which I haven’t heard Peterson ask yet, which is why are we so desperate to avoid suffering in the first place? I tried to answer that here. To sum it up, I would say it’s because we hate not being in control due to our pride and lack of trust in God. So we try to control things that are out of our control, and that makes things even worse for us. It puts us in an endless loop of misery. For Peterson, and all atheists, pain should be avoided when possible because it has no use for us. For the Christian, pain is a good thing because it helps us detach ourselves from our selfish desires and focus more on God, who is the source of all good things, including peace and happiness. This is why I think he’s setting up his fans for failure and misery.

He then says we should try to interact with other people in a way that doesn’t make us suffer more. This is delusional, and it’s viewing people in a utilitarian way once again. It’s delusional because people are unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable, so when we interact with them, there’s always a good chance that they’ll cause us more suffering, that’s just human nature. We all have weaknesses and needs, and those weaknesses cause us to have conflicts with other people with their own weaknesses. Likewise, we all have needs, some more than others, and our needs often come into conflict with the needs of others. If we live our lives constantly trying to avoid these conflicts, we’ll actually be causing more suffering for ourselves because we’ll be constantly under stress, and we’ll also limit the good that can come from those interactions as well. This is why a utilitarian life philosophy collapses under its own weight. It ignores the weaknesses in human nature and is eventually overcome by those weaknesses. A Christian life philosophy, on the other hand, takes our sins and weaknesses into account but teaches us to love people despite them, and despite the pain they cause us, rather than to see people as either good or bad objects that cause us varying degrees of pain.