If you’ve ever tried to comprehend the writings of sainted ancient Christian theologians Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), for example, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about in this post.

These guys’ complex arguments are as dense as lead. Who knows what they were trying to say exactly?

Augustine

In Book 1 of his autobiographical Confessions, Augustine wrote (in an English translation of his original Latin):

“I have heard somewhat, and have myself seen women with child? and what before that life again, O God my joy, was I any where or any body? For this have I none to tell me, neither father nor mother, nor experience of others, nor mine own memory. Dost Thou mock me for asking this, and bid me praise Thee and acknowledge Thee, for that I do know?”

Huh?

Aquinas

Aquinas’s tortured prose was equally confusing, as when he was trying to explain how angels exist in the real world:

“There must be some incorporeal creatures. For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself. And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a case is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat.”

I was reminded of this tendency to vastly overcomplicate religious ideas yesterday while reading an intriguing post by Esther O’Reilly on the online Patheos evangelical channel, titled “Sam Harris Asks Questions Jordan Peterson Can’t Answer.” The article itself, about a series of Harris/Peterson debates, was clear enough; the ideas Peterson argued for weren’t.

The ‘Four Horsemen’

Harris (The End of Faith), of course, is one of the so-named “Four Horsemen” of the “New Atheism” that galloped into the American secular milieu around the turn of the millennia, including Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) and the late Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), all of whose books are well worth reading.

Peterson, is a Canadian clinical psychologist and psychology professor, whose first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, investigates human psychology as it relates to religious/ideological beliefs.

In her post, O’Reilly contends that the divide between Harris and Peterson is that the former is a committed atheist, the latter an only partially deconverted religious skeptic. O’Reilly, says Petersen, is “a thoroughgoing pragmatist in the technical sense that if you’ve found an idea that seems to work in your everyday life, the mere fact that the idea works makes it true.”

What survives is ‘true’

So, Peterson argues that because Christianity has so fundamentally informed the trajectory of Western history and civilization, and robustly survived, it is arguably “true.” Harris, unsurprisingly, calls BS, arguing that the “only logically sustainable theory” in determining truth is a rational acceptance of what is and isn’t. O’Reilly explains:

“But Peterson is not so much concerned with logical sustainability. He’s concerned with sustainability, period. And he believes we have already seen what happens when atheists behave in consistently logical fashion. For him, the path of truth is synonymous with the path that takes Western civilization as far away from the gas chambers and the gulags as possible.”

O’Reilly wrote that once, when asked if he was Christian and believed in God, Peterson demurred, sounding like 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “I think the proper response to that is no, but I’m afraid He might exist.”

Pascal’s Wager

Pascal, by the way, famously — in “Pascal’s Wager” — proposed that, if a person fairly weighed the risks (hell) and benefits (heaven) of belief vs. nonbelief, belief would be the vastly more reasonable choice.

But, still, is belief in invisible divinities actually true “true”? That’s the only real question, not whether belief is popular with human beings or expansively persistent or (per Pascal) a good insurance policy or even if all humans seem to naturally imagine chimera. Do they exist?

The rhetorical complications always arise when theologians try mightily to explain the unexplainable, such as how invisible divine beings can exist in a patently material cosmos or why an all-benevolent deity would allow, much less inflict, suffering in the world. In other words, it’s difficult in the extreme to square a circle but simple to just accept the natural, common-sense reality of its circle-ness, especially when all manifest evidence indicates an overwhelming probability it could be nothing else.

But there still seems to be a hunger for learning about these conflicting ideas surrounding religiosity. Harris remains a popular speaker who also sells a lot of books, and Peterson, O’Reilly reports, can fill auditoriums with eager ticket-buyers on multiple successive nights in one city. And they’re also popular in tandem; the ongoing Harris/Peterson debate series enjoyed four sold-out nights last month alone in Canada and Britain.

God in the mind, heart

Nonetheless, Jordan’s quasi-spiritual proclivities lend themselves to unnecessary complications and obfuscations, the kind of discombobulating hallucinogens philosophers and theologians have been weighing us down with since the dawn of civilization. As O’Reilly notes:

“Jordan obliges, with a volley of definitions: ‘God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence of an action of consciousness across time.’ ‘God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.’ ‘God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values.’ ‘God is the voice of conscience.’ ‘God is the source of judgment, mercy, and guilt.’ ‘God is the future to which we make sacrifices.’”

But these are explanations of emotional intuitions in our bodies, not concrete realities reproducible in the real world — which is the true realm of truth.

Everything else, as they say, is just opinion.

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