In 2017, I had the opportunity of talking with Jordan Peterson. I made a rough draft of a few topics that I wanted to talk about, and one them was this one. However, at the time I had more important topics I wanted to cover, and there wasn’t enough time to get to this. I hoped I’d get to talk with him again to cover this and a few other subjects, but since then JP has exploded in popularity, and so that seems unlikely to happen. The topic popped into my head yesterday, so figured I’d make an article on it, especially given I already had a basic structure written down. This article is simply touching on an issue I personally disagree with, and it doesn’t undermine much if anything of what he provides.

So, let’s get into it. The gist of it is I think Jordan’s views on the resurrection make his beliefs somewhat inconsistent. So let’s first lay down his beliefs. If you have watched or read JP, you know he puts great value into religious stories and religion in general. However, this is mostly with a Jungian framework, interpreting its symbolism, and extracting valuable philosophical ideas. He declares himself a Christian, but it’s a rather dubious and uncommon position on Christianity. By most Christians, he would not be considered one.

Almost all his beliefs and how he interprets religion and Christianity can be done with an atheist perspective and belief. In fact, whenever I see threads within the JP community asking about this, it’s a rather common stance to view him as atheist that simply sees the value behind Christianity. I don’t think that’s entirely correct, but nevertheless it’s a reasonable impression, given how far away he is from the classic Christian, since he never appeals to anything supernatural. All the value he extracts from Christian lore and tradition is mostly codified philosophy, and never conflicts with scientific facts.

In fact, I remember a video of him where he humorously described that many of his followers are calling themselves “Christian atheists” after watching his lectures, being previous atheists who rejected religion completely. First of all, I don’t think he realized that this actually exists. From Wikipedia:

“Christian atheism is a form of Cultural Christianity and a system of ethics which draws its beliefs and practices from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the Gospels of the New Testament and other sources, while rejecting the supernatural claims of Christianity at large.”

And second, funny enough, 99% of the population would include him in this category given his beliefs. Again, I’m not saying this is entirely correct because of JP’s philosophy which makes this tricky, but it’s very reasonable nevertheless.

However, there is an exception to this overall secular approach. While pretty much all his material doesn’t appeal to anything supernatural, he always claims he’s not denying any metaphysics either. This gets problematic on Jesus Christ’s Resurrection.

Is there anything metaphysical about the story of the Resurrection? Did Jesus literally (this is important because JP always has a symbolic framework) come back to life, beyond any philosophical and psychological interpretation? His answer is: “Did his body resurrect? I don’t know. […] What happens to the world around you as you import as you increasingly embody the logos? And the answer to that is we don’t know. […] I don’t know what happens to a person if they get themselves completely into alignment”.

What he means by logos and alignment would take too long to unpack, but for our purposes we can oversimplify to mean in this specific context “the ultimate path” of the individual. But the important part is the implied assumption here is that if you managed to get enlightened, you can, quite literally, transcend biology.

Now, to be fair, he is not claiming this happened, or that it’s even possible. He claims he’s agnostic about it, which probably makes me look pedantic. Why is this an issue then?

The first thing is how he’s addressing the question to begin with. Christ’s resurrection is simply another story. Now, when I say story, I don’t mean in the pejorative sense that it’s silly, or even that it’s not true. But the point is: it’s a story that becomes from the Bible. If they’re historically true or divine is irrelevant. So why does Peterson put such emphasis on it? Being agnostic about supernatural events is a reasonable position, but why is he agnostic?

Is he agnostic on the story of the Noah’s Ark? Or the creation in Genesis? No. They’re obviously not literal historical events, but nevertheless he draws psychological value on the symbolism behind those myths. So why is the Resurrection different? Of course, there is also a psychological analysis of it. You can view it at an individual level (death and rebirth of the personality, in the attainment of the “ideal”), or a sociological one (Christ’ “spirit” lives on through time). But what makes this story different than the others? Why suspend the denial of a metaphysical reality, when he obviously and reasonably doesn’t to any other story? This is common for Christians, as most don’t believe that the Bible is an accurate, historical account of events (except fundamentalists) and contains a lot of metaphors. But they don’t view certain parts as metaphors, one obviously being the Resurrection. This is because it’s central to Christ’s divinity and a host of other key factors in the belief system, but Jordan doesn’t necessarily need any of it.

I predict this may not make sense to some. He’s agnostic, he’s not claiming it happened, so what’s the problem? I first have to clarify what I mean by agnosticism.

When you’re agnostic about something, it means you don’t claim to know if it’s true or not (or that’s unknowable). In a religious context (where it comes from), this means you don’t know if God exists. But where does atheists fall then? Do atheists claim they know God doesn’t exist? Obviously not. Some probably do, but most know that’s an unreasonable claim. They are also unavoidably agnostic, as they can’t claim to know that it doesn’t exist. So why the distinction in the first place? The distinction exists because of the emphasis on each category. I have to oversimplify it and this is obviously a generalization bound to exceptions and nuance, but I’ll try to explain each one, how they differ and how they overlap:

Atheism is the rejection of a claim about God. Some people claim God exists. Based on the evidence that I’ve been presented with and the arguments for and against it, I’m willing to assume it doesn’t exist. I can’t possibly know for sure it doesn’t exist (“technically agnostic”), but it seems to me to be the most reasonable position.

Agnosticism, on the other hand, is the skeptical position regarding the claim about God. Some people claim God exists. Based on the evidence that I’ve been presented with and the arguments for and against it, I don’t know if it does. Because I don’t believe it exists (not because of a “negative” belief, but rather because it’s a neutral one, and therefore a “non-positive” stance), it’s also in one sense atheism.

Couple caveats: This obviously it doesn’t mean that your conclusion is correct. The point is the rationale behind your position regardless of its validity. And also atheism can indeed mean the explicit claim that there is no God period (often called positive atheists in the philosophical literature, compared to negative atheists), however, it’s not a common position, at least in educated circles.

To sum up: They’re not the same thing, but it’s pretty close, and greatly overlapping. And this applies to everything, even outside of a religious context. I would say I’m agnostic about the claim that we will have strong AI in the next 50 years. From the evidence and arguments that I’ve seen, I don’t know if that will happen or not, or perhaps I can even say we can’t know (a form of apathetic agnosticism taken out of its religious context). However, I’m not agnostic about Atlantis. From the evidence and arguments that I’ve seen, I don’t know if it existed or not, but it seems the most reasonable position is that it didn’t. But that doesn’t imply that I’m claiming it definitely doesn’t exist, I can’t. This type of thinking and belief can be applied to pretty much everything.

This was a rather lengthy on agnosticism alone, but I felt it was necessary to understand my point.

This is what makes JP’s agnosticism in my opinion inconsistent. Why the even the assumption to begin with, that this supernatural event can be possible, to warrant his agnosticism? What exactly makes him believe that transcending biology, based on psychological factors alone, is remotely achievable? He sort of tried to answer this once: “I don’t know the limits of human possibility […] in order to stay alive it’s necessary to get the balance between death and life right in your psyche and your physiology because death keeps you alive and regenerate all the time, and if you die too much then you die and if you don’t die enough then you also die. You have to get the balance right. I don’t know what would happen if you’ve got the balance of life and death exactly right.”

Sounds very poetic, but unfortunately this doesn’t really say anything. The fact that there is a balance of life and death doesn’t mean you can reverse death, and if you can reverse death, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that is tied to anything you can possibly do at a psychological level. When simplified and and hyperbolized, the claim here is that if only you can get your act together sufficiently, you gain superpowers.

Another issue is that if that actually happened, it makes the psychological interpretation close to irrelevant. Because it makes little sense to be both. Whatever interpretation you make of a given story, that will have very little weight if it so happens that it turns out that literally happened. The psychological value of it crumbles because it’s self-explanatory. The reason you make a psychological interpretation is because you assume they’re projections (this is the core of Jung on mythology and thus of JP on religion). But if they’re literally true, then they’re not projections, they just happened. This gets tricky if the events are true but misinterpreted (the story is false), but generally, if the event is true as a whole, that’s so out of this current paradigm that I think it’s likely that the stories would be reasonably accurate.

For a final argument, another issue with being agnostic about the Resurrection, from a Peterson perspective, is not only begs the question of why stopping at the Resurrection compared to other biblical stories, which I’ve touched on, but why stop at the Bible? I’m sure he doesn’t consider himself agnostic about other religions and myths that claim supernatural events. Jordan is especially found of Christianity because of 2 major factors:

- It’s his culture

- He beliefs it developed the idea of the individual more than anything else

Neither are based on any type of divinity. In fact, Jordan has stated several times that other religions and cultures may be of great value as well, it’s simply tougher for him to fully understand them because they’re alien, as Christianity already took him a large portion of his life to study.

He also thinks Christianity is superior because it‘s the foundation and the creator of the West, the richest and most progressive culture to date. But that still doesn’t validate any divinity, and it’s a tricky argument to make to begin with. If the outcome was different, would you say Christianity now isn’t as valid as a cultural “software” for human beings? Christianity contributed to modern science immensely. It also had a great resistance of course, but nevertheless its importance can’t be ignored. If science turns out to decimate us by nuclear weapons, AI or something else, is that proof against Christianity? Especially with Peterson’s Pragmatic-Darwinian stance, that would be a seemingly tempting conclusion. But even if one takes a pure pragmatic stance, you can’t assume you have enough knowledge or understanding to assume a causal connection when there’s so many variables with unbelievable complexity.

No matter how you slice it, his take on the Resurrection is incoherent with his overall philosophy, and doesn’t fit into his generally Jungian framework. To be fair, he does admit that this isn’t exactly a logical belief, and it’s in part based on his religious experiences. That’s totally fine, he can believe anything he wants to, just like everyone else. But it doesn’t make it any less inconsistent.