jeudi 3 mai 2018

Jordan Peterson and Matt Dillahunty discussion on God and atheism

Jordan Peterson and Matt Dillahunty recently had a conversation about God and atheism. Link is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDbAR0CoRno

The video goes for 1 hour and 40 mins, including a Q&A session. It was in a discussion format rather than a debate, which I think worked well. I'd never heard Peterson talk about God before, though I knew he was a theist. As a theist myself, I was interested in how he defended theism.

The funniest part was how they kept coming back to the idea of throwing Sam Harris (who wasn't present) off the stage, and the ethical position of doing that. Neither of them seemed to have a high opinion of Harris.

I thought that Dillahunty kept missing Peterson's point on two topics:

(1) Dillahunty kept coming back to the "God as creature" analogy. Similar examples are Sargon's "Dragon in a garage" or Bertrand Russell's "Orbiting Teapot", where God is a thing in a category of things. Peterson's view is "God as phenomenon", that can be evidenced through mystical experiences.

(2) Dillahunty seems to miss the point of Peterson's criticism of the bedrock of skepticism. Dillahunty says that "well-being is important" (not sure if those were his exact words, but something like that), but misses that he needs to define "well-being", and whether it requires a metaphysical component or not. Dillahunty seems to ludicrously infer that Peterson is saying that you need to believe in God to not be a murderer, which wasn't Peterson's intention at all.

All-in-all, it was a good discussion. I'd be interested in what others thought.


via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2I4CU9J

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