In this episode Trent sits down with Catholic philosopher Chris Kaczor and examines whether Canadian professor Jordan Peterson’s thought can intersect with the Gospel.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. A lot of you have probably heard about a public figure, he has a lot of videos on YouTube, there’s a lot of people who talk about him, and it seems they have a lot of strong opinions either for or against him, and that would be Jordan Peterson. I thought it’d be really … I wanted to talk about that because Chris Kaczor, who is a philosopher at Loyola, I’m going to say Marymount University, he’ll correct me in a second if I’m wrong, has co-authored a good book on “Jordan Peterson, God, and the Search For Meaning.” I wanted to talk about that book and get an understanding of looking at kind of the phenomena of Jordan Peterson from a Catholic perspective and how we should look at that.
Trent Horn:
So, Dr. Kaczor, welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast.
Chris Kaczor:
Thank you, Trent. Really glad to speak with you about this.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. And you are at Loyola Marymount, right?
Chris Kaczor:
That’s right. Yeah, Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles. There’s a number of Loyolas around, but we’re the only Loyola Marymount.
Trent Horn:
Right, okay. So you’ve authored a number of articles, books … Just for listeners, by the way, if you want one of the best defenses, philosophical defenses of the pro-life position, get Dr. Kaczor’s book “The Ethics of Abortion,” very good book. But you’ve also co-authored this new book. Tell us a little bit about the book and why you decided to take part in it.
Chris Kaczor:
The book’s co-authored with a colleague of mine in theology named Matthew Petrusek. Professor Petrusek and I, we’d have lunch and get together, and Jordan Peterson came up a lot. He was in the news and we watched his videos and read some of his books, and we just got talking more and more about it. So the idea kind of percolated up that we should maybe co-author something about him. It was a real pleasure to work with Matt. I basically wrote one half of the book and he wrote the other half, and then in the last part of the book, we teamed up and co-authored that section. He was a great person to work with, and we really shared a lot of common ground in terms of what we really enjoyed about Peterson’s work and things that we thought that Peterson can develop to move forward. It was great to work with him, for sure.
Trent Horn:
Sure. All right, so I know a lot of people have heard Jordan Peterson’s name, might know a few basic things about him. He’s a professor in Canada, focuses on psychology, has very popular videos on YouTube. So tell us a little bit more. Who is Jordan Peterson, and why do so many people have these strong opinions about him?
Chris Kaczor:
Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. I think the reason that people have such strong opinions about him is that he tries to live by this rule, tell the truth or at least don’t lie. So that’s what he does. He speaks out what he thinks is true, whether or not it’s going to land in a popular way, or whether or not it’s going to cause controversy. He has indeed caused a lot of controversy, I think in particular about a couple interviews he had with very hostile feminist kind of reporters. He acquitted himself, I think extremely well in those interviews. His prominence I think also has to do with something that’s distinctive about his thought, and that would be a combining of scientific investigation and philosophical and theological speculation.
Chris Kaczor:
In doing this, in a way, he’s doing something that Thomas Aquinas did too, and that is arguing in favor of a sort of complementarity of faith and reason. This is quite controversial, because many people in our culture think that faith and reason are enemies, they’re total opposites, and you have to choose either faith or reason. So the new atheist types think that faith and reason are totally opposed and they say, “Well, we choose reason and science over faith.” And then on the other side, you have some Protestant fundamentalists who think that faith and reason are opposed and they choose faith.
Chris Kaczor:
But Peterson, again, like Aquinas and like many figures in the Catholic tradition. Wants to say, “This is a false choice. We don’t have to choose either faith or reason,” that in fact the best way forward is to fruitfully combine faith and reason together. A lot of Peterson’s work is doing that. It’s combining psychology with the study of scripture. It’s combining evolutionary insights with insights from mythology. He’s sort of bringing things together in a very new and fruitful way, but that does cause quite a bit of controversy on occasion.
Trent Horn:
Right. I think what’s helpful here is that the common trope is that religion is fantasy, it’s divorced from reality, and science and non-religion are committed to upholding reality. But Peterson seems to be attracting people who may not be religious, but they feel that a lot of non-religious people have embraced fantasy. For example, with transgender ideology, Peterson was very clear that he would not be compelled by the Canadian government to use biologically incorrect pronouns and really was committed to defending freedom of speech. He’d even go on a hunger strike if he was forced … I think there’s a lot of people who are not religious who when they see something like transgender ideology saying, “Well, no, this is not reality.” And if the religious people can see that, maybe there’s a bit more reality and reason here as well.
Trent Horn:
So I think that maybe that could be a good springboard also to talk about, what are some of the elements of his philosophy or his thinking that people really find attractive, and what can Christians glean from that?
Chris Kaczor:
I think there are a lot of different things that we could talk about here. But for me, I’d say that the most important thing is his reading of scripture. He has these extremely popular YouTube lectures on the book of Genesis. In these lectures, he basically puts forward, I think what in the Christian tradition would be called the moral interpretation of scripture. So famously, scripture can be interpreted in a variety of ways. There’s a literal sense, the moral sense, the anagogical sense. What Peterson’s doing is really focusing on that second sense, the moral sense, which is, how does scripture teach us how to live better.
Chris Kaczor:
This is really quite traditional. Augustine did this, and Origen and many other important Christian thinkers. What makes Peterson, I think, so important is that many people who lack faith, many people who say things like, “I thought the Bible was just a bunch of stories written by illiterate pre-scientific people to explain things they didn’t understand.” Many of these people say after Peterson’s lectures, they now appreciate and can really see how scripture is an inexhaustible font of riches and insights for better living.
Chris Kaczor:
I think that was an enormous service that Peterson gave to Christians. In order to help people that don’t have any faith to reconsider the Bible, to think about the Bible as a really key fundamental text that can really help us to live better lives. This is, I think, an enormous contribution that really helps Christianity move forward in their own situation.
Trent Horn:
Do you think Peterson helps in that, as a role model for young, disaffected people or non-religious people, to show them that even if you’re non-religious, it’s not a choice between religious fundamentalism and atheistic fundamentalism. It’s not like you have to be either a religious zealot or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. You can be someone who can take a favorable view of religion and see more of its good without declaring it to be some kind of enemy. Do you think that it’s helpful, a way he can serve as kind of a way point for people in that regard?
Chris Kaczor:
I think that’s right. I think in a way he goes even further. It’s not just that faith is not the enemy, but rather that faith is something mysteriously beautiful, that maybe at this point he can’t quite fully accept in all its ramifications, but it’s something that is attractive and something that if he could accept it, I think even Peterson sees that it would enrich him in some fundamental, important way. So his attitude, you might say, is, I think, quite important. That is to say, it’s an attitude of taking these questions as unbelievably important and trying to go as far as he can to figure out what the truth is about these questions. That sort of attitude is, I think, really admirable. In other words, I think if all of us tried to seek the truth as much as we could and tried to grow in living in accordance with the truth, I think the world would be a much better place. Peterson is providing, I think, a really inspiring example for many, many people of doing just that.
Trent Horn:
Before I talk about some of the more problematic elements in Jordan Peterson’s thought, which is to be expected from someone who is, at least does not identify as Catholic or Christian or in any way like that. I think one thing people also like, these are things [inaudible 00:09:50] 12 Rules for Life and things like that, is that Peterson seems to be hearkening back to what the Greco-Roman world would call virtues, even stoicism, that I think in the modern age people are obsessed with “what am I allowed to do?” Like, I want to be allowed to do whatever I want, and people watching Peterson’s videos thinking, “Oh, I should be able to do whatever I want,” he’s honed in on, “Well, maybe you are allowed to do that, but not necessarily you should do that.”
Trent Horn:
I think that he can provide a way where people who may not be open to religion are at least open to virtue, and that can be another stepping stone. What do you think of that?
Chris Kaczor:
Yeah, that seems possible to me. I mean, one of his big themes is taking up responsibility, taking up a load. It starts off maybe very small, cleaning your room, but it can grow into taking responsibility in ways that are very, very significant. And in particular, taking responsibility in terms of speech, that if we really could live by this rule of not lying, of telling the truth, that itself can really transform how we behave and how we act, because if we are going to do that, that’s going to require courage. And if we have both honesty and courage, that’s moving down the road of virtue quite a long ways, really. So Peterson’s rules for life, you might say, I think you’re right, are linked up to important virtues like being honest, like being courageous. He talks about the virtue of temperance. Now, he doesn’t always call it that, but in fact that’s really what he’s talking about in terms of warning people against abuse of alcohol, abuse of drugs and things like that.
Chris Kaczor:
So I think many of the things that he’s saying are things that are found in the Christian tradition, but he’s saying them in a new and very attractive way, so I think that’s a real plus.
Trent Horn:
All right, let’s … But of course, now some people, I think that you can find good elements here, but you can go too far and lionize someone or idolize someone and that’s important with any human being, but especially someone who is looking at Christianity from the outside. What are some elements of his philosophy for people to be aware of, like, “Wow, this is not something that Christians can really buy into”?
Trent Horn:
I know just recently, actually, before this interview, I think he was on a podcast kind of speculating about whether the roots of the Christian faith could have hallucinogenic elements to them. So he is a mixed bag. What are some of these things that might be antithetical or problematic?
Chris Kaczor:
Yeah. I would say one of the key things is that, at the end of the day, he thinks that … Or he’s not willing to commit to the idea that, for instance, Christ rose from the dead in a literal historical sense. It seems to me that if you don’t have that, then you don’t have Christianity at all. So Christ is more than just a teacher. In Christianity, Christ is the way. It’s not just that Christ is a kind of exemplar on the same level as someone like Socrates. I mean, Socrates is great, but Socrates himself never said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In fact, what Socrates says is that, “I may be wise simply because I know that I don’t know.”
Chris Kaczor:
By contrast, Jesus is making claims about himself that really are radical, and really do, I think CS Lewis points out, force us to make a kind of choice. I think if we’re consistent we can’t put Jesus simply in the category with, “Well, he’s like Socrates, he’s like Buddha, he’s like Martin Luther King,” or something. Well, Jesus, I think in his own way of speaking about himself really excludes that as a possibility. I’m referring here, of course, to the famous God or a bad man argument that was put forward by Lewis and put forward by many others as well.
Chris Kaczor:
On that point, I think that Peterson’s thought really could be developed. Another way too is where he says very often, “I try to live as if God exists.” And I think that’s great. I try to live as if God exists too. But for me, there’s a few more steps involved. If I try to live as if God exists, then it seems to me I need to take really seriously what God may have said about himself. And in my opinion, Jesus really is the fullness of God’s revelation. Peterson seems to sign on to that, at least to a degree. I mean, he appeals to Jesus as somehow revelatory of God on many occasions. But then if we take Jesus seriously, well then it seems to me the next step is to take the church seriously, because Jesus did found a church. He said to the apostles, “Whoever hears you hears me,” and so I think that if I’m going to live as if God exists, that means taking what Jesus says very seriously. And then if I take what Jesus says seriously, that seems to me to lead me into a question about following Jesus, not just as an individual, but as part of the church.
Chris Kaczor:
So that’s an element of Peterson’s thought that I’d say is very important, to live as if God exists, but in a sense, incomplete. There’s steps that follow, in a way. If you really take that seriously, it seems to me at least there’s steps that follow pretty directly from living as if God exists.
Trent Horn:
Very good. Well, Dr. Kaczor, thank you so much for joining us today. If you have any other thoughts you want to share about the book’s message or central theme, feel free to do that, but otherwise, I’d love for people to hear more. Just tell us the book’s title again and where people could be able to get a copy of that.
Chris Kaczor:
Sure, yeah. The book’s called “Jordan Peterson, God, and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life,” and in the book what we’re trying to do is really engage Peterson’s thought in both a sympathetic, but also a critical way. The book is neither a hagiography saying that everything that Peterson says and does is perfect in every respect, and I think Peterson himself would be the first to say that he’s not perfect in every respect. But part of the book also is trying to push him or people that agree with his views to move a little further, to develop those views, and really to show them that many of the things that Peterson says are found in a richer and more complete way in the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Chris Kaczor:
So that’s sort of where we’re coming from in the book. The book is available at the standard places, but maybe the best way to get it maybe would be to go to WordOnFire.com. They have the book at a discount, I believe, right now where people can get it I think 20% off or something. So Word On Fire would probably be the best place to get the book, but it’s available at all the standard places to buy books.
Trent Horn:
Well, great. I’ll leave a link to the description below. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the Counsel of Trent podcast.
Chris Kaczor:
Thank you, Trent, I appreciate it.
Trent Horn:
And thank you everyone for listening. Definitely check out Dr. Kaczor’s book, as well as his other books. I hope that you all have a very blessed day.
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