Jordan Peterson | Religion Myth Science Truth | Transliminal 2014

IMO this is one of the best interviews on this topic I've seen.

0:00 INTRO: PETERSON'S JOURNEY

9:45 RELIGION: CROWD-CONTROL, NAIVE SCIENCE, OR NEITHER?
10:08 "They're straw man arguments"
11:45 Multiple motivational systems, different levels of thinking
13:32 Fundamental presuppositions
14:13 Dawkins vs. Christianity: like a "smart 13 year old boy"

14:36 INTERMISSION: PETERSON ADDRESSES HIS DOG

14:44 SCIENTISTS MISREADING RELIGION
15:52 Different systems of thought, different purposes
16:00 More than one basic assumption is possible

17:13 ENTER: DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES
17:19 What's real is what's persistent across time
17:33 Dominance hierarchies and lobsters
17:58 We're evolutionarily adapted to hierarchies

18:14 HIERARCHIES, RELIGIOUS THINKING, AND SUBJECTIVITY
18:42 "Being" as not reducible to material reality
19:12 The road to nihilism and authoritarianism

19:57 DETERMINING THE TRUTH OF A THEORY
20:07 Newton or Darwin? Choose one. You can't have both.
20:20 Nietzsche's "Truth serves life" is a Darwinian idea
20:38 No idea if our knowledge will help us survive over deep time
20:50 Answer to: "But look what we've built with it"
21:20 Crossing Ebola and Smallpox: some science is clearly insane
22:30 Check your assumptions about reality
23:45 Darwinism: truth is what enables survival within chaos, period.
25:03 Dawkins is a Newtonian not a Darwinian
26:09 Reductionism leaves things out. This has consequences.
27:27 The pragmatic problem: truth for what?

28:09 DEEP DARWINISM & RELIGION
28:15 Religion as evolved knowledge about action
29:40 American Pragmatist philosophers: the true Darwinians
30:17 Godel, the stock market and reality

31:02 TRUTH AS ACTION
31:44 Truth from the bottom up: lobsters, wolves, humans
34:27 Ethics: evolved patterns in dominance hierarchies
39:23 Dogs, chimps and humans: hierarchy navigators
44:45 From dominance hierarchies to archetypes: ancient Egypt
52:36 The soul
55:50 Jung on Christianity, truth and speech
59:07 Truth versus the lie

1:00:52 THE INTELLECT
1:00:52 The totalitarian intellect
1:02:43 Have you made thinking your God?
1:03:38 Attention trumps thinking

1:04:11 EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS OF WESTERN RELIGION
1:04:33 Christ as a metahero
1:04:43 The deep roots of myth
1:07:00 Chaos monsters
1:08:55 Myth as behavioural truth
1:09:37 "Darwin trumps Newton"
1:10:02 "Dawkins is a rationalist...not a darwinian"
1:10:07 Darwinian time, Darwinian truth
1:13:57 Mesopotamian myth as successful behaviour blueprint

1:17:36 FROM NATURE TO HERO MYTHOLOGY
1:19:33 Religious stories model being as a field for action
1:21:13 Our religious task
1:21:47 Religion as hero mythology
1:22:30 "You...don't know that you know the story."

1:23:58 PIAGET AND PRE-RATIONAL MORALITY
1:25:16 We learn to act before we learn the rules
1:26:18 Moses the Judge: observer of emergent moral patterns
1:27:54 "Opiate of the masses" as naive industrial era thinking

1:28:43 METAPHORICAL THOUGHT
1:29:11 Hyperactive agency detection module: it goes deeper
1:31:00 The brain as archetype detection organ
1:32:08 Women are nature
1:33:48 Metaphor, myth and science

1:36:00 SCIENCE AND MORAL TRUTH
1:37:52 Are all scientists devoted to the truth?
1:39:44 How do we judge if science is ethical?
1:42:57 Evil as archetypically real
1:44:06 The reality of good and evil
1:45:09 Science and mythology: which is embedded in which?

1:48:17 EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND DEEP TIME

1:49:13 RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS: OPTIONAL?
1:49:20 Is God an old man with a beard in the sky?
1:51:12 Hurricane Katrina, corruption and poverty
1:52:12 The significance of the bible
1:53:43 The genius of the sacrifice

1:55:50 INTERLUDE: TRIANGULATING MEANING

1:58:02 END OF RELIGION?
1:58:02 On new atheists' claims of a secular rational future
1:58:29 On new age spirituality
1:58:49 New atheist rationalist optimism so absurd it must be motivated

1:59:18 REDUCING RELIGION VS. EXPANDING EVOLUTION
1:59:40 "[The Jungian alternative]...is terrifying [for people]"
1:59:57 "[Jung's work]...puts enlightenment thinkers to shame"
2:00:17 "Which ideas have you? ... We're like playthings of the gods"

2:01:09 JUNG: STUDYING INFORMATION, NOT MATTER
2:02:23 "If you study religion properly, it'll demolish your personality"

2:08:16 METAPHOR VS REALITY: NOT OBVIOUS
2:10:11 Ancients: phenomenologists, not scientists
2:12:24 Religion as spatial

2:13:24 HUMANS: EFFICIENT COMPLEXITY MANAGERS
2:13:48 Reality in terms of resolution
2:15:52 There's lots worse than death
2:16:46 On Becker's "The Denial of Death": smart but mistaken
2:19:40 Death's not the problem, it's complexity

2:21:06 THE MULTICULTURAL DIMENSION

2:27:35 FROM THEORY TO ACTION
2:28:40 Fixing what bugs you
2:29:30 Overcoming the lie
2:31:54 Peterson's experience with truth
2:34:45 The most powerful thing we can do