Peterson loves to score culture-war points by bashing atheists, but the closer you look at his own religious views--and his version of pragmatism about truth--the less clear it is what he believes.
I enjoyed the fun at the expense of the bad doctor’s terrible skills of conceptual analysis. I think there is no doubt his statements on what it means to believe in God come ultimately from Tillich through Northrop Frye, and Tillich is also the source of the liberal Reform rabbi or Episcopalian priest’s response on these issues. (And Tillich goes back to Hegel and Spinoza). Frye was a dominant intellectual influence at U of T when Peterson got there and he always sounds to me like he is trying desperately to write an exam in Frey’s class in a way the great man would approve.
Frye certainly would say that the Bible, at its best, is to the history of Bronze Age Canaan and early principate Judea as Hamlet or Macbeth are to the history of medieval Denmark and Scotland. It would both be correct to say they are not good histories and miss the point, which is about psychological resonance.
For a reasonably friendly account of what the sophisticated present-day pragmatists believe about this stuff, I would recommend Huw Price’s “Naturalism Without Mirrors”
I enjoyed the fun at the expense of the bad doctor’s terrible skills of conceptual analysis. I think there is no doubt his statements on what it means to believe in God come ultimately from Tillich through Northrop Frye, and Tillich is also the source of the liberal Reform rabbi or Episcopalian priest’s response on these issues. (And Tillich goes back to Hegel and Spinoza). Frye was a dominant intellectual influence at U of T when Peterson got there and he always sounds to me like he is trying desperately to write an exam in Frey’s class in a way the great man would approve.
Frye certainly would say that the Bible, at its best, is to the history of Bronze Age Canaan and early principate Judea as Hamlet or Macbeth are to the history of medieval Denmark and Scotland. It would both be correct to say they are not good histories and miss the point, which is about psychological resonance.
For a reasonably friendly account of what the sophisticated present-day pragmatists believe about this stuff, I would recommend Huw Price’s “Naturalism Without Mirrors”