https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=jvDgzys3GLw

And so Christopher, in terms of Genesis, I think that for sure my own interest with Jordan is far more in that area. I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t actually read 12 Rules for Life, but his work on the relationship between cognitive science and evolutionary biology and the manner in which to read Genesis, this idea of perception and the problem of multiplicity, this is what has kind of interested me the most with Jordan, what got me excited about the manner in which he talks about it. And so what is it about the way he talks about Genesis, which you found connects so much to the Christian tradition? Well, I would say in a weird way, the most basic thing was something I never noticed until Jordan Peterson pointed it out to me, and that was that God creates through rational speech. So in some of these rival creation stories, the gods have a big battle, a big war, and then the universe is fashioned out of the basically battlefield remains of this sort of inter, what would you say, this war among the gods. And what Jordan points out, which again, it’s weird that I never noticed this, but that God says, let there be light. And if you think about rational speech, rational speech can only arise from some kind of reasoner. You can’t have rational speech just from a duck quacking or a tree falling over and making noise. If it’s a rational speech, there is a mind behind it. And so the universe arises from this rational speech and reflects a rational mind, and that God repeatedly does this and then says, and it was good. That’s another really key point, because some of these rival myths thought of the created order as actually evil, that to have a body, for example, would be seen as a bad thing and an evil thing that we should transcend. And rather than view creation and the human body as good, these other stories would say, no, no, you’re trapped in your body, your body like Plato would say, your body’s a prison that traps your soul. And I think in the Christian tradition, there’s this emphasis on the goodness of creation and an emphasis on the goodness of the human body. And so again, Jordan sort of highlighted these things, and I had heard the stories before, but Sissam never registered with me properly, and he really made it register with me properly. So I was very grateful for those insights. And then the more I thought about those sorts of insights about how human beings are made in the image of God, and therefore we too express ourselves through rational speech. I mean, Jordan really brought that out in a really beautiful way. So I guess what I was trying to do in the book is connect Peterson’s interpretations of Genesis with some of these older classic interpretations of Genesis that you find in people like Origen and St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and others. And again, I found this big overlap. And in some respects, I thought that these classic thinkers, in a way, could really contribute and augment what Peterson was saying and bring him kind of further down the road. So in the book, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do is say, this is great, we’re moving in a good direction, but if we look at these classic writers, we can go even further and even deeper. Yeah, I think that your point about the goodness of creation is a huge thing that seems to come up time and time again in Jordan, which is, even though sometimes you wonder if he really believes in the goodness of the world, he realizes that just like his proposition about God, that if you act as if the world is good, then the fruits of that will be something. If you act as if the world is inherently bad, then you can also see what the fruits are. And it’s interesting because in the past maybe 20 years or so, there’s been a resurgence of Gnosticism in the popular culture. There’s been in even in universities, this idea that the Gnostics were the real Christians and that Orthodoxy was just suppressed all these marginal voices of Christianity. You have this narrative which is there and it’s fascinating to notice that as we kind of see postmodernism play itself out, we’re seeing in these transhuman moves and in these, even in the digital space and this obsession with the digital space, something like a kind of soft Gnosticism where we believe that we can exist only in these kind of subtle bodies on screens and that our actual physical bodies are something of an obstacle to our ideal existence, whether it’s even in the whole gender sexual identity thing, but also in other even weirder tropes like the fashion for furries and all that kind of weird stuff where people kind of project themselves into avatars and things like that. you