https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JC8HuIZUppw
I think one of the interesting things that seems to be happening, and Jordan does also seem to be someone who opened the door or kind of participated in opening the door, you’d participate in this as well, which is we had this kind of last new atheist moment, you know, with Sam Harris and Dawkins and all of these people. And it seems like that moment has broken, it’s broken. And there’s something about the zeitgeist, which makes it possible for, I’m seeing it, a lot of atheists who perceive even what it is we’re talking about. Because this has been difficult for me until maybe five, six years ago, is that when we talk about the stories, we talk about the Bible and how it’s a worldview rather than something that you kind of analyze from above, how we can enter into these stories and participate. It’s something which until recently I felt like people weren’t even able to grasp, but now that door has been opened. You know, there’s a lot there. I remember a teacher of mine saying years ago that sometimes a block in the spiritual life can simply be an intellectual conundrum or it’s a question or it’s something, I’m just stuck. And until I get unstuck, I can’t move any deeper into the spiritual truth. And I think for a lot of young people, and the new atheists spoke to this, there were intellectual blocks. You know, isn’t Christianity just a pre-modern nonsense? It’s opposed to science. It’s a bunch of old superstition. It’s a projection of our idealized self-understanding, all the usual things. And young people got stuck. They probably heard a lot of that in their college and university classrooms. They thought, yeah, okay, religion is just a lot of nonsense. The new atheists, they geared all that up again. Well, here’s the thing. In a way, that does great service because it allows us to deal with some of these problems that young people have and thereby to eliminate false understandings of religion. I like the cleansing quality of atheists from Govind Feuerbach all the way to Sam Harris. They do something. They cleanse idolatrous understandings of religion. They raise and therefore allow us to address some of the intellectual blocks. Once that’s over, then, as you say, I think quite rightly, people can begin to move into the spiritual power of these great texts and these great symbols and these great doctrines. But in a way, I’m happy that the new atheists led to a renaissance in Christian apologetics, in Christian philosophy. We had to pick up our game because to tell you the truth, we were god-awful when the new atheists came. By we, I mean the whole Christian world. We didn’t know how to address them, which was stupid because we have extraordinary resources in our intellectual tradition. But that’s a long story. We threw down our arms to a large extent because we were so concerned about dialoguing with the culture and reaching out to the culture, we lost our edge apologetically. But that’s dangerous because when the atheist critique comes, and it always comes in some form, we’ve got to be able to meet it or young people especially will get stuck and then they won’t be able to move into the wider world. I think as I read Jordan Peterson, there’s something, I’ve always found kind of this lovely innocence about him. He just discovers certain things and then begins to talk about them. And what he discovered was the spiritual power of the Bible. And we, again, I’m speaking broadly, we Christians, we were kind of lousy at that too. We weren’t very good at opening up our own spiritual riches. And so Peterson, he said, hey, look, hey, look, young people, look at all this stuff. And they responded like crazy to it, which doesn’t surprise me at all. So that’s how I read the moment. The new atheist critique was cleansing in a way. And then Peterson has been like, as I was kidding, saying like a gateway drug for many people into the real spiritual stuff. And so, you know, thank God for him.