https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SuuKdKvQWfo
You need a uniting principle to orient your perceptions and actions toward for two reasons, two fundamental reasons, three fundamental reasons. One is if you’re aiming towards something valuable that gives you positive emotion and hope and so all the motivation that goes along with that fills you with enthusiasm. Second, if you don’t have a uniting ethic that governs your own perceptions and actions, then you’re confused and in disarray and the cost of that is anxiety and hopelessness and pain and frustration and disappointment and grief. All of the negative emotions. And then third, if you don’t have a uniting ethic, and so that has to be united under something like a monotheistic superordinate entity, if you don’t have that then you have social disarray because there’s nothing that unites people in their common ethical pursuit and that’s their behavior and their perceptions. And so I’ll let Jonathan comment on that a bit. No, I think what you’re saying is right on track. That is one of the problems that happen in the story of Christianity is something like the Enlightenment and modernism, which is that as the world was moving towards this notion of mechanical causation and the interest in mechanical causation, there came to be a misunderstanding of the way that traditional Christians believed the world actually existed. And so there’s a difference between the material causes and something like the vertical cause of something. And the vertical cause of something is exactly this hierarchy that Jordan is talking about. And I would push what Jordan is saying even further. That is, it does actually affect to a certain extent even the is because we can’t perceive an is without a hierarchy of attention and without a hierarchy of perception because the world is indefinite in detail and in quantity. And so for even to be able to say this, to point to something, to say that is already in this hierarchy of something we could call vertical causation. So this glass has millions and millions of aspects to it. But we nonetheless are able to see it as one and the fact that we see it as one is a total mystery to scientists. They don’t know how to account for it. They use words like emergence and you could just use the word magic and would be the same. It’s like this jump into unity. That is the type of causation that we talk about when we talk about religious causation. Well that unity that you discussed in relationship to the glass is a pragmatic unity because… It’s a unity of good. Well, that’s also a unity of good. Well, then you think well… It’s an ethical in a general, very general sense. It’s an ethical unity because… It is an ethical unity. Well, I would say in a specific sense because if you were a photo realist painter, you could spend a month painting all the reflections on that glass. It’s a very complex thing to perceive. But you perceive it as a unity and we know this neuropsychologically. We know this scientifically. You perceive it as a unity because you can grip it and because you can raise it to your lips and because you can drink it and because you need to drink water to survive and you are willing to drink water to survive because you believe emotionally and motivationally and perhaps rationally that survival is a good and that’s dependent on your belief that human existence in some sense is a good and that it’s striving towards some sort of higher unified order. And you might think well you don’t need all that to perceive the glass and the answer is yeah as a matter of fact you need all of that to perceive the glass and if you lose some of that because of various forms of cortical damage let’s say you enter into the realm of all sorts of bizarre blindnesses and so and so that point you make about the is being dependent on the ought is also extremely interesting because if the world is infinitely complex which seems to be the case or close enough the the hierarchy of attention you bring to bear on it and so your intent determines in no small part the array of manifestations that that infinity will produce in your field of apprehension and that does determine to some degree at least what adds elements of the object you have access to and then manipulate and then bring into being. I’ve been thinking about objects too as this so they have this reality surrounded by a field of possibility right and so the object isn’t just what it is it’s also a set of things that it could become with varying degrees of degrees of difficulty depending on your intent so it’s a combination of being and becoming. Could become a weapon but it couldn’t become a car. Right right so it has an identity but it’s also surrounded by a field of possibilities that’s a good way to talk about it. Right right right. 60% of U.S. pork production comes from one company. Their hogs are given something called ractopamine which is banned in 160 countries yet you find it in your grocery aisle every day. If you like knowing exactly where your meat comes from check out Moink today. With Moink that place is from small family farms all across the country. Moink delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken and sustainable wild caught Alaskan salmon right to your door. Moink offers rib-eyes, chicken breasts, pork chops, salmon fillets and much more. You choose the meat delivered in every box. You can help save the family farm and get access to the highest quality meat on earth when you join the Moink movement today. So keep American farming going strong by signing up at moinkbox.com slash jbp right now and Dr. Peterson’s listeners can get a free package of bacon in your first box. It’s the best bacon you’ll ever taste. That’s moinkbox.com slash jbp moinkbox.com slash jbp. The point is that when we look at the way that the creation of the world is described in Genesis it’s related exactly to that. God creates something, sees it and sees that it’s good and so there’s this notion of apprehension of identities and realizing that those identities have to do with the fact that they’re bound up in a value judgment even though it’s not necessarily moral it’s just a value judgment about how good something is because if I see a glass I am always asking is it a good glass even if I don’t do it consciously necessarily because I know that it’s there to grip and to drink from and it’s the same even with like even scientists are doing that because they have to focus their attention on something because they can’t study everything at once they have to decide I’m going to study this and I’m going to decide going to decide the reason why I study that and therefore I’m going to be able to identify the facts that fit with my theory and prove my theory so even the scientist is moving is moving in this type of perception of the world even sometimes without realizing it. We could I’d like to make a comment on the scientific front too and I really started to think about this after talking to Dr Dawkins and I suppose to some degree to Sam Harris too on the atheist front and so I know that as the death of God in the Nietzschean terms has progressed we’ve lost faith in an increasing range of underlying realities and the first might be the deistic reality but then what we’ve seen happening under the onslaught of postmodernist thought is that we’re starting to lose faith in the idea of fact itself and then I was thinking well what’s the precondition for being a scientist and I thought well in some sense it’s a deistic pre there’s deistic preconditions because one of the things that characterizes scientists and this includes people like Dawkins who’s a real scientist is that the scientist presumes axiomatically that there’s a transcendent realm outside the domain of epistemological theory so if you have a scientific theory and you’re a real scientist you know that your theory which is really what you see when you look at the world you you know that your theory is insufficient in comparison to the reality that transcends it and so then as a scientist what you try to do is you try to pit your theory up against the transcendent reality so that it fails so that you find something about what you don’t understand that is able to make itself manifest then you adjust the theory to get a better grip on the world and you assume while you’re doing that that there’s an underlying logic to the transcendent object and that analysis of that underlying object is both corrective and redemptive and as far as I can tell those are all essentially axiomatic religious claims and that and that they’re preconditions for any true empirical science and then so what that implies is that if we lose faith in the transcendent hierarchy we might lose the entire scientific endeavor um let me just briefly if I may take us away from the glass of water because I only have Jonathan Paget’s word that it is a glass of water and I don’t want to get into that um let um let me address what I think is is a sort of a necessary thing to begin with which is the the issue of the magisteria we are talking about them separately but of course the interrelation of them the whether or not the realms of science and religion are overlapping magisteria or not and of course some people would claim that they’re absolutely unrelated uh we’re getting towards I think in this discussion the realization that of course they’re overlapping to some degree we don’t know exactly how much Jonathan probably thinks very significantly I suspect Jordan thinks to some extent and I would say to some extent as well but let me throw out then two issues that I would put as a challenge both for the religious and the non-religious in the discussion that we’re heading towards the the first is the challenge for the non-religious and that’s to do with something that Jordan’s already talked about which is the area of ethics and shared values and and much more uh a great challenge for the non-believers in our age is is that issue of where the values come from and and as Jordan’s already suggested uh for instance the enlightenment the idea of rationalism soul rationalism which not all enlightenment thinkers would were dealing with but many were the idea of rationalism being the sole way in which to discern ethics seems to me not to have been embedded very wide or very deep and may suggest that it’s just not possible as a project so uh to to quote my late friend rabbi Jonathan Sachs on this the idea that that ethics are self-evident is self-evidently wrong um so let me throw that out first as a challenge for the non-believer then the challenge for the believer comes down to this thing that Jordan’s also already dealt in which is the issue of let’s say myth or story because we might agree for instance that we need a story to agree upon or a myth to agree upon or a set of ideas to rely upon and to ground ourselves in and that doesn’t necessarily of course by any means lead to the to the fact that those things are also true we get into the realm of what Schopenhauer in the dialogue on religion which always made a huge impression on me deals in where he says of course he what he describes as the tragedy of the clergy the tragedy of the clergy is that they know the necessity of the thing they know the truthfulness of the story in a certain sense of truthfulness but could never admit or their job would be over that that’s what it is in other words they have to continue to deal in it as if this is not simply story or unifying myth or anything like that but is something which has a truth claim behind it and then let me just say one other thing on that which is this the issue of unifying ethic because it must be what we’re sort of somehow also among other things as well as trying to define what the true is and what the real is must be one of the things that we must sort of try to grapple towards the the the issue on this seems to me to be is is the christian ethic the christian tradition to think of it in hegelian terms is is it an exhausted force or an unexhausted force this this for our age seems to me to be one of the absolutely crucial issues to address is it exhausted or unexhausted all right i i have a few things to say first about the idea of the the ethic question now that there’s something which is actually especially in your project there’s something which is more than about ethics and about how we should act it has to do with the glass sorry but let’s bring it to people now it has to do with why do we think people are the same how do we recognize ourselves as being the west or being england or america like there these things that’s first that’s the question that is how what is it that we have in common that we celebrate in common that we recognize in common as binding us together and my contention is that one of the things that happened during the enlightenment is that people thought we can get rid of god but we can keep our nation or whatever but then that was a slippery slippery slope and as soon as we got rid of the transcendent the thing we we wanted to have the king the queen the president the this narrative which was at a lower level started to crumble and to break down