We Who Wrestle With God | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
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It's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is, is beyond categorization. God is outside our category structures. Now, does that make him real? Well, I would say God is hyper-real.

God is the reality upon which all reality depends. That's a different kind of category. It's an atheist game. Is God real like a table is real? Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner. God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space.

And so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible. This week on the Sunday special, I'm excited to welcome back Dr. Jordan B. Peterson to discuss his latest book, We Who Wrestle With God. Jordan has lectured on biblical symbolism for years, including with us here at The Daily Wire in his groundbreaking seminars on Exodus and the Gospels.

After the success of his previous bestsellers, Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order, Jordan has at last put pen to paper to canvas the timeless lessons of the Old Testament. In today's episode, Jordan describes what it means for man to be created in the image of God and what the Bible can tell us about our capacity for both tremendous sacrifice and tremendous folly. He also reflects on his writing process

and why he believes it is good enough to conduct himself as if God exists. In his book, Jordan works through some of the most profound questions of all time. We Who Wrestle With God is available everywhere on November 19th. Stay tuned. Don't miss this episode of the Sunday special with the inimitable Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. ♪

Well, Jordan, it's great to see you. Great to see you, Ben. Thanks for the invitation. Yes, let's talk about your brand new book. Obviously, it's burning up the bestseller charts already. Yeah, that's the one. That'd be the big one. Yeah, I'm very happy about it. I'm also perplexed. So tell me about your perplexion. Well, I don't know what people are going to make of it because, see, I tried to do two things in the book. I tried to make a case that was scientifically and theologically unassailable.

And, you know, people might be skeptical about whether or not, let's say, psychology qualifies as a science, but it does if you triangulate with enough precision. So the arguments that I'm making, I think, are, what would you say, they're viable at a psychopharmacological basis. So with regards to brain chemistry and brain function, and also with what we know about

perception and clinical practice. And then they also make sense from a literary and religious scholarship perspective. Now, that's what I think. That's a lot of fields to cover and refer to. And so am I a master in all those areas? Well, I suppose in each of those areas, there are people who know more than me. But across the areas, I'm not doing too bad.

And so I figured out some things that are very fundamental, I think. And we'll see how people respond. Like I figured out, for example, that I make a very strong case that it is now an unassailable fact that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. That's what a story is. A story is actually a description of a waiting function. You know how in large language models,

The relationship between words is specified statistically. There's weightings that define the relationship between letters and words and concepts and sentences and paragraphs and words.

A story is a description of the waiting function that someone applies to the facts. So, for example, when you go to a movie and you see the protagonist in action, you watch how he attends to things and you watch how he conducts himself and you infer from that the manner in which he waits the facts that are presented to him. And in consequence, you can internalize the story and then you can see the world that way. And

That's why that also accounts, by the way, for why we're so interested in narratives, right? So the problem with the empiricist perspective, technically, is that the empiricists essentially presume that all facts are to be weighted equally, right? And that's a value-free consideration of the facts at hand, but that's not viable

Biologically, it's not viable psychologically. Some things have to be more important to you than other things because otherwise you drown in the complexity of all of those facts.

So, I mean, just as a family man, you pay more attention to your child, for example, than someone else's child. Well, that's a waiting function. So, okay, so the first part of it is we see the world through a story. And I think that's incontrovertible. I think, Ben, that's actually why we're in a culture war, most fundamentally. Because there has been converging evidence from about six disciplines, right?

not least the literary theorists in France, the dread postmodernists, that have insisted that we see the world through a story. Now, where they went wrong is that the story that is being put forth as canonical is one of power. That's certainly the case for the mad Marxists and the French postmodernists fit into that category, or hedonic self-gratification.

or nihilistic collapse. And all of those are self-defeating. The proper story is one of sacrifice. And I know why that is too. And I think I explained it. There's two reasons that the fundamental story is one of sacrifice. The first is that whenever you attend to one thing, you sacrifice everything else.

So every act of perception is a sacrifice. That's why, for example, in the Christian, what would you say, conceptual universe, that the reality itself is founded on sacrifice. It's a very strange concept, right? That's John making the case that Christ's sacrifice is identical to the word at the beginning of time. But the psychological significance of that proposition is that

reality itself is predicated on sacrifice and because attention is sacrificial there's something about that that's deeply correct but but there's more than that there's no difference between work and sacrifice because work is the sacrifice of the future to sorry the sacrifice of the present to the future and the sacrifice of the narrow self to the community and so you could imagine that

for reality to unfold properly, and that would be the reality that is good or very good, as is portrayed, say, in Genesis 1, the appropriate sacrifice has to be made. Sacrifices have to be made. And then you can envision the biblical library from beginning to end as an analysis of sacrifice. And I think that's all correct. And so that's pretty damn terrifying because

I don't know what it means for that to be correct. I don't know what it means for there to be a convergence between neuroscience and our deepest theological presuppositions. And I don't know what it would mean if people actually started to understand that the proper story is sacrificial. But look, I'll just close with this, Ben. Look, the community is founded on sacrifice. Okay, justify that. Well, if it's all about me in the most narrow way,

then there's no community, right? There's only the immediate gratification of my whims. So I devolve into a set of whims and I have to impose those whims on other people using power because they're not going to cooperate voluntarily if it's all about me.

Now, to the degree that I establish a voluntarily chosen and reciprocal community around me, then I'm sacrificing my narrow aims to that higher end. Obviously, right? I mean, it seems to me that once you understand these things, this is another thing that's very strange, is once you understand these things, they become that much, they become

They attain the much vaunted status of self-evident. We'll see what people think. I read it by Jonathan Paggio, and he's terrified with regards to some of the things that I said theologically. And so I'm sure I misstepped, you know, in various places, but we'll see. I mean, the book certainly opens a bunch of these conversations and certainly what you're talking about in terms of sacrifice and the story that we tell about our lives.

And that's true because the place where you most obviously make your first sacrifice is in marriage, where you sacrifice your interest to the interest of something larger. And then the place where you make your second sacrifice is when you start to have children. And a society that refuses to recognize that it's not a giant surprise, that a society that refuses to

to see the story of humanity as a story of sacrifice refuses the sacrifice to themselves. So it makes a lot of sense that people aren't getting together. People aren't actually getting married. People aren't having babies because the minute you start to live that sacrifice, it becomes impossible to unsee. Yeah. Well, and, and you might say, well, what's wrong with that? Why can't I pursue my own ends? And, and,

There's a variety of answers to that. The first answer is, what do you mean by your ends? Because actually what you're really proposing is that your immediate fragmented whims become the ruler of the world, right? Because the my you're referring to is what you want now. And it's sort of what you want now, regardless of the consequences for your future self or for other people.

I mean, the whole issue of what I want begs the question of what is meant by I. What is this sovereign, self-evident I that in principle is

what would you say, is the highest possible source of value? Well, that's by no means obvious. You know, we're an internal war of competing motivations, and each of those motivations can emerge as dominant at any moment. That's what you see in the behavior of two-year-olds, for example. And

To say that each emergent whim should be triumphant is to doom yourself to the same fate that a two-year-old who never grew up would be doomed to. So the simplest explanation for why your own desire can't be paramount is that that isn't a playable game. Everyone will run away from you. You will end up isolated and alone. And a society that facilitates that will become corrupt and unmanageable forever.

overnight. And I just don't see any way out of that. I mean, one of the things I've really come to understand, Ben, is that I think is that I hate to get political and I'll try to avoid that as much as possible. But I think part of the reason that a radical progressivism is eternal is because there's no difference between rule by whim and power and immaturity from a

Psychophysiological perspective. They're the same thing. And so any immaturity is going to find its political expression. I mean, in many ways, that's what you see in the story of Exodus with the worship of the golden calf, right? What happens when

Moses departs from the Israelite polity, right? And they have the habits of slaves. And all that's left for the Israelites to attend to is the political voice. That's Aaron. And the political voice, without a connection to the divine, let's say, without being subordinate to what's properly highest, reverts to a...

a mirror, a mirrored populism and just offers the Israelites, let's say what they want. But that isn't what happens is that what happens is the worst of the Israelites rise to the top and demand their immediate gratification. And the Israelites end up partying naked in the desert, in the midst of an orgy in a manner that makes them, you know, contemptible to their enemies. And if that doesn't echo in,

echo for you with regards to the modern situation. You're not really thinking very hard. And I think that's eternally the case is that it makes perfect sense structurally and psychophysiologically because of the

If the form of order that unites us most thoroughly collapses, so that would be something equivalent to the disappearance or the death of God, then what happens is a war between competing underlying motivational states emerges. And one of the things I've been thinking through, I'd like your opinion about this, is that...

What is to be expected in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God? What's to be expected psychologically? Well,

the most dominant subordinate motivational forces will vie for supremacy. And that would be sexuality. So now we have Freud or power. And that would give us, say, Nietzsche or even Alfred Adler to some degree, or the postmodernists or the Marxists. Hedonism and power go hand in hand because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power because you can't get people to cooperate voluntarily. Or the collapse of everything into a nihilistic mess. And

I also don't see any, like, how else could it possibly work? If you lose the highest uniting value, things could collapse utterly, and that's where you get a kind of nihilistic depression, or the next most powerful forces will emerge. And I think it's inevitable that those are something like hedonistic sexuality and power. I mean, what else? What the hell else would rule when you remove, let's say,

sovereign self-sacrifice as the highest order principle. That's all of what you're saying. And as you say in the book, a lot of these are encapsulated in biblical stories. I mean, that's sort of the story of the Tower of Babel versus the story of the society before Noah versus the family-centered society that God chooses with Noah. You basically have three competing stories. You have sort of the hedonistic individualism of the society of all against all, in which

you know, sexual impropriety and robbery are common. And God decides to blot that out. And then he decides to uplift Noah or you have the tower of Babel, which is power consolidated top down to build, to build the great big thing. And God says, this is actually evil. This is wrong. It needs to be stopped.

And so the only alternatives that has always been and will always be family structure, which as we discussed at the very beginning, what you were saying, that's the most sacrificial thing that you do is the stuff that you do for your family. It's where you make the biggest sacrifices. It's the place where you subsume your own personal interests in favor of other people. And God understands that, which is why the story of Genesis really is a family story more than any other type of story. Well, you also laid out a remarkable point

narrative accomplishment by the editors of the biblical story because

The story starts out, of course, with creation and the establishment of man and woman, and then the fall. And the fall is a consequence of overweening pride and overreach, right? Adam and Eve bite off more than they can chew, and suffering enters the world. And that's very much worth contemplating because the degree to which suffering characterizes existence as a consequence of prideful overreach is an open question.

No, I mean, there does, because we're mortal and fragile, a certain degree of suffering seems built into the structure of existence. It's the finite against the infinite and that conundrum. But true suffering has this hellish aspect that you can only attain if you bring it on yourself. And the best way to do that is through pride. And I think the story of Adam and Eve

The fall of Adam and Eve actually details out the particularities of the prideful sin that each sex is most prone to. So it's a kind of hyper-compassionate all-inclusion on the part of Eve, and it's a part of pathological attempt to impress the other on the part of Adam, cowardly, and then to blame. And that produces this...

collapse of paradise. Then you get the establishment of these two sacrificial patterns in the story of Cain and Abel.

which is brilliant, brilliant, immediate follow-up from a narrative perspective. And then as you said, you get a story of the forms of society that are likely to prevail if prideful overreach is the name of the game. You get a collapse into chaos, and that's clearly the story of Noah. That's all of its symbolic associations. Or you get the rise of the all-seeing eye of Sauron, and that's the Tower of Babel. And the consequence of

the rise of the totalitarian state is that words themselves lose their meaning. And we're certainly at that point in our society because we can't even agree on what constitutes a man and a woman, which is, I think, by the way, the most fundamental perceptual distinction. I think it might be the distinction upon which all other distinctions rest. It's certainly the case from the symbolic perspective. Well then, in keeping with your analysis,

The story of Abraham is presented as the alternative pathway to the flood and the Tower of Babel. And Abraham is a story of upward spiraling sacrificial offering, right? And so you could say, well, at each stage of your life, you're in a new narrative. So it's a new episode.

And each episode is concluded, it concludes with something approximating a psychological transformation. So you become more than you were. And then the new episode is marked by a reestablishment of your sacrificial relationship with what's highest. That's what Abraham does when he builds the altar, right? Every time he moves into the space of a new adventure, he

reaffirms his commitment to the highest possible sovereign principle. In Abraham's case, it's really construed as something approximating the spirit of adventure, right? And the consequence of that is God offers him a bargain, right? God comes to Abraham with a deal. That's the covenant. It's a really good deal. And it's so cool because I think it works psychologically. Again, God tells Abraham that if he leaves his zone of comfort,

then he will be a blessing to himself. So that's a good deal because people seldom are. He will have a name that's renowned among his peers and justifiably so. So that's a good deal because we want to be known. That's not exactly right. We want to develop a stellar reputation.

That's the treasure that's stacked up in heaven by the way that the gospels refer to, right? Because it's the best place to store your wealth is in your reputation. Clearly, he'll establish something permanent, in Abraham's case, a dynasty. So now he becomes the pattern of fatherhood itself. And he'll do that in a way that's of benefit to everyone else.

So it's a great deal, way better than the zero-sum Malthusian nightmare that the apocalypse mongers foist on us. And so then Abraham does that. He swears to do that. And at each stage of his development, he reaffirms his commitment to that spirit of adventure. And then he transforms himself through a process of sacrifice. And what that means is that every time your personality expands because you have a new opportunity, you have to leave things that aren't worthy behind.

in the dust, so to speak, right? And so Abraham does that. He does it so thoroughly, he literally becomes a new person because he gets a new name. And then he's called upon to offer his son to God. And that's the stumbling point for like, say, most skeptical atheist readers. But I also understand what that means, I think, because

Mostly because I'm thinking about Michelangelo's Pieta. You know, there's this tremendous statue in St. Peter's that Michelangelo carved when he was like 23. And it shows Mary holding the broken body of her adult son in her arms. And I would say offering him to the world.

or to God, offering him to the highest. And that is what you do if you have children, if you have any sense, right? Is you sacrifice your children, let's say their whims, their immediate desires, all of that, even your relationship with them, their dependency on you, you sacrifice that to the highest possible aim. And

If you do that properly, you get them back. And that's also true because if you encourage your children to go out into the world in this Abrahamic way, then they become competent and stable and they're appreciative of you. And once they're adults, they can establish a

long-lasting friendship at that point. It's more than friendship, but it's at least that. And so Abraham, he's the archetypal individual and his pathway forward, him and Sarai, that's definitely offered as the alternative to the catastrophe of the flood and the all-seeing eye of the state. The coherence of the biblical story is so deep that it's

It's spellbinding and absurd. It's surreal.

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There are people suffering on the ground right now in the Holy land. The fellowship is doing amazing work, helping them out. Now you can help out as well. Head on over to Ben for the fellowship.org. Again, that's Ben for the fellowship.org doing amazing work in the Holy land and all over the world. God bless. And thank you. So Jordan, obviously you wrote maps meeting. You've talked before about how maps and meeting was a very difficult book to write. Uh, I've read maps meeting. It's a very dense book. It's not the easiest book to read. Uh, you know, you, you've also written obviously huge bestsellers like 12 rules for life. Uh,

Where does this one stack up in terms of the writing process? Well, the writing was much easier, Ben, because I've done so much of it now. And because also I was writing this book while I was lecturing continually and on a lecture tour. And the ideas flowed much more easily. I would say in terms of difficulty, this book is probably midway between Maps of Meaning and Twelve Rules. It's not a simple read, but

Well, it's as simple as I could make it, you know, and I would also say the same about maps of meaning. Like, I wasn't trying to be opaque. I was trying to figure something out. Now, with 12 rules and beyond order, I was more explaining something than trying to figure it out, although there was some of the latter in it. With this book, it's sort of halfway between. You know, I was definitely entering new territory, much deeper analysis of

many more biblical stories. And so there's a fair bit of investigation on my end there, and that tilts it more towards the academic direction. But I think that like 12 Rules or Beyond Order, the book is extremely practical. Like if you understand the things that are in We Who Wrestle With God, it'll change your life. And I don't say that lightly. And I also say it knowing it's true because hundreds and hundreds of students at

Harvard and the University of Toronto told me year after year for 20 years, informally and formally in the course evaluations that the Maps of Meaning course changed their entire life. It changed the way they looked at everything. And then I also know from the tours and the thousands of people that I've spoken to, or even tens of thousands of people, that the 12 rules for life and be on order have had the same effect. And like, I think this is a

Well, this is a deeper book in that it unites, as I said, it unites modern science with the deepest of our theological traditions. If that's true, like that's a preposterous claim.

It's really, it's a preposterous claim. But I also think, Ben, I think we are on the cusp of something truly new because I think the Enlightenment has come to an end. I think in my wilder moments that that was signified in some ways by my discussion with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

And, and the reason that those discussions happened and the reason that they attracted a certain amount of attention was because there is something new under the sun. And it is that what's new is our understanding now, our emergent understanding that there's no escaping from the story. So let's, let's talk about that. I mean, like those, those debates were really fascinating because again, what you hear from sort of the, the new atheist crowd is that,

when you talk about truth or when you talk about symbolism, that that's an attempt to avoid the questions that they're asking about the quote-unquote hard science. But that's not really the case that you're making. So why don't you explain for people who missed it? Well, first of all, there is now a hard science of symbolism. The large language models have mapped out the symbolic world. And what they have mapped out is the probability that ideas will co-occur. And what a symbol is, is

Like a central symbol would be the center point of a network of statistically associated ideas. And then I would say every perception is a network of that sort. So when you perceive an object, you perceive the object in relationship to its embodiment or incarnation of the ideal.

So every object is platonic, it's a platonic idea, but it seems to be, it actually seems to be literally the case. This is actually how you perceive. You perceive every pillow, or there's a pillow in this room that I'm looking at, you perceive every pillow individually.

as a reflection of the ideal central form of pillow, which is something like an amalgam of its practical function and its objective qualities. It's both of those. And every perception has that element. There's a center and a fringe around every perception. And that's

That's not a matter of opinion. That's how the large language models work. And they've modeled human linguistic cognition far better than anything we've ever created by many orders of magnitude. So we can map out the symbolic world objectively now, but the best way to think about it is just the symbolic world is the weighting of ideas. So for example, I use this example in the book. If you hear the word witch,

You instantly know which W-I-T-C-H. There are a plethora of images and words that co-occur with that. It's

It's witch and swamp. It's not witch and glass enclosed, high rise penthouse apartment. Now you could, you could play with that. Like you could play with the witch representation by having a witch that who was witchy in all regards, except she lived in a penthouse, you know, and that would be an interesting twist, but you have to stay within the realm of the symbolic representations in order for the portrayal to make sense. And so, and I think,

I asked one of the world's top neuroscientists flat out. Can I remember his name off the top of my head? Anyways, it'll come to me. I asked him if every perception was a micro narrative and he said yes. Right. And so that's very interesting. This is revolutionary because, of course, the

The atheist reductionist materialists like Dawkins assume that there is a self-evident fact level somewhere and that you can reduce everything that's value predicated to this level of incontrovertible self-evident fact. That level doesn't exist. It's interpretation all the way down. Now,

The weird thing about that is that, in a sense, that's what the postmodernists have been claiming. But what they got wrong was that that interpretation level itself, the weighting level, also has a structure. And one of the things I tried to tell Dawkins was that that's the structure of the meme world. That's a good way of thinking about it.

Like the world that we've abstracted up in linguistic representation and imagination, it has a structure. That's the Jungian collective unconscious. And that's the consequence of the competition between memes across...

hundreds of thousands of years. And so one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins and I had spoken with Brett Weinstein in some detail before that was that Dawkins' meme idea is way more significant than he thinks. But he won't take that step because if he steps beyond, like he said, a meme is a backwards baseball cap. It's like, Jesus, Richard, really? I mean, come on, give yourself some credit.

You're talking about the manner in which abstract representations war for supremacy in the space defined by abstract human cognition. You can do better than backwards baseball cap.

You know, I tried to let him know that Mircea Eliade, who's a great historian of religion, has mapped out something like the structure of the war between gods in heaven across multiple cultures. And it's a very calm, it's a very stable pattern. You get a polytheistic interpretation of the world, which is something like the narrative embodiment of different value structures. And then they vie for supremacy. And that probably happens as

isolated tribal groups come together in larger civilizations. So there's actual war on the ground, but there's also conceptual war in the space of imagination. And then that tends towards the emergence of a monotheism across time, if the culture manages to unite itself. And then that monotheism has certain properties. Like in Mesopotamia, for example, a god named Marduk rose up out of the polytheistic

out of the realm of polytheistic combat. And Marduk was characterized by eyes all the way around his head, so attention, and by the capacity to speak magic words, the words that transform night into day, which is very similar to the conception of Yahweh at the beginning of time. But there's a reason for that. It's that as these underlying value structures vie for supremacy,

What emerges as superordinate and stable is structured. And I think the reason for that, Ben, is that imagine that you had to, imagine that you took the set of all possible playable games and you extracted out what playable meant. Playable would mean something like infinitely iterable, improving as you played it, and voluntarily chosen.

Well, that's a very tight set of constraints around what would constitute an acceptable game. And there's no reason to assume that wouldn't reemerge continually as the world of playable games battled

What would you say? As battles raged in the world of potentially playable games. It makes perfect sense. And Dawkins kind of got excited about that idea near the end of our discussion because we talked about how that might function biologically, right? So once you establish a story as supreme, then people can compete within that framework for reproductive supremacy.

And that would mean that the reproductive victory would confer an advantage on the genes that matched that story. So that's how biological evolution can chase the...

structure of narrative well geez well Dawkins he figured when we talked about that this was only the last half an hour so he saw how that might work which I thought was well I couldn't have asked for a better end to our discussion than now it's like that's also an explanation for the emergence of the union collective unconscious right at the genetic from the genetic level all the way up to the conceptual I think it's indisputable that these sorts of things have occurred

It can't not be the case. It has to be the case. And I think it has to be the case biologically. Once human beings opened up the capacity for abstraction and we created worlds of representation in abstraction,

then the fact of the existence of those worlds is going to start to have a determining effect on the course of biological evolution. The alternative hypothesis is that the fact that human beings can think is independent of their reproductive status and their biology. That's a stupid theory. Obviously, that's not true. So I think we're in a revolution, a conceptual revolution, Ben, and

I think all this political drama, all the culture wars are a reflection of something much deeper going on underneath the surface. Everyone has that feeling anyways, you know? Yeah, I think that's right. And you're seeing competing stories, as you say, being told in the political sphere that really are just happening at the top of the iceberg. There's a much bigger story that's happening much deeper. Jordan, one of the questions that you get asked a lot is,

It's about your own personal view of God. Because you've talked about what you think of religion in terms of sort of useful truth or utilitarian truth or various types of truth. And once again, the accusation is, well, you're avoiding the question of factual truth. You factually believe that God exists. Are you trying to end around that question? Obviously, we've seen a number of high-profile conversions. And the recent pastor wife became a recent convert to the Catholic Church.

What do you make of that question? How do you answer it? My answer to that always is, you know, I act as if God exists and people don't like that because they say, well, what do you believe? What do you think is true? It's like, well, it's perfectly reasonable to have a debate about what constitutes the basis of faith.

As far as I'm concerned, and it's an existential claim, what you believe to be true is what you stake your life on. It's what you act out. And it isn't. See, I think that's really a hangover in some ways from

a Protestant view of belief. And I'm not trying to single the Protestants out here. The Protestants did more than anyone else, arguably, although you got to give credit to the Jews on this front too, to bring literacy to the world, right? It was the combination of the printing press and the Protestant insistence that everyone could have direct contact with the word of God that made the whole world literate. And that is not an overstatement. That's a historical fact.

But the problem with the Protestant approach in some ways, because it's so hyper-linguistic, is that belief gets transformed into something like the willingness to mouth a set of propositions. And I just don't think, like, that's true in a way, but it's not fundamentally true. You know, and Christ himself says in the Gospels that not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Like, the mere...

mere verbal assent to a statement of belief is not sufficient to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. It's a matter of commitment and action. It's a matter of actual sacrifice. And then I would say to people who want to know what I believe is, well, first of all, it's not like I'm hiding anything. Here's a book. It explains what I believe. That's why I wrote the book. And it's one of four books. And all of those books are my attempts to make

what I believe to be the case as clear as possible. People seem to assume that there's some secret hidden underneath that. Maybe there is, but if there is, I don't know what the hell it is. But it's even more like there's, look, I get trolled online a fair bit, as you do, no doubt, and of course. And the worst trolls are two types.

The atheistic reductionist materialists, they're Luciferian beyond belief. And every time I interview a scientist, the Simpsons comic book guys come out of the bloody, out from underneath their rocks and whine about how the fact that they're smart hasn't made them king of the world in their bitter and resentful troll demon epithets. And the other ones are the Christian fundamentalists. And like, they're equally intolerable.

Peterson's almost there. It's like, well, hey, great. Glad you think so. What have you done lately? We'll get to more with Jordan in just a moment. First, folks, let's talk about dressing sharp without sacrificing comfort. If you're tired of choosing between looking professional and feeling relaxed, I've got great news for you. Collars & Co. is revolutionizing menswear with their famous dress collar polo. Imagine this, the comfort of a polo combined with the sharp look of a dress shirt. It's the best of both worlds, giving you that professional edge without

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adjudication of what they actually believe, right? This is true in everything from psychology to survey data, that revealed preference is significantly more important than what you think of yourself. And so people spend an awful lot of time thinking like, what do I think? What do I believe? But the truth is that the vast majority, and this is a point that's made by the philosopher Michael Okshott, the vast majority of what we do in the world

has very little to do with a conscious belief system that directs us toward doing the thing. Much of it is inherited. Much of it is taught to us by our family. Much of it is so deeply embedded that it becomes near instinctive. But the thing that you do in the world, the choices that you make in the world are...

are the best characterization of the thing that you believe. This is why whenever people will say like, do you believe in God? That's a weird proposition. The idea that I believe in God the same way that I believe in a proposition like two plus two equals four. Well, I mean, two plus two equals four, it doesn't actually demand anything of me. It doesn't demand any sort of action on my part.

The belief in God demands action on my part, and that action is either taking place in the world or it's not taking place in the world. And if it's not taking place in the world, of what use is the belief system? It's completely anodyne. It's an idea that exists in the realm of uselessness. You put your finger on something of crucial importance there with regards to the nature of both the real and belief.

2 plus 2 equals 4 doesn't demand anything of you. And that means it isn't a proposition that is translatable immediately into a value proposition, let's say. Not with regard to your own action. Well, things that are deeply true have implications for action. This is something that I tried to lay out in Maps of Meaning. There's a structure of perception that has to do with action. And that's a different form of action.

Belief it's a much different form of belief. It's even instantiated differently neurologically and so but there's we also have to understand for for the religious types that are listening, especially the more literal minded religious types who are propositional eyes beyond belief

The God in the Old Testament and the new, for that matter, is ineffable. He's beyond category. And so to say, is God real? In some ways, it isn't a genuine question because God doesn't have the same order of reality as the profane things that are littered about the landscape. God isn't real the same way a table is real, right? And this is

I'm not inventing this up and out of whole cloth. There's an insistence that's continual. And I think it's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is, is beyond categorization, right? This is why even Moses can only get a glimpse of God. So God is outside our category structures. Now, does that make him real?

Well, I would say God is hyper real. God is the reality upon which all reality depends. That's a different kind of category. And it's not exactly comprehensible. It's certainly not

It's an atheist game. Is God real like a table is real? Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner. God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space. And so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible. That's clearly in the Hebrew text. I mean, the

The text, you know, the name of God, which in Hebrew, you know, as a religious Jew, I'm not actually supposed to even spell it. The letters would be Yud and then Hey and then Bav and then Hey. But what that encompasses in the Hebrew is Hayahoveviyihiyah, meaning that in Hebrew, that means what was, what is and what will be. Right. United in the name of God. Right. And then when the description that God gives to Moses at the burning bush,

is, hey, yeah, I share, hey, yeah, right? I will be what I will be, right? Like that's the best description that God can give to a human being is like, I am what I am basically. And I will be what I will be. And, you know, you're just going to have to deal with that, which is the answer at the end of the book of Job as well, which is, you know, you can't understand me because we're of a different, we're of a completely different kind. And, you know, that insistence by God that is also then baffled by the biblical text in which God takes an active role in history, is talking to people, it's like this.

God is too mysterious for any of these categories that are attempted for God. It's why I think that some of the Neoplatonic arguments, they do some solid work in terms of establishing a logical predicate for believing in God, but they don't do all the work in the sense that...

that a Christian or a Jew would want them to do, or even a Muslim, that, that God is active in the world, that God has perspectives, that God does things that a sort of neoplatonic God that floats above everything and doesn't have any intervening impact that, that, that God is, is, is barren and doesn't have a lot to say about what humanity constitutes. And that's not the God that, that according to the scriptures built the world and maintains it. Well, so one of the

issues that I wrestle with in this book is actually something I derived from Dawkins, because Dawkins is at pains, not least in his new book, to establish the proposition that every organism is a microcosm of its environment.

And I think that that's actually key to solving the mystery that you just described. He said that not only is that so, this is Dawkins, but it's necessarily so. So, for example, if an alien ever got a hold of a bird, an earthly, a terrestrial bird, it could derive information.

a tremendous amount of knowledge about the constituent nature of the earth from analyzing the bird. The bird's DNA has encoded its entire evolutionary history, for example. And the ratio of bird wingspan to body weight

describes the atmosphere and the fact that the blood is oxygen dependent describes the chemical nature of the air through which it propels itself, etc., etc. Its eyes speak a certain language about the sun. So every organism is a reflection of the environment to which it is adapted. And there's an ancient medieval idea that the human soul is a microcosm. And I don't see that those ideas are different at all. And so

You know, the Genesis insistence is that we're made in the image of God. And I don't see that that's any different whatsoever than Dawkins' claim that every organism is a microcosm of its environment. And what that would mean, Ben, is that possibly, imagine that there's a layer of reality that's divine.

And it's outside the realm of human conception. And you don't believe in that the same way that you believe in the existence of an object. I mean, that's just an idiot atheist game anyways. Because what the atheists want to do is they want you to say, well, I believe in God like I believe in a table. And then the atheist says, well, there's no material evidence for your God the way there is for a table. So you're a fool. It's like, no, you're a fool because the game that you're playing is the game of a fool.

So there's a divine level that's beyond human understanding. And I would also say that's potentially the realm, let's say, that people contact when they're...

under certain psychophysiological conditions that are replicable. All sorts of exercises can put people in touch with that strata of reality, not least prayer. And so, and above that, there's a material level, and then there's a social level and a psychological level. And those are all, what would you say, the divine patterning is reflected in the patterning at each of those emergent levels. And that's all

echo that all echoes in the human soul and so and Can you speak with that? I think you can like if you devote look here's another strange proposition And I believe this to be true the spirit that will reveal itself in consequence of your inquiry is the spirit that the aim of your inquiry is calling upon and

So imagine this. We can walk through this very logically. So imagine that I'm having an argument with my wife and I allow myself to be possessed by the spirit of anger and I call on it for...

revelation of my pathway forward. Well, my head is going to fill with aggressive images and I'm going to strive for domination and victory, even over someone I love. And that's because I called on the spirit of anger to reveal itself to me as I'm moving forward. Or I could call on the spirit of pride, or I could call on the spirit of immediate sexual gratification. We do this when we're plotting

our pathway forward continually. So imagine instead that I oriented myself so that I was communing with the highest possible spirit. That was my aim. Even if I left that somewhat ineffable, the goal would be I want to do what would be best in the next moment, all things considered. What would that be? Well, I believe that our perceptual and cognitive systems are set up so that

The spirit that that aim, the spirit that responds will be the spirit that your aim conjures, even conjures out of the void. And that's a very, I truly believe that's the case. I can't see how it could be otherwise because our perceptions and our conceptions

do orient us toward our aim. Otherwise, what the hell good would they be? And so the spirit that responds to your inquiry is going to be the spirit of your aim. Jesus, man, once you understand that, the whole world changes. So then why wouldn't you aim for the highest possible good? Because then that's the spirit that's going to respond. See, in the Gospels, that's what Christ refers to as the pearl

of great price that the wealthy man would sell everything he owns to possess. It's like if you had that, why would you want anything else? And the promise, the eternal promise in the biblical corpus is that pursuit of that highest aim is simultaneously the pursuit that brings life more abundant. And I also think that's incontrovertibly true in that the best long-term strategy is virtue.

The best practical long-term strategy is virtue. Jordan, one of the things that you mentioned earlier, you know, with regard to sort of the various layers of reality, I think that's the argument that's being made at the beginning of Genesis. So one of the weird things in the original sort of, you know, eating the apple story

is that when you read just the text of it, one of the things that you see is that the snake actually doesn't lie. At no point does the snake lie. He actually tells a series of truths, right? He says, if you eat from this apple, then you'll be like God. You'll be able to distinguish good from evil, which is something that God later repeats, right? He says, if they've eaten from it, now we have to banish them from the tree of life because they'll be like us, distinguishing good from evil. He says...

you surely won't die, right? They've been told they'll die. And the snake says, you won't die, which is true. God doesn't immediately just kill Adam and Eve. Instead, he allows them to live. So the real question is, what's the sin of the snake? So this leads to my favorite pun in probably all of the Bible in Hebrew. So there's a dual pun that's used to describe the snake and then Adam and Eve. So the word in Hebrew is arum. So the word arum means in Hebrew, both cleverness and nakedness. So it says that Adam and Eve are in the garden and

and they're naked. Everything's hunky-dory, right? Then the next thing that happens says, and then there was the snake, and the snake is Arum. He's the most Arum of all creatures, right? He's the most clever of all creatures. So what's the connection between nakedness and cleverness? So the argument the snake is actually making is you can discern from your own wants, needs, and desires what is appropriate for you. And because you can discern that, even if you have the explicit order of God, he's

He's clearly lying to you. God is clearly not telling you the truth. If God says don't eat of that tree, but God's created a desire within you to eat from the tree, then clearly he wants you to follow your desire. He created you that way that you can sort of make the Dawkins argument that looking inside your own soul that you know better than God does, even if God explicitly gives you the rule not to eat from this thing. So in your own nakedness, in your own sort of material, physical being lies the root of cleverness.

And cleverness is bad. And so the first thing that happens, obviously, is they discover that they're naked, but not naked in the way that they thought they were, as in like all powerful and that material reality can overcome what God wants of them. Naked in the sense that they're actually vulnerable, which is why the first thing that God does after, you know, he has this big conversation with them is he sews them a skin, right? He sews them a coat. Yeah.

It is designed specifically to shield them from the element. So the story I think of the beginning is really about good parenting because God lets them suffer the natural consequences of their decisions. He says, you've made yourself vulnerable and naked. I'm going to help shield you from that by giving you a coat. But the reality of being vulnerable and naked in the world is that the environment is no longer your friend.

If you thought that you could simply manipulate, that your desire for what is good magically manifests, that's not true. You now work in a world in which the ground resists you. You work in a world where childbirth does not come easily to you. You want to live in the animal world, you now live in the animal world.

And because you'd ignored the word of God and you instead decided that you were akin to God, now you have to live the animal part of your existence in a very real way, which is why you have to be banished from the Garden of Eden. You're now subject to all the rules of the animal. You see this relationship between cleverness, let's say, and nakedness manifest itself very directly in people's lives. So a common nightmare for people is to be naked on stage.

Right. And so that's to have all your vulnerabilities, your bare self exposed to the evaluative eye of the social community. Okay. So now imagine that you are on stage and you become self-conscious.

And there's no difference between becoming self-conscious and becoming aware of your vulnerability. Then you might say, well, what's the preconditions for being self-conscious on stage? And the answer is, well, as soon as it's about you, when you're on stage, you're self-conscious, right? How am I doing? Am I winning the argument? What do people think of me? You know, am I performing properly? Is this going to further my career? Those are all prideful conditions.

And the consequence of that query making itself manifest is self-consciousness. If you're on stage and you're just trying to say what you believe to be the case, you know, and letting the cards fall where they will, then that self-consciousness disappears. And I don't think there's any difference between that and walking with God in the eternal garden.

And that's because you're allowing that deep reflection of the structure of reality within yourself to make it manifest in your words. And there's no reason for self-consciousness then because it's a sacrificial gesture. It's not about you. It's about wherever the truth will take you, let's say. And the biblical insistence, the voice of adventure that comes to

Abraham is no different than the voice of truth that comes to Jonah, let's say. It's the same thing. It's the voice of conscience that comes to Elijah, right? And it's the thing that can and should possess you. And it's the thing that Eve and Adam try to usurp in the Garden of Eden. And they do bring undue suffering into the world in consequence. And so all of these things can be seen fairly directly once you understand a few things.

what you say, key concepts. And that's ridiculously exciting. I mean, it was extremely... I had a better time writing this book than any book I've written. I mean, partly because my health is much better. I was very ill when I wrote the last book I wrote, and I'm much better now. But this was also almost entirely an exciting venture. When I wrote Maps of Meaning, I was really still dealing with the depths of malevolence and

ignorance, let's say, you know, the darkness that characterizes human beings, because this question I was trying to answer in the final analysis was something like the origin of evil. And that's a very dark endeavor. But with we who wrestle with God, I was more investigating the nature of the good. And that's a lot, that's a lot, that's a lot more joyful and endeavor. That's for sure. And it was a series of continual,

optimistic revelations as the structures of the texts revealed themselves because the news is so good while the covenant, for example, that covenant that

Abraham makes with God or that God makes with Abraham. Here's the cool thing about that, Ben, because we can do a counter proposition. So imagine that the divine in the story of Abraham is conceptualized as the spirit of adventure that impels people forward into the world. So that would be the same spirit that

makes your child exploratory and courageous, even on a playground when he has to meet new people or when he's mastering a new skill. And you're trying to foster that as a good father. Okay, so now imagine that that spirit of adventurous exploration is the best pathway forward to the expansion of the child's character.

Okay, a genuine character in the most positive possible way. Well, then you'd say that the instinct for development is the same instinct that fleshes out possibility most easily.

thoroughly. Well, the counter proposition would be the spirit of adventure that drives a child to explore has no relationship with the psyche or society or the world. Well, that's a stupid theory. Obviously, that can't be the case. Okay, so now imagine that the world is structured so that if you followed the voice of adventure fully, which is the spirit you would encourage as a good father, and of course, Abraham is the archetypal father as well, then you would

entice or invite people down the pathway that makes them a blessing to themselves, that helps them establish something permanent, that

makes their name renowned among other people for good reason and that does that in a way that brings benefit to everyone. Well, how could it be, given that we're social creatures, how could it be that our deepest instinct for developing ourselves and moving into the world, how could it be other than aligned with what brings the optimal social order? Because it would mean that we're maladapted to the social environment, right? Well, that's obviously not. Now,

That doesn't mean there isn't a niche for psychopaths, for example. You know, I mean, once you establish a playable and productive game, people can take the role of parasite and scavenger and they can eke out a pathetic cane-like existence. By doing that, they have to be wanderers in the land of Nod. But you can do it. But that's...

The perversion of the postmodernists is that the path of Cain is the only story that rules. Well, no, that doesn't, no. And, you know, I detail that out quite radically in the book too, not least from talking to people like Franz de Waal and knowing the work of people like Jacques Panksepp. Power doesn't even work to structure the social relations of chimpanzees. Even in chimps, you see the emergence of something like a reciprocal ethos.

If at least you see that in the behavior of the chimps who establish relatively stable and peaceful reigns and troops. They're not power-mad, chest-thumping Hitlers. Those chimps meet a vicious end.

And that's part of that, the self-defeating nature of a game that's predicated on power. Folks, the book is amazing. I mean, you should go check it out right now. Jordan poured his heart and his soul into it. You can see that directly in the book. And it's We Who Wrestle With God. It's available right now. It's soaring up the bestseller list, as all of Jordan's books always do. Go check it out. It's going to open your mind. And you're certainly going to experience something new while you read it. Jordan, really appreciate the time. Can't wait to talk to you soon. Hey, man, I'm looking forward to it too, Ben. We've got lots more to talk about.

The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp. Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick. Editing is by Austin Davenport. Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina. Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina. Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo. Production intern is Sarah Steele. Production coordinator is Jessica Kranz. Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

Executive in charge of production is David Wormis. Executive producer, Justin Siegel. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2024.

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