1 Response to Full blown Documentary on JBP

1. wildiris says:

   January 8, 2018 at 11:40 am

   A friend recently shared a C. S. Lewis quote with me. Here was the beginning of it: “[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before…”
   One way to understand Jordan Peterson’s views on Scripture is to see Scripture as a roadmap of the choices, both wise and unwise, that the generations that came before us have made. That is, among the many things that Scripture is, it is also a story of how we as human beings have gotten to where we are today. If you accept Darwinian evolution, then good choices lead to the success and longevity of a species, bad choices lead to the demise of a species. Implicit then in the notion of Darwinian selection is that choices can be ranked good-too-bad to the degree that they correspond to the cause and effect reality a particular life form must survive and ultimately thrive in.
   So scripture, as a history of good/bad choices, must be telling you something about the way the universe works. So for Jordan Peterson, the fact that after three millennia the Scriptures are still with us, whether they make sense to us or not, is in fact telling us something fundamental about the world we live in. And to ignore the wisdom contained within them, the human race does at its peril. This is not a statement of religious confession as much as a pragmatic observation of how the world works. This is a step in abstract thinking that his critics like Sam Harris and others, seem unable to take.
   As an aside, here is the point that the worldviews of C. S. Lewis and Jordan Peterson crossover into physics. If the laws of physics were perfectly deterministic, then there would be no choice possible. Choice in this universe is only possible precisely because the laws of physics are not perfectly deterministic. I think the physics community shies away from this question because it reeks of the anthropic principle; the dreaded “A”, word as some physicists call it.
   But then, the ability to make choices is part of what defines our humanity.
   The only reason Bret Weinstein has been paired with Jordan Peterson for interviews is that Weinstein was the biology professor at the center of the kerfuffle at Evergreen State College earlier this year, while Jordan Peterson was the center of the kerfuffle regarding Bill C-16 in Canada. Their pairing is for political reasons, not for the sake of intellectual argument.
   Intellectually, Weinstein is not in the same league as Peterson, by any stretch. But an interesting association pops up at this point. Weinstein was mentored under the socio-biologist Robert Trivers. I had the good fortune to be at UC Santa Cruz the same time Robert Trivers is on the faculty there and attend some of his seminar lectures. Even as a Christian he profoundly influenced my thinking.
   Paul, considering the very eclectic choice of the people that fascinate you, you might want to check out Robert Trivers. To describe him as a character would be an understatement. His short bio on Wikipedia doesn’t even begin to do him justice. So if you wanted a debate with some real intellectual meat, then Robert Trivers would be a far better choice than Bret Weinstein to match up with Jordan Peterson; this would be a fantasy lineup worthy of a pay-per-view offering.
   From the point of view of sociobiology, we humans shape our environment by our choices, but our environment in turn shapes our evolution; both biological and sociological. As an animal species we are unique in this ability. We are the only animal that can consciously/deliberately shape its own evolution with its choices.
   I notice that when Jordan Peterson makes reference to our human traits, there is often an implication that these traits go back tens of thousands of years in our evolution. This appears to be one of the axioms/premise that undergirds Peterson’s thinking; that human evolution is a history of choices made by our ancestors going back 10,000’s of years.
   Anyway I think that’s enough for now. Thank you for your patience and time in giving my comment consideration.

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