Matt Dillahunty Takes On Jordan Peterson's Unsophisticated Arguments on God and Atheism

I have mixed views on Jordan Peterson. He’s clearly an intelligent individual and for better or worse he has captured the hearts and minds of huge numbers of people.I find some of his output valuable, and some of it has me scratching my head. This is ok though. I’ve realised that if you expect individuals to be on-point on absolutely everything, then you are going to have a bad time. One of those itchy-scalp topics for Peterson happens to be religion and god. I’ve been waiting for someone to shine some daylight on this blind spot and I’m very pleased to see Matt Dillahunty appears to be just the man. You can watch a conversation between the two men here:

Despite the points of disagreement between them, both men conducted themselves respectfully and engaged in a constructive manner for which they should be praised.

In other spheres, Peterson is known for railing against the infuriating postmodernist way of using language in such a way that is so elastic as to be utterly meaningless.

However, it’s clear to me that this is the precise way in which Peterson operates where the question of god is concerned. For instance, at one point Dillahunty makes the claim that decapitation would be bad for human ‘well-being’. Astonishingly, Peterson attempts to argue against that proposition, playing a game of “it depends on how you define well-being”.

Peterson also espouses deeply unsophisticated attitudes towards atheists. On the one hand he claims to respect them, but then denies their entire existence by saying they are not godless, they “just think they are”.

In another conversation, when Peterson was asked to confirm whether god was “fact or fantasy”, Peterson answered with “Why can’t it be both?”.

This is garden variety ‘hide the ball' apologetics and is not indicative of a critical thinker, or at least a consistent one.

I’m pleased to say none of this got by Matt Dillahunty. Matt is far too experienced to be bamboozled by Peterson's verbose obfuscation.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Stephen Knight is host of The #GSPodcast. You can listen to The Godless Spellchecker Podcast here, and support it by becoming a patron here or making a one–off payment via PayPal here.