I watched the recent dialogue between Craig, Peterson, and Goldstein:
1. It was somewhat disappointing. A lost opportunity. The discussion was too diffuse. Three speakers is one too many. A debate or dialogue is more effective if it's like a tennis match between two players who bounce off each other.
In addition, Goldstein rambled and filibustered. Running out the clock.
2. Peterson is the best speaker of the three. Craig has a tinny, creaky voice. Peterson is emotionally compelling in a way that Craig is not.
But that depends on what you're listening for. When Peterson tries to justify his moral intuitions, it's a mishmash of evolutionary ethics with a gesture at Platonic realism. Very ad hoc.
Peterson has become a folk hero due to his courageous refusal to knuckle under to the SJWs. In addition, he's defended common sense differences between men and women. Good for him. But in a discussion like this, he's out of his element. And he exposes the hollowness of his naturalism.
3. Peterson's opening speech was very aggressive. He says Craig is giving the wrong answer because Craig is asking the wrong question. Indeed, that Craig has it backwards. The way Craig poses the question creates the problem by generating a sense of futility.
4. Peterson used two examples. A suffering child and the fall of the Berlin wall. On that occasion, Beethoven's Ode to Joy was performed. Very inspirational. But what if someone objected that the music is ultimately meaningless because it comes to an end? Likewise, if child is in pain, how is telling the child that the universe will cease to exist in 10 billion years the right answer?
But there are serious problems with Peterson's comparisons:
i) Music ending is not analogous to life ending if we pass into oblivion:
a) Music is memorable.
b) Music is repeatable.
Even when it ends, we can still hear it in our minds. Even replay it in our minds. And in the age of recordings, we can repeat a performance. Many of us have favorite pieces of music which we like to revisit from time to time.
Moreover, there's the aftereffect of music. It's mood-altering.
If, however, humans lack immortality, then that's not analogous to savoring a musical performance. Music is repeatable while life is unrepeatable. Music is memorable but memories die with the brain. Music has an aftereffect, but if there's no afterlife, then the comparison breaks down.
ii) In addition, a piece of music is designed to end. But it doesn't merely end. It usually has a shape and direction. It builds to a climax. The experience and appreciation of music depends on its finitude. That's what makes it possible to absorb. Never-ending music would be impossible to follow. It goes nowhere because it goes everywhere.
But music appreciation involves a listener who doesn't cease the moment when the music ceases. A listener who can look back on the performance or look forward to a repeat performance.
Indeed, Peterson himself is recounting an unforgettable event in his own experience. If, however, he ceases to exist, then that retrospective viewpoint will be voided. So his comparison is counterproductive.
5. How we view the future is all-important to how we view the present. It just depends on the future in view. Sure, telling a suffering child that the universe will end in 10 billion years is irrelevant to his situation.
But that misses the point. If this life is all there is, then what happens in the distant future is beside the point since you won't be a part of that future. If, however, this life is not all there is, then what happens in the distant future is germane since you have a personal stake in that future.
And not just you, but all your loved ones. Parents and grandparents, kids and grandkids. Friends and neighbors. Old classmates and coworkers. As soon as you’re gone, someone will clean out your desk, trade your family photos for his own, and take your place on death row.
It's a cliche that intense suffering here and now is more bearable if we know that the future will be better. If we know there will come a point when the worst is behind us, when nothing worse will befall us.
iii) The Berlin wall ruined entire lives. People kissed their loves ones good-bye to make a day-trip to the other part of town, only to be cut off. They never saw each other again. They died apart. No reunion in this life, and from Peterson's standpoint, no possibility of reunion in the afterlife.
6. Peterson's appeal to biological adaptation is self-defeating. If evolution is a stochastic process, then every time you reset the process, you get a different outcome. So what we value is arbitrary, since that's the luck of the draw. Reshuffle the deck and you get different moral instincts.
Peterson's presentation, while rhetorically effective, is a dodge and a bluff. Although he may be a sincere, there's a willful and prideful evasiveness. At one point he questioned objective truth. But that's self-refuting.
Like many atheists, he's impatient with questions of ultimate meaning. He resents them. He refuses to take his position to a logical conclusion. He doesn't want to think that far. Perhaps because he's convinced that this life is all there is, so why judge it by a hopeless ideal? Yet he still wants life to have "positive value".
In addition, I think people like Peterson cling to their autonomy. They bristle at the specter of a God to whom they're answerable. Non serviam.
Yet according to their own worldview, they are slaves of physical determinism. Toy soldiers wound and bound by the blind toymaker. According to naturalistic evolution, we've been brainwashed to be altruistic. But like false memories, once we realize that the significance we attach to things is conditioned and arbitrary, we know it's a sham. There's no underlying good to back up our sense of good.
