"To say "I believe in God" is equivalent, in some sense, to say "my thought is ultimately coherent, but predicated on an axiom (as my thought is also incomplete, so I must take something on faith)."
To say "I don't believe in God" is therefore to say "no axiom outside my thought is necessary" or "the necessary axiom outside my thought is not real." The consequence of this statement is that God himself unravels, then the state unravels, then the family unravels, and then the self itself unravels.
To stem this unraveling with false certainty: that is totalitarianism. To speed it along is nihilism. We experimented with totalitarianism in the twentieth century, as an alternative to the ultimate axiom of faith in the unknowable and unspeakable. Totalitarianism failed. Now we will have to experiment to nihilism. This experiment, led by the resentful, will also fail, and it is as doubtful that we can survive it as it was that we could survive totalitarianism."
-Jordan B Peterson
Interesting quote
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Diebert van Rhijn
- Posts: 6469
- Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2005 4:43 pm
Re: Interesting quote
It's very unclear what Peterson means with "God" here but I take it to mean all possible higher realities we can imagine.
All thoughts end up being expressions of a certain system of interacting meanings. And such structure is indeed based on axioms but by definition the axioms are part of that system. Perhaps one could call them "core" truths functioning as context. Now like Gödel tried to establish with his incompleteness theorems: "truth is a higher notion than provability". So the axiom derives always its "truth" from a higher order system and cannot be proven inside the system it underpins. But I looked it up and Peterson uses Gödel as well but he's trying to make him say the absolute opposite! At least in formal system theory a higher system will be assumed even by the unbelieving scientist. This is how faith operates even in science or materialsm but not in a recognizable classical religious sense.
Now if this formal type of logic can be applied to the real messy world of psychology and religion is another question. Either way, the issue is the same as with faith: the idea that a causal agent or thing must be "there" as subject or object, a method which results in all objects disappearing into a transparency: they start to escape us. Hence nihilism, sometimes seen as postmodern culture, ultimately destroys the world, sometimes even in a very literal sense. Here Peterson indeed has a point.
All thoughts end up being expressions of a certain system of interacting meanings. And such structure is indeed based on axioms but by definition the axioms are part of that system. Perhaps one could call them "core" truths functioning as context. Now like Gödel tried to establish with his incompleteness theorems: "truth is a higher notion than provability". So the axiom derives always its "truth" from a higher order system and cannot be proven inside the system it underpins. But I looked it up and Peterson uses Gödel as well but he's trying to make him say the absolute opposite! At least in formal system theory a higher system will be assumed even by the unbelieving scientist. This is how faith operates even in science or materialsm but not in a recognizable classical religious sense.
Now if this formal type of logic can be applied to the real messy world of psychology and religion is another question. Either way, the issue is the same as with faith: the idea that a causal agent or thing must be "there" as subject or object, a method which results in all objects disappearing into a transparency: they start to escape us. Hence nihilism, sometimes seen as postmodern culture, ultimately destroys the world, sometimes even in a very literal sense. Here Peterson indeed has a point.