Influential psychologist Jordan Peterson continues to explore God and his word.
“If categories just dissolve, especially fundamental ones, the culture is dissolving, because the culture is a structure of category,” he said.” “That’s what it is. So and in fact, culture is a structure of category that we all share. So we see things the same way. But that’s why we can talk, I mean, not exactly the same way, because then we have nothing to talk about. But, roughly speaking, we have a bedrock of agreement. That’s the Bible, by the way. So, I just walked through the Museum of the Bible in Washington. That was very cool. It’s a very cool museum.”
The visit clarified his thinking about the Bible.
“The Bible isn’t a book, it’s a library,” Peterson said. “It’s a collection of books. And so what I figured out was, partly because I was talking to my brother in law, Jim Keller, who’s the world’s greatest chip designer and has now designed a chip that’s as powerful as the human brain, which is optimized for artificial intelligence learning, by the way. And so I talked to him about that, he said, ‘you heard of the internet?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Jim, I’ve heard of the internet.’ He said, ‘this is way more revolutionary than that.’”
When asked if “structure” is what the Bible provides, Peterson responded, “Yeah, that’s what I figured out.”
Peterson listed several of the most notable authors in the history of the world and noted how their writings became the fundamental basis for many things that came after those writings, adding that the Bible is “certainly” at the “base” of it all.
“And so it isn’t that the Bible is true,” he said. “It’s that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of truth, which makes it way more true than just true. It’s a whole different kind of true, and I think this is, I think this is not only literally the case, factually, I think it can’t be any other way.”
