The Foolishness of God

Brilliant minds chew on the great human questions: how should we find meaning? How should we order our lives together? What are the essential and real qualities of being human, and what does that imply for what we do?  And, although answers vary, one dominant, modern idea informs most of the modern answers: Human beings emerged through time on a continuum with everything else, from non-life to life, from non-consciousness to consciousness, from practical survival behaviors to morality, from awareness to self-awareness, from awe to religion, from irrational to rational.  In short, to say that man evolved from the lower animals is to say something mundane, like saying the earth is round.

This now commonplace theory of origins has found renewed energy in the teachings of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, whose essential message is that of acquiring virtue.  Unlike traditional treatments—ancient wisdom, religious teaching and practice—Peterson’s is grounded in a remarkably broad and comprehensive view of human nature, built largely on Darwinian evolutionary theory expanded by Jungian psychology.  His teachings can be grouped into two halves, one half being the sound wisdom he offers, like always to be honest and grateful; the other half being the complex explanations on why (or how) those wise things work.  In short, wisdom meets the deep need of modern people for causal understanding, where the complicated explanations anchor the phenomena to something coherent, lasting, and outside of themselves.  In short, to a world that long ago reduced God to an idea, and then to a casually overlooked idea, comprehensive systems like Peterson’s make for appealing replacements.

Yes, it’s a logical system.  Yes, it produces results in the form of order and well being for individuals, and, consequently, ought not to be easily dismissed.  As good as it is, however, it’s incomplete.  Followers of Peterson might agree to the incompleteness as a consequence of the system’s dependency on evolving or emerging information; it’s necessarily incomplete.  But the gap I find is a gap in true theology.  There is no god (or gods) in Peterson’s system, not in the sense of a being (or beings) with objective and independent existence.  For this reason, by only following what Peterson suggests (and I would recommend doing that), one misses out on the deeper experience of devotion to, and relationship with the maker of all things, and giver of life.  This is the one step Peterson cannot take, because for him, such a being is a plausible reality, not concrete reality.

Peterson’s god differs qualitatively, but not practically, from the modern “god:”  a principle of devotion, an emotional focal point, a notion and repository that efficiently and authoritatively carries the wisdom of human experience.  This is the god of “spiritual but not religious,” and what’s special about Peterson is that he seems to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the religious.  He does it by consistently reserving a blank space in his system that could be filled by a divine being, and he consistently refuses to state what fills the blank.  It’s an honest move because there is no logically and materially consistent means of filling it.  Peterson’s system, you might say, is a probabilistic model[i] with two random variables, one is the human race, and the other is god.  Peterson’s study is the first random variable, people, and his profession is devoted to characterizing that probability function.  As for the second random variable, “god,” he does not speculate beyond the measurable traces of its effects within the human.  And so, while this is honest, it does not open the way to knowing God, which is the richest of all human experiences. 

We who are religious appreciate the fact that Peterson’s model does have a place for god.  The mistake in that model, however, is the setting of human beings and God on equal footing, two contributors to a common, larger, reality.  But God is the author of reality, not its subject.  Reality flows from God, not god from Reality.  And within reality is one location where human beings operate, and that location supplies the natural limitations of human experience. But the opposite of this comes out in Peterson’s explanations where “god” emerges from human experience, that the notional repository, “god,” grows in content and authority as human beings evolve[ii] along with an evolving reality.  Such a “god” cannot be related to.

Speaking from within the Christian Tradition (the religion, the Church), I know full well that the practical principles taught by Dr. Peterson are true because those principles can be found within the Tradition.  In other words, the Tradition does not need Dr. Peterson.  Peterson, however, has greater currency within modern discourse than does the Christian Tradition.  The modern conversation does need Dr. Peterson.  Is the Christian Tradition left out of that conversation?  It seems so, but the response is not to convert truth into mere principles.  That would be tragic.  Religion is a soil where principles grow and acquire richness well beyond the principles themselves.  For the soil to be rich, and for the Tradition to take up space in the modern world, it must be embraced and lived.  The Christian Faith has always had the same answer, draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.  When that happens the impact will be profound, even if quiet and humble.  Nothing like the modern conversation will then be needed.

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.  1COR1:20-25

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[i] The model is my simplification of Peterson’s system, not Peterson’s.

[ii] And this, I believe, is closer to what Peterson does say.  From that perspective, his system is fundamentally hostile to belief in an objective, autonomous being who created reality.