I hope you all are enjoying your Saturday and this cool Fall weather. This is my favorite time of the year. I’m sitting in my car writing this admiring the new Fall foliage, specifically this tall tree with its green leaves turning a dark red, and thought I’d comment on what I’ve been paying most attention to lately.
First, the war in Gaza. I made a mistake in a previous post to suggest Palestine is part of Israel, when in fact they are two different nations, yet once upon a time Palestine was part of the Pronised Land.
From my own argument then, I should say since Palestine has for some time been Muslim, with its own culture, and language, then I think they have a right to that territory they’ve occupied. Including the Gaza Strip, or that part of the Gaza Strip historically Muslim.
True peace would recognize that, and Israel’s control over any area largely occupied by the Jews. So part of me sympathizes with Palestine, while not Hamas itself. I think Jordan Peterson argued along this line recently but I haven’t listened yet to that talk.
Second, speaking of, I’ve been listening a lot lately to Jordan Peterson. He does seem to have evolved in different directions. Since recovering from his severe illness, he seems more aggressive and promoting an image of masculinity in certain respects, promoting himself as an online brand more than before, including with his daughter and wife both doing YT podcasts. They promote a carnivore diet while critiquing wokism and feminism. Peterson’s wife is now a Catholic, and I think the daughter is now, or is in the process of, becoming a non-denominational Christian.
This all admittedly draws me in, curious what he has to say on a certain subject. It is not that I agree with his world view, which is mainly science/psychology. It is that he is a heroic defender generally of what is true and good in the culture war.
But when he goes on and on about Carl Jung and Nietzsche, etc, as an apologist for religion, he is more a modernist than he admits to, or acts as if he would admit to. He suffers from intellectualism where his line of thought and discourse can become unnecessarily complex to the point he loses the force of argument and reason.
That said, I think we have to celebrate that Peterson now believes in the existence of God. For a long time he dodged the question, but after his illness and his wife miraculously recovering from terminal cancer, it seems that period moved him from agnosticism into being a theist. But I’m not sure how close he is to formally converting to Christianity due to his strong attachment to Enlightenment-type thinking.
His strength is psychology and anchoring it to reality but he is more of an idealist than a realist, seeing reality more a construct of the mind than something separate from the mind. He would need to see better the pitfalls of that and embrace the kind of realism seen in Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle.
He would have to crawl out from under the tall stack of psychological writings he has immersed himself in and consider philosophy and theology just in themselves distinct from psychology. He would have to see that psychology isn’t the ultimate way of looking at reality.
That said, I still hold him up as a sage for our times and continue to welcome his contribution, while praying one day for his conversion to Catholic Christianity. He is definitely on that trajectory, and if that happens I could see him embracing Catholic Tradition and the Latin Mass since he values greatly the traditions of Western civilization. To that end he should consider some of the most profound Catholic miracles like the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, Turin of Our Lady of Guadalupe, etc.
And third, I’ve been watching a lot of theism vs atheism debates, including one between Peterson and this popular atheist debater from Texas. Both kept talking over each others’ heads, often not really addressing the points the other person was making. At several points both got upset with each other. Jordan kept characterizing atheists a certain way to the point the atheist shouted calling him a liar, at least twice.
And I noticed this same pattern in other debates involving other debaters. It is curious to watch and at times intellectually stimulating, but it seems like these debates are usually not seriously answering the question or the other sides’ objections, but became a flame war of ideas as if whoever can do that better is the winner.
As for the atheist arguments, their premise is false that all truth must be based on observation and concrete evidence from the five senses which can easily be addressed. Atheists themselves believe in all sorts of abstract truths based on deductive reasoning and abstract thought without direct, empirical evidence. So both sides can admit there are forms of truth beyond empirical, scientific truths. It seems like most of these debates online tend to devolve and go off track, needing better structure and pre-planning.
See my recent post giving my own argument for the existence of God and truth of Christianity/the Church, not so much my own as me boiling down classical arguments that I find most convincing, in the way that I’d go about it
I have yet to see the theist argue theism with an atheist referring to near death experiences. They demand empirical evidence or evidence from direct human experience. To my knowledge, the best form that takes is the near death experience, when someone clinically dies, sees God, comes back to life, and reports what they saw.
I was listening to a priest in a YT podcast, a devout, orthodox Jesuit, who has devoted part of his priesthood to studying and cataloguing near death experiences, contributing to scientific studies of this at special academic centers and departments at universities devoted to just this. There are thousands of reports that have been formally investigated. To me, this body of research seems like the closest thing we have to scientific evidence for the existence of God, an afterlife, final judgment, hell and heaven, and the soul.
The common narrative is the person dies, feeling themselves literally “pop” outside the body, then hovering over their body in the room and nearby rooms observing the scene, then going through a tunnel, then for the majority seeing relatives and then a brilliant light they perceive to be, during the encounter, God.
What the atheist or materialist should find most compelling is that there are aspects to some of these experiences that cannot be explained by a natural process such as brain chemistry during death. Many cases involve the dead person observing specific verifiable situations and facts, then reporting it later once coming back to life, that could not be known unless they really had died and left their body. For example, the priest cited one case of the person floating outside the hospital and seeing an old shoe on a ledge of the building that could not be seen from any vantage point except from a distance away from the building, describing it in detail. Later that shoe was retrieved from ledge matching the description.
The most compelling accounts are from people born blind, who have never had any visual experience, dying, coming back to life, and then describing the visual experience of God and heaven in great visual detail, which would be impossible having never before seen anything.
Anyway, those are my thoughts today.