So far, anyway. That most important thing would be Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, but he hasn’t been able to make what to him is probably a leap. That’s a shame, for obviously possible eternal reasons, but also because his worldview is so infused with Jewish-Christian notions about the nature of man and sin, and the inherent struggle that is life. I’m slowly reading through his 12 Rules for Life with one of my sons, and this paragraph (p. 93) blew me away:
We are always and simultaneously at point “a” (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point “b” (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values). We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right, and improve, even if we have everything we thought we needed. Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.
This is so accurate to our experience that I can’t fathom why the question never seems to occur to Dr. Peterson as to why this is so. He is an unusually perceptive observer of human nature, but his perceptions never drive him to ask why this should be, only to accept uncritically that it is. That is great as far as it goes, and is far better than the mass of his secular contemporaries who can’t see any of this, or refuse to, but it still compels the question, why are we like this? Why do we act this way, or feel these things, or see life as we see it? What explains the human encounter with ourselves and reality as we find it? I would, of course, argue that there is really only one plausible explanation, and Christianity gives us that. Christianity has explanatory power, while materialism, or metaphysical naturalism (that all we are and all that is, is matter) explains nothing. Lucky dirt doesn’t act this way. It acts, well, like dirt!
Skeptics of every sort claim that there is little or no evidence for Christianity being true, but I would enter this paragraph as exhibit A any time in a court of law. We infer things every day from our experiences, or we couldn’t exist. What is this notion within us that we can never be satisfied, that we are always looking beyond the horizon of our experience for something else, the next thing, that will finally be it, finally connect and make us happy or fulfill us? And it never does! Can we not conclude, reasonably, that this infers that there is in fact something else, something this life can never provide that will ultimately fulfill us? Can’t we reasonably infer that nothing in this life was meant to ultimately fulfill us? Yes we can! And no matter how much someone claims they’re happy and fulfilled, we’re all gonna die. Not much fulfillment in that.
What Peterson talks about in this paragraph is the driving force of modern civilization, given to us by Judaism, and made universal by Christianity. Even a non-Christian like Tom Holland argues in his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, the ancient world without Christianity could never have turned into the modern world. The perceptions of Jordan Peterson, seemingly so universal to him that they are axiomatic, could never have existed without Jesus of Nazareth! For him, apparently, these are merely sociological phenomenon, things that just happened, well, because. A much more powerful explanation is that they reflect the true nature of reality, that God created man, male and female he created them, good, and that he rebelled and fell. Life then became a constant struggle against thorns and thistles by the sweat of our brow and painful toil, and that God himself provided the ultimate solution in his Son on a cross 2,000 years ago. That is the “one thing above all else on which to focus.”
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