If Professor Bret Weinstein is not quite
Washington State’s answer to Jordan Peterson, at very least he’s managed to make
a bunch of the same enemies by refusing to kow-tow to political correctness on campus, and good for him.
Weinstein is an evolutionary theorist and a
professor of biology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. He and Peterson
got together on Joe Rogan’s show recently (ostensibly to discuss Hitler, of all
things) in a wide-ranging, almost
three hour brainstorm-fest. (Rogan may have an ‘everyman’ sort of appeal,
but he too is no intellectual slouch.)
At least part of the three-way exchange might interest other Christians as intensely as it interested me.
The Best of the Best
These are highly
intelligent, well-educated men putting their heads together collegially and
obviously with very good intentions. They are fun to watch, and one can learn a
lot from them.
So I pull this
particular set of quotes from Weinstein not because I think either of these men
are idiots, but because their exchange serves as a great example of why young,
well-taught Christians should not be uncomfortable facing up to what is currently
being expressed by the great minds of our day. As persuasive as the arguments of
the intellectual elite may sound to us initially, they have been constructed on
a foundation of sand.
The Evolutionary Utility of Untruths
Here, then, is Bret
Weinstein on the evolutionary utility of beliefs that are not quite true:
“We tend to think of intellect as having evolved because knowing what’s true gives you an advantage, but there’s actually nothing that says knowing the literal truth is where advantage lies. And so I have a category that I call ‘literally false, metaphorically true’. These are ideas that aren’t true in the factual sense, but they are true enough that if you behave as if they were true you come out ahead of where you would be if you behaved according to the fact that they’re not true.”
Now, Weinstein’s too-broad
use of the word “true” here is the first problem.
Truth and Wisdom
To be fair, he’s
picked that up from Peterson (or maybe it’s just the way all the educated talk
about truth today). Peterson uses “truth” to mean all kinds of things (and
defends that historically and linguistically, though I’m not sure he’s got his
facts quite right). Rogan calls both professors on it later in the program, at
which point they begin to use “data” and “fact” for what they earlier called “literal
truth”, and “wisdom” for what they earlier called “metaphorical truth”.
The tags are less important
than the fact that to understand the discussion, everybody needs to be speaking
the same language. But no Bible student I know even encounters this sort of
muddle. It seems to me that the word of God quite consistently uses “truth” to describe that which is honest and reliable, consistent with reality, and
conforming to the facts, while it uses the word “wisdom” to describe advice or commandments that purport to apply truth to human
experience. To maintain any kind of coherence, Peterson and Weinstein
eventually find themselves doing pretty much the same.
Score 1 for the Bible.
Porcupine Design Facts
Weinstein then goes on
to illustrate the difference between what he calls the two sorts of “truth”:
“Let me give you a couple of trivial examples that won’t be controversial:
‘Porcupines can throw their quills.’ It’s not true. However, if you live near porcupines and you imagine that porcupines can throw their quills, you’ll give them some space. If you don’t, you may — realizing that they can’t throw their quills — get really close to one and it may wheel around and nail you with a porcupine quill, which can be extremely dangerous, because they are microscopically designed ...”
Wait. Stop. Stop. Stop. You caught that, right? Evolution doesn’t “design” anything, which is
something Dr. Weinstein knows all too well. Now, perhaps he is just
slipping into metaphorical language. Perhaps he’s being poetic. Almost surely
he doesn’t really mean it, and I would be inclined to let this sort of inadvertent
creationist Freudian slip slide right on by if it were not something every
single atheist I’ve watched does regularly as a matter of course.
The evidence of intelligent
purpose in the world is so apparent even to an evolutionary theorist that he
can’t help but slip repeatedly into the language of creationism. One might even
conjecture that God’s invisible attributes have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.
Score 2 for the Bible.
Literal Falseness and Metaphorical Truth
Sorry, back to
Weinstein’s porcupine quills:
“... they are microscopically designed to move in from where they puncture you over time, and they can puncture a vital organ, or you can get an infection. So the person who believes that a porcupine can throw their quills has an advantage that isn’t predicated on the fact that this is actually a literal truth, right?
Another one might be that people say, ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ Well, unless you’re talking about physics as the reason, everything doesn’t happen for a reason. However, if you are the kind of person who believes everything happens for a reason, and then some terribly tragedy befalls you, you may be on the lookout: ‘Well, what’s the reason that this happened? Maybe it’s supposed to open up some opportunity.’ And you won’t miss that opportunity the way somebody who is preoccupied with their misfortune would.
So literal falseness but metaphorical truth is actually, I would argue, the category under which religious truth evolves.”
Fair enough, at least from his perspective.
A Relevant Point Made
But as Rogan later
points out (and here’s where the everyman’s common sense sees right through
educated bafflegab), the first old wives tale is untrue in any sense. You cannot rightly describe the projectile porcupine yarn as “metaphorical truth”;
it is simply false. The second example is at least questionable, in the sense
that if by “everything happens for a reason” you mean that God actively made it
all happen, I think you’re well into superstitious territory and are confused
about how the universe operates. It’s a platitude, neither accurately expressed
nor particularly useful in practice. Worse still, if you mean that everything happens for a good reason, or that good will ultimately come of every bad thing that happens to everyone, well, let’s just say you really haven ’t been paying attention.
But regardless of the
confusion in terminology, Weinstein IS making a relevant point here, and it’s
one that is increasingly at issue in Western thought. There can indeed be legitimate short-term
utility to holding an incorrect belief, however it is you managed to arrive at
it. It can keep you out of trouble, give you comfort, motivate you to do good things
for society, and so on. This is why increasingly we hear talk about how
Christianity is one of the pillars of Western civilization and that society
needs its effects to survive even if the Faith turns out not to be literally
true.
The Bitter Pill Goes Down the Wrong Hatch
Weinstein goes on:
“Now the problem — the bitter pill I mentioned — is that I’ve heard you [Peterson] say that the truths that are captured in the religious version of things are basically ... like, you know, there’s an individual truth, and then there’s a truth of your family, and there’s a truth of the population you’re living in; and these things are all encoded in these doctrines.
Which is true, and you would expect it to be because the doctrines are carried along in the population. The problem is what I hear you arguing — and you tell me if I have it wrong — is that we should therefore expect the encoded metaphorical truths in these religious traditions to be morally right. But there’s nothing that actually says it actually will be morally right, because there are metaphorical truths that might in fact be reprehensible but nonetheless effective. And so the overarching point here would be that you’re right that the documents that contain these descriptions of things are full of things that are true in some sense that is not literal scientific truth, nor was that their purpose. What isn’t true is that those things are inherently up to date.”
Here is where Weinstein’s underlying assumptions turn his argument into nonsense and reveal
its essential poverty. If only for reasons of utility, he clearly values what
is “morally right” and most “up to date”. These are the two metrics by which he
wants to either retain or discard the teaching of scripture.
A Thesis with No Foundation
But his evolutionary
perspective gives him no logical basis for preferring morality, or even for
defining it. As he points out later in the discussion, he believes evolution is
amoral and unthinking. He may defend the concept of moral rectitude on a purely
utilitarian basis, but then he would have to stop and ask himself why it is
that moral behavior should be valuable at all. If it is because morality “works”, then
he needs to ask himself why that is (one good answer might be that it was
handed down by God and represents genuine truth). On the other hand, if, as
Weinstein incoherently claims later in the same conversation, immoral behavior is actually evolutionarily
advantageous in getting ahead, on what basis does he value morality at all? In
an evolutionary economy, taking the high road would appear to be a losing
strategy.
Further, his use of “up
to date” reflects an uncritical and entirely unsubstantiated belief that
society is progressing morally. That’s awfully hard to defend when much of the “progress”
that has been made (and which Weinstein values) is arguably due to the
influence of the Christianity whose relevance he questions. Further, if moral
progress is indeed the natural order of things, then why does the envious
malevolence of the students currently calling for Dr. Weinstein’s head bring to mind the response of Adam’s son Cain to the success of his brother, a
tale that goes back at least 6,000 years?
You may not like how the Bible addresses the issues of modern life, but it does have the great advantage of at least being internally coherent.
Game. Set. Match.
All My Teachers
The world is full of
very smart people; many of them are a whole lot smarter than me. But their
arguments are full of the sorts of logic-holes a well-taught Bible-believing
sixth grader could see through in a heartbeat.
Or, as the psalmist well put it, “I have more understanding than all my
teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.”
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