Peterson VS Dennett on the foundational status of religion

I just watched the last discussion Dennett (who I wrote a book about) had before passing away, with Peterson, one of my greatest influences.

They basically agree about how neuroscience works, how development works, how the intentional stance can be used to advance one’s ability to have and follow aims and goals.

The agree that religion was fundamental to structure civilization and science.

Dennett argues that religion was a scaffold needed for science to unfold, but now that we have science (and philosophy and ethics) religion not only is no longer foundationally needed, but has historically been bad, always digging the heels in, while moral progress was done via secular institutions, like universities and the state.

Peterson then describes an analogy about how the self correction of essential DNA is very high, leading the mutation rate to near zero, whereas at the “fringes” there is less and less self correction, leading to modifications that don’t undermine the whole structure of the organism.

They stop there but Peterson was going to say that religion and its foundations is like this central skeletal part, that needs to be preserved, while civilization and science are more flexible, with an ever evolving set of negotiations.

Dennett would reply that there is no need for religion to serve that purpose, there are skeletal structures like our goodness, empathy, and moral secular ideals that themselves become set in stone over time, for example, we are fairly unlikely to go back to slavery this century.

I’m not sure where Peterson would go from here, he expected there to have been more disagreement before, since he didn’t know Dennett has thrice the mind of Sam Harris.

Where he did briefly venture is that woke people and stuff are ruining the universities. Dennett said “yeah, and postmodernism has a lot to do with it” “it’s a mess” “it needs to be discussed, taken seriously, and solved” but without conceding what
@jordanbpeterson
would have wanted, that is the assumption that one solution is to restore the religious foundational moral thingamajibs from which the unis went astray, leading to loss of academic freedom.

I am almost equally influenced by Dennett and Peterson, so I serve as a synthesis of their minds (and Dennett died so the guy who wrote a book called Simulating Dennett is the best you guys got now, sorry)

My take, as an Anthropologist, is populational. There are people that need Sam Harris and people that need Peterson. Religion isn’t going away, so having a Peterson to orient religious people into neurodevelopmental harmonic integration is better than not having someone do that. The great march of history though, is on Dennett’s hands, we are evolving, the scaffold is no longer needed at the top, by those having the conversaiton, secular ethics is enough. The postmodernists and wokes are causing a raucus now, but we will find a way to deal with them, and science and philosophy will continue to progress.

The other populational aspect Dennett never considers is the 2.2children per woman religion used to be able to produce. The sustainability criteria. However even religion has not been able to keep this growth knob going, so we should not give many points to religion for that.

As I see it, we need to push religion into a smaller and smaller corner, and steal as many religious people as possible. But since there will always be billions of them, we should also train them to understand the neurobiology of the bible, as Jordan has been doing last year.

If the changes at the fringes become too bad – say if universities start to look like BLM riots – then the religious institutions and universities, the skeleton, will be there to generate the seeds of the trees that will fix it all. But for now, we should do as Dennett and Destiny suggest, continue the march of ethical conversation within the universities and secular institutions, and hopefully find ways of destroying the woke and postmodernist and feminist cancers that infected it since Derrida cast his spells.

Not many can carry on the path Peterson is blazing, but hopefully both can continue to thrive in the respective populations, while slowly, but steadily, Dennett’s side, which has more truth, gains terrain in the interminable evolution of biocultures.