Did Jordan Peterson Just Get Exposed? Yes, And Here’s Why

Somehow I knew this was coming. I had hinted at it in various FB posts, the occasional Twitter/X tweet and in comment sections on YouTube videos. I knew, eventually, that Jordan Peterson’s comeuppance would, well, come up. I did not look forward to it, nor did I relish in it when it happened. After all Peterson has done an amazing thing. He literally, and almost single-handedly, made theology interesting again to a broader public. As a lay theologian what more could one wish for? Nevertheless, I wasn’t surprised when Peterson’s reckoning did come. At the same time, there is part of me that is glad it finally happened, and I will say more about why toward the end of this post. But first, let’s get readers up to speed. Here’s the quick and dirty of what went down.

Peterson’s Paltry Performance

On a recent debate podcast called “Jubilee,” Peterson was pretty thoroughly thrashed by a group of sharp, young students. Each came well-prepared to challenge Peterson’s vague philosophical positions and his fluid religious commitments, especially those related to Christianity. These challenges were related mainly to the intellectual domains of theology, philosophy, and Church history. Peterson’s actual academic field of psychology did not come up as a topic of debate, and that was clearly too bad, for him (I will address this at the end of the post as well). While some of the challengers were snarky and hard to listen to, most of them had substantive points to make and did a reasonably good job at making them.

That said, in these three areas of study: Theology, Philosophy and Church History, Peterson has felt free to publicly roam over the last several years. And, on occasion and in certain ways, he has presented himself as an expert voice in those fields. Again, not all of this has been bad. As I said above, Peterson’s very public intellectual journey has put theology back on the map and into the marketplace of public discourse, where it is desperately needed. That is no small feat. For this reason, the episode of Jubilee was originally entitled “A Christian vs. 20 Atheists.” Later, however, the title was changed to “Jordan Peterson vs. 20 Atheists” (which still minimally implies “Theist” vs. 20 Atheists). This seems to have been done after Peterson repeatedly denied Christian faith and was, by one interlocutor especially, made to look rather foolish for doing so.

Peterson’s waffling on his own Christian identity, as well as his lack of knowledge of basic tenets of orthodox Christianity, exposed the thinness of his views and the shakiness of his religious convictions. Admittedly, after so many conversations with so many committed and intelligent Christian thinkers (e.g. Peter Kreeft, Fr. Robert Barron, Os Guiness, James Orr, et al.) this was disappointing to watch.

Christians have both cheered Peterson on in his project of exploring Christianity, and cringed along the way at his persistent errors and unorthodox claims. One of the cringiest moments in the Jubilee debate was when Peterson responded to one interlocutor about the purpose of Christianity, and his response went as follows: “In the Christian tradition the purpose of life is to engage in voluntary, upward self-sacrifice so that the kingdom of heaven can be established on earth.” (28.00) In another answer (43:34), when pressed about whether there are intrinsic moral goods, things that are just good in themselves, Peterson says that “good is tied up with goal,” which seems to imply that there are only instrumental goods.

In each of these responses we see a fundamental error in Peterson’s thinking about Christianity, one that is foundational and that we would expect him to have corrected by now. For clearly there are intrinsic goods as well as ultimate goods, or one ultimate good, in Christianity. That intrinsic and ultimate Good is God Himself. Thus, a response we probably would have been right to expect from Peterson, having been surrounded by so many Christians for so long now, would have been something like this:

“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

Westminster Shorter Catechism

Peterson has indeed been a very mixed bag for conservative Christians since his meteoric rise to online celebrity. Moreover, not only did each of the contestants (is that the right term?) do a good job of critiquing Petersons’s views, many put him on the defensive in a way that made him look emotionally and even physically uncomfortable, if not outright disagreeable. Part of their success was tied up in their unwillingness to be lead astray by Peterson’s rhetoric which, by now, has probably become quite familiar to most observers. In any case, there was no way for Peterson to intimidate his interlocutors or wiggle his way out of the hard positions he was put in. In short, he didn’t do well. But as I said at the start, I knew this was coming.

Why?

Well, first some evidence from the past:

Some Predictions about Peterson

Here is one comment I left on a Dave Rubin video entitled “Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson Admit Their Friend Went Off the Rails” (basically a video about Peterson and Rogan complaining about Sam Harris) from two years ago:

@anthonycostello3457

2 years ago

While I appreciate Dave and Jordan…speaking up against woke nonsense, one has to say…that when it comes to professional academic philosophy, metaphysics, the natural sciences, economics etc., let’s not fool ourselves. Sam Harris is a literal nobody in the philosophical community, he is no great thinker, at all. If you want to know about philosophy you have to read actual philosophers like David Lewis, Rob Koons, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Alexander Pruss, William Lane Craig, Graham Oppy, LA Paul, Eleanor Stump, JP Moreland, David Chalmers, Robbie George, Peter Kreeft, Ernest Sosa, Dan Bonevac, Joshua Rasmussen, Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, Oliver O’ Donovan, and so many others. I mean, if you want to see how bad a “thinker” Sam Harris is, just watch his 2009 debate against William Lane Craig. I mean really, just because somebody seems “smart” on a podcast means very little these days.

This comment on Rubin’s channel was not about Peterson, per se. It was about Peterson’s views on Sam Harris. But the idea that Peterson took Harris seriously as a philosopher was evidence that there was an ignorance of the academic literature in that field: the field that, as it turns out, mattered most on the Jubilee platform.

Here is a more recent Twitter/X post, from earlier in the year:

The Kirkwood Center

@kirkwoodcenter

Christianity has symbols, yes, but Christianity is not a “symbol system.” It is a metaphysical one. We need to start a project of radically de-psychologizing our theology. Sorry Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau.

4:48 PM · Jan 13, 2025

567

Views

And another Twitter/X Post after watching Peterson’s debate with Dawkins:

The Kirkwood Center

@kirkwoodcenter

This is the problem when you have two guys who are utterly ignorant of (in Peterson’s case) or antagonists toward (in Dawkin’s case) metaphysics.

10:03 PM · Oct 22, 2024

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In these two tweets I pointed out my concern over Peterson’s ignorance of metaphysics, and his reliance on myth alone as the universal basis for belief (a carryover from his infatuation with Jung who was, to be clear, an occultist and a pagan). This was part of what was exposed in his Jubilee debate, especially by the interlocutor who brought up Graham Oppy’s work (1:00:21; 1:06:40), and the one who challenged him on his equivocation regarding the term “God” (11:00). Peterson’s final response to the student who had clearly studied some analytic philosophy of religion was simply “well, have it your way then” (1:08:20). That was not a good response.

Or here is another Tweet from last year (on Bari Weiss’ thread!):

Bari Weiss

@bariweiss

Oct 22, 2024

Question: Who is the intellectual successor to the beloved, late Rev. Timothy Keller?

The Kirkwood Center

@kirkwoodcenter

Keller was no great intellectual, although he was a great communicator. We confuse popularizers with those doing the harder, more expansive and deeper theological work. That’s no knock against Keller, but it’s like asking who will be Jordan Peterson’s intellectual successor.

2:22 PM · Oct 22, 2024

167

Views

In this tweet, I didn’t mean to dismiss the legacy of Tim Keller, but I did intend to clarify to a well-known online personality the difference between academic theologians and popularizers of those theologians’ work. Keller was first and foremost a pastor, and very few pastors today do, or even can do, the work of constructive theology. To Keller’s defense, he was always honest about his role, and he never hid the fact that he was conveying the work of others.

Finally, here is a more extensive comment on my FB Page, from late 2024:

Anthony Costello

November 18, 2024

Shared with Public

For those who are still struggling to understand Jordan Peterson’s approach to “truth,” and who perhaps watched the debate between Peterson and Dawkins on Alex O’Connor’s channel, here is the crux of the academic issue. The excerpt that follows is from D.A. Carson’s PNTC Commentary on John, where Carson is talking about literary vs. higher criticism as they apply to the biblical text:

“‘This crisis of historical narrative’, [Hans] Frei argues, led the Germans to develop higher criticism and thus to question the truthfulness of the Gospel narratives; but it led the English to invent the novel, which conveys its own kind of ‘truth’ — not truth qua historical facts or chronicle, but some deep insight into reality, constructed in historically more or less specific contexts. Therefore the way forward, Culpepper argues, in an age when many thoughtful people ‘cannot accept as historically plausible [the Gospel’s] characterization of Jesus as a miracle worker with full recollection of his pre-existence and knowledge of his life after death’…is not to restrict truth to historical truth and therefore the truth claims of the Gospel, but to recognize the peculiar nature of narrative truth. Culpepper is not saying that the Fourth Gospel’s narratives convey nothing of history; rather, he wants to preserve some sort of blend: ‘The future of the Gospel in the life of the church will depend on the church’s ability to relate both story and history to truth in such a way that neither has an exclusive claim to truth and one is not incompatible with the other…’ Yet not only does his [Culpepper’s] example of miracles in the life of Jesus fail to inspire confidence (Could the resurrection be thrown into the list of negotiable? If not, why not?), but he gives no criteria to guide us, as if the divisions were immaterial.”

– Carson, PNTC Gospel of John, 64

If you aren’t familiar with Peterson’s defense of the Bible, it is basically a defense using Culpepper’s method, the defense of the Bible, or the biblical stories, as “narratively” true, but, at best, historically a-veridical (or historically unimportant).

My goal here is not to put down Peterson, nor is it to pump up myself. I am no great intellectual, nor an academic. But I do know the difference when it comes to the fields Biblical Studies, Theology, and Philosophy between academics and popularizers. To be clear, I am also not knocking the function of popularizing. I am someone who tries to perform that very function. My main point is just to say that those of us who spend all our time in these areas recognized where Peterson was going to be weak if pressed.

Were Peterson to find himself in a room of trained analytic philosophers, even ones only at the Master’s degree level, he was going to get into trouble. And not only that, but were he to find himself in a room with some former Christians, he was, at least on this topic of Christian faith, going to be in hot water. Because no Christian actually believes about God what Peterson says about God.

And this is basically what happened on Jubilee.

The Problem of Propping Up Peterson

In 2012 the analytic philosopher Thomas Nagel published a book called Mind and Cosmos. While Nagel is in no way Christian, or even theistic, his critique of “Neo-Darwinian materialism” was roundly championed by many Christian theists. That in itself was not wrong. However, it exposed something deep in the (especially American and British) Christian psyche. That was a desperate need to find intelligent, non-theists who, in any way, agreed with some philosophical claim that supports, however marginally, traditional Christian belief. One commentator at the time rightly pointed out that Christians, especially those working in the sciences, felt so “beat-up” by secularists in the academy that any non-theist who deigns to entertain a philosophical proposition amenable to Christian theism is immediately championed as a herald of a new awakening (I am paraphrasing a bit).

The same could be said of Peterson. From the get-go, Christians not enamored with his popularity, regardless of how justly earned, were pointing out the dangers of propping up Peterson. His views of God, after all, are just wrong. While God is maximally valuable, God is not “a maximal value.” Zena, the interlocutor Peterson chose to return for further conversation, made an adroit move in challenging Peterson’s definition of god in this sense. For if everyone has a maximum value, and if that maximum value just is god, then everyone has “a” god. Therefore, no one is actually an atheist or, in principle, even capable of being one.

But this is obviously false. Clearly there are atheists, and they are atheists because they reject a particular God, namely, the only God that is actual: the God of the Bible, the Christian God! Of course, from their perspective, this is the “concept” of an immaterial, eternal, uncrated, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving Creator of the universe. But that is the God they were there to debate, and Peterson should have known that if he was going to be the “Christian” on stage.

As to Peterson’s view of the Bible as an interlocking system of universal symbols and common myths, and not a revelation of a metaphysically real, transcendent Creator, let alone a historical text, this is equally problematic. Peterson claims at one point that atheists accept Christian morality but reject Christianity’s “stories.” For Peterson, it is often unclear as to whether the stories of the Bible are equivalent to those of, say, Dostoyevsky. And that is a problem when it comes to grounding one’s ethics, since it assumes a form of nominalism, eliminating any metaphysical substrate that might make values objective or obligations real.

Again, myth is not a replacement for metaphysics, even if myth can be a good medium for articulating metaphysical truths. The Brothers Karamazov is not creating moral values and duties, it is expressing them. True, that for Peterson, there is some underlying thing, some “unity” that is being expressed through both the Bible and Dostoyevsky. However, this is where, to reference Peter Kreeft, we see the “blob god” of pantheism start to emerge from Peterson. And honestly, if Peterson does believe in a god, the god he believes in is a pantheistic one.

Yet, in part for good reasons and in part for less than good ones, Christians have continued to put Peterson forward as one of their own: as Christianity’s great champion. However, as was clearly exposed on Jubilee, Peterson is, by his own admission, not one of us. And, if we are honest, he doesn’t want to be. And that’s fine, in one sense. But when Peterson says repeatedly in public he doesn’t consider himself a Christian, or doesn’t know if he is, but then goes on to a popular YouTube channel as the lone “Christian” who is there to debate twenty atheists, it makes the whole thing not only awkward for professing Christians but difficult for Christian apologists, many who now feel they have to do damage control (or do they?).

The Popular and Professional Peterson

There are two issues I have tried to address given Jordan Peterson’s flop on Jubilee. One is his lack of personal commitment to and profession of Christian faith. The second is his lack of knowledge about key Christian beliefs. Both of these were exposed in the debate(s). As to the latter of these, it should be said that for online celebrities like Peterson, it is hard to be an expert in every field of inquiry. Peterson certainly tries to be and, to some degree, he can pull it off because he is quite smart. But at the end of the day we must all accept our limitations, otherwise we will get exposed. Peterson is a professional and clinical psychologist. He is not a theologian, a Bible scholar or a philosopher of religion. But these were really the areas of expertise that were needed on Jubilee. Why? Because these are the main fields of knowledge needed to defend Christianity. Perhaps you don’t need them to defend pagan Jungian pantheism, but to defend the Faith of the Apostles, they come in pretty handy.

To conclude, in my first ever post on Peterson, commenting on a convocation event he did at Liberty University in 2019, I said this:

Anthony Costello

March 31, 2019

Wow, just watched this interview with Peterson at Liberty University. This was bizarre, weird, chaotic, and inspiring all at the same time. Couple of quick points:

1) In over an hour long interview, Gary Habermas asked one stinking question! Why even have him up there?

2) Peterson, in my humble opinion, is like the Pelagius of our times. So, yes, I find him to be heretical in what he teaches, even if I think he has incredible qualities in many other areas.

3) I hope he does become a full-blown follower of Christ; he certainly is a prophetic voice in our times

4) I find nothing that he says new, however, it’s interesting that his books and lectures have garnered so much attention. It is more his personality, I think, than his actual intellectual output.

5) The incident with the student around the 20 minute mark seemed genuine. That was both weird and incredible.

6) I think the moderator did a great job respecting Peterson, yet being explicit about the truth of the Gospel and the need for Jordan to ultimate accept Jesus fully as Lord and Savior. Again, I hope he sees what seems to be right before his eyes (see point 2).

Six years later I would draw people’s attention to points 4 and 6. There is nothing that Peterson says that is new when he speaks about theological issues. The reason for that is simple: because theology was, for Peterson, a very new endeavor and a raw intellectual project. Again, that is obviously okay. But here was someone who was basically a novice in Christian theology, a new-comer to biblical studies and a beginner in philosophy of religion being propped up as an expert “Christian” voice.

Now, six years later, he still can’t bring himself to call himself a Christian, let alone articulate the most basic, and orthodox, theological claims, like the chief end of man being the glorification and enjoyment of God, forever. Of course to get there, you may need to just accept the Gospel–once and for all.