Evaluating Jordan Peterson's Strangest Religious Argument

If God didn't exist, could you still believe in him? Jordan Peterson is famously difficult to make heads or tails of. His mixture of storytelling, philosophy, psychology, and literature analysis all rolled into one makes it hard to decide just how literal he's being in some of his arguments.

Is that a tongue-in-cheek remark, or is it a serious philosophical point? And perhaps no area of his thinking has caused more confusion than his beliefs about God. Peterson sometimes comes across as an atheist, sometimes a Catholic, and sometimes a mystic, making it difficult to see what his position on the divine actually amounts to.

But there is a particular class of arguments that he uses to support a belief in God that I find endlessly fascinating because it crosses over with a rich tradition of philosophy that threatens to turn the entire field on its head. And I cannot wait to share this with you today. Get ready to learn why you might want to believe in God even if he doesn't exist.

how your actions are fundamentally divine and so much more. First, remember that this is not a video about Jordan Peterson as a person, nor a comprehensive guide to what he believes. It is rather an analysis of a series of arguments that he puts forward.

To put my cards on the table, I am agnostic leaning towards atheists. So, these arguments are of particular interest to me. But with that out of the way, let's get started.

One, Peterson's wager. In the mid-7th century, Bla1 Pascal stood on the precipice of the Enlightenment. The French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist had spent his entire life in service to reason.

Then in 1654, he had a profound religious experience that shifted his entire worldview. He immediately set about turning his genius to theology and constructed a now famous thought experiment that is emblematic of the kind of argument Peterson makes in many of his lectures. Pascal recognized that reason and evidence was insufficient to fully prove the existence of God.

Yet it struck him that there was still one excellent reason to become a Christian. That it is much better to believe and have made a mistake than to disbelieve only for God to end up existing. In the first case, you die and simply cease to be.

No harm, no foul, to completely misquote Epicurus. You will have lived a good Christian life and it turns out you were wrong. But you haven't lost very much here.

You just die like everyone else. But if you did not believe in God and it turns out that God actually exists, then you are well and truly stuffed. You'll be sent off to hell for an eternity of deeply unpleasant experiences.

So Pascal says if it's a toss up between the two, you should probably throw your hat in God's camp. And we could go one step further and say that since the stakes are so monumentally high with infinite suffering and infinite pleasure being on the table, even if there is only the minutest possible chance that God existed, it would make rational sense to choose to believe in him. So for Pascal, we should believe in God, not just for the evidence, but because it is good for us.

Now, this thought experiment has been criticized and played with and spawned a whole cottage industry in decision theory, but I largely want to examine its structure here. It is not an argument that God exists, but rather an argument that you should believe in him. That is, it's not an empirical or logical argument, but instead a pragmatic one.

We can boil Pascal's argument down into the simple structure, you are better off believing in God, so you should believe in him. I'm going to refer to this as the volunteerist argument after volunteerism, which is the philosophy that says you can choose your own beliefs consciously to a certain extent. Peterson has his own version of this type of argument at the individual level.

And it's normally couched in terms like the phenomenology of religious experience. Here's an example of what I mean. And so the idea that whatever the people who conjured up the Old Testament creation account were doing was something akin to scientific theorizing is a mistake that would only be made by people who don't know how to distinguish between different kinds of truth.

One of the issues that that I have is that let's say the celebrity atheist types, they don't seem to me to be contending with the real issues. Like there are some serious heavy hitters in the religious phenomenology domain. But if you give people magic mushrooms, psilocybin, and they have a mystical experience, they have about an 85% chance of smoking sessation with one treatment.

Yeah, but that's kind of like evidence. You know, I'm going to summarize his overall point here because it stretches over quite a large period of time. But do go watch the original video for yourself to check that I'm not accidentally misrepresenting him.

Peterson references a number of different aspects of religious belief that are supposedly lifeenhancing. He talks about how mystical experiences can help people beat addiction or influence their life in a more open or positive direction. Funnily enough, Bla1 Pascal is a good example of this.

Elsewhere, Peterson has talked about the benefit of having a metaphysically grounded sense of order in your life and that God can provide this. So, religious belief can protect you from a sense of meaninglessness. It can make your inevitable suffering seem worthwhile and it can prevent his dreaded forces of chaos from closing in.

And I am willing to grant that religious belief probably does have positive effects for the believers in a lot of cases. A great many theists testify to their faith granting them strength in hard times and there is statistical evidence that religious people are on average happier. There is certainly philosophical precedent for this as well.

Kagard famously argued for faith in God as a route out of existential despair. Peterson's argument here is of a similar form to Pascals, but with the stakes considerably lower. He explicitly concedes that there is no evidence confirming beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of God.

But then he argues we have good pragmatic reasons to have faith regardless. Just like Pascal, he says you're better off believing in God, so you should believe in him. This treats belief as something you can actively choose and given that holds that it is rational to choose the beliefs that are going to work best for you in the long term.

It's worth noting this is really separate to any argument that affirms God's actual metaphysical existence. A similar view was put forward by William James, the father of modern psychology, who argued that we might adopt a belief in God because it would make us more mentally healthy. Again, this is a volunteerist argument.

This in turn provoked a notorious and scathing critique by Bertram Russell who essentially said that what is true and what is useful are not the same thing and that truth should be the principle that guides our belief, not practicality. Thus, there are inconvenience truths, appalling truths, and painful truths. To quote Russell, "If I say Hitler exists, I do not mean the effects of believing that Hitler exists are good.

" And to the genuine believer, the same is true of God. In other words, according to Russell, a pragmatic argument like the one Peterson puts forward is not really about belief as we traditionally conceive of it. Normally, belief has what is called a direction of fit, where we examine the world, see what is out there, and mold our beliefs around whatever we find.

But Peterson's argument along with James' and Pascal's distorts and reverses this direction. It asks that we first choose to believe something and then let it guide our actions in the world. And here we see the emergence of a key theme in Petersonen's arguments about God.

A particular definition of belief. For Peterson, belief seems first and foremost to be something that guides actions. So if I believe that I can do a somersault, that entails certain behaviors.

for instance that I would not at all hesitate to display the somersault if someone asked. I want you to put a pin in this definition of belief as we're going to come back to it later. In a lot of ways, it's actually very very strong.

The trouble is that even if this is an accurate description of what belief is, it still doesn't follow that the regulations for belief should be what is useful as opposed to what is true. We can still say, "All right, your belief that you can do a somersault implies that you also believe that you can demonstrate it. " But at the same time, if you repeatedly try and fail to do a somersault, your belief ought to be revised in line with this new evidence.

On the other hand, Peterson can point to other situations where we think it is rational to believe something, even if it might not be true. For instance, if I have to jump from one ledge to another ledge over a deep chasm, many people would say it is rational for me to believe I can make that jump since this belief will actually increase the chances that I can get across the gap because I'll put my full effort into leaping across the chasm as opposed to a half-hearted or even 90%hearted attempt. So, for Peterson's arguments to be plausible here, you have to hold two further assumptions.

The first is that you can choose your beliefs. And the second is that your choice of beliefs can be rationally guided by factors other than truth. If so, then Peterson's argument is at the very least plausible.

But without these premises, it seems like a non-starter. If you think that belief should only be guided by truth, then these pragmatic arguments are just besides the point. And if you don't think you can choose your beliefs, then the whole debate is idle.

Of course, both of these premises would require substantial argumentation. But if I went into it here, then this video would be several hours long. Luckily, Peterson has another pragmatic argument for believing in God.

This time with a societal twist. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then consider subscribing to either my email list or my Patreon. The links are in the description.

Two, the demons of DSTVski. DSTVski once wrote that he would rather be with Christ than correct. And while at first this seems like a ridiculous thing to say, it makes more sense when you consider what he thought would happen if mankind lost its faith.

In the aptly titled Demons, spoilers ahead by the way. Dossi explores how a group of revolutionaries use their atheism as an excuse to bring a town to ruins under the pretense of humanistic socialism, but really for the vague self-interest of the leader of the rebellion. Meanwhile, another character uses his disbelief to commit increasingly selfish actions, culminating in his confession of a crime so unspeakable that I will not repeat it here.

Dossivvki reflects a worry that many philosophers since the beginning of the 19th century have echoed that with the decline of religion in society, there will come chaos, social unrest, and eventually millions may die. Some people have even tried to link the atrocities of the 20th century back to the decline of religious belief with varying degrees of plausibility. Considering the influence dski has had on Petersonen, we shouldn't be surprised that he develops his own version of this classic argument.

The clearest example of Petersonen giving this argument I can find is from a clip called the problem with atheism and I'll play a few sections from it now. Dosioski said straightforwardly if there's no God. So if there's no higher value, let's say if there's no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want.

Where where's the pathway from rationality to to an egalitarian virtue? Why the hell not every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost? It's a perfectly coherent philosophy.

To steel man Peterson's argument here, I think he's essentially saying that the moral underpinnings of much of western society or ex-Christian society, you might say, is shaped by the influence of Christian moral values and that without these values, we might gradually allow other moral systems to take over which might be more self-interested or self-destructive or even psychopathic. There are sort of undertones of CS Lewis here. Peterson essentially makes the point that at the societal level, we are better off with religion than without it.

This is conceptually distinct from the first argument we looked at and has a very different conclusion. Even if you think that on a personal level it would be quite advantageous to assue religious belief. Peterson thinks that on a societal level this will be a disaster at least when it comes to Christianity.

And again we do see philosophical precedent for this. It's quite similar to what Arthur Schopenhau saw as the function of religion. He said it could give people an interpretation of their lives and provide them with allegorories to guide their behavior.

Since explicit allegorories do not have the same persuasive effects that holding something to be literally true does, anyone with atheistic leanings should pretend for the good of all that the Bible is literally true, as this is the safest path forward. I will refer to this as the social argument for belief in God. Again, we see this has a very different scope to the first argument.

It is essentially moral in nature and doesn't so much concern what we believe as individuals, but rather what we encourage other people to believe. In propositional form, you could render it roughly as follows. One, we have a duty to promote the greatest amount of well-being in our societies.

Two, promoting a belief in a metaphysical ordering of values grounded in a god will promote well-being in our societies. Conclusion, we have a duty to promote a belief in a metaphysical ordering of values grounded in a god. So, this is not so much an argument from personal welfare, but instead a sort of sociological point.

Religion is good for a society, so we ought to maintain it. It treats the promotion of a belief in God as an action that is subject to moral judgment like any other and argues that it is a good thing to do. There are obviously a number of potential responses to this.

The first is that it is unclear how we would verify if religion was good or bad for a society. The religiosity of a group of people is very difficult to separate and test in isolation as a causal factor. So, it's hard to see exactly how we would measure the effects of declining belief in God separate from other confounding variables.

I certainly think that Peterson's view here is plausible, but I could also imagine someone else turning around and saying, "Isn't this a fantastic opportunity to build a new moral system, one where universal human value is not just an after effect of a belief in God, but an irrefutable axiom? " Without testing, it is difficult to conclude which of these would come to pass. Though people have used anecdotal experience, philosophical arguments, and historical examples to point in either direction.

However, perhaps unsurprisingly for a recovering logic student, I want to look at the reasoning structure at play. Here we again see justifications for a belief that are separate from the truth of a proposition, but are instead to do with that proposition's effects, this time at a societal level. This brings up an interesting tension at the heart of our moral intuitions, the concept of the noble lie.

Let's abstract away from the example of God at the moment and instead choose an idea we know is false. say that pigs can fly. Imagine there exists a society that for whatever reason if you promulgate the belief in flying pigs, this will help it become calmer, more peaceful, and more prosperous.

On the other hand, you know that if they learn the truth that pigs cannot fly, then their society will sharply decline. It might not fall completely into chaos, but it will be less cohesive, kind, and caring than it otherwise would have been. Do you promote the noble lie?

I love this problem because it tugs at two competing moral impulses. The impulse to be honest and the impulse to do what is best for others. This is a bit of a tangent, but it's notable that whenever Professor Peterson is pressed on the question of whether God actually exists, in a literal sense, as real as this bookshelf is, he almost always seems to switch the topic to a similar but ultimately distinct question, whether it is good to believe in God.

Peterson is often charged with being unclear in his speech about religion, even more so than in other areas. And I sometimes wonder whether this is because he feels this tension inside. On the one hand, many of his statements paint him as an atheist in the traditional sense.

That is, he does not believe in the existence of a transcendent metaphysical god. That the statement the Christian god exists is strictly false in our least restricted domain of quantification. I've linked a video by Alex Okconor where he gives further arguments for Peterson's underlying atheism.

But on the other hand, Peterson clearly believes that religion and specifically Christianity is good for the societies he cares so much about. And he has also experienced similar thoughts to Schopenhau that it is not enough for a belief in God to be allegorical. There must also be a metaphysical component for it to have the desired effect.

I wonder whether he's caught between a rock and a hard place here. From other parts of his writing and lectures, he seems to put a high premium on honesty, but he also clearly thinks that the widespread adoption of religious beliefs is a good thing. and as a result he wants to promote it.

If this is true, I don't envy him the dilemma. And of course, this is all somewhat baseless speculation on my part. But I do think it is worth pondering for when we are confronted with the idea of noble lies in our own life.

But now I want to turn to what I think is Jordan Peterson's most interesting argument for the belief in God by far. And it is that for most atheists, they are not actually atheists at all, but believe in God without even knowing it. Three, you already believe in God.

Imagine that I told you that it's going to rain today. At first, you have no reason to think that I'm being dishonest, so you at the very least believe that I believe that. Then you notice that I haven't packed an umbrella or a raincoat.

Fair enough. You think he's just a bit dim or wants to get wet. However, soon after that, you realize that I'm putting on my sun hat and taking out my sunglasses.

Moreover, I have planned for us to spend the day at the beach, and I insist that you don't need to wear anything other than a t-shirt and some shorts, all while insisting that I am 100% confident that it will rain today. If I behaved that way in front of most people, I will probably get one of two reactions. They would either think that I had become confused or that I did not really believe that it was going to rain today and that I'm being dishonest for whatever reason.

Or, if I'm not being dishonest, that I am in some sense mistaken about what I believe. This is essentially how Petersonen views atheists. We may say we don't believe in God, but we don't act like we don't believe in God.

The neatest example of Peterson giving this argument I can find is in this clip, and I'll play a section from it now. Do you believe and therefore act out the proposition that slavery and tyranny is wrong? And if the answer to that is yes, well, congratulations to you because at least in principle, you're being guided by the spirit that pulls people out of slavery and that opposes tyranny.

And we might say, well, that's good in some transcendent sense. And then we might say that God is the sum total of all things that are good in some transcendent sense. And that's not a matter of mere belief in a factual proposition.

It's more a matter of what are you willing to stake your life on. He does go on to say a bit more about this, but I'm going to try and make it shorter. As far as I can see, Peterson here is arguing something like if you act as if slavery and tyranny are wrong, then you are acting in accordance with a transcendent value system.

And the topmost point or sum of that value system is what you call God. This argument might look simple, but there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes. I'm going to refer to this as the involuntarist argument.

It differs from the voluntist argument because it does not advise that we believe in God, but says our behavior already demonstrates a belief in God, whether we want it to or not. First and foremost, you have an assumed definition of belief that I actually think is quite plausible. Here, belief is at least partly defined by what you act in accordance with or would act in accordance with given a situation.

So just like my story about rain at the beginning, if I don't demonstrate any behavior in line with my stated belief that it's raining, then it is natural to question whether my belief is sincere. A very sophisticated version of this idea can be found in the early pragmatist thinker Charles Pierce, who held that any analysis of belief that did not take into account its utility for predicting action is woefully incomplete. This is a part of Petersonen's argument I am perfectly willing to accept as even if you think there is more to belief than this, I still think this is a necessary component of the recipe.

However, then we face the question of what beliefs we can infer from a given course of action. The trouble is that there's an asymmetry here. Any number of beliefs can be signaled by a single behavior.

So, if you watch me sit down on the sofa and start reading, what can you infer about my beliefs from that? Well, you could reasonably say I believe that I can read. You might also say that I believe the book is worth reading.

However, it could instead be a book that I have been forced to read or I've picked up the wrong book by mistake or that I am merely pretending to be able to read so that people think that I'm smarter than I actually am. The point is that while a belief might imply certain actions, many different beliefs can compel us to perform the same set of actions. So, it's difficult to retroactively infer from behavior to beliefs in the way that Peterson wants us to.

This especially goes for more abstract or religious beliefs because there's no clear agreement over what behaviors they actually entail. At some points, a belief in the Christian God might signal support for retaking the Holy Land or for the real presence of the host. But now, by itself, it's not a reliable signal for either of those things.

Depending on who you ask, believing in God might entail a belief in hell or not. It might involve giving away all your possessions or holding on to them or acrewing more in the case of the infamous prosperity doctrine. This is actually a point that Peterson admits to in some of his other lectures, we encounter a similar problem with Peterson's idea of a transcendent set of values being behind each of our actions.

While I think it is plausible that when someone acts, they are assuming a set of values for their action, even if only implicitly. I am unclear on why this would necessarily be transcendent. I could imagine a scenario where someone acts under a certain hierarchy of values but does not think they are transcendent.

Perhaps they think they are material or intersubjective. When I was younger, I used to obey the commands of my father, but I don't think that entailed. I thought his instructions were imbued with transcendent value.

It's just that I respected him as an individual authority. Of course, Peterson does have a response to this. Elsewhere, I've heard him argue that if we keep questioning why we are performing a certain action, we will eventually trace it back to something transcendent, even if it's only implicitly transcendent.

Underlying this seems to be an assumption that if a belief in values is motivating, then that belief is in a sense a belief about the transcendent. That without this transcendent quality, it just wouldn't be motivational. However, then it seems we're caught in a circle.

Why is a belief transcendent? Because it's motivating. Why is it motivating?

Because it's transcendent. I'm not suggesting that this is insoluble. It just seems to be an active problem.

If Peterson wants to define transcendent as that which motivates someone to action, then I think that's perfectly fine. But it does bring the transcendent down to earth a bit more. Do I think there's transcendent value behind my decision to eat chocolate or not?

Or my decision to sit on the sofa rather than the chair. It eliminates the distinction that we often have between those decisions which explicitly invoke values like moral decisions and mere preferences that we often hold to be motivated by something slightly less grand like mere taste. It makes the trolley problem and the question of whether to put ketchup or brown sauce on your bacon roll to be fundamentally the same type of question.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It's just counterintuitive. It makes the transcendent mundane as much as it makes the mundane transcendent.

There's also some lack of clarity on what transcendent means here. Sometimes Peterson imbuss it with this divine metaphysical quality. But other times it seems to mean something like that which you cannot justify on the basis of any other principle almost like a victinian hinge statement.

And that's a much less controversial claim but it also doesn't seem as directly related to the idea of God. Then there is Peterson's final step where he says that if you have transcendent values, you must also have something at the top of that transcendent value tree or alternatively something that is the sum of all those good things. And you call that thing God.

Aesthetically, I kind of like this argument. It's a quinus with a pragmatic streak. But I also have a couple of questions about the reasoning steps here.

The first is that I can imagine a transcendent structure that doesn't have a topmost point or that has no total sum. In fact, we're all familiar with structures like this. The integers are a really good example.

There is no greatest number nor smallest number provided we include the negatives. Yet we have no problem making sense of bigger and smaller in this context. The second is that if the definition of God is to be the topmost part or sum of this value structure, then that is a much more minimal conception of God than we normally want.

When Aquinus uses this same sort of reasoning in Simma Theologica, it's part of a whole patchwork of different arguments about God's existence and nature which together converge on a picture that looks something quite like the Christian God. However, if you use this argument in isolation, it actually becomes quite limited. Even if it establishes that someone believes in God, it's a very different sort of God from what we normally talk about.

For one thing, this argument doesn't imply that God has any sort of agential characteristics. However, despite the issues I have with Peterson's arguments here, I am in some ways a real fan of the type of reasoning he's using. And now I want to explain why.

Four, a pragmatic philosophy. William James once said that if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should have identical consequences, then those two definitions would really be identical. And within this simple statement, we have a view of philosophy radically different from how many people conceive of it.

According to the pragmatist thinkers we've looked at today, like James and Pierce, philosophers should be analyzing far more concepts in terms of their practical and observational consequences rather than just their logical structure or metaphysical dimensions. It's not that we need to get rid of those. It's just that focusing only on those leaves the job half done.

For instance, we cannot simply proclaim that all men are mortal and move on with our day or even limit our analysis to logical consequences like Socrates is mortal. We have the further question of what this practically implies for the world and our lives. It means accepting that our time is finite and limited and asking what this entails for how we want to spend it.

Philosophy here is not just acrruing truths but asking what the behavioral and practical consequences of those truths should be. On the other hand, this pragmatic instinct can let us know when a debate might have less to it than originally thought. For instance, some have argued that the debate over the existence of free will is behaviorally idle, at least at the individual level.

If I believe that all my actions are determined or that all my actions are fundamentally free, this won't actually have a meaningful effect on how I live my life. Because unlike fatalism, determinism doesn't imply that you are not a causally effective agent, just that all the choices you will make are already determined. I personally think there's probably a bit more to the debate than this, especially once you move from the individual level to the societal level.

But I've certainly seen people put this forward as an argument. For a counterpoint, you might check out Robert Sapowski's new book, and I've probably butchered his name. And despite my problems with Peterson's arguments, I really like that he has taken this angle into contemporary debate about God, asking what the practical consequences of a belief in God should be.

Although his question, "What do you mean by belief? " has become a bit of a meme, it is genuinely worth asking because our working definition of belief is going to have a real tangible impact in how we interact with the world. If we think a necessary component to belief is predicting someone's behavior, then if someone tells us that they believe in something, we're going to take that very differently to someone that thinks that it's an internal affirmation of a proposition and nothing more.

The arguments Peterson puts forward also highlights important further philosophical questions in an accessible way. For instance, is it ever justified to believe in something not because you think it's true, but because you fear the consequences of not believing it? Is there such a thing as a freely chosen belief?

Is it okay to tell a noble lie for the benefit of society? Can I believe in something without even realizing it, provided I act as if it is true? There's a throwaway line Peterson uses during a debate between himself and Matt Dillah Hunty that I want to briefly hone in on.

It's not that easy to distinguish between what's useful and what's real. This reminds me of an incredibly interesting set of arguments put forward by Australian philosopher Hugh Price. In various essays and books, Price calls for a shift in how philosophers view concepts like belief, truth, and utility.

He does not have an issue with the idea that truth is objective or real. But he wants us to come up with a naturalistic theory about where this concept came from, similar to what nature wanted to do with the concepts of good and evil. After all, a lot of people today are naturalists and as a result think humans are a biological organism in the world and nothing more than this, subject to societal and evolutionary factors.

So we must give a causal account of the concept of truth in these naturalistic terms as well without appeals to abstract propositions or mysterious metaphysical correspondence relations. And Price's argument is that the cause of our concept of truth probably stems from some form of abstracted utility. That is knowing what is true is almost always useful and that explains our concept of truth and its cultural importance across as far as I know every society to have ever existed.

Like I said, Price is not saying that truth is relative or anything like that, but rather that truth needs explaining at the naturalistic level as well as the abstract logical one. To quote one of his biggest inspirations, Charles Pierce, something tangible and practical must be at the root of every real distinction of thought. But once we are playing with this idea of truth explained by abstract utility, Peterson's original statement starts to make a bit more sense.

It is not that what is real or true is what is useful at a first order level. If it were useful for me to believe that I would become a billionaire tomorrow, it still wouldn't make it true. But if utility is part of the causal story that underlines our concepts of truth and belief, then we can start to draw finer distinctions between how these words are used in everyday life.

For instance, one of my friends has a PhD in fluid mechanics. And in all his work, he assumes that fluids are continuous and infinitely divisible. That is what he practically believes while he is working or else all of his models would collapse and the mathematics that keeps planes in the air would cease to function.

However, we know that actual physical fluids are not infinitely divisible because of atomic theory. Nonetheless, in the moment, my friend is believing it to be true, at least in his actions. This suggests to me that far from being a simple concept, belief is much more multi-layered than we initially gave it credit for, and that it deserves a more pragmatic philosophical treatment.

It also points to a realm of things that we treat as true situationally, all while knowing they are false. How should these function in our account of belief or our account of justification? Obviously, expanding on these points or answering these questions would take a much longer video and possibly several books, but I've left some recommended reading in the description for anyone who's interested.

Remember, none of this means that ultimate truth is relative in any way or that we need to give up objectivity. It simply raises a series of philosophical questions to explore not just what these concepts are, but what they do and how their usage might differ between situations. how these words function in our language and the way they help us explore and interact with the world.

The way my mathematician friend believes that fluids are continuous is true when he's working is clearly very different to the way he believes it is false in some ultimate sense. Questions like these open up a whole new dimension to philosophy, one that is intimately connected with action and utility to the human race. And I don't know about you, but I think that's rather exciting.

And if you want to further explore the concept of God from a pragmatic angle, then click on this video to explore what a religious poem can tell us about our own minds.