Navigating Belief, Skepticism, and the Afterlife | Alex O'Connor @CosmicSkeptic | EP 451

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down in-person with philosophical-oriented YouTuber and podcaster Alex O’Connor. They discuss the proper use of skepticism, the true meaning of belief and prayer, the mythological and historical nature of the Bible, the level-of-analysis problem, and the potential for the use of AI to examine epistemology.

Alex O'Connor is a philosophy-oriented YouTuber, podcaster, and public speaker with over 750,000 subscribers on YouTube. He graduated in 2021 from St. John's College, Oxford University, with a BA in philosophy and theology. In 2023, he launched the “Within Reason” podcast, which has featured guests including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Slavoj Žižek, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Rory Stewart, amongst others. He has debated issues of religion, ethics, and politics with figures including Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Douglas Murray, and Piers Morgan.
- Chapters -

(0:00) Coming up
(0:46) Intro
(2:47) Skepticism should be in the service of something
(5:35) Intellectual victory versus fruitful conversation
(9:31) Clarifying the term “belief” in it’s religious and mundane context
(13:54) God as an orientation toward the highest value and the regress issue
(15:50) Understanding God conceptually; is he “real” in the material sense as an agential being?
(18:50) The evolution of the physicality of God; Eliade on Nietzsche’s “death of God”
(20:20) “Profound religious account is bottomless;” the mythological and historical Jesus
(28:43) Where Dawkins and Peterson might just agree
(31:40) Can falsehoods help you survive?
(35:20) The impossibility of reducing the Biblical corpus to a reassuring banality
(45:25) God as the ultimate fictional character and how fiction and fact intertwine
(49:01) Possession, perception, and the level-of-analysis problem
(55:34) Elvis Presley’s guitar; hierarchical context is separate from the apprehension of the object
(58:18) The inverse correlation between the specificity of an answer and the importance of the question
(1:02:14) The physicality of the resurrection; the canonical versus the Gnostic tradition
(1:05:55) The Testimony of Truth; was Christ the serpent in the Garden?
(1:14:20) Computational epistemology: a new field of religious study?
(1:22:43) Can ideology be good? Proper interpretation and the cosmic order
(1:29:00) Jesus and the Quran; the pathology of mythologization
(1:35:24) “If your aim is upward then God is with you;” vicarious redemption and bearing your cross
(1:38:17) Dr. Peterson on Hell and the afterlife
(1:48:15) What really forms the basis of Christian thinking and the responsibility it demands