For a good portion of my intellectual journey, I have flirted with atheism. I have incredible respect for the arguments of Dawkins, Hitchins, and Harris. I love the work of Stephen Fry and Ricky Gervais. Atheism makes sense to me.
As much as I love and respect the many religious teachers I have tried to follow as well, they always required me to turn off a part of my brain, to set aside the questions I had, in order to learn from them. Until Jordan Peterson.
When Peterson had his debates with Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty, then later with Richard Dawkins, they spent far too much time talking past one another and refusing to agree on terms.
Because I have so much love and respect for both sides of this intransigent argument, I have been trying to reconcile them in my own head and I find myself coming back to Iain McGilchrist’s Master and his Emissary.
The human brain has two hemispheres. As Dawkins well knows, the human brain has been evolving for millennia to more accurately map the world we live in. If it evolved two hemispheres with divergent perspectives that synthesize the most accurate understanding of existence in existence, then the synthesis of those perspectives must be very close to the reality of the universe.
Peterson oversimplifies the right hemisphere as that which focuses on the unknown, exploration, chaos. The left hemisphere focuses on the known, the understood, order. The two most important categories in understanding the reality of the universe are What We Know and What We Don’t Know.
And, as McGilchrist goes to great lengths to prove, What We Don’t Know is the most important.
And that is precisely where the breakdown in communication between the likes of Peterson and Harris can be found.
Peterson believes that humans live in the right hemisphere and that we use the left as an amazing tool. There are infinite things in the universe that we don’t understand, while there are only a select few that we do. It is amazing that we understand what we understand, but we don’t need to understand something for it to be true.
What atheists believe implicitly, though likely not explicitly, is that the right hemisphere is a vestigial organ, that not only can we live in the left hemisphere, making decisions based only on what we know, but that operating any other way is wrong.
They believe that, if we study and learn well enough, we will know, we will understand, we will be able to articulate, everything important about existence, that lack of evidence is reason enough to abandon any belief, habit, or tradition.
But the truth is that, while you can kill cancer by killing the whole body, it is better to make your target as small and specific as possible. We don’t know scientifically everything about religion that is true and everything that is not true, but from a strictly evolutionary perspective, it is more important to make the right choice than it is to know why it is the right choice.
