God in the Fog

Demystifying the Peterson–Atheist Debate

It’s not every day you get to see your friend challenge one of the most polarizing public intellectuals of our time, let alone on camera in a circle of challengers. So when I heard that my friend Cade had taken part in Jubilee’s latest video, Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists, I couldn’t not tune in. I listened to his segment first, then went back and watched the rest of the debate.

It was, in a word … messy.

First, I have to say that Jubilee’s “Surrounded” format doesn’t exactly lend itself to sustained argument. With too little time and too many voices, the discussion rarely rises to the level of agreement, or even to clear disagreement on mutually agreed-upon terms. Instead, it fragments. It falls apart at the level of basic definitions. Conversations build toward frustrating, sensational moments of conflict with plenty of heat, but little meat.

And yet, buried beneath the theatrics and the semantic tug-of-war, there were real questions struggling to surface in this debate, especially around how we define God, belief, religion, and worship. In this post, therefore, I want to respond to what I see as the central questions recurring throughout Peterson’s conversations with the atheists. I’ll take up each of these four, highly multivalent terms and try to clarify the differences in how Peterson and his atheist interlocutors used them. I’ll attempt to articulate the substance of what I believe Peterson was suggesting before offering my own critiques, where appropriate.

My aim isn’t to adjudicate this debate post hoc or to defend everything Peterson said. Rather, I’m interested in the fundamental questions this debate largely failed to answer. First of all: What are we really talking about when we talk about God?

God: Metaphysical Substrate or Logical Postulate?

Peterson opened the debate with a bold and provocative claim: “Atheists reject God, but they don’t understand what they’re rejecting.” To many of his interlocutors, this claim came off as patronizing, especially as he followed it up with a tangle of metaphors, analogies, and allusions that seemed designed, not to clarify who God really is, but to increase confusion and avoid being nailed down to any particular definition. One atheist, lost in the thicket of Peterson’s argumentation, accused him of “retreating into a semantic fog.”

To be clear, I think their frustration was warranted. Peterson spoke of God in layered, shifting terms: the voice of conscience, the moral axis of action, the structure of being itself. He referenced Old Testament theophanies, Carl Jung, Cardinal Newman, and the Logos of John’s Gospel, all without ever staking a definitive metaphysical truth claim of his own. Even when backed into a corner and asked directly about his own beliefs, Peterson reframed the question rather than answering it plainly.

Some have called his evasiveness disingenuous or accused him of operating in bad faith. However, I think Peterson’s reluctance to define God in terms of clear, creedal propositions is a result of philosophical caution. Peterson, after all, is not a Christian in any doctrinal (or as he might say, “sectarian”) sense.¹ The best label I have been able to find for his theological posture is the one proposed by Nathan Ormond, who calls him a “proto-pragmatist.”

In classical pragmatism, truth isn’t primarily about correspondence to reality, but about what works—what leads to coherence, flourishing, transformation. Peterson, similarly, operates within a kind of pragmatic or functionalist view of truth, belief, and religion. He begins, not by evaluating the truth of creedal claims, but with the observable fact that human beings live as if something matters absolutely, and then attempts to work backward from that observation toward the source of that meaning.

As far as I can tell, Peterson’s larger project is a kind of postmodern approach to natural theology, which attempts to argue for the existence of God, not from divine revelation, but from logical necessity. Specifically, he’s trying to reconstruct the necessity of the divine from psychological, existential, and ethical first principles.

Thus, Peterson consistently frames God, not as a supernatural being, but as a functional necessity of human life. Peterson’s “God” is the necessary condition for the possibility of meaningful and ordered human activity. This is what I take him to mean when he speaks of God, variously, as the voice of conscience, the unity upon which moral claims are based, or the highest (or deepest) value in our hierarchy of meaning.

Whether this “God” exists in any metaphysical sense is, for Peterson, a secondary concern. It may in fact be an absurd question—not merely unanswerable, but incoherent. “God” functions in Peterson’s system much like the idea of the “first cause” or “unmoved mover” in Aquinas’ metaphysics, as a necessary postulate of reason. Just as Aquinas reasons from motion to the unmoved mover, Peterson reasons from the structure of moral experience to the postulate of God.

I found one moment early in the debate particularly revealing. Peterson references Exodus 33, where Moses is told by God that he cannot see God’s face, but only His back as He passes by. This, Peterson suggests, is a metaphor for the divine as fundamentally beyond human comprehension. You can’t see God head-on; you can only see Him in retrospect, in His effects. It’s a powerful image, rooted not only in Scripture but in the apophatic and mystical tradition. (Drawing from this same tradition, Aquinas likewise insisted that we can speak of God only analogically, and that whatever we can truly say about Him is always more unlike than like the divine reality it describes.)

If we take Peterson’s reference to Exodus 33 seriously, and if we understand his overall project, as I do, as a kind of proto-pragmatist approach to natural theology in a postmodern world, then we can only approach an adequate definition of Peterson’s God, not by trying to pin Him down with creedal propositions, but rather by the via negativa—eliminating conceptions of God that are too small or narrow.

Thus, Peterson’s God is not:

• The “old man in the sky” of deconverted evangelicals or New Atheist straw men.

• The watchmaker deity of Deism.

• The tribal war-god of literalist readings of Scripture.

• The psychological projection of Feuerbach or Freud.

• The moralistic therapeutic “deity” of American civic religion.

• Nor is He, in Peterson’s view, reducible to a mere metaphor.

What is He, then?

Here is my attempt at a definition. For Peterson, God is the symbolic, moral, and existential axis of human life, the transcendent source of value that orients our conscience, anchors meaning, and underwrites our capacity for purposeful action. He is less a who than a what. “God” is the name we give to that which must be assumed for life to be lived as if it matters.

This God cannot be seen face to face. His existence cannot be proven with metaphysical certainty—but then again, those things are more or less irrelevant to Peterson’s project. What matters is action. Thus, Peterson calls God “the presupposition of your attention and your action.” Whatever we do in life, God is the context, the horizon, the unity or center of our experience that makes meaningful human action possible at all.

Now, we must pause and consider the objection of the atheists. Is all this a retreat into vagueness, so much rhetorical hand-waving, or a broadening of the definition of God beyond all recognition? Peterson’s God is certainly not the God most people think of when they pray, worship, or read Scripture. We do not profess a belief in the “symbolic, moral, and existential axis of human life” when we recite the Nicene Creed. The divine attributes mentioned by his debate partners are more recognizable elements of a traditional Christian definition of God: the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, all-perfect One in Three and Three in One.

While I find Peterson’s definition of God deeply inadequate from the perspective of my own Catholic faith, I find it satisfying from within the perspective of his project of postmodern natural theology. Having bracketed off divine revelation and metaphysical truth claims, Peterson still makes a compelling argument for the necessity of God as the logically necessary ground of meaning and moral action.

Furthermore, I find Peterson’s core claim persuasive, even though I think it was unnecessarily provocative. I do believe those who reject God are, in fact, rejecting a distorted or narrow image of God—precisely because I believe, with St. Thomas, that our human notions of God are always more unlike than like the divine reality. The via negativa in the Christian mystical tradition is meant to strip us precisely of our too narrow, reductive or distorted images of the divine, in order to open us up to the reality that is always greater than we can grasp.

It may be that some who reject the face of God as it was shown to them—a caricature, a sketch of the real thing—will someday recognize His back as He passes by. The move from inadequate, fundamentalist conceptions of God to atheism may, ironically, be a step for some along the via negativa toward a truer, deeper faith.

Which brings us rather neatly to the next core question of this debate: What is the nature of belief?

Belief: Existential Orientation or Propositional Affirmation?

In the debate, one of the sharpest disconnects between Peterson and his atheist interlocutors was the concept of belief. Several asked, with increasing exasperation, “But do you believe in God?”—meaning, of course, “Do you affirm that God exists?”

It’s a straightforward question, but one that Peterson consistently sidestepped. To the atheists, this looked like slippery evasion. But for Peterson, I think they were asking the wrong question altogether.

In Peterson’s system, belief is not primarily a matter of intellectual assent to metaphysical propositions. It’s not about checking the right boxes on a theological quiz. Rather, belief is enacted. It’s lived. “If you believe something, you stake your life on it,” he told one of his debate partners. “You live for it, and you die for it.”

In other words, Peterson’s notion of belief is existential rather than propositional. It manifests in behavior, priorities, sacrifices. It’s revealed in where your attention goes, what you’re willing to suffer for, and what you orient your life around. One might profess something to be true and yet not believe it in any meaningful sense, he argues. On the other hand, an atheist who lives and dies for love of neighbor might believe in the core claims of the Gospel more authentically than a Christian who affirms all the right doctrinal propositions, but refuses the call to “take up your cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24).

I find considerable resonance between Peterson’s framing of belief here and elements of our Catholic tradition. Pope Benedict XVI, for example, reminded the Church in his first encyclical that faith is not so much about intellectual assent to a set of propositions as a transformative encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.² The Catechism calls it the “personal adherence of man to God,” involving the whole person—mind, will, heart, and body (CCC 150).³

What frustrates Peterson’s critics, however, is that he refuses to clarify whether this enacted “belief” in God actually corresponds to any specific doctrinal truth claims. And while I recognize the limits of what Peterson can affirm within the intellectual boundaries he has set for his project, I also admired one of the atheists, Zena, who pointed out that religious belief necessarily involves, not only behavior, but also intellectual assent to specific historical and theological claims. The Creed is full of them: God became man, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered, died, and was buried, and rose again from the dead on the third day.

Of course, Peterson would likely reply that such claims lie beyond the limits of human knowability. He does not seem especially interested in whether people believe these claims or reject them. What matters is whether they live as if they were true. You may not say you believe in God, but do you live like someone who does? Do you live as if there is something higher than yourself, something that calls you to live with courage, integrity, and sacrifice? Do you orient your life toward truth, order, and moral responsibility? If so, then perhaps you believe more than you think. And if not—if your life is oriented toward comfort, chaos, or nihilism—then perhaps something essential of your humanity has been lost.

Personally, I think Peterson’s concept of belief runs the risk of severing belief from its necessary doctrinal and historical dimensions. If belief is only what we live out, with no necessary connection to truth claims about God, Christ, or salvation, then it becomes difficult to distinguish from a kind of moral earnestness or “do-good-ism.” On the other hand, I appreciate his emphasis on the existential and embodied dimension of belief, shifting the focus from intellectual assent to a life of integrity, courage, and sacrifice.

This, I think, is a moment where the classic “both/and” of Catholic theology shines. Belief is both my assent to a set of necessary historical and theological claims, and the existential orientation of my life and behavior toward the good as a result of those claims. If all I have is intellectual assent, my stated belief is hypocritical. However, if all I have is action, I think something essential to the nature of belief is also lacking.

Religion: Myth, Metaphor, or Meaning?

If Peterson’s God is the “axis of moral action” and his notion of belief is “existential orientation toward the good,” then we should not be surprised that his definition of religion likewise defies traditional conceptions.

For Peterson, religion is not primarily about doctrine, dogma, or institutional belonging. Rather, it is about our orientation toward meaning. He sees religion as the symbolic structure by which we understand and act in the world. A religious worldview is simply one in which your life is ordered by something greater than yourself: a transcendent pattern that makes sense of suffering and death, and calls you to live with courage, responsibility, and love.

The advantage of such a broad definition of religion is that it unearths the religious impulse in all of us, even if we deny that it is there. “Everyone worships something,” as David Foster Wallace famously observed.⁴ To live without reference to the sacred, Peterson suggests, is simply not possible. We humans are meaning-making creatures. Our lives are structured by mythic patterns, whether we recognize them or not. The only question is whether the God we worship is worthy of us.

This, however, is precisely what troubled many of Peterson’s interlocutors. If “religion” can refer to anything from devotion to Christ to commitment to a cause or a code or even love for one’s spouse, then what does the term even mean? One atheist, clearly exasperated, pointed out that by Peterson’s definition, every person who values something deeply is “religious,” whether they believe in God or not.

It’s a fair critique. Peterson’s framework may be drawn too broadly to be useful. And yet, I think, his point in positing such a broad definition of religion is to draw attention to the depth dimension of human life itself and the apparently innate orientation of the human person toward what is true, beautiful, and good.

In this broad sense, “religion” names not only institutions, rituals, or beliefs, but our natural human capacity for reverence and self-transcendence. The person who believes in a transcendent God and orders their life accordingly, the person who sees in each human face an image of infinite dignity, and the person who loves their spouse with a covenantal devotion that reorients all their other priorities—each of these, Peterson would argue, is religious in the most meaningful sense of the word, for all of them have located the axis of their life beyond themselves and staked their existence on the reality of something greater than themselves. However varied the outward forms, these “deep matters” spring from the same source: that mysterious wellspring we call the soul (psyche), which continually reaches beyond the limits of the self toward the true, the beautiful, and the good.

That said, there is an undeniable risk here. Peterson’s expansive account of religion lacks the concrete commitments, practices, and community that define actual religious traditions. As far as I’m concerned, religion without ritual, meaning without metaphysics, and logos without liturgy can only go so far. As with his concept of belief, Peterson’s idea of religion might inspire people to seek the deeper meaning of their lives and reorient their actions accordingly, but I wonder whether it will prove too thin and individualistic to bring about a lasting metanoia.

Peterson dismisses more conventional definitions of religion as “sectarian.” In doing so, I think he risks severing religion from the very elements that have given it historical depth and transformative power: shared rituals, communal belonging, and authoritative narratives that give a shared (not merely individual) sense of meaning and order to life. Religion, in its traditional sense, is not only the internal orientation of the soul but also the external form that binds individuals into a people and gives shape to their moral imagination.

I find myself sympathetic to the thrust of Peterson’s effort here. His existential and psychological framing of religion illuminates important dimensions of religious life, especially for postmodern seekers. I imagine that people who have deconstructed rigid or traumatizing religious frameworks or who otherwise feel estranged from institutional forms of faith might find space in this broader definition of religion to reach toward the great mystery that calls us beyond ourselves.

Still, I think his definition would be strengthened, and made more fully human, by recovering what thinkers like Anselm understood: that faith seeks understanding not in isolation, but in communion. Belief without belonging may be a beginning, but it is not yet a religion in the full sense of the term.

Worship: Adoration or Attention?

As we have seen, Peterson subscribes to the view that “everyone worships something.” By this, he does not mean that all people pray, sing hymns, or practice ritual devotion, but that all people live according to a hierarchy of value. Whatever lies at the top of this hierarchy (or the bottom, depending on whether we conceive of it as an ascending or descending hierarchy)—whatever commands our greatest attention, devotion, and sacrifice—is, in effect, what we worship.

As with belief, he redefines worship in functional, psychological terms. Worship, for Peterson, is about the direction of attention and the structure of priority. “You always have a highest value,” he argues, and this highest value is the object of your worship: what you orient your life around, what you sacrifice for, and what gives unity and coherence to your actions.

I appreciated when Gerard, one of the atheist participants in the debate, argued for a narrower, more traditional definition of worship as a “reverential view” of something perceived as sacred or transcendent, something “beyond what any human being could ever be.” According to this view, worship is not merely a matter of attention or priority, but a posture of awe toward that which is wholly other. This distinction allowed Gerard to draw an important line between love and worship: he might love his spouse with all his being, but he would not say he “worships” her, because she is not above or beyond him.

From a Catholic perspective, Gerard’s view aligns more closely with the theological tradition. In Catholic teaching, worship (latria) is the adoration due to God alone, an act of profound reverence, humility, and surrender to the infinite and transcendent Creator. It is not simply about what matters most to us or what we sacrifice for, but about who God is in Himself and our right relationship to Him. This is why Catholic tradition distinguishes between latria (worship due to God), dulia (veneration of the saints), and hyperdulia (the special honor given to Mary). Worship, properly speaking, is in a category of its own, since it is reserved for God alone.

I will say that Peterson’s redefinition of worship offers an intriguing psychological lens. In fact, it reminds me of the ancient maxim, lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief—suggesting that whatever we habitually attend to forms what we believe and ultimately become. Nonetheless, I am concerned that Peterson’s broad, functional definition of worship risks flattening meaningful distinctions between worship, reverence, honor, and love. While it rightly identifies the formative power of attention and sacrifice, it equivocates on the uniqueness of worship as a response to the divine. It may illuminate the disorder of modern life, the way in which false “gods” claim our attention and leave us fragmented, but it also obscures what worship is in its fullest theological and spiritual sense.

Still, Peterson’s central point about worship deserves consideration. Every life is ordered around something. The only real question is what—or whom—we put at the center. In this sense, his definition may serve as a diagnostic tool rather than a theological claim: not a definition of worship in the creedal sense, but a way to ask what “gods,” lowercase or capital, shape our daily choices.

Why This Debate Failed—And Why It Still Matters

At one level, the Peterson–atheist dialogue was a spectacular mess. It was a debate without common terms, where each side spoke past the other in mounting frustration. But the failure of the debate is itself instructive, because fundamentally, this wasn’t a clash of beliefs. It was a clash of categories.

The atheists arrived expecting to spar over doctrinal claims and propositional truth: Does God exist? Is Scripture reliable? Are miracles real? They came, as it were, to debate a creed. But Peterson came offering something else entirely: a meta-structure of meaning, not a system of belief. A way of seeing reality, not a set of answers.

Summarized briefly, here are the claims Peterson brought to the table:

• God is not a metaphysical entity to be proven, but the logical postulate that orients moral life itself, the symbolic center of value, meaning, and conscience.

• Belief is not primarily about assent to propositions, but the existential commitment revealed by how one lives: what I love, what I’m willing to suffer and die for, what I will refuse to betray, no matter what.

• Religion is not primarily a matter of sectarian, institutional belonging, but the mythic and symbolic framework through which we orient ourselves to meaning.

• Worship is not confined to adoration of the divine, but is rather the act of placing something at the apex of one’s attention as the structuring principle of one’s life.

In short, Peterson displaces God, belief, religion, and worship from the metaphysical and doctrinal domain to the existential and psychological realm. To repeat my central claim about Peterson, his project is a kind of natural theology for a postmodern age: not aimed at proving God’s existence, per se, but at recovering the symbolic necessity of God and religion for human flourishing.

This reframing may strike the traditional believer (and even the conventional atheist) as frustratingly vague. The charge of “semantic fog” leveled against him is not wholly unfounded. As we have seen, Peterson avoids firm metaphysical commitments as a matter of course, and and the slipperiness of his language—part metaphor, part psychology, part myth—can make it difficult to pin down his actual positions.

And yet, there is light in the fog. His symbolic style even reminds me a little of Jesus’ own rhetoric in the Gospels. “Why do you speak to them in parables?” the disciples asked Him once. Jesus replied, “Because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Mt 13:13). Perhaps Peterson, too, uses symbolic language not to obscure the answers, but to provoke his listeners to deeper engagement with the questions.

His project has real limits, as he himself admits at the end of the debate. What I find acutely lacking in his account of God, belief, religion, and worship is the incarnational particularity of the Christian faith—not merely as a pattern of meaning, but faith in the real Person of Jesus Christ, who breaks into history and into each one of our stories, offering us grace and redemption. In seeking to universalize religion, Peterson risks diluting it beyond recognition. In psychologizing belief, he risks severing it from truth. And in reframing God and worship in the abstract terms of value, meaning, and priority, he risks immanentizing the transcendent and cutting man off from the highest order of reality.

Still, I find much to admire in Peterson’s project. In our post-Christian, postmodern world, many no longer resonate with traditional terms like sin, grace, or salvation. Many more people are disaffiliating from churches than joining them. What Peterson offers them is a bridge—an invitation to reengage the sacred from the ground up. For some, that bridge may lead back to faith. For others, it may mark a first, halting attempt to live with meaning and responsibility in a fractured world.

This debate may have failed to persuade any of its participants or advance toward meaningful, shared understanding. But it still matters, I think, because of the deep fault lines it exposed. It laid bare the disorientation, fragmentation, and hunger for meaning that Peterson is trying—however imperfectly—to name and address. His project is, at heart, a response to nihilism: a call to moral seriousness, to live as though life matters and truth exists. He may not be able to offer the fullness of faith, but he does offer a challenge to complacency, a summons to reorient one’s life around what is good, true, and worthy. And for many adrift in the fog, that may be the first step toward the light.

1. Although this debate was initially billed as one Christian surrounded by twenty atheists, Peterson has never, to my knowledge, claimed to be Christian. Jubilee later changed the title of the video.

2. See Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005), §1.

3. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997).

4. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009).