ʙʀᴏɴᴢᴇ ᴀɢᴇ ʙɪᴛsʜɪғᴛᴇʀ

What Jordan Peterson is trying to say (but keeps muddling) Peterson is gesturing toward a true insight - that science presupposes realities it cannot justify by its own methods. Those include: intelligibility of the world reliability of reason normativity of truth meaningfulness of ‘better explanations’ goodness of knowing rather than not knowing These are ontological and moral preconditions, not scientific conclusions. Where Peterson goes awry is that he slides immediately from ontology into symbolic theology and Jungian myth, collapsing: God into archetype Good into evolved narrative Truth into adaptive meaning That move weakens his case, because it makes the foundations of science look psychological or symbolic, rather than metaphysically real. So when he says “the gap between believing in God and believing in Good is very narrow”, he is aiming at something but imprecise. The real gap is not narrow or wide - it’s categorical: Good is ontological (a feature of reality) God is metaphysical (the ground of that reality) Gad Saad is saying something different. Saad’s response is textbook scientistic when he says: “the epistemology of science is fully and unequivocally decoupled from religion” he is swapping epistemology for ontology. Science may be methodologically decoupled from religion, but it is not ontologically self-grounding. Worse, Saad explains religion as an ‘evolved instinct’ which immediately undercuts his own trust in reason. If religiosity is adaptive illusion then so is truth-seeking, then so is ‘rationality’ and so is ‘science’. Evolutionary accounts explain how beliefs arise, not whether they are true. Using evolution to justify epistemic trust is self-undermining. Saad’s position only ‘works’ by rhetorically borrowing realism while functionally denying it. The core problem with both sides is that they are arguing God v atheism, when the real divide is ontological realism v ontological nihilism. Science does not require revealed religion, scripture or ecclesial authority - but it does require real being, intelligibility, normativity, truth and real good. If those are denied, science collapses into instrumentalism, power optimization, narrative management and technocratic control. At that point, ‘science’ becomes engineering in service of will, not knowledge of reality. 2020 onwards (and long before that) has been a masterclass in the denial of reality in the ‘name of science’.