The Virgin Birth: Myth or Fact? Michael Horton Responds to Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Richard Dawkins: Did a man have intercourse with, with Mary and produce Jesus? That's a factual question.

2. 00:06

   Jordan Peterson: These sorts of questions, they're not getting to the point.

3. 00:10

   Michael Horton: Well, getting to the point of what? Everything hinges on this for Christians. You don't get a ripping good myth out of this unless it's actually true.

4. 00:21

   Jordan Peterson: There are patterns that seem to work and to propagate themselves properly and to orient cultures towards life abundant. And there are other patterns, the pattern of Cain, for example, that lead to absolute bloody devastation.

5. 00:35

   Michael Horton: The question that Richard Dawkins is rightfully pressing is, we're talking about a specific claim about something that happened in history. Is that claim true? And if Christ is not raised, we're still in our sins.

6. 00:50

   Jordan Peterson: We don't understand the relationship between metaphoric truth and value-predicated truth and factual truth.

7. 00:55

   Michael Horton: Richard Dawkins is wondering, is it true factually? And Jordan Peterson is saying it's true in terms

8. 01:02

   Michael Horton: Hi, my name is Mike Horton, and I teach theology and apologetics. And today we get to examine some claims from Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, and Alex O'Connor. Jordan Peterson argues that the stories in the Gospels of the virgin birth and the incarnation give us mythological meaning. The story of the virgin birth is a mythological story. Whereas Richard Dawkins, the atheistic biologist, says it's all rubbish. And Alex O'Connor is mediating the conversation. So let's see what they have to say.

9. 01:35

   Alex O'Connor: Yeah, my job is to keep things on track here. I think there are a number of questions which Professor Dawkins—

10. 01:44

    Michael Horton: I love Alex O'Connor is, you know, Oxford-style debate right here. I love the way he just comes right out of the gate and says, I'm going to keep things on track here, because he knows he has 2 people who have a lot to say and could go in a lot of directions.

11. 02:05

    Alex O'Connor: He's asked quite directly. Yeah, that we still haven't really heard an answer.

12. 02:10

    Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay.

13. 02:11

    Alex O'Connor: Professor Dawkins asking about the virgin birth, you've started talking about metaphor, you started talking about myth. I think anybody listening to this conversation will understand that maybe a society that doesn't believe in the virgin birth won't work. Maybe that's the predictive power that you're talking about. But I think you must understand that when Professor Dawkins is asking you, Do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin? He means something like a biological fact. And, and by the way, saying I don't know, or saying, you know, I'm not qualified to comment, is an answer to that question. But is that your answer, that you, that you don't know?

14. 02:56

    Jordan Peterson: I said earlier, and, and I, I would hold to this, is that there are elements of the text that I don't know how to— that I'm incapable of fully accounting for. I can't account for, for what the— what the fundamental reality and significance of the notion of the resurrection is. My knowledge just ends.

15. 03:19

    Michael Horton: Now, see, that's— I think what's interesting is Alex O'Connor is an atheist also, but he has a lot of understanding of the Christian claims, and he is willing to consider them and take them seriously. What's interesting here is you have an atheist like Alex O'Connor who takes those claims seriously as factual claims that he disagrees with, and Jordan Peterson, who is claiming to be quasi-Christian and yet runs away, frankly, from the question of whether the resurrection happened, whether the virgin birth as attested in the Gospels is a fact.

16. 03:56

    Jordan Peterson: I know that whatever happened whatever happened as a consequence of the origination and the promotion of the Christian story was powerful enough to bring Rome to its knees and demolish the pagan enterprise. So there's some power in that story that's remarkable.

17. 04:13

    Richard Dawkins: Let's stick to the virgin birth. Yes. Yeah. Well, the virgin birth results from a mistranslation of Isaiah. You know that.

18. 04:22

    Michael Horton: This is— he's referring to the prophecy in Isaiah 9 of Emmanuel, God with us, who will be born of a virgin, and could be translated young woman, but it doesn't make much sense to prefer that translation over virgin simply because it wouldn't have made much sense of a miracle that she was just, she was a young woman. So Dawkins here is being a little sly in saying that all the evidence in the Bible for the virgin birth is a mistranslation of Isaiah.

19. 04:56

    Jordan Peterson: I'm like, these sorts of questions, what would you say? They don't strike me as— they're not getting to the point.

20. 05:04

    Michael Horton: Well, getting to the point of what? That's the question. For Christians, Orthodox Christians, the point is that Jesus Christ was the eternal Son, took his humanity, from the Virgin Mary. It's not just virgin birth. We actually believe in virgin conception, virginal conception, and was therefore conceived and born without sin. And he could thereby be not only God, but the sinless substitute. So everything hinges on this for Christians. You don't get a ripping good myth. out of this unless it's actually true.

21. 05:38

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I never think that.

22. 05:40

    Jordan Peterson: It has a purpose. Well, and look, I understand that there's, there's perfect reasons to debate this. I, I know that, and I know that your question is more than valid, but it's beside the issue as far as I'm concerned. And, and it's, it's partly because, well, when we started this conversation, I said, for example, that it, it appears to be the case that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. We see the world through a story. And so that's a remarkable thing. That's a remarkable discovery. And it's emerged probably in the last 16 years— 60 years in multiple disciplines, because we have to prioritize our facts.

23. And so we prioritize them according to a particular pattern. And there are patterns that seem to work and to propagate themselves properly and to orient cultures towards life abundant. And there are other patterns, the pattern of Cain, for example, that lead to absolute bloody devastation.

24. 06:46

    Michael Horton: You know, a lot of this is just getting the cart before the horse. He— I think Jordan Peterson is right that there are a lot of patterns that lead to disaster and patterns that lead to life. But the question that Richard Dawkins is rightfully pressing is we're talking about a specific claim about something that happened in history. Is that claim true? And the early Christians didn't set about to transform the world and come up with a pattern of ideas and mythologies that would lead to a blessed society. They claimed Jesus was raised on the 3rd day. They claimed that Jesus was born of a virgin. They claimed that God became incarnate, died on the cross for our sins, and was raised on the 3rd day. They didn't set about to talk about the moral or mythological import of these events, but the factual meaning.

25. These events that actually occurred, and if Christ is not raised, we're still in our sins. It seems to me, ironically, that the apostles argued with the epistemology being closer to Richard Dawkins than to Jordan Peterson. The difference is Richard Dawkins doesn't believe that it's a fact. The early Christians did, and we do today.

26. 08:07

    Jordan Peterson: And I don't know exactly how to construe that sort of truth, but we talked about the oppression of women, for example. It's like, how do you make a case on purely factual grounds that women should be treated as equals?

27. It's a moral question. And I

28. know that's exactly—

29. 08:26

    Richard Dawkins: I was dealing with a factual question, which is, did Jesus have a father? And you won't answer it.

30. 08:34

    Jordan Peterson: Well, Jesus had an earthly father and a heavenly Father, like almost all mythological heroes.

31. 08:40

    Richard Dawkins: So, he wasn't born of a virgin then? So, you're saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin?

32. 08:48

    Jordan Peterson: I don't know how to mediate the fact-value dichotomy in that case. I said the same thing about the resurrection.

33. 08:56

    Richard Dawkins: No, it's not a value. It's a simple fact. I mean, did a man have intercourse with Mary and produce Jesus? That's a factual question. It's not a value question.

34. 09:08

    Alex O'Connor: You must understand what you're being asked here, that even if you think that, say, the author of the biblical texts intended much more significance than a simple scientific analysis of events, Professor Dawkins is interested in scientific truth. That's the kind of truth that he's interested in. And even if you think it's irrelevant to the point of what the Gospel authors were getting at, that first needs to be clarified before you can then begin actually uncovering what the stories are about. So, I think Professor Dawkins is asking from a scientific perspective, Maybe you think that that scientific approach is wrong, but if you just take it for a moment, maybe this is how we find out that it is wrong. Let's take a scientific approach, ask the question, did this occur?

35. 10:02

    Jordan Peterson: I think that it's inappropriate to use a question like that to attempt to undermine the validity of the entire, what would you say, deep mythological enterprise.

36. 10:12

    Michael Horton: Well, again, if Jesus is not who he said he was, this is what Christians have always contended. If Jesus Christ is not who he said he was and did not do what the New Testament tells us he did, there is no reason to be a Christian, no matter what moral effects or mythological import. I actually think, and I think Dawkins would agree, that if Jesus Christ wasn't born of a virgin, if God were not made incarnate, if Jesus Christ didn't die for our sins, if Jesus wasn't raised on the 3rd day, literally in history, then there is no moral or mythological upshot. Paul doesn't say, well, at least we had a good myth to support us and look at all the moral benefits of Christianity in the world. Jesus said if he was not raised, we're still in our sins. And we are, of all people, the most to be pitied.

37. 11:15

    Alex O'Connor: Suppose we weren't doing that.

38. Suppose we were asking out of interest. Suppose that we were all here devout Christians, maybe even Jungian Christians, and we thought, this is interesting, over dinner. Do you think it really happened? Like, scientifically? Would your answer just be, I don't know?

39. 11:34

    Jordan Peterson: Yes.

40. 11:34

    Alex O'Connor: And you wouldn't consider it— I mean, it's not an inappropriate question to ask just on a point of interest,

41. right?

42. Did this really occur? And I think so often people are asking you that, and especially given the context of this conversation, We've heard everything that you're saying about metaphor and myth, but because the question is still then being asked, did it really happen? You know that that's what you're being asked. And the way you just so easily said yes, I wonder why you struggle to do that in so many other circumstances.

43. 12:12

    Jordan Peterson: I think because I don't look at the situation the same. The way that Dr. Dawkins and I look at the situation are really quite different and at many, many, many levels. You know, so even on the meme question, for example, you know, like, I know the literature on the history of religious ideas. I see how these ideas have battled across millennia in a manner that is very reminiscent to me of the same sort of claim that Dr. Dawkins is putting forward with regards to meme. I know that literature, and we're dealing with things that we don't understand the relationship between metaphoric truth and value-predicated truth and factual truth. We don't understand that.

44. It's a big problem. We cannot— there's no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts.

45. 13:09

    UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Sure.

46. 13:10

    Jordan Peterson: And that's a fact. And it's a fact that's been detailed out in great detail in the last 60 years by people from a variety of different disciplines. We have to prioritize the facts. That's a value hierarchy. There may be true and false ways of prioritizing facts. But you can't determine the truth or falsehood of the way that you prioritize facts by making reference to the facts. That's a big problem.

47. 13:39

    Michael Horton: It's, it's certainly true that our knowledge is not merely a jumble of facts, and it's hard to separate fact and value cleanly, as I think Richard Dawkins would like to do. But essentially what Jordan Peterson is, is doing is, is using value and mythology and interpretation as a smokescreen for saying, I feel that it's true, I value it as truth, but it isn't true. And I think that's really where this debate comes to a head. Richard Dawkins is wondering, is it true factually? And Jordan Peterson is saying it's true in terms of value. And so they're talking in incommensurable language games here.

48. 14:22

    Alex O'Connor: Let's, let's, let's talk about that as perhaps a slight detour here, because I think we do need to come back to this Christ resurrection thing. But Professor Dawkins, would you say that underlying the scientific enterprise is a fundamentally unscientific assumption? You can, you can make scientific investigations in the world, but in order to do so, You need to choose what to prioritize. You need to choose what to investigate. You also need to value the truth. You need to have a value and a motivation for doing it in the first place. Those kinds of things cannot themselves be scientifically justified. And so does the scientific enterprise have an unscientific assumption at its base?

49. 15:08

    Richard Dawkins: I think that Jordan prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact. And I think myth is kind of but it's not the be-all and end-all of my life. I think it's somewhat secondary to scientific facts, the sort of facts that tell us how old the universe is, how old the world is, the history of life, the engineering achievements of landing a spacecraft on a comet. These are the things that are really important. things that science can do. And as I said, the predictions of quantum theory, to come back to that, the predictions of quantum theory, which are verified to a sufficient number of decimal places that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one hair's breadth. Hmm. Now, that is, however difficult quantum theory is to understand, that is what you can get from quantum theory.

50. Now, the mysteries of the Bible, if they are mysteries, aren't in the same league. I mean, they just don't cut it.

51. 16:14

    Michael Horton: See, if you believe that all knowledge is the kind of knowledge that can put human beings on the moon, then of course you're going to say the Bible just doesn't cut it because the Bible doesn't give us any information at all about how to put people on the moon. It's not a science book. I think he's asking the Bible to be something that it's not, but he's reducing all genuine meaningful knowledge to scientific knowledge. If I could enter into this debate, I think C.S. Lewis has the best response to this conundrum here between these 2 points of view in his essay called Myth Became Fact. And in that essay, he says, yes, all of the myths that we find, so many myths in history that seem to echo the story of Jesus, born of a virgin, came into the world, suffered, died, rose again even. We have a lot of anticipations of that in mythology. Well, you could say then, the New Testament is just ripping it off of other cultures.

52. Jesus is a figment of the mythological imagination. Or you can say, as the early church fathers did, that all of these myths were pointing inchoately toward something that's real, something that people knew was needed for God whoever he is, to come and save us. The difference is, C.S. Lewis said, this is the myth that actually became fact. It's not anywhere, anytime like the other myths. It doesn't matter. Historical points don't matter. It doesn't matter where it happened or what time it happened, what day.

53. Here in the Bible, you have that Jesus was born while Quirinius was governor of Syria and a census was ordered by Caesar Augustus for everyone to be taxed. While Pilate, an unknown bureaucrat, would have remained in the shadows, he— we know about him because he's in the Creed, crucified under Pontius Pilate. And Romans in that day and Jews of that day in their documents say he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. A lot of liberals didn't even believe that Pontius Pilate really existed. And then about 25 years ago, they found the Pontius Pilate Stone that listed him as the ruler of Judea at that time under Rome. So that's the kind of thing that you have to bring into this conversation that can can harmonize. It's a— yeah, it, it is a myth. It's a mind-blowing myth.

54. And yes, there are a lot of myths that anticipate it, but this is the only myth that actually happened on a certain day, certain time, in a certain place.