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The Bible is data. It's a collection of texts with its own [secular] field of study. Peterson's thesis is something like the following: that the early biblica
by lambdaphagy 8y ago
The Bible is data. It's a collection of texts with its own [secular] field of study.
Peterson's thesis is something like the following: that the early biblical stories constitute a kind of dominant eigenvector of human cognition and experience, what you get when you iteratively retell a story over a hundred generations.
To dismiss this as anecdotes or fiction is very much to miss the point of what Peterson is trying to do.
- emodendroket 8y agoIt's hard for me to see why this logic points to the Bible and not the Odyssey or the Iliad, about which we could say much the same things (especially the Iliad, which shows clear marks of some parts of the story being much older than others). Or frankly any very old text with pre-literary roots. I am certainly pro-Bible, but in the terms you're putting it here it doesn't seem especially compelling.
- lambdaphagy 8y agoIt doesn't uniquely pick out the Bible, except to the extent that Western civilization was shaped far more thoroughly by the Bible than by Homer.