Jordan Peterson on The argument from religious experience

Of all the arguments for God's existence, the argument from religious experience is the one Peterson is most sympathetic to — though he recasts it in his own distinctive terms. He argues that religious experiences — encounters with the numinous, experiences of awe, the sense of confronting something infinitely greater than oneself — are not pathological or delusional but represent genuine contact with the deepest layers of psychological reality.

Peterson draws on his clinical experience as a psychologist and his reading of Jung, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche to argue that religious experience reveals the archetypal structure of the psyche. Encounters with God, in his framework, are encounters with the fundamental patterns that organise human consciousness — patterns of order and chaos, meaning and suffering, death and rebirth. These patterns are real in a sense that transcends the merely material.

This position is genuinely difficult to classify as theistic or atheistic. Peterson insists that religious experiences point to something real and important — but he is reluctant to identify that something with the personal God of traditional theism. He has said that he acts as if God exists, that the consequences of atheism are catastrophic, and that the divine is encountered in the assumption of ultimate responsibility. Whether this constitutes belief in God remains, characteristically, an open question.