Jordan Peterson on The ontological argument
Peterson has not directly engaged with the ontological argument, though his pragmatic approach to God's existence operates in a different philosophical register entirely.
Jordan Peterson has shown virtually no interest in the ontological argument. The attempt to prove God's existence through pure conceptual analysis — from the definition of a maximally great being to the conclusion that such a being must exist — is foreign to Peterson's intellectual temperament. He is a clinical psychologist and a reader of myth and literature, not an analytic philosopher, and his approach to the question of God operates in a completely different register.
Peterson's version of the God question is pragmatic and existential: not 'Does a maximally great being necessarily exist?' but 'What happens to individuals and societies that act as if God does not exist?' His answer, drawn from Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and the horrors of the twentieth century, is that the consequences of atheism are catastrophic — that without a transcendent moral framework, human beings descend into nihilism, resentment, and totalitarianism.
This pragmatic approach means the ontological argument is simply irrelevant to Peterson's project. Even if Anselm's proof were valid, it would not address the questions Peterson cares about: how to live, how to bear suffering, and how to orient oneself toward meaning in a world that seems indifferent to human concerns.