In a heated and widely discussed video released on the Jubilee YouTube channel on May 25, 2025, clinical psychologist and public intellectual Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engaged in a spirited debate with a room of 20 self-identified Atheists. The video, already amassing over 2.2 million views, was marketed as a candid confrontation of worldviews—but it quickly turned into a philosophical standoff where Peterson’s ideas struggled under critical scrutiny from the audience.
The debate exposed the growing chasm between popular Christian-adjacent intellectualism and the empirical worldview held by many Atheists. What was meant to be a discussion on morality and belief became, for some viewers, a demonstration of Peterson’s increasing reliance on ambiguous religious metaphor rather than reasoned argument.
In this essay I will share some of my own thoughts and assessments of the debates and the arguments, along with a few of my own rebuttals to Peterson’s claims I believe were not adequately addressed by the debate attendees.
The Atheist Oppositions’ Familiarity with Peterson’s Ideas Was Abit Weak
While my overall conclusion is that Peterson did not perform very well in this debate, the attendees were also not very familiar with Peterson’s writings and lectures. I think a major contributing factor to why Peterson performed poorly is because he got frustrated with what he perceived as a lack of preparedness on the part of his opponents. Based on the original title of the video published to the YouTube channel that said “A Christian Vs 20 Atheists” (which was changed a few hours after its original upload) and that one of the debaters (as seen in the opening) claimed he was told by the debate organizers he was here to “debate a Christian”, I think there is a strong possibility the attendees were not told in advance they would be debating Jordan Peterson and came only prepared to deal with more popular Christian apologetics rather than Peterson’s unique variant.
For example around 35 minutes into the video Peterson flat out refuses to engage in hypothetical moral dilemma thought experiments designed to entrap people into making a choice against their own claimed morals by presenting a scenario that is stated to be limited to only two choices, both of which would result in violating a moral code. Peterson refused to engage in this — and rightly so. These kinds of thought experiments generally bear no resemblance to reality, creating a scenario the person would never find themselves in and therefore are not useful at dissecting what a person would actually do when presented with moral dilemmas. For these thought experiments to be useful at assessing if a person would act according to their beliefs when tested, the experiment must allow for the possibility of avoiding finding oneself in the bad situation to start with and not force people’s into binaries between two terrible choices.
What I am saying here is not a defense of Peterson’s views — I will point out his failures of reasoning later in this essay — but instead only that the usual kind of rhetoric that is commonly employed by Atheists against apologetics generally does not work against Peterson because he is well versed in Atheist literature himself, and so has devised new kinds of arguments that your average apologetic does not use and which the average Atheist is therefore not very familiar with how to address.
Peterson’s main failures in the debate is that upon realizing his opponents were not automatically familiar with the full context of the claims he made that he became angry and frustrated, instead of taking the time to fully explain his points of view. This didn’t leave the best impression of him and his arguments, making his opponents rebuttals and claims appear more credulous than they actually were. Peterson largely defeated himself in the debates by losing his temperament, as I have seen him in past debates better able to address the same arguments.
Peterson’s Central Claim: “Atheists Don’t Know What They’re Rejecting”
Opening the dialogue, Peterson contended that Atheists “reject God but don’t understand what they’re rejecting.” This prompted immediate pushback. One participant, a former Catholic seminarian, rejected the accusation outright, asserting his deconversion stemmed from deliberate and thorough theological study.
Peterson, known for drawing heavily on biblical and Jungian symbolism, responded by reframing God not as a “man in the sky,” but as a symbolic representation of the unknowable—arguing that Atheists reject a caricature rather than the deep, archetypal meaning of divinity found in scripture. He cited the story of Moses only seeing God’s back as an example of human limitations in grasping the divine.
But his Atheist opponent countered that this kind of semantic fluidity obscures rather than clarifies. Words like ‘God’ must be defined clearly if they are to be debated at all. Multiple participants accused Peterson of equivocation—changing the definition of what god is to Christians mid-argument from a metaphysical being to abstract ideals like conscience or order.
Morality, Science, and Evolved Ethics
One of Peterson’s more contentious claims was that “morality and purpose cannot be found within science.” He argued that science describes how the world works but cannot provide ethical imperatives.
A debater responded with examples from evolutionary biology and cognitive science, which offer naturalistic explanations for moral behavior such as altruism, empathy and group cohesion. It was also emphasized that human morality is observable in the social structures of primates and is not reliant on theological systems.
Peterson countered by distinguishing between observed behavior and prescriptive ethics. He suggested that religious traditions, particularly the Judeo-Christian moral canon, offer frameworks that science itself presupposes. Yet this was Peterson retreating into circular reasoning.
Conscience: Divine Signal or Natural Instinct?
Peterson devoted substantial time to his “conscience is God” thesis, referencing in passing Cardinal John Henry Newman theories (as discussed in Newman’s 1870 apologetic treatise Grammar of Assent), and the biblical stories of Elijah and Jonah. Peterson described conscience as a divine voice within, guiding humans toward truth.
While the Atheists that Peterson debated over this claim didn’t specifically address it and instead focused on how Peterson was cherry picking definitions for god from certain sections of the Bible while ignoring other sections that portray god as a supernatural entity with forms that can manifest on Earth, I do feel Peterson’s claims are in need of a rebuttal, and wish to provide the following response to them:
While an individual person’s conscience plays a powerful role in moral decision-making, this is not evidence of conscience possessing personification as a deity. A person’s conscience is a blend of empathy, social conditioning and rational reflection—the mind measuring the moral weight of decisions against an internal moral compass based on the individual’s values. This is not evidence of the divine, but rather it is evidence that humans are capable of introspection. A person’s ‘conscience’ is ultimately a feeling — a cognitive process that manifests as emotions such as satisfaction, shame and anger. Yet human emotions are not infallible measures of truth and are only one data point — one that is extremely subjective. Emotions can lead people to make mistaken judgements when emotions are not guided by good reasoning and the result of misunderstandings. Obviously then, a person’s feelings, to include one’s conscience, are not absolute measures of right and wrong, and therefore cannot be an absolute divine supernatural presence like a god.
Peterson is mistaken to assume conscience must be some divine voice merely because ancient people who knew nothing of how the human nervous system functions mistakenly assumed their inner monologue was the voice of a deity.
Morality and Purpose
During the debates Jordan Peterson made the claim that “Morality and purpose cannot be found within science”. My observation is the Atheists attending did not seem to understand the context here — Peterson was almost certainly making a rebuttal to the claims of specific Atheist authors such as Sam Harris who have often blurred the lines between descriptive and normative claims with their use of scientific data. So Peterson’s statement was, I believe, making a reference to Hume’s law that Atheist influencers such as Harris sometimes violate in their lectures. This was apparently not understood by any of the Atheists in the room, which is likely why they were unable to directly engage him on the topic during this part of the debate.
While I agree that Peterson is correct that science cannot be directly used to make ethical claims and that it can only be used to discover objective truth (through a process of eliminating what is untrue by subjecting claims to scrutiny), it is still necessary to know what is true in order to decide what is moral. This is because moral ideas such as fairness, justice, honesty and wisdom are intrinsically tied to first knowing what is true. So although the scientific method cannot be used to directly define morality, science is still useful for morality because it allows us to create an accurate model of reality which we can then use to investigate how we should construct moral beliefs to be aligned with what is true about reality. This assessment of the moral quality of actions based on knowing truth is indeed a separate process that does not use the scientific method but instead other forms of reasoning depending on the context of what is being evaluated. The scientific method is a school of Empiricism, and Empiricism is of course logical, but not all forms of logical thinking are Empirical, and not all Empiricism is science.
Again, this nuanced discussion about how scientific information should be used to inform moral decisions is an area that, in my own assessment of popular Atheist literature, I do feel is weak as some Atheists fall into the trap of assuming the scientific method can be used to make moral claims. Peterson’s own familiarity with this popular literature is most likely why Peterson made this claim during the debate and also why no one in the room was able to directly engage him on it. This is not to suggest I believe the Atheists in the room with Peterson were only capable of regurgitating popular talking points created by Atheist influencers such as Sam Harris, but rather that among Atheists scientism is often taken for granted because few Christian apologetics engage in a debate over the philosophy of science. As the topic rarely comes up in these debates between Christians and Atheists, many Atheists are just not familiar with the topic.
Is Moral Progress Religious or Human?
The debates reached a boiling point when Peterson argued that moral progress—such as the abolition of slavery—was embedded in Judeo-Christian tradition. This was challenged by one of the Atheists, who noted that slavery, subjugation of women and genocide are all condoned in various parts of the Bible.
In response, Peterson argued that scripture must be read as a layered, interconnected narrative, not cherry-picked for critique. He acknowledged that one can behave morally without belief in Jesus, claiming that someone could be part Christian in values without being a theist. Yet this metaphor, while catchy, did little to resolve the underlying dispute about the source and ownership of moral frameworks.
Redefining Belief and Worship
Peterson also attempted to redefine the word ‘belief’—not as intellectual assent, but as what one would live or die for. He claimed Atheists still have beliefs in this sense and therefore are not as divorced from the sacred as they assume.
He went further, asserting that “everyone worships something,” equating worship with prioritization to a thing. When an atheist challenged whether loving one’s spouse constituted worship, Peterson answered that worship exists on a spectrum and reflects hierarchical values. This semantic maneuver rightly drew criticism for blurring lines between ordinary commitments and theological constructs.
Peterson’s failure here is the use of the word ‘worship’ and attempt to redefine it to suit his argument. He is mixing the platitude definition of ‘worship’ (such as that a person can be accused of ‘worshiping money’ to suggest they value the acquisition of material possessions above all other moral principles) with also a suggestion this platitude definition of ‘worship’ can be inferred to have a spiritual component. While I can agree that in practice an Atheist person can adopt zealous beliefs about non-superstitious ideas that become as deeply ingrained into their identities as a superstitious idea for deeply religious people (political ideas are a common example of this) I disagree that this is evidence of any divine supernatural hand at work in the minds of Atheists.
I can concede to Peterson that Atheists, just like non-Atheists, can take on pseudo-religious beliefs that are as central to their identities as that for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and so on. But this is not evidence of anything supernatural at play, it is only proof that Atheists are humans and therefore the brains of Atheists function the same as any other human who has adopted superstitious ideas. It is not that some supernatural thing causes humans to have strong moral beliefs, but rather that humans adopt strong moral beliefs as part of the functioning of our brains to make sense of the complex social structures humans have developed as part of our evolutionary history. While crude forms of reasoning are instinctive to humans (such as emotional reasoning), logic and empirical reasoning are not, and this kind of superior reasoning therefore must be learned and practiced by an individual in order for that human to make decisions aligned with truth. Furthermore, as Empiricism i.e. modern science is a relatively new method of investigating truth, it is only in the past few hundred years that humans as a collective who learned and practiced this kind of thinking have been able to collect highly accurate data about the world we live in and the things that live in it — including ourselves. The ancient people who invented superstitious religions and these ideas about gods existing did not use Empiricism to develop these ideas, but instead cruder forms of reasoning that are far more inaccurate.
Everything I have just said, I believe Peterson knows. He is not an uneducated man. However, he makes the same mistake that so many Christian apologetics make — he ignores the truth that he knows in favor of the ideas he prefers because he believes the ideas are useful. While Christianity, like all major religions, has had usefulness to people in the past, our intellectual advances as humans make Christianity, like any other religion based on crude forms of reasoning and superstitions, no longer practical for creating the kind of long term stability it might once have because too many people alive today can see its errors. The fact of the matter is Christianity makes false claims about the nature of reality and its moral principles are based on the existence of a deity there is no evidence for ever having existed. If that deity is fictional then so too is the moral authority that all of Christianity hinges upon, and this is where all of Peterson’s claims fall apart just as they do for any other apologetic, even if his arguments are more novel than those used by your garden variety apologetic.
Final Thoughts: An Unresolved Divide
I’ve not covered every claim made throughout the debate but I think I have provided enough of a summary and rebuttal to the key claims he made that I think lacked sufficient refutation from his opponents.
In the closing exchanges of the debate, several Atheists acknowledged Peterson’s contributions to popular discussions of masculinity, responsibility and meaning—but maintained that his arguments for the existence of a god fell short of rational justification.
One thoughtful critique summarized the sentiment in the room: “You’re right that life needs meaning. But you haven’t proven that meaning requires a god—or that a god even exists.”
Peterson’s insistence that Atheists unknowingly live out Christian morality may resonate with his fans, but among these 20 critical thinkers and myself as an observer of the video, his claims on this topic just do not hold up to scrutiny in my opinion.