Here’s Matt’s follow up to the debate. I think it’s accurate. He talks about the time he got really annoyed at the end of this. And he slams the guy a few times, with good reason.
In between 23 and 25 minute marks, he talks about the value of story. I argued with him a lot about this, and now he’s too busy to answer my emails, so I’m glad he’s saying stuff like this that I agree with. Peterson talks about the importance of keeping religion, he calls it the “metaphoric substrate”, but doesn’t define that term. Matt says, either gods exist or they don’t. It’s a separate question from whether or not god stories have value. If a god story has value, maybe it’s showing that any myth could have value, and that facts and observation about what it is to be human also has value. He says, the things that these stories point to that are true are things about us. The mythological characters are not true.
Later, around 30 minutes, he says the commonality of these stories doesn’t point to some supernatural influence, we tell the same stories because we are the same. This isn’t just some philosophy of myth, it points to how we can see, in our cultures and histories, that we are more alike than different. If we would stop arguing about the name of the thing we are pointing at, we could see that.