Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Are we in a relationship with God?

The spirit of being and becoming.

That's a good way of thinking.

But I don't mean with the material world.

That's not what I mean exactly, because...

The material world, in some sense, isn't the whole world, you know?

And we all know that because, well, first of all, we exist within the material world, and we're conscious, and we don't know how to relate that to the material realm at all.

Not at all.

We have no idea.

We don't understand the relationship between consciousness and matter at all.

And you might say, well, it can be reducible to neurological function.

And I would say most of the neurological function that characterizes you has no consciousness.

And so how we distinguish between the neurological function that hypothetically underlies consciousness and the neurological function that seems equally complex but has no consciousness is not something that anyone knows.

And I would say...

the one undeniable truth that we have at hand is the fact of our consciousness.

That was basically Descartes' proposition.

He said, I think, therefore I am.

But what he meant in more modern parlance is something like the brute fact of my own consciousness is the deepest of undeniable realities.

And so what that appears to indicate is that

Well, you can make a materialist case that matter is at the bottom of being itself, but you can make an equally powerful case philosophically that consciousness is at the bottom of things.