Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

You're not going to get much of an answer unless you ask the question.

You know, and that's really what a prayer is in the final analysis.

It's an admission of insufficiency, and it's a reaching into the beyond for a revelation.

Now, thought itself doesn't end there, because your prayers might be warped, and what that means to some degree is that you might be aiming at the wrong thing.

And what that might mean is the revelation you receive might not precisely be from God, which is why you have to test the spirits, so to speak, to see if they're of God.

And there's actually no difference between that and critical thinking.

You know, you'll ask yourself a question, hopefully a well-aimed one, hopefully one that's aiming up, not something like, how can I take advantage of this situation for myself in this moment maximally and to hell with everyone else, for example, which isn't exactly a prayer to God, let's put it that way.

And so you have to check yourself, and you do that with critical thinking of various sorts, which is another manifestation of the creative process.

And I don't see any difference between that on the scientific front and prayer, not on the hypothesis-generating side.

And I think also it's a completely reasonable claim, anthropologically and historically, to generate the hypothesis that the thought that moderns are capable of, literate

semantically sophisticated moderns is a variant of the prayer which clearly preceded that historically.

So, you know, there's a gospel statement that says if you ask, you'll receive.

If you knock, the door will open.

And if you seek, you'll find.

But it's nested in another set of propositions, which is something like

careful what you ask for.

And seriously.

And so if you ask for what is highest, you'll receive what is highest in return.

And if you ask for what is lowest, you'll receive what is lowest in return.

And I wouldn't recommend that.