Obviously I’m not a fan of Dawkins. I haven’t read any of his work, but from the various clips and quotes of his I’ve seen over the years he strikes me as an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview. But I have no reason to doubt that he is a smart man.
So it’s very funny to see him realize that he’s debating a genuinely delusional person, as Peterson makes some bizarre epistemological argument that dragons are literally real because we use the concept of predator as a shorthand for animals that kill other animals. Except Peterson seems to expand the definition of predator to “anything that can kill a person” when he argues that fire is a predator.
That’s fairly run-of-the-mill esoteric quackery and i’m unfortunately not surprised that this shows up in a self help book. What’s worrying is that at this time, he was still lecturing at a Canadian university and practiced as a licensed psychotherapist, and that both of that only stopped after he got cancelled, oh wait, he wasn’t, he decided on his own to make a career as a professional transphobe instead because he liked getting fanmail from groypers so much.
There’s a very, very fine line between discussing, like, how ancient mesopotamian creatures we gloss as dragons often combine features of many creatures, including lions. Or how lions and other predators are used to allegorically represent many different things in medieval art, ranging from supernatural evil, to actual lions, to the authority of kings, to the gentle mercy of Christ. On one side of that line is an analyssi of a common symbol or motif based on textual and artistic sources. On the other side is whatever the fuck Peterson is.
When people occasionally argue that peasants didn’t understand literal vs metaphorical, I’ve always found that hard to believe, but maybe Peterson is actually like that.