The meaning of life: three perspectives

Tonight sees a debate, which will be live-streamed on YouTube, between philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, psychology professor Jordan Peterson, and philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. The debate is expected to be lively and provocative, as the three scholars offer their very insights into questions around the meaning of life.

See the debate live here.

Jordan Petersen, a leading Canadian intellectual, is the author of recently-published 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which has been described as ‘a hardline self-help manual of self-reliance, good behaviour, self-betterment and individualism’. Peterson was recently in the news for his fiery interview on Channel 4 News, focusing on gender issues, which resulted in online abuse of the interviewer, Cathy Newman.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist as well as a philosopher and public intellectual, and her 2010 novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, included ‘thirty-six traditional and modern arguments for the existence of God together with their refutations’. In 2011, she was named Humanist of the Year and is regarded as a new new atheist.

William Lane Craig, an analytic philosopher and Christian apologist, has been named as one of the 50 most influential living philosophers, and is the author of Reasonable Faith, which argues the case for the existence of God and the truth of the Christian faith. He is perhaps best known for developing the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, which is included in our free PDF booklet, Five Arguments for God.

The debate is part of a series, Religion and Society, by Wycliffe College in Toronto, Canada.