- Feb 5, 2002
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How Intellectuals Found God: Jordan Peterson, Peter Thiel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. . .
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion. Peter Savodnik meets the new theists.
In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.
“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.
He was 8 when his parents split, and he followed his mother to a Hindu ashram in Oakland, California. There were trips to India; upstate New York; Miami Beach, Florida; Santa Monica, California. It never stuck.
Like his mother, Crawford, now 59, was always searching. He felt unsure of who he was or should be—how to be happy, what it meant to be a man.
In the 1990s, he was a graduate student at The University of Chicago, where he studied Greek philosophy and embraced his agnosticism—“the preferred position of modern people,” he said, half-jokingly.
“I was impressed, as a young man, with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity,” he said. The German philosopher saw religion as little more than a “slave morality”—a crutch for the weak and cowardly.
Continued below.
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion. Peter Savodnik meets the new theists.
In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.
“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.
He was 8 when his parents split, and he followed his mother to a Hindu ashram in Oakland, California. There were trips to India; upstate New York; Miami Beach, Florida; Santa Monica, California. It never stuck.
Like his mother, Crawford, now 59, was always searching. He felt unsure of who he was or should be—how to be happy, what it meant to be a man.
In the 1990s, he was a graduate student at The University of Chicago, where he studied Greek philosophy and embraced his agnosticism—“the preferred position of modern people,” he said, half-jokingly.
“I was impressed, as a young man, with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity,” he said. The German philosopher saw religion as little more than a “slave morality”—a crutch for the weak and cowardly.
Continued below.
How Intellectuals Found God
Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion. Peter Savodnik meets the new theists.