More and more you realize society works in reactionary cycles. One generation's smartest thing becomes the next generation's dumbest thing, because it wasn't a complete idea, just an overreaction to a previous problem.
When I was growing up the two alternatives were folk religion ("If you don't eat your broccoli you'll go to hell" type stuff) and reactionary atheism "No I won't, because hell is a lie!". Of course atheism seemed the more intelligent of the two.
Now that we've conceded the silliness of folk religion, atheism is up against complex fusions of cosmology, existentialism & evolutionary psychology which are totally reframing the question away from "Does God exist?" into "Some force beyond our comprehension created the universe, data shows religion itself (a reverence for that force) is prerequisite to human sanity, so which ideology's metaphor most benefits society?"...
Last-generation atheism is still designed to tell grandma hell isn't real or point out petty contradictions in the Bible. It just doesn't seem to have a purpose in the modern West (it still has a purpose in the Islamic world).
You see the same thing in politics. When I was growing up conservatives were stereotyped as manual laborers who hated "fancy government types" and liberals were the intellectuals ready to embrace global governance and colonize the moon. Extreme opposite reaction. Now the vast majority of emergent/relevant intellectuals are right-leaning and nobody seems quite sure why liberalism exists. They're scrambling to find any kind of traditions to rebel against — resorting to crossdressing & pedophilia as "movements". They have no intellectuals & rely on washed up celebrity influence, or boating in new supersitutious savages to give themselves purpose again.
Peterson saw how the radical left & militant atheism were both overreactions to problems which no longer exist and how their adherents are now just a headless monster running around in circles. His role is to announce obsolescence.
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