Reviewing the Shapiro vs. O’Connor Religion Debate

Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And today I’m going to be doing a review of a recent informal debate that took place between Ben Shapiro and Alex O’Connor on the question, is religion good or bad for society? Before I do that though, here’s a question that needs no debate. Is subscribing good or bad for this channel? Easy. It’s very good. It helps you keep up with our content and it helps us continue to share the faith online. So please hit the subscribe button and definitely support us at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so this dialogue took place as part of the big conversation series on the Premier Unbelievable? YouTube channel. Right off the bat, I got to say they have a fancy studio. I love the floating lights, the slowly gliding track shots. I really love to have some of that around here.

So if you support us at trenthornpodcast.com, hopefully we’ll get to that point in the future. I also want to say I was a little nervous for Ben Shapiro going into this debate. I’ve debated Alex twice. He’s a smart guy. He’s British, so that makes him sound extra smart without even having to try. But he says really smart things. He’s studied this issue a lot. He’s studied philosophy, theology, and he has experience debating different religious people. Ben Shapiro doesn’t do as many debates, at least as Alex. I don’t think he does. So I was a little concerned, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. Overall, I think Ben Shapiro did a really good job keeping the subject laser focused on the topic and showing the problems with Alex’s worldview.

Keep in mind that the topic is an interesting one. Is religion good or bad for society? That’s actually a question that could be debated by two atheists because the question does not assume anything about the truth of religion. Religion could be false and still be good for society. There’s even a 2009 book that defends this thesis. It’s called An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion Than Without It by Bruce Sheiman. Shapiro does a good job throughout the debate of pointing out that he’s not trying to argue that God exists or that a certain religion is true. Instead, he’s just arguing that certain things that are good for society like truth, morality, and most importantly free will do not make sense without some kind of religious belief to ground those things.

I should start off by saying I don’t actually think that it’s possible to prove the existence of God. I’m also not a believer that you can disprove the existence of God. What I think is an atheist delusion, is that it is possible to live ideologically purely in a way that does not rely on fundamental faith principles. When I say faith principles, I’m not going to make the claim that those faith principles are direct from Sinai or those faith principles require the New Testament for example. I’m going to make the claim that there are a bunch of principles upon which we base ourselves that are external to what we know about nature and evolutionary biology.

Alex’s argument on the other hand, seemed to be that religion is not good for society because it contains a methodology that leads to false beliefs or bad practices like slavery, punishment for witchcraft, rejection of so-called LGBT rights, et cetera, et cetera.

[inaudible 00:03:23] a society today that decides that religion throughout its history has been wrong about the position of women in society, wrong about the mortal fate of practicing homosexuals, wrong about the position of the earth in relation to the sun, wrong about the age of both of those celestial bodies.

I’m not going to do a play-by-play of the entire discussion. You can watch that in the link below, but I just want to give some general thoughts and point out some of the issues that came up. Overall, I think Shapiro got the better of the exchange at least until when Alex was hammering home Bible difficulties. Overall, I think Ben did a really good job. It’s just the points where they had to debate specific difficulties in the Bible. That’s always hard in a debate setting to talk about because they require nuance and a lot of explanation, but I think Ben handled those very well also. Ben was doing well in making an argument primarily from the importance of free will to society functioning well to really ground in saying, look, we need free will for society to work and you can’t have free will or at least the idea of free will without religion to ground that.

Can I call him Ben, by the way? Not like he’s my friend or anything. We spoke for six minutes on his podcast a while back, so hopefully he remembers me from that, but I’m just going to call them Ben and Alex to make this a lot easier. In any case, Ben’s argument would be that society functions well when there is a general belief in free will that grounds our ability to choose our actions and thus be able to be held morally accountable for our actions. If you don’t have that, then you have a recipe for social discord. And Ben was very clear in saying that all he is arguing is that if you believe in free will regardless of whether or not free will even exists, if you believe in free will, then you need religion to ground that belief because you can’t have free will in a materialistic universe where we’re just atoms in motion.

I don’t think the burden is on me there. I think you were the one who’s making the claim that free will does exist, that there is this mysterious property of the universe,-

Actually that’s not true.

Escapes this determined or indetermined dichotomy. And then when I say that this is unintelligible to me and based on what I see to be fundamentally appeal to a law of logic, suddenly I’m the one making the claim. I’m the one with the burden who has to do the proof,-

No, the actual claim that I originally made, if you recall, was a conditional claim. I did not claim free will exists therefore, God. I claimed if you believe free will exists, it cannot exist in materialist universe. Now you say, okay, fine. It doesn’t exist in materialist universe. I don’t believe in free will.

Yes.

That’s fine. It’s totally plausible. As I said right at the top here, I’m not going to prove to you that God exists today. What I am going to say is that the vast majority of people throughout nearly all of human history have believed there is a thing called a self. It is a deciding self that makes these decisions. If you are a person who believes that you’re right, it can’t exist in your world. So I’m not saying that it does exist, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re totally right and all of this is just a series of chemical firings. That’s quite plausible. That’s fine. What I have said, and this is the argument that hasn’t yet been rebutted, is that society does require an extraordinary number of people to believe that they are capable of making decisions for the good or for the bad.

And this was a good move by Ben because Alex basically agreed with him that, yeah, if atheism is true, you don’t have free will. Alex is not a compatibilist. He’s a hard determinist who would say free will is an illusion. Now Alex tries to soften the blow by saying he lives life just fine without free will.

I hear this all the time. People say, “Look, you may say there’s no free will, but you don’t act as though that’s the case.” I suppose that I’m just confused as to what it would look like for somebody to act as if they believe there was no free will. I mean, the very argument that there is no free will that I subscribe to at least one of the various forms that it takes is a sort of [inaudible 00:07:09] view that you can do as you will. You just can’t will what you will. The very mechanism that I think is responsible for eliminating the possibility of free will, that is the drives that make people do what they do. Like I say, do exactly that, make people do what they do. They make them get out of bed in the morning.

But Ben pointed out that that might work for a highly educated individual like Alex O’Connor, but what happens when lots of regular people start to doubt that they have free will?

That may work for you. You’re a very high IQ individual who can somehow reconcile the idea of living a very purposeful life with the idea that actually there’s no purpose to anything, but for the vast majority of people, that is not actually how they live. And I would suggest that even in your daily life, you don’t get out of bed in the morning thinking, man, my biology is driving me this morning to get on the bike, have a great day, the sun is shining. That’s my biology doing this. And I don’t think that most people who live purposeful lives, even if they believe that everything they’re doing is predetermined by the world around them, by their own biology, I don’t believe they actually feel that. They have to engage in what they themselves would term an illusion in order to feel a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.

And the data backs this up, which is one of the few things I would’ve liked to seen more of from Ben’s presentation, are some of these empirical studies and what they say. So in 2008 Vohs and Schooler conducted a study which showed participants were more likely to cheat at solving a math problem if they didn’t believe in free will. Specifically, they were allowed to have a purported glitch. So they were given math problems to solve on a computer and there was an alleged glitch in the system that would show them the correct answer and they were told, oh, that’s a glitch to get rid of the correct answer, hit the space bar on your computer and please try to continue to solve the problem honestly. But those who did not believe in free will were more likely to not press the space bar and just use the correct answer when it would come up, or they would take longer to press the space bar, allowing them more time to cheat and see the correct answer.

So that was one of the issues of studies showing that people who believe they don’t have free will are more likely to engage in unethical or immoral behavior. So on the one hand, we have this problem, we have a problem of people who don’t believe in free will being more likely to justify their own bad behavior. They think to themselves, well, what does it matter since I’m just going to do what I’m going to do anyways. On the other hand, you have another problem. The problem of justifying bad behavior and saying that criminals just shouldn’t be punished because they don’t have free will, they couldn’t have chosen to do otherwise. Other studies have shown that rejecting free will leads to rejecting retributive punishment or thinking that criminals don’t really deserve to be punished. I’ve covered this before in my episode on why the left coddles criminals, but in there you can see that when you reject the idea of free will, you end up choosing to not punish people for their actions, which creates this feedback loop of society worsening and degrading over time.

So we have both of these problems to confront that make society worse if free will does not exist. So that’s why the Israeli philosopher, Saul Smilansky wrote the following in his book, Free Will and Illusion, “To put it bluntly, people as a rule ought not to be fully aware of the ultimate inevitability of what they have done for this will affect the way in which they hold themselves responsible.” So in other words, Smilansky is saying that even if free will does not exist, in order to have society run well people need to believe in free will. So even if belief in free will is false, it still is good for society for people to believe in it. But if free will does not exist because atheism is true, if you don’t have religion to ground free will, then you have these other social problems that are going to arise.

At this point, Alex tried to argue that lacking free will, well, that’s not a big deal anyways for his view, because nobody can even explain how free will works. It’s a mystery. How do we even explain it? How do we even prove it? Free will doesn’t exist. Why believe in this if it doesn’t even make sense if all? And Ben had a good reply to this. He actually used a variant of atheistic skepticism against Alex.

What you’re saying to me if it applies to atheism, I think simultaneously applies to theism as well.

How so?

An uncaused decision. I mean, what is the process by which your decision is made?

But now you’re falling into the same sort of argument that I excluded at the beginning, which was I said that the beauty of religion is that there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t understand. So I can’t explain to you how the uncaused self makes decisions.

Well then I can’t explain to you how the uncaused self exists on an atheist,-

But you have burden and I don’t meaning that,-

I don’t think that’s the case.

You do though. I mean, the simple fact is that you are the one who’s claiming that a reasonable materialist universe is the cause of all. And so if that’s the case, you do have to explain the mechanism in a way that I certainly do not. My entire philosophy rests on the positing of an entire realm of things I don’t understand in terms of their interaction with the world.

I love this approach. How many times have you heard an atheist say, “Well, I don’t know where the universe came from and I don’t have to know, or I observe the universe around me and I can just accept that the universe exists even if I cannot explain where the universe came from or how it works. I am fine not having all the answers.” I hear atheists say that a lot. Well, that’s exactly what Ben Shapiro is doing. He’s saying, I observe free will. I could have chosen to not do something. I can be held morally accountable for my actions. I just observe. It certainly appears that I have free will. I have no reason to doubt that. Even if I can’t explain how free will works, that doesn’t give me any reason to think that I should not believe in free will. I certainly seem to observe it even if I can’t explain how it works.

And that’s a perfectly fair position to hold among philosophical issues. I’ll give you another example of holding a similar position. I am justified in believing, and you’re justified in believing that you and I are conscious. We’re justified in believing that human consciousness exists even though nobody, at least within the secular philosophical world, is close to solving what is called the hard problem of consciousness. And that would be this problem. Why do material beings have immaterial personal experiences? Mental states, qualia, if you will, these immaterial experiences that are not identical to any single material state, like the neurons that are firing, the experiences that you have, the dreams, the thoughts, the visions that you have that is not identical to neurons that are firing. They each have different properties. So just because you can’t explain how consciousness works, you’re still justified in believing that you’re conscious.

Why can’t we apply the same thing to free will? And so if free will exists and atheistic explanations are not good enough to explain them, we should prefer theistic explanations even if you don’t want to go that far. And Ben was saying that he wasn’t trying to make that argument for God, though Alex said it certainly sounded like he was making that argument. He could say, at the very least, if you want free will and you recognize that atheism just can’t get the job done to explain why we have it, then you have to postulate religion to ground this important element of society. So I felt that at this point that he subtly shifted the topic they were debating. Remember originally Alex’s argument was some variant of this. Religion leads to bad answers on questions like slavery, and slavery is bad for society, so therefore religion is bad for society.

But somewhere along the way, Alex’s argument turned into this, why would God allow the Bible to have a less than perfect set of rules regarding an issue like slavery? Notice that this question is implicitly endorsing an argument and it would be an argument against the God of the Bible. If Yahweh existed, he would not allow slavery to be in the Bible even if it was regulated in a way that was superior to surrounding cultures. If Yahweh existed, the Bible would have our modern understanding of slavery. The Bible does not have a modern ethical view related to slavery. Therefore, Yahweh doesn’t exist. Alex’s argument eventually drifted into this territory.

It seems strange to me that God does seem willing to completely and utterly condemn a bunch of other practices, including by the way imaginary crimes like witchcraft. Just done away with entirely. And even if it is the case that God for some reason couldn’t just say, couldn’t even hint at the idea that maybe eventually we should be moving towards the abolition of the idea of owning human beings as private property, he just hatched,-

I think he hinted at but yeah.

I still think it’s the case that he would not permit a flat immorality. And I think you would agree with that too.

But notice that that’s not the topic of the debate. I didn’t like that the end of their discussion, it turned into Alex kind of grilling Ben on these Bible difficulties because that’s not the topic of the debate, about just these Bible difficulties and whether it shows that why would God allow these to be in the Bible? Does this show that the Bible is not divinely inspired? Even if Alex didn’t explicitly say that, that seems to be where the argument was going because an atheist defending Ben Shapiro’s position in this debate could have just said, yeah, you’re right, this was bad. But overall, religion has done more to promote the dignity of the human being than non-religion ever has.

It would’ve been helpful to say at this point, yes, thousands of years ago, the application of social institutions was a lot different in societies where survival was not a guarantee, given that the natural world and other tribes are always out trying to kill you. Harsh environments sometimes require harsh laws. And in some cases, and Ben brought this up well I think, if God is trying to encourage people to move towards a progressive understanding of the good, he’s trying to move them away from that is bad. He may not give them an ideal set of laws that they’re just going to ignore. He may give them progressively better laws to move them to a moral ideal.

Whether he can or whether he can’t. If he can’t abolish the practice, then the idea of wooing people away from a particular type of sin through a gradualist process is known throughout societies across human history. I mean, the gradualistic processes are the way that most things get done across human history. And by the way, the universal practice, unfortunately up till today in many places in the world, is in fact the extreme version of what you’re talking about. Raise everything, kill everyone. That sort of stuff unfortunately does take place even on planet earth, even in the year 2023. And so the idea of a culture arising from the Bible that not only abolished slavery on its own shores, but then abolished slavery literally everywhere else, which is what Great Britain did. That again, to separate that all from a tradition that also says that every human being is made in the image of God, right, which is the verse from Genesis or that you have to treat the stranger well, right, which is repeated more than any injunction in the Bible.

But as I said before, that would be a separate discussion about whether God exists, was he justified in allowing this kind of progressive revelation in scripture, is this what we would expect? That’s a debate about the truth of religion. That’s not what this debate was about. It’s about whether religion is good or bad for society. So at the end of the debate, I think Alex was hammering a lot on this and the Bible and religious worldviews where I think it’s important for Ben and others in this position to kind of punch back to say, yeah, but what about non-religious societies? What about what they do in trying to completely, if you’re going to talk about one example of religion that leads to something bad, what about other examples of non-religion lead to really horrible evils stamping out freedom and dignity all in the name of the greater good.

In fact, the Protestant apologist, Gavin Ortlund has a really good commentary on the questions that were raised in this debate, and he goes through that commentary with a good discussion of one of the largest non-religious states in the 20th century, the Soviet Union, that he uses an example. So I’ll link to his video below. Go and check that out. At this point also, when I would point out the problems of not having religion to ground social norms, I would borrow the approach that Andrew Wilson used in his debate with Matt Dillahunty. That was on a similar topic, what is the better foundation for ethics Christianity or secularism? In that debate, Matt Dillahunty said that Christianity is bad for ethics because of what it says about LGBT issues. And Wilson used the same argument. He said, secularism is bad for society, bad for ethics because it leads to the insanity of transgender ideology.

So once again, I did another episode about that as well. Click that link in the discussion below. So what I would say is that if atheists are going to bring up issues that do require nuance in their discussion, like the role of slavery in the Bible and what took place thousands of years ago, and that’s being used to compare a religious foundation of society to a non-religious foundation of society, then it’s quite fair to also bring up the tough issues that arise from the non-religious perspective. Yeah, you’re going to bring up slavery and things that happened thousands of years ago. Then religious people, is fair for them to bring up what happens with atheistic totalitarianism in the 20th century or atheistic sexual insanity in the 21st century to show there are far worse problems happening right now versus what religion has done to inspire moral progress among people.

But once again, there’s lots of suggestions that could be given. Overall, I think Ben did a very good job. I have done lots of debates. I’ve been in positions where I wish that I had said something that I didn’t say or that I did not say something that I did say. It’s a lot tougher when you’re in the hot seat. But overall, I think Ben Shapiro really showed good chops and understanding philosophy and logical and ethical argument. For example, this came up when Alex said he was an emotivist when it comes to morality. Ben showed that he had an awareness of that even though he quickly moved on from it.

The idea of right and wrong. So there are many problems with emotivism. Alasdair MacIntyre does a good job sort of breaking down the problems with the emotivism, but the sort of idea that there have to be certain moral absolutes that are beyond contention, and those moral absolutes have to be universally accepted. You can ground that, I suppose, in a sort of descriptive universe. The problem is that to go back to your example, which again, I think is a really interesting one, if a man comes to kill me, I think the real question of religion versus non-religion in the utility sphere here is, is it more likely that a man is going to come to kill you being a devotee of a religion that says that he must kill you, or is it more likely that a man is going to kill you out of self-interest because he is not a devotee of a God who says that killing is wrong?

However, I would’ve pointed out that Alex’s emotivism is contradictory in the moral arguments he makes in this debate and other debates. Emotivism is the theory that morality does not refer to objective truths like no one should commit murder. So when we say murder is wrong, that does not refer to the objective truth. No one ought to commit murder, for example. Instead, the statement Murder is wrong, what it means is murder makes me feel bad inside, murder gives me negative emotions. It doesn’t refer to an objective state of affairs. It just talks about subjective emotions I have when I think about other behaviors. But emotivism has really big problems even beyond the problem that most people think that morality is objective, that emotivism can’t explain that. For example, if emotivism is true, you cannot engage in moral argument. For example, if murder is wrong, then it is wrong for Frank to murder Bob.

An emotivist can’t reason that way because it goes like this. If murder makes me feel yucky, then murdering Bob makes Frank feel yucky. If you translate those terms, that’s what that would mean under emotivism. But I can’t know that just because murder makes me feel yucky, it’s going to make Frank or Bob feel yucky. But the wrongness of murder does not relate to how it makes us feel on the inside or our emotions. It relates to things like the natural law, the intrinsic dignity of human beings or overarching objective moral principles that everyone is bound by. I also noticed in Alex’s conversations that when he presses people about their moral inconsistencies, whether he means to or not, this really undermines his own emotivist foundation for ethics, like when he presses Destiny in this exchange on animal rights.

I’ve heard you say essentially there is such thing as moral consideration or moral worth. It just is something that sort of doesn’t apply to non-human animals.

Yeah, they’re basically philosophical zombies to me, I guess.

Is that true of every animal that isn’t a human being? So like chimpanzees, dolphins.

Yeah, I guess. Yeah.

The problem that I have with your view is that it’s sort of like an on-off switch. All life on earth exists on a scale of gradation. No species has ever given birth to a new species. It has to be a point at which you just sort of arbitrarily say the sort of apeish hominid on this side of the line, I do not care. Inanimate object. Do whatever you want with them. And the identical creature on the other side of the line, human being sentient, care about, want to sort of hold people at gunpoint to make sure that they don’t get cold at night. That to me seems like an entirely untenable position.

Or in this exchange on war.

Where there are these conflicts and you say this would’ve essentially evolve into violent conflict. Do you think there’s a sense in which you can say either side is right in that conflict imagining, for example, some version of World War II where the fighting was based on some fundamental value conflict about what you’re allowed to do to other human beings, violent conflict? Is there a sense in which we can say that one side is correct there,-

I feel like to say one side is correct, I feel like you would have to be able to ultimately resolve some moral statement down to some truth value. There would have to be some moral facts to speak of, and I don’t really believe in stuff like that. So I wouldn’t be able to say at the end of the day that it’s right to not want to enslave somebody or it’s right to not want to murder somebody. I don’t know if I believe that any of those moral statements ultimately reduce to some fact of the matter. So no, I don’t know if I could ever say there’s a right or wrong side in any given conflict like that. There’s just the values that I purport to have and hopefully other people around me have them, and if some people are so incompatible and we can’t find common grounds on it, then at some point it’s probably going to come to some sort of violent conflict to resolve the difference.

In these exchanges, it seems like he’s really appealing to an overarching moral fact that is necessary in order to drive out these moral inconsistencies. An atheist who thinks moral statements are just reflections of emotions cannot objectively ground these kinds of moral statements so that they have a universal truth quality about them. Instead, these moral statements just reflect how different people feel at different times and what’s wrong with people having different emotional responses at different times? But of course, if you go down that route, you can’t get a system of ultimately grounding these overarching moral principles like the wrongness of killing innocent human beings, these untouchable moral principles, even if you have to historically develop your application of the principles in concrete situations like war, the death penalty, things like that. And Ben brings up a good point that if you want a society of function, you need to have these sorts of untouchable moral principles that can’t be gain by things like majority opinion or subjectivism or other things like that.

Let’s say that you are master of a society and you get to build that society. One of the things that presumably you are going to do is you’re going to build in certain things that are untouchable. Right. There’s going to be certain moral precepts that you’re going to build in that are untouchable, and how are you going to justify those things to people such that they’re going to believe you? You’re going to either have to use compulsion, or you’re going to have to use some sort of other argument that is so strong that they are going to overweigh their, I mean, there’s a reason why Voltaire suggested he didn’t believe in God, but he hoped that his maid did so she wouldn’t steal the silverware.

All right. Well, thank you guys so much for stopping by the podcast today and hearing my thoughts on this. I would love to make a trip to the UK either this summer or sometime in the future. Maybe we could set up a debate with Alex or Stephen Woodford of Rationality Rules or other British critics of Catholicism, who knows. If you’d like to help us set up projects like that, we definitely need a lot of funding to do those things. So if you could support us at trenthornpodcast.com, I would really appreciate that. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very pleasant day.

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