Can society survive without God? Ben Shapiro and Alex O’Connor clash over atheism, morality and the Bible

What begins as a discussion about whether religion is good for society rapidly becomes something much bigger.

Does free will exist? Can atheists really believe in objective morality? Did Christianity create the values of the modern West, or did many of those values emerge in opposition to religion? And what happens when the Bible itself appears to permit behaviour almost everyone today believes is profoundly wrong?

Within minutes, Shapiro and O’Connor are challenging some of each other’s most basic assumptions.

Ben Shapiro: atheism has a problem with free will

Shapiro starts somewhere unexpected. He does not claim he can prove God exists.

Instead, he turns the challenge around.

His argument is that atheists routinely depend upon concepts such as free will, truth, reason, morality and purpose that are much harder to explain within a purely material universe.

If human beings are ultimately the product of genetics, environment and physical processes, Shapiro asks, in what meaningful sense are we actually choosing anything?

O’Connor surprises him by conceding the point, at least partly:

“If there is no God, there is no free will.”

But O’Connor’s solution is not God.

It is to abandon free will.

He argues that human beings may simply be extraordinarily convincing biological machines, experiencing the sensation of choice without possessing ultimate control over what they choose.

Shapiro pushes back. If that is really true, he asks, what happens to responsibility, purpose and the foundations on which a functioning society depends?

O’Connor’s response produces one of the sharpest lines of the entire encounter. If free will is an illusion but society needs people to believe in it, he asks:

“Who’s relying on the delusion here?”

The exchange captures what makes this conversation so compelling. Neither man takes the obvious route, and neither allows the other an easy escape.

Can you have morality without God?

Then the debate becomes even more uncomfortable.

Asked what ultimately makes something good or evil, O’Connor admits:

“I don’t have a good answer to that question.”

He is suspicious that objective moral goodness exists at all.

But he thinks religion faces an even more dangerous problem.

Imagine someone wants to kill you. If their motivation is ordinary human self-interest, O’Connor argues, laws, social pressure or consequences might restrain them.

But what if they believe God has commanded them to do it?

For O’Connor, grounding morality in divine authority can combine ordinary human fallibility with absolute religious certainty.

He calls it:

“A dangerous cocktail that we drink at our peril.”

Shapiro responds that O’Connor has the problem backwards.

Human beings have been killing each other for territory, revenge, power and resources throughout history. Religion, Shapiro argues, has often provided precisely the opposite force: a moral authority capable of telling us there are things we must not do even when doing them would benefit us personally.

His conclusion is stark:

“I think that a society that does not have these moral absolutes is in deep trouble.”

So which danger is greater?

Religion giving bad ideas divine authority, or a society losing any authority higher than individual preference?

That question drives the debate into some of its fiercest territory.

Did Christianity make the West, or hold it back?

Shapiro argues that Western assumptions about human dignity, equal justice and moral obligation grew from a fundamentally biblical and Judeo-Christian inheritance.

And he believes something is happening as that inheritance disappears.

Religious institutions once provided friendship, marriage, community, moral formation and a shared purpose, he says, but secular societies have struggled to build anything comparable in their place.

His claim is one of the defining ideas of the whole conversation:

“There really has been nothing to replace it.”

O’Connor is unconvinced.

Yes, Christianity profoundly shaped Western civilisation, he accepts. But does Christianity therefore deserve credit for everything the West eventually became?

What about women’s rights? Slavery? Science? Sexual ethics?

O’Connor challenges the increasingly popular claim that movements such as abolition, modern human rights and the scientific revolution are essentially fruits of Christianity.

Many of those developments, he argues, involved people fighting religious authorities or challenging interpretations of Scripture.

Shapiro fires back with William Wilberforce, Isaac Newton and generations of religious thinkers who understood their pursuit of moral and scientific truth as flowing directly from belief in God.

Neither argument is easily dismissed.

And then O’Connor opens the Bible.

The moment the debate turns to biblical slavery

This is perhaps the most charged section of the conversation.

O’Connor confronts Shapiro directly with difficult passages concerning slavery and warfare in the Hebrew Bible.

Finally he asks him plainly whether owning another human being under the conditions described in the biblical text was immoral.

Shapiro answers:

“Yes.”

O’Connor immediately presses the implication.

If slavery was wrong then as well as now, why would God permit it and provide laws regulating it?

Shapiro appeals to the long Jewish tradition of interpretation and to the idea that biblical law sometimes works gradually within an already-existing ancient culture rather than instantly replacing it.

O’Connor sees a serious inconsistency.

Religion was supposed to supply the timeless moral standard that secularism lacked.

Now, he says, Shapiro appears to be arguing that biblical morality itself must be understood partly in relation to its historical moment.

His challenge lands:

“Who’s the moral relativist now?”

What follows is one of the debate’s most fascinating exchanges, ranging through Hebrew slavery laws, ancient Near Eastern culture, Talmudic interpretation and whether divine revelation could legitimately accommodate a deeply flawed society while moving it towards something better.

And it is worth hearing the argument in full before deciding who has the stronger case.

But O’Connor has one final problem for Shapiro

Near the end, Alex O’Connor grants Shapiro almost everything for the sake of argument.

Suppose religion really is good for society.

Suppose it creates stronger families, greater social cohesion and institutions that secular culture cannot successfully replace.

There is still a problem.

What if you simply do not believe it is true?

O’Connor asks what an atheist is supposed to do with a religion they regard as false but socially beneficial.

Pretend?

Raise their children to believe something they themselves reject?

“You can’t just choose to believe in God,” he argues.

That question takes the conversation somewhere surprisingly personal.

Shapiro’s answer is not that sceptics should fake faith. Instead, he suggests that genuine religious belief itself contains uncertainty, doubt and a “leap of faith”, and that parents who are unsure can honestly present both religious and atheist arguments to their children rather than pretending certainty.

But Shapiro finishes with a warning.

Individual advice to “do the right thing”, he argues, cannot easily replace communities that repeatedly form people into particular ways of living.

Remove God as the “capstone” from those institutions, he says, and eventually:

“The whole institution tends to fall apart.”

Is he right?

Or is O’Connor right that human beings now need to find ways of building community, morality and meaning without believing propositions they can no longer accept as true?

That is the unresolved question beneath this remarkable encounter.

And it is why the debate reaches far beyond the usual argument about whether God exists.

Watch Ben Shapiro and Alex O’Connor debate: Is religion good or bad for society?

Whatever your starting point, the more interesting question may be the one neither side can easily answer:

If the West really is losing its religion, what exactly is going to take its place?