YouTube apologetics has started up again—and it has not improved

Many years ago, evangelicals wielded apologetics as weapons against their worst enemies: atheists. They lost not only their battles but the entire Keyboard Wars themselves, then retreated into their current walled-garden enclaves on social media. But a community member noticed a video that might just mark the return of those heady days. Not only does it use the exact same apologetics, but it also deploys the same dishonest tactics that evangelicals made famous then!

Let’s dive into this video, debunk it, and see why it might mark a resurgence of the Great Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars of 2005-2015.

(This post first went live on Patreon on 5/23/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! Also, here’s a previous post touching on the Keyboard Wars! Discord link for Movie Night and Alpha Course watch parties.)

SITUATION REPORT: YouTube apologetics idiots are retreading some very old tires indeed

RuslanKD is a basic-tier clickbait-peddling outrage merchant on YouTube. His schtick centers around the various conspiracy theories infesting right-wing evangelicalism to his roughly 770k marks followers. Recent videos touch on Justin Bieber’s “cult” pastor, “proof that Hollywood is a huge secret cult,” and various accusations of CIA cover-ups.

A couple of days ago, he dropped a short video on YouTube called “Atheists don’t want you to see this…” It’s only about a minute long, but it packs a lot of bullshit into its runtime, so here it is (along with a local archived copy):

This is the state of modern evangelical apologetics, folks. This is the very best these hucksters can do, and it still fails on every single level. We’ll discuss it today, and also we’ll touch on evangelicals’ very short memories for utter defeat and failure. Cuz see, we’ve been here before.

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure: The Great Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars

About 20 years ago, evangelicals started the Great Keyboard Wars. Fueled by PROOF YES PROOF apologetics routines and bottom-tier zinger attempts, they fought their newest declared enemy: atheists. To do that, they’d drop into secular spaces and start fights, make dumb apologetics videos, lie their asses off about miracle claims, and invite atheists to debate their favorite apologists.

The Keyboard Wars ended in summer 2015 with the publication of the Pew Research Religious Landscape Study. That study marked a final and decisive defeat for evangelicals. They were never the same afterward. Their entire approach to internet usage changed as a result—they began clustering in far more insular, protective communities that they felt were safe from mean ole atheists barging in and wrecking things.

Every single point RuslanKD raises in his short video comes straight from the Keyboard Wars. It’s like a time capsule of dishonest apologetics sleight of hand. And so whenever I can, I will use sources from that era to debunk them.

First question: Why wouldn’t atheists want Christians to see this doofus’ apologetics video?

The video is clickbait-titled: “Atheists don’t want you to see this.”

And immediately, I ask: Really? Which atheists told him so? Did he take a poll, perhaps?

Of course, he’s just trying to make atheists look conspiratorial, like they have something to hide. The video’s title functions as the first part of his strawman argument.

In reality, I don’t think atheists as a general group want to censor religious bullshit. Why on earth would atheists be opposed to Christians being exposed to obvious lies, willful ignorance, and strawmanning? This guy’s all but doing atheism a public service here!

I say that because really, the best way to deconvert a Christian might be to confront them with the terrible state of apologetics. I’ve known a good many very smart ex-Christians who deconverted on that basis alone. One guy even wrote an all-singing, all-dancing apologetics guide for evangelicals, then deconverted instantly when he suddenly realized he’d only compiled a long list of substitutes for real evidence.

So personally, I think every Christian alive should stuff themselves full of apologetics. Yes. And then, they should trot right up to some atheists, parrot what they’ve learned, and expect everyone in earshot to drop to their knees and recite the Sinner’s Prayer.

I’d love to see an entirely new generation make contact with these apologetics tactics. I’m looking forward to the results. They never got old during the Keyboard Wars!

Prepare yourselves, atheists, because this guy’s apologetics zingers will fry your mind straight to belief!

Here, according to RuslanKD, are the four miracles every atheist apparently believes:

1. “Everything coming from nothing”
2. “Order from chaos” (and he references the “fine-tuned universe”)
3. “Life from nonlife”
4. “Consciousness from mindless matter”

Then, his sidekick intones all wide-eyed, “And we’ll call those… MIRACLES. The atheist worldview doesn’t allow them to have miracles!” Like he feels so sowwy for the poor widdle atheists, sneef sneef. Aww, poor widdle atheists, they don’t even get meerkuls!

In response, RuslanKD observes that it’s totally mean of atheists to deny Christians’ miracle claims when lookie here! Atheists totes believe in miracles themselves! Checkmate!

At the end of the video, RuslanKD attributes his zinger attempts to Glen Scrivener, an apologist from the UK. And yeah, that tracks. Among other venues, Scrivener has shown up at The Gospel Coalition (TGC). He has a major boner for C.S. Lewis, like TGC guys are apparently required to have by law. I’m guessing Scrivener is not educated in biology or astrophysics, either, especially if he’s teaching his gullible followers these ancient zinger attempts.

Seriously, we debunked all of these points before broadband internet became commonplace. And yet they just keep popping up again.

So let’s talk about them again!

A preshow warmup: One of the best apologetics debates to come out of the Keyboard Wars

Here’s a fantastic debate from March 2014 between William Lane Craig (who is not a scientist in any sense of the word) and Sean Carroll (who very much is):

This debate was such a definitive pecker-slap to apologetics that it reverberated across evangelical Christianity itself. Between this and the “Ham on Nye” debate that took place one month earlier (February 2014), the entire religious-debate trend ended. It was a decisive victory for atheists.

I include it here because it touches on all four of RuslanKD’s claims. But we’ll still discuss them, of course!

Miracle claim #1: “Everything coming from nothing”

Christians, of course, believe that their god created the universe out of nothing. So naturally, they want to paint atheists as believing the same exact thing. This is an instance of the Law of Conservation of Worship:

The Law explains why so many evangelicals think atheists practice Christianity, but with different labels: Instead of church, atheists go to science lectures; as Christians revere their Bibles, atheists clutch Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to their hearts.

So if Christians believe the universe came from “nothing,” then obviously their enemies think the same thing! Just atheists must attribute that creation differently—and wrongly, obviously. So in essence, RuslanKD is mocking atheists for holding the same exact wackadoo beliefs he does.

Yes, apologists do frequently piss on their own shoes like this.

The best way to debunk this talking point is to observe that not knowing exactly how something happened does not mean a magical wizard must have made it happen. The current working models of the universe’s origins certainly include room for “nothing” at the beginning. A 2010 book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, makes that exact point. Here is an excerpt from it about the “theory of everything,” which the authors call “M-theory”:

According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. [. . .] Most of these states will be quite unlike the universe we observe and quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Thus our presence selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

So yes, something can come from nothing. However, no gods need to have been involved at all with that origin story. Indeed, no evidence has ever surfaced of any who might have been. Not one single current scientific model relies on ghosts or fairies or leprechauns either, and I don’t think any ever will.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for apologists to learn about cosmology and astrophysics. People like RuslanKD get their income from gullible Christians who know nothing about real science.

Miracle claim #2: “Order from chaos” and a “fine-tuned universe”

You know how hoarders’ houses are full of junk, but gradually the inhabitants work out a way to get around it? The entire place might be packed floor to ceiling, but over time they tread down narrow paths through it all so they can get to the bathroom and sit down by their computers and TVs. Given eons, they might even crush down the junk to fit more into it, and more, and more—until they’ve made their own ziggurat of condensed trash.

That’s how order comes out of chaos: time + gravity. Stars explode, flinging matter near and far, and the gravity from other stars brings them close and packs them together again like hoarders’ junk. Or collisions between the dust and rocks themselves draw enough of the junk together to start exerting their own gravity, which draws in more and more matter on its own. Some of it even ignites and turns into stars again!

The story of our galaxy is a beautiful one of constant upheaval and change and renewal. Over countless eons, slow but inevitable forces draw a symphony of order out of all that chaos.

None of this process requires divine intervention to happen.

But those same forces make our universe incredibly, perhaps even almost uniquely hostile to life. In fact, so far we’ve only for-sure found life on one tiny speck of a planet: Earth. I asked Grok to work out the percentage of the universe that supports life, and it almost laughed at me before offering an educated guess of “10⁻¹⁰% or less” of the universe by volume. That’s 0.0000000001% of the universe. Heck, 95% of it is just dark matter. We don’t know exactly what dark matter is yet, but it’s probably not full of butterflies and puppies.

If the Christian god fine-tuned the universe for Earth-style life, then all one can say is that he’s wasteful on a scale that even the Southern Baptist Convention can’t imagine—and that he really, really likes dark matter, radiation, and rocks As Sean Carroll puts it in that 2014 debate (at around 1:06:00):

There’s absolutely no reason why the universe would look like this if the fine-tunings were put there in order for life to exist. I’m not saying there’s not fine-tunings. I’m saying they’re not there for life.

It makes way more sense for life to have evolved around and in response to the constraints of our universe, just as a puddle of water takes the shape of the dip in the ground it occupies.

Miracle claim #3: “Life from nonlife”

This claim, of course, centers around abiogenesis, which means life arising from non-living chemicals. It has nothing to do with the universe as a whole, only with life on Earth. RuslanKD refers to abiogenesis as a “miracle” to make it sound as absurd as his god sculpting Adam out of dirt and then zapping life into the husk. However, the actual evidence points to abiogenesis being perfectly natural.

In the 1950s, scientists discovered that it actually isn’t hard to get life from nonlife. It’s just chemistry. Put a bunch of the right chemicals together and play enough ZAP ME, DADDY with the storms above, and it’ll happen.

More recently, Jack Szostak won the 2009 Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of how telomeres protect chromosomes’ integrity. He’s really big on self-replicating RNA, too. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, he created the first artificial chromosome in yeast. He even recently co-authored a book about how life arose. You’ll be shocked to know that he does not suggest even once that life arose from wishes from genies or cantrips from pixies.

Yeah, this is ancient Keyboard Wars territory. In all of these claims, RuslanKD assumes that whatever he doesn’t understand must be his god’s doing. I’m sure he doesn’t think his god makes eclipses happen, or that demons cause diseases like leprosy and epilepsy. Instead, RuslanKD is dealing here with the extreme fringes of human knowledge—because he must. Everything else is done and dusted, scientifically speaking. In the 2000s, PZ Myers had a good time with RuslanKD’s “god of the gaps” style of apologetics. And I see he’s still dealing with it in 2025.

Miracle claim #4: “Consciousness from mindless matter”

Here, RuslanKD tries to make human consciousness into a miracle. Out of everything he’s tried to zing with today, though, this one might be the dumbest. Here’s what he says is a total miracle:

The brain producing self-awareness, emotions, and thoughts.

This is what happens when you get your science news from apologists!

In 1992, John Eccles wrote extensively about the evolution of consciousness. His evolutionary model tied consciousness to the neocortex, which evolved in the first mammals 200 million years ago. Not long after in 1998, Euan Macphail tied human sapience to our ability to use language. Even one of the OG “New Atheist” horsemen, Daniel Dennett, wrote a book on the topic in 1998. Here’s a humongous 2007 Cambridge book about it, too.

Just since 2021, tons of books and papers describe the evolutionary processes that have led to human sapience. None of this is a mystery that will just never be solved except through Jesus-magic.

Instead, scientists have produced some tantalizing models to explain the data we’ve amassed about consciousness and sapience. No gods are required for any of it.

Apologetics and the strawman: A love story

What RuslanKD reveals in this video about his own beliefs is telling—and damning to his own claims. He portrays atheists as dogma-driven weirdos who just won’t admit that what they embrace on faith is divinely miraculous. Christians like himself, however, are the superior rationalists who see miracles and call them what they are.

As if.

RuslanKD doesn’t understand any of the real answers to this “just askin’ questions” jerkoff video. He doesn’t even understand the underpinnings of the scientific method itself. That’s why he thinks science operates just like his religion. In his religion, Christians offer wild, ignorant guesses about stuff all the time. They have no evidence whatsoever to support their claims, only an insistence that their interpretation of the Bible is correct and everyone else’s is wrong.

When differences of opinion arise in RuslanKD’s religion, as they inevitably must in the absence of an objectively-true sourcebook, the winner of the argument is just whatever side agrees with the judging Christian.

But apologists’ sky-castles explode on impact with the truth. That’s why Creationists stopped doing real-world research. Nowadays, they just attack anyone who disagrees with them. (Their targets include even Christians—both back in the 2010s and in the present day.)

Apologists avoid unpleasant confrontations with the truth with strawman arguments. It’s a lot easier to knock down a strawman than to contend with the real thing. That’s why apologists—from the amateur ranks like RuslanKD up to the professionals like Scrivener—make such liberal use of this tactic. They can’t stand against a real live scientist (though RuslanKD positions his enemies as atheists, not scientists—and I’m not at all sure he even understands there’s a difference). But that’s okay, because they get their reward from feeling superior to their enemies, not from adequately overcoming any objections to their apologetics claims.

Much Jesusy! VERY loving!

A strawman won’t ever push back by asking what evidence RuslanKD has for his own claims, either.

Apologetics and the “Last Ideology Standing”

All of these zinger attempts present questions about the origins of the universe, life on Earth, and consciousness. Evangelicals like to imagine their god created absolutely everything out of nothing, especially those three things. Alas, they have no evidence for any of these claims. However, they don’t want to just take these beliefs on pure faith, even if Jesus himself said (in John 20:29) that that’s the best way to be a Christian. Even Christians like RuslanKD realize it’s dumb to believe something important for no good reason, so this how they get around having no good reasons.

Instead of dwelling overmuch on their lack of evidence, Christians like RuslanKD attack their strawman as hard as they can to make atheism—again, their big enemy of the hour—look stupid. If they can make atheism look super-duper stupid, then that will, they hope, make Christianity look better. With success, Christianity becomes the Last Ideology Standing. People will have no choice but to believe! Hooray Team Jesus!

Fortunately for them, none of this process requires them to pony up evidence for their claims. By now, they’ve utterly rejected even the need for any.

The burden of proof forever eludes apologetics for a reason

As a field, apologetics would not exist if Christians had evidence to support their claims. They use apologetics in place of supporting evidence. If they had real evidence, they’d immediately stop using apologetics. They wouldn’t need it anymore.

But at its very best, at the tippy-top of its potential—and here I mainly mean the more robust Jesuit-style stuff—the best apologetics can only make Christianity sound a little less preposterous and evil. None of it rises to a compelling reason to accept Christian claims.

Nothing an evangelical can produce comes even close to that level, however. Their apologetics can be rejected out of the gate for containing logical fallacies, tribalistic chest-thumping, and blatant emotional manipulation. It’s cowardly and dishonest, especially from someone like Scrivener or RuslanKD who style themselves Christian leaders.

Not that I ever expected anything else.

But don’t get me wrong: I’m so happy to see this video

I’m delighted that these tired old apologetics arguments are making a return. When I saw RuslanKD’s video, I laughed like a kid on Christmas morning. Here’s why:

For a couple of years now, I’ve been seeing today’s Christian doubters voicing the same questions I heard in the early 2010s. Research may say one thing, but on the ground I was seeing something else. And I had a feeling that apologist hucksters would sense sales opportunities on the breeze and leap into action in response to demand on the ground.

But I wasn’t seeing it. I was starting to wonder why.

Now, finally, the other shoe has dropped. We’ve zapped back to 2005.

Begun, the Second Keyboard Wars have.

But you’ll know this grift train has started running again if Ray Comfort starts pushing out retreads of his old stuff.

Wait. Hold on.

Hold up. Wait just a second.

Let me check Comfort’s YouTube channel…

Way of the Master is returning.

Oh my god. It’s happening! Yes, it’s really happening!

I. Am. So. Excited.

NEXT UP: Somehow, Calvinists have figured out a way to make Calvinism even worse. It’s called the “Moses Model,” and we’ll check it out next time. See you soon! <3

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