You’ve seen the thumbnails. Someone frozen mid-sentence, mouth half open, a red arrow pointing at their face. Across the bottom, in capitals: FEMINIST DESTROYED. A few years earlier, the same kind of channel ran the same kind of title about a different target: CREATIONIST OWNED. Sometimes they added “with facts and logic,” in case you wondered about the weapon.
The title tells you what’s being sold, and it isn’t an Argument. Nobody clicks “DESTROYED” to find out what the other side actually believes. They click for the feeling of watching it lose.
Fair enough. Everyone likes that feeling, and every side has its own version of the thumbnail: the apologist who demolishes an atheist, the pundit who owns a student. That doesn’t give anyone a free pass. But it isn’t my charge either.
The standard on the tin
A partisan dunk channel isn’t failing anything by its own lights. It promises a win and delivers one.
The sceptic movement promised something else. Its whole identity was epistemic: follow the evidence, don’t believe things because they’re comforting, be the one who checks. That’s the standard I’m holding it to, and I didn’t invent it. It’s the one printed on the tin.
Everyone here gets judged by their own standard. Shallow apologetics fails a stated commitment to truth. Shallow anti-religion fails a stated commitment to evidence. And shallow anti-feminism, much of it from the same crowd, fails the commitment its authors had spent a decade making, loudly, about religion.
Weak from the start
I spent years in those circles and called myself an atheist for most of them. What I rarely saw was anyone stating a religious Argument at its strongest before taking it apart. The debunk came first, and the Argument was whichever version made the debunk work.
That isn’t just my impression. The movement’s flagship book, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, drew some of its harshest reviews from people with no interest in defending God. Thomas Nagel, a philosopher who has written that he wants Atheism to be true, reviewed it as an uneven mix that included “amateur philosophy,” from a writer working mostly outside his scientific expertise. Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology who spent his career defending evolution against creationists, said the book made him ashamed to be an atheist and that its Author would fail an introductory philosophy course. He added that, for the first time in his life, he felt sorry for the ontological Argument. Having written about that Argument myself, I know the feeling.
From outside the atheist camp, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton opened his review in the London Review of Books by comparing the experience to hearing someone lecture on biology whose entire knowledge of the subject came from a bird-spotter’s guide.
The movement even had a ready-made answer to criticism like this: the courtier’s reply, coined by the biologist PZ Myers. Point out that a critic of religion has misdescribed the theology, and you’re cast as a courtier insisting nobody may call the emperor naked until they’ve studied his tailoring. It’s a clever line. It also turns “you haven’t understood the Argument” into proof that there’s no Argument to understand.
In fairness, this isn’t what Atheism looks like when it’s done well. J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism, William Rowe’s evidential Argument from evil (which I’ve written about) and Graham Oppy’s Arguing about Gods all state the other side’s case carefully before arguing against it. The popular movement had its own best people. It routed around them.
Same moves, new target
Now watch the same habits pointed somewhere else. I’ll take two examples, and they form a chain: each stops a step too soon, and the next picks up only to stop again.
The pay gap, “debunked”
The debunk goes like this: control for hours worked, experience and choice of job, and the gap shrinks to a few percent. What’s left is “choices.” Feminist destroyed.
But a control doesn’t answer a question. It moves it. Why do women work fewer paid hours, take career breaks, pick the jobs with predictable schedules? That’s the interesting part, and it’s exactly where the video ends.
It’s also where the real research begins. Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics partly for showing that most of today’s gap is between men and women doing the same job, and that much of it appears after the first child is born. The “choices” being controlled away are, in large part, what a first child does to her career and not to his. The debunk stops precisely where a Nobel prize started.
“Women are just worse at some subjects”
Ask why women end up in different jobs and the standard answer is waiting: they’re worse at some subjects, or at least less suited to them. Less mathematical, more interested in people than things. It usually comes with a statistic about engineering enrolment or average test scores.
Anyone who argued against religion in the New Atheist years should recognise the move. The God Delusion passes along a Mensa magazine write-up reporting that nearly all of 43 studies since 1927 found religious belief falling as intelligence or education rose. A statistic about a group, offered in an Argument about whether the group is right.
The first stop is at the data. A gap exists; therefore, it’s innate; therefore, it’s fixed. Each “therefore” does work the data never did. If women’s place in a field were set by biology, it shouldn’t swing within a generation. It swings. Women’s share of US computer science was climbing into the early eighties; then, from about 1984, it stalled and fell, while women kept gaining ground in medicine, law and the physical sciences. Genes don’t move on that timescale. Culture does. For broader evidence, see Cordelia Fine’s book so that I won’t repeat it here. The short version: “there’s a difference” and “it’s innate and fixed” are separate claims, and the Argument only ever checks the first.
The second stop is at the conclusion, and it matters more. Suppose the gap were real, innate and permanent. What would follow? Not what the video needs. Equal rights never rested on equal ability; we don’t hand out votes by test score. A statistic about women isn’t an Argument about their rights, any more than a statistic about believers is an Argument about God.
John Stuart Mill made both halves of this point in The Subjection of Women in 1869. We can’t know what women are naturally capable of, he argued, while they’ve never been free to find out. And if there’s something they really can’t do, a rule against it is pointless: “What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing.” The reply was in print almost 150 years before the videos.
I know how “even if” sounds from someone who wrote a whole post about arguments that can’t lose. “Whatever the data says, I’m right” is exactly the immunity I criticised there. The difference is the kind of claim. Equality is a claim about how people should be treated, not a prediction about test scores. Averages were never the right kind of evidence for or against it, just as a country’s average height says nothing about whether its citizens should vote.
It’s also worth being clear about what this doesn’t settle. The better-read version of the Argument isn’t against equal rights. It concedes them and argues instead that differences in interests or ability explain part of the gap in, say, engineering, so not every gap is evidence of bias. That’s a real Argument, and “equality doesn’t depend on ability” doesn’t answer it. The first stop does: you have to look at why the gap exists, which is the part the video skips. Each stop answers a different version of the Argument, which is why you need both.
Believers do it too
None of this is special to atheists, and a post that pretended otherwise would be doing the thing it describes.
“Atheists don’t really disbelieve; they just want to sin.” If you’ve ever called yourself an atheist in public, you’ve heard some version of it. It skips the Argument and goes straight for the heart, and there’s no answering it, because any denial is exactly what a sinner would say. It’s lazy apologetics in the same way the thumbnails are lazy scepticism.
It’s also the move I’m most tempted to make here. “They never cared about the arguments; they just wanted to win” has the same shape, pointed the other way. It was no better aimed at atheists, and it doesn’t improve by being aimed at them.
Where the search stopped
What I can do instead is describe something you can see. The rationalist community, a near neighbour of the scene I’m writing about, has a name for it: motivated stopping. You stop searching when you reach an answer you like, and keep going when you don’t.
It shows up as uneven standards. The same person who demands peer-reviewed evidence for every claim a believer makes will accept a ninety-second clip on the pay gap as settled. Same person, same stated standards, applied unevenly, and the unevenness tracks which answer he wanted. You don’t need to read anyone’s heart to see that. You only need to notice where the search ended.
Both times, the popular version skipped the strongest work on its own side: Mackie and Oppy in one case; in the other, the careful research on sex differences, including researchers who’d have agreed with some of its conclusions. Not because that work was hidden, but because the strong version doesn’t make a watchable video.
A scene built around checking things stopped checking, and the format paid better for stopping.
Religion was only the first target. The habit didn’t care much what it was pointed at, and my manosphere series is about where it went next.
Written with AI assistance.
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