Rationality Rules' Terrible Take on AI and Christianity

Bad historical arguments, bad current arguments, Woodford is scraping the barrel for mindless anti-Christian content.

Stephen Woodford, credit:YouTube

Seven or eight years ago Stephen Woodford, aka ‘Rationality Rules,’ was making similar YouTube content to Alex O’Connor. Clinging on the departing coat tails of New Atheism they were both making videos about how belief in God was stupid with various punchy titles and takedowns, Woodford pumping out videos “debunking” stuff that didn’t really need debunking, but that hoovered up the views of younger atheist audiences happy to have their worldview handed to them with some confirmation bias.

Many years later, Alex O’Connor has shifted towards a more mature approach to discourse and disagreement, hosting conversations with believers and moving from New Atheism to a kind of respectable agnosticism, and as such has found a bigger audience, a platform alongside other significant names and a seat at much more interesting discussion tables.

Woodford though has stayed largely in his lane and is still banging the predictable headlines: “He Thought He DESTROYED Atheist Arguments—BACKFIRES SPECTACULARLY!,” “Christian 'EXPERT' Called Out by REAL Experts,” and so on ad nauseum. Worst of all though perhaps is a recent video in which Woodford claims “the End of Christianity is Sooner Than You Think,” for reasons that involve a take so painfully ridiculous it requires some comment and some putting right, especially since the video itself stands as pretty clear proof that Woodford and his fellow atheists are as “religious” in the pejorative sense as any actual believer, they’re just too willfully blind to care.

Woodford claims in this video that the rise of artificial intelligence is going to bring about the end of Christianity. Why? Because it makes it now impossible to “lock down information,” and so all of the religious people out there who are being manipulated by the wicked powers of religion will soon be able to find out it’s nonsense because AI will make it impossible for religious authorities to control their texts and their interpretations of them.

He presents a narrative of Christian history in which the church, apparently, is engaging in guarding its texts in “layers of linguistic control” so that ordinary people aren’t able to read it, claiming that texts in Greek were “kept from the masses” even before the “Roman church’s power grew” and they used Latin as an “even stronger means of control.” He claims those who tried to translate the bible into common languages faced persecution and death, citing some early martyrs of the reformation.

He then goes on to describe the apparent phenomenon in which, he claims, all religious institutions are all guarding their texts from ordinary people, citing bizarrely the pyramids in Egypt and mountain top monasteries in Tibet. This is meant to, apparently, show that all religious institutions are basically the same as the pre-reformation medieval Catholic church “controlling access to divine knowledge…if you control what people can read, you control what they can think…it’s a brilliantly effective system, create a dependance on divine texts and make yourself the sole interpreter, make the texts impossible for most to access, whether it be through language barriers, literacy restrictions, education or physical location.” This is, he claims, “truly genius.”

He then claims that AI is going to be religion’s “final boss” because, in his world, all religion depends on control, and so now people have access to AI the powers of religion will be impotent to control people anymore. Amazingly, with an almost comical timing, Woodford then swings into an advert for some news site he has a subscription discount for, claiming that on the internet “headlines compete for our attention, often sacrificing context and nuance for clicks.” Yes, don’t they? I find it hard to believe this unbearable irony is lost on him, but it seems apparently it is.

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The Case for Christian Universalism

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Woodford then makes an argument about how the reformation undermined the Catholic church largely because of the printing press, destroying their ability to control the narrative and “questions that couldn’t be unasked.” This led to the cracks in the church authority and the questioning that basically led to the enlightenment and the divides of the modern world.

Woodford, who hates Tom Holland—and made a video trying to debunk his claims which was shortly after removed after viewers pointed out he clearly hadn’t read the book— is with yet more painful irony actually making part of Tom Holland’s Dominion argument, that the enlightenment itself was essentially a movement in the history of protestant Christianity, so deeply was it shaped by its assumptions. Woodford even hints that Wilberforce’s abolition movement came out of this shift, an argument that he actually, again incredible ironically, condemned Tom Holland for in his now deleted video. Given that this video was actually before he released the video condemning Holland, the cognitive dissonance is unbelievable.

Let’s rewind a little though to Woodford’s ridiculous telling of Christian and religious history. Putting aside the fact that Woodford doesn’t seem to know that the New Testament was written in Koine, or “common” Greek, and was hardly “guarded from the masses” in the early church in which Christianity spread precisely among the masses, there is a basic contradiction in his claim. On one hand, all of Christianity and on top of that all religions are keeping their texts in secret places away from the masses, and on the other hand it was only the advent of the printing press that meant everyone could get access to texts, undermining church authority. So did the church have printing presses and were keeping it from everyone? or was it actually that religious monasteries were actually places of learning in which texts deemed to be highly sacred were faithfully transmitted? Applying the pre-reformation church to all religions ever requires a stupid, stereotyped, lazy view of religious history entirely uninterested, again ironically, in context and nuance. For clicks, I guess.

But the implication here is that this is what religion and theology actually is about: control. But anyone who thinks the theologians of Christian history were solely interested in controlling people is willfully ignorant. When St.Basil tended lepers with his own hands or St.Macrina toured rubbish dumps rescuing exposed babies, were they doing this simply to control people? Were the desert fathers fasting, practicing religious asceticism and spending their spare time occupying their minds weaving baskets to sell and give the money to the poor doing it to control people? Did Julian of Norwich write that all God’s plans resolve upon love to control people? These are saints revered by the church Woodford claims is simply guarding its texts from ordinary people, texts that themselves motivated these saints.

Add to this, in an age where there is no dissemination of information in the same way, some kind of control of this nature or “guarding” of the churches learning and texts is actually essential. Christian monks also spent time copying classical texts as well as their own, and if they didn’t we wouldn’t have them. Of course, there is no question that the control of the church swings into the pathological throughout Christian history and that attitudes to heresy have at times been murderous, even genocidal, which is why protestants would argue the reformation is so important. But it is then their stereotypes as much as their arguments Woodford is puppeting, either because he doesn’t know any better or because he doesn’t want to know better.

Which, again ironically (it seems irony is a theme of this post) actually clearly disproves Woodford’s entire point. He has access to this information. He could have actually bothered to read Tom Holland’s book before making a video about him, this is the age not just of the printing press but the internet, Woodford could have a far more nuanced view of history based on a grasp of its complexities and contradictions, but he doesn’t want to. He chooses not to. How, then, is he in a position to claim the apparent unthinking religious will be undone by yet more access to information? Are he and they so different?

He then jumps to the internet, which has apparently transformed the world just like the printing press. Apparently, the internet has “eliminated the ability to control information through physical means…you can’t burn a server farm.” Well, yes, you can actually, not to be pedantic, but server farm fires are actually a problem, there was even one recently in a place leased by X, another fact Woodford could just google. But he claims Christianity has declined because of the internet, the only argument for which he offers is correlation with its decline. Ignoring the obvious fact that Christianity was declining before the internet he claims the reason this is happening is because “the internet makes it impossible to maintain the kind of information control that religious institutions historically relied on.” Apparently, because statistics show young earth creationism is (slightly) declining in America, the internet is apparently undoing religion altogether. “The fortress of enforced ignorance is being dismantled.”

It seems the extent of Woodford’s research into these claims ends at googling some statistics about creationism, and I suppose he deserves credit for bothering to go that far, but it’s clear he hasn’t paid any attention to what has been going on in recent years, let alone looked at the state of his own channel to consider how warped internet incentives are when it comes to information. He claims the internet is so great because people questioning faith can find entire communities that are “safe spaces” for people freeing themselves from religion.

The issue with the internet is that most of these “safe spaces” are echo chambers full of bad information, bad arguments and manipulation. And it isn’t just people leaving religion, it’s people questioning almost anything. People making the most absurd claims can now generate huge audiences, and people can find “safe spaces” questioning anything from vaccines to whether the earth is round. He uses images of reddit pages when making these claims, but anyone who has looked at somewhere like r/atheism would know it’s an appalling circle jerk full of woeful cliches, hardly a “safe space” for polite critiques. This is the internet, and as Woodford’s constant attempts to maintain his own traffic show, algorithms don’t incentivise truth, and they don’t seem to be making people more informed.

Anyway, Woodford claims Christians are still trying to control people by starting YouTube channels and using social media (irony, AGAIN) but that now “something even more revolutionary” is coming that religion can’t possible keep on top of: AI.

Here his argument is at its weakest. He claims AI is the “ultimate disrupter of information control, and its implications for Christianity are nothing short of apocalyptic.” He claims “entire religious texts can be created critiqued and dismantled faster than ever before, way faster.” Apparently now no one can monopolise the truth now because AI has the ability to undermine it, and that because we can “instantly scrutinize” religion which has relied on the “slow dissemination of information” religion is now apparently done for.

Of course his point here is not entirely wrong, it’s just shallow and blinded by his own disdain for religion. What he’s talking about is already true of the internet in general, it’s why conspiracy theories proliferated during lockdowns, why trust in science and vaccines has declined, because no one, even those claiming to have science on their side, can maintain a unifying narrative when algorithms are instantly incentivising the attacking of that narrative. The result is the fragmented state of the world that we see, the lurch between political extremes, the proliferation of ignorant bandwagon narratives. And no, information is not helping. People continue to do what Woodford does, be able to know better and choose not to.

Not to mention the fact that his claim assumes anyone can trust AI more than any group of people, even if AI is trained by people. We’ve seen plenty of examples of AI representing biases, and it’s silly to think that Chatgpt is some kind of truth machine rather than just a verbal prediction engine. But Woodford seems entirely taken in: “the truth is instant” he claims. He seems to believe “a critique of Christianity” will now be translated into the idioms of every language and “give it a few years and YouTube will do this automatically.”

It’s hard to know what to make of someone who is so possessed by their own views that they think that forthcoming AI will soon be saving the world from being wrong by broadcasting a criticism about it around the planet. Not only this, he seems to believe his own work is somehow part of this, he says “this very video, by an English guy, will soon be available to a farmer in rural Nigeria, a factory worker in Brazil or a student in Japan.”

Stephen, darling, they already speak English in Nigeria, and I doubt students in Japan will be wasting their time watching this rubbish. He says, staggeringly, “the idea that you need to read the bible in Latin is about to become obsolete.” Sorry, have you ever in your life met anyone who reads the bible in Latin in 2025? At this point in the video you realise Stephen is not a serious person, and “rationality rules” is one of the most ironic channel titles ever. He ends by saying we’re soon going to be downloading information into the brain like the Matrix, meaning religious people will finally be ousted because “a devout Catholic could in a matter of seconds access every argument against the existence of God..the result could be a moment of instant enlightenment.”

Well, I await the age of enlightenment when I can instantly download Woodford’s videos to my brain. Until then, I have to admit as I wrap this, writing this article was tough sledding. I started the video expecting something other than an absurd set of rambling attempts to claim all religious people are stupid and simply lacking information, a position that depends on an arrogant sense of superiority and an ironic lack of knowledge of history. Rather like his attempt to take down Tom Holland, Woodford has again handed in the essay without doing the homework, and the result is a clumsy disproving of his own argument. AI may have all sorts of disconnecting and fragmenting effects, it may bring about a dystopia or it may just be another banal tool we get used to, and discussing its impacts is important. But Woodford is simply shoving his atheism in to the discussion like a door to door evangelist under the ironically religious conviction that his uninformed beliefs are unalterably correct. And it’s a shame, because it seems his contemporary Alex O’Connor has shown that better engagement produces better results. Woodford may get the views to keep going, but maintaining his attitude is isolating and creates a siloed following, and in an age where the internet absolutely is degrading our unity and putting our very concepts of truth into question, we need to actually connect with each other more than ever.