In less than five minutes, Tim Barnett, a pastor and apologist from Ontario, set the record straight after one atheist tried to sloppily invalidate Christianity.
The tweet, apparently posted by Atheist Republic founder Armin Navabi, reasoned: “Everything has a creator. God is that creator. God does not have a creator. Your solution fails when it violates its own premise.”
Barnett, in his response, said Atheist Republic got off to a “really, really bad start,” noting the very first statement — the claim that Christians believe “everything has a creator” — “is false.”
“No Christian apologist makes that first claim,” the pastor said. “We don’t believe that everything has a creator. We believe that everything that begins to exist has a cause. That’s a fundamental distinction, because if God did not begin to exist, then he doesn’t need a cause or creator.”
So the atheist activist’s argument, Barnett explained, is based entirely off a “complete misunderstanding of what Christians actually believe.”
Barnett conceded, then, that the second and third premises — “God is that creator” and “God does not have a creator” — are true.
But since Christians don’t really hold to the Atheist Republic’s initial claim, the entire argument can be easily invalidated.
“This is a textbook example of a straw man fallacy,” Barnett said. “When you defeat a defenseless imitation of an argument instead of the real thing. In other words, it’s easier to knock over a straw man than a real man.”
“I find it really hard to believe that Atheist Republic did not know that we believe everything that begins to exist has a cause,” he added. “It’s literally the most popular argument that Christians use.”