Pastor Makes Up Story of How he Vanquished the Atheists

If there’s one thing many Christians love, it’s the anecdote about how another Christian soundly thrashed an atheist in some mythical debate. That’s the whole point behind all those viral emails about some brave student bested his professor, who was a horrible atheist (the entire premise of the movie God’s Not Dead). Here’s another such story.

Pastor Glyn Barrett of the aptly-named Audacious Church in England got his congregation all fired up by telling a story of how he was invited to debate “all the atheists” at “the atheistic society” at Cambridge University. And of course, he proved them all wrong with the profoundly ridiculous argument that perhaps God might exist in some other dimension that we can’t see. Such compelling. So logic.

Like nearly all such stories, it is almost certainly fiction. As Seth Andrews and Hemant show, there is no “atheistic society” at Cambridge. There is the Cambridge University Atheist and Agnostic Society, but when asked about this they said not only was there no such event, they’ve never even heard of the guy. And now, after being shown to have lied, the church removed the video of his sermon from Youtube. Hemant saved it, though. And Seth put up a video detailing the whole thing:

This is why movies like God’s Not Dead are so popular, and why similar stories continually circulate among the faithful. I don’t know how many different evangelists or preachers I’ve heard tell stories about how they were sitting next to an atheist on an airplane (or in some varieties, a gay or lesbian person) and got into a conversation with them. And of course, they defeated every argument they made, always with the most simpleminded and ridiculous retorts.

Remember the big debate between the student and the professor in God’s Not Dead? The student’s big argument, the one that made the professor crumble, was to yell “WHY DO YOU HATE GOD?” over and over again. That is always the level of argument being made. And the strawman arguments of the mythical atheists in these fictional anecdotes are always even dumber. They love this stuff. They eat it up like they were starving. And they are, not for food but for easy validation of what they believe without having to engage in all that pesky thinking.