Apparently I was confused regarding what Ben Wallis actually deleted from his blog post where he interacts with Paul. Ben thinks that I am Paul, but I can take that as a compliment. 😉
In any event, you can catch up on everything by reading my previous post. The comment from Paul that Ben actually deleted is posted below, compliments of the real Paul. With all due respect to Mr. Wallis I must be moving on for now because I have better things to do with my time at the moment and trust that Ben does as well!
I am not going to further develop or defend my argument as given what I’ve already said, that would be unnecessary. However, I’ll make two brief corrections:1. It is not “my” view that he who asserts has burden. That is the view of the *atheists* who make that claim, as demonstrated by my quotations from *atheists* saying as much. So it appears my position has been misunderstood, despite my attempts to clearly set forth the nature of the dialectic. Same follows from “Goodness Over God’s” remark. The point is that *atheists* (like those quoted in my comment, and an untold number of quotes from internet village atheists) have claimed, “he who asserts has burden.” Moreover, the argument has been put to the presuppositional theist that: strong atheists, i.e., those who claim that they believe that God does not exist, have burden; however, weak atheists, i.e., those who claim that they do not believe that God exists, do not have burden. This is the distinction between ‘believing . . . not’ and ‘not believing . . . ‘. Thus, in my post, I made an argument that when it came to the views of some presuppositional Christian theists, if we granted some of their basic premises, it is easy to show that weak atheism entailed strong atheist, which entails, *according to the atheists cited above*, that per their own standards, they have burden.2. Given an overly pedantic reading of “this will be my last comment on this thread,” one might be able to get some kind of self-referential defeat out of my responding again. However, given what I did say surrounding my claim about the terminal nature of my last comment, as well as following guidelines of charity, claims like “this will be my last comment” should be read as a conditional—though the conditional is suppressed. So, claimed like I made should probably be treated like this: “This will be my last comment *unless* my interlocutor advances the discussion in some relevant way, or defeats one of my arguments. If the discussion had been advanced in a profitable direction, or some new un-defeated defeater had arisen, then one would assume I would comment again. However, given that I noted that the discussion was not bearing fruit, and since we were going around in circles even after three attempts at explaining the position, then commenting further seemed pointless. Thus, my claim could be read as suppressing this conditional too: “If things keep progressing at this rate, and I see no reason to believe that they won’t, then this will be my last comment.”
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