Another Round With Paul Baird: Stating and Defending the Requested Rebuttal (2)

See Another Round With Paul Baird: Stating and Defending the Requested Rebuttal and Paul’s exceedingly weak reply.

Apparently Paul Baird did not like my post which recounted Paul’s decision to leave the blogosphere (we see how long that lasted) and tries to cast it in the same light as his fundamentalist atheist rhetoric (“banter”) when in actuality that post was addressing Paul Jenkins’ insubstantial rhetoric about my podcasts. Paul boasts that he is going to print out our exchange and show it to his pagan friends. He predicts that they will agree with him about it. Pagans agreeing with Paul? Now there’s a shocker! But I suppose you need any sort of comfort you can get when your best argument fizzles. Note that unlike Paul, I will now actually support my contention that Paul’s argument fizzled.

In his most recent comment Paul Baird continues to assert that I do not understand PR even though that is what I have been writing on for the last few posts. If Paul really does think that I do not understand his counter then he needs to explain why and what part of it I supposedly do not understand. His suggestion that someone who has studied this material for years, written on it for the last three years, and has done relatively well in terms of academic study of philosophy and religion does not understand PR is disrespectful to the intellectual level of the audience.

Paul rejects the interpretation of his counter represented in my last post by PR1, leaving himself with PR2. PR2 is the claim that PR is similar to Christian revelation in that it provides “grounding and certainty,” not in that it has the same revelational content. That is, Paul is merely claiming that PR provides “grounding and certainty.” But how does it do that? Why should anyone accept this mere claim as anything more than another one of Paul Baird’s many empty assertions? He does not tell us, and so PR, as presented, fails to constitute any sort of “rebuttal” when taken as PR2. It is a mere assertion.

After having answered his objections in my most recent post, Paul does not interact with APR at all. Recall that APR states:

If atheism is true, then PR is false.

Atheism is true.

Therefore, PR is false.

Paul claims that I have only offered “some poor word games,” but as I have mentioned a number of times already, APR is an instance of modus ponens and as such is a valid form of argumentation, not a “poor word game.” Paul is just blowing smoke. His apologetic is pathetic and he knows it, but he wants to save face by lying to his readers and implying that his unoriginal counter is so sophisticated that I do not grasp it. If you believe that, then I have a bridge to sell you.