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Nate,
I listened to it about 4-5 years ago (can't remember precisely). I was disappointed. I had just listened to the Great Debate and heard Bahnsen dispatch Stein.
I've expressed my assessment on Barker to Paul as he is about to debate him.
I honestly thought that Barker was a bit of a clown. When I say that, I don't mean to say that I mind people making jokes or using humor to make a point. I mean by it that he didn't seem to give any answers that would satisfy a person with even a modest interest in meaning and truth.
When Butler would challenge him with how he accounted for logic or morality or any other immaterial concept, Barker's response was akin to "Aww shucks, there's no reason we really use it other than it just works...."
Are you kidding me? It just works?
I wondered at the time if Barker and others had seen Stein try to explain the use of logic and explain to Bahnsen that Hitler was wrong because he violated a Western cultural norm and they decided that the best approach is just to deflect the problem altogether.
The bottom line for me was that I was unsatisfied. I felt like Barker was just a populist that used ad populum arguments that appealed to Atheists but was devoid of any substance. I found it hard to believe that he would gain a following from anyone who wanted to maintain an air of philosophical sophistication.
I also found it unsatisfying because I didn't think that Butler was able to adapt to his style once he revelaed it. He kept running in a track that Barker wasn't going to interact with. So you had this one serious guy using philosophical language that was not interacted with and a clown using populist arguments. It was just really flat.
I haven't heard Barker debate since then. I'm looking forward to hearing Paul interact with him because Paul has a gift for talking in a way that the common man can relate to. His recent phone call to "The Narrow Mind" made an atheist look foolish in 10 minutes in a way that the host was having difficulty with for an hour and a half up to that point. Paul diagnosed the correct approach, grabbed the guy by the throat, and had him subdued. Anyway, it should be interesting.
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