Faith, Hope and Love - the pillars of destruction?

[spockrates]

True, with the exception of deductive reasoning, which does dictate.

Ah, the famous Sherlock Holmes drivel. (remove the impossible and what remains is the truth) Deductive reasoning guarantees nothing


Logic does NOT guarantee truth. In formal logic, the premise is assumed to be true for the sake of argument. A logical inference may be claimed to be true IF AND ONLY IF the premise been proved to be true.

Agreed.

Hence, I argue that God cannot be argued into or out of existence. I demand that any truth claim be supported by evidence. If it cannot be,the best I can do is to accept degrees of plausibility/likelihood.

True.

EG; I do not believe in gods,and consider the likelihood of their existence remote,based on an absence of credible evidence. Nor do I believe in the soul, an afterlife,angels,demons, the paranormal,alien visitation, dragons,mountain trolls or fairies living at the bottom of my garden,for the same reason.


PS When people speak of 'logic' it is to deductive logic they refer.It has even been argued that the simplest form of deductive logic, the syllogism, is the basis of western thought.

You might be right.

Remember: There is a difference between asserting that a premise is untrue, and asserting
that the logic of the argument is faulty. “All dogs can fly. Fido is a dog. Fido can fly.” That
is a perfectly valid argument in terms of logic, but this flawless logic is based on an untrue
premise. If a person accepts the major and minor premises of an argument, the conclusion
follows undeniably by the sheer force of reason. If in an argument, the logic reaches a
conclusion that seems absurd, it behooves you to analyze each sentence separately (to see if
each premise is true without exception) and then to analyze the structure of the argument
(to see if the reasoning of the argument itself is valid). Also be on the lookout for
“equivocation,” the use of two different meanings of one word during the process of an
argument.

Right. There are FE and LE factual errors and logical errors. Either will prevent the one making the argument from demonstrating her point.

http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Syllogisms.pdf