Argument from Absoluteness

[Angrboda]

@max-greece:

The problem with your argument is that one of the premises rests on an inductive inference. A deductive proof argument cannot rest on an inductive inference because it makes the deduction invalid because inductive inferences do not have a 'necessary' truth value. It's like oil and water, you can't mix the two, inductive and deductive inferences. It could be reformatted to be a valid deductive argument, but doing so would require restating the conclusion to be that God probably does not exist, with the probability governed by the inductive inference. Unfortunately, there's no deterministic way to set those probabilities, and so the conclusion becomes highly controversial, and justifiably so.

You are so far beyond my understanding of the nature of philosophical arguments that I have to accept that as is, without actually understanding it fully.

Seemed sound logically to me is all I can say in defence.

Thanks.

To try to bring it into your ken or knowing, it faces the infamous black swan problem. The black swan problem is so named because prior to Europeans coming to knowledge of the existence of black swans (if I remember rightly), the syllogism that "all swans seen so far are white" therefore "all swans are white" was a commonplace idiom. Unfortunately for the idiom, black swans do exist, and the generalization that all swans are white simply did not hold. Now if you put yourself in the shoes of a logician, examining a deductive argument from before the existence of black swans was acknowledged, you might encounter this assertion about white swans, and note that it seems true enough from that perspective, but ultimately the truth of whether all swans are white or not depends only on whether all swans are in fact white, not on what the composition of the swans you've seen is, nor how many swans you've seen, nor how confident you are that you've seen enough white swans to conclude that they are all white. All that the person having seen a bunch of white swans can say is that, a) so far I haven't seen any non-white swans, and b) the probability of a non-white swan existing is low (though exactly how low, is, very difficult to determine without complete knowledge of just how many white and non-white swans there in fact are).

So, translating this to your argument, you're stating that you've never seen any perfect things in the world (ie. non-white swans), therefore, there are no perfect things in the world (ie. non-white swans). That assertion is incorrect, as rigorously speaking, all you can conclude is that the probability of there being a perfect thing in the world (a non-white swan), given the number of not perfect things seen, is such and so a probability. From that point, since one of your premises results in an assertion which is only probabilistically true, any conclusion cobbled together from that premise and any others together cannot rise above that degree of certitude; that essentially puts a brake on how strong your conclusion of the whole can be.