False Dilemma

Type

Informal

AKA

False Dichotomy, Either/Or Fallacy, Bifurcation

Description

Presenting two options as the only possibilities, when in fact more options exist.

Examples

"You're either with us or against us."
"We must ban all cars or destroy the planet."

Linked from

Argument from Abstract Objects

Premise 2 is a False Dilemma. Platonism and divine conceptualism are not the only accounts of mathematics and logic. Nominalism, fictionalism, structuralism, and the view that logical and mathematical truths are constraints on any coherent…

Fine-Tuning Argument

The trilemma is a False Dilemma. "Necessity, chance, or design" omits selection. If there are many universes with different constants (eternal inflation and the string landscape both predict this, uninvited by atheists), then observers fin…

Lewis's Trilemma

The missing option is Legend. The explicit claims to divinity ("I and the Father are one", "before Abraham was, I am") are all in John, the last gospel, written sixty or more years after the crucifixion. In Mark, the earliest, Jesus deflec…

Creationism and Intelligent Design

Why it matters. Around 40 per cent of Americans tell pollsters that God created humans in their present form within the last ten thousand years. Creationist schools exist in Britain, and a replica of the Ark stands in Kentucky as a theme p…

Religious Education

Why philosophy and critical thinking. Most of the errors catalogued in my Thinking Tools notes are not errors of knowledge but errors of reasoning, and they are made by people who are otherwise well educated. The ability to recognise a Str…

Quotes I like

“Most of society’s arguments are kept alive by a failure to acknowledge nuance. We tend to generate false dichotomies, then try to argue one point using two entirely different sets of assumptions, like two tennis players trying to win a ma…

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), Belfast-born scholar of medieval literature, novelist (The Chronicles of Narnia), and the most widely read Christian apologist of the twentieth century. Mere Christianity (1952) contains the Argument from D…