Logical Fallacy #4: The Excluded Middle
Fallacy of the Excluded Middle
I came across this little gem on a web forum I read. It concerned professing born-again Christians who exhibit behavior inconsistent with that blessed state:
"My suggestion is if you know someone who claims to be a Christian and is engaging in any of the above behaviors that are inconsistent with Christianity, bring the issue before the person in private. Watch how the person reacts. If s/he asks for forgiveness and changes his/her ways, then you might have helped a True Christian see the error of his/her way. Thank you for helping to stop the damage of that message to unbelievers. But if the person says something silly such as, "Oh, I'll just ask for forgiveness on Sunday," that person is definitely a "so-called"Christian (or Christian in Name Only). Someone who has Jesus as the priority in his/her life will not want to sin ever, and will be open to correction."
How very reasonable. And how very presumptuous. Here we have the fallacy of the excluded middle, AKA the either/or fallacy, the false dichotomy, and black-and-white reasoning.
The excluded middle posits two mutually exclusive choices and then demands you select one or the other. There is no "middle ground"; it is excluded. The choices are presented as exhaustive. In the above case, it does not occur to the speaker he might not be in possession of all the facts beyond what he sees of the person's behavior; that the behavior which he considers un-Christian may have a perfectly acceptable explanation. Nor does he consider the possibility that such explanation might be sensitive, private, none of his business, yet nonetheless not sinful.
This is also known as a false dichotomy, false correlative, and bifurcation. The same essential fallacy may also employ three choices (trifurcation).
Skeptic: I find "intelligent design" is not supported by scientific findings. Evolution is a much more rational explanation for the existence and variety of species on Earth.
Creatio...er...Intelligent Design Advocate: Oh, so it's all just blind chance, eh?
The Excluded Middle presents these two mutually exclusive choices as if they were the only ones available. But students of evolutionary theory are well aware that natural selection is hardly a synonym for "blind chance." Yet those who employ this particular false dichotomy show no awareness of the existence of natural selection, let alone how it works.
Another case: "Whoever is not with me is against me." (Guess who said that!)
This ignores the idea of neutrality. I might be neither for you nor against you. I may be undecided; I may be indifferent. But the speaker's words refuse to take those more moderate views into account. (In rhetoric, such flourishes are called an "appeal to emotion," a clear sign that the speaker is out of ideas.)
Here's a nice secular example for you:
You meet a man engaged in the practice of dowsing—finding water (and these days also oil, minerals, precious metals, and even missing persons) using any of several odd devices that appear to move or act inexplicably when water (oil, etc) is near. You look at the guy with your best, skeptical eye and say, "He's either a conscious fraud or the real deal." That is, either he knows what he's doing is baloney and is somehow deliberately defrauding people, or he actually possesses a paranormal ability to locate water with a stick. You have committed the fallacy of the excluded middle by ignoring the very real possibility that he is sincerely deluded. (In the case of dowsing, this has been demonstrated in case after case.)
Can you stand one more?
Born-again Christians will be familiar with the author Josh McDowell. In his first best-selling book in the 1970's, called Evidence That Demands a Verdict, McDowell posited what amounts to a case of "trifurcation," a sort of 3-way false dichotomy. He said (echoing C.S. Lewis two decades earlier) Jesus does not give us the option of calling him a great, human, moral teacher. Instead, he was, in McDowell's words, "Lord, Liar or Lunatic." That is, either Jesus was the savior, he was a conscious fraud (and a fool, since he died for it), or he was insane (which choice, we are asked to believe, could not possibly be, judging by his exemplary behavior—which included beating people with a whip for engaging in lawful commerce, and cursing a fig tree because "it was not the time for figs...." But I digress).
It all sounded so reasonable when I read that back in1977 or so. But I wanted it to be true, so I ignored the trifurcation before my eyes. What trifurcation? You ask. You mean there are other possibilities? Why yes, there are. For one, he could have been a liar AND a lunatic. The two have certainly gone hand in hand before, and would easily explain why he allowed himself to be killed in the end. But the more likely scenario is that Jesus was fictional. Oh, he may have existed—a guy who some people regarded as the messiah. But 1st century Palestine was littered with messiahs, and probably more than one with that very common Hebrew name, Yehoshua. But the stories about him were all written down many years after they allegedly happened, they contain many elements which were common in pagan religious mythology of the 1st century, and it is not hard to imagine a good deal of fictionalizing taking place along the way. A lot of what people think are his "original" teachings were current in popular culture at his time. He did not originate much of anything. Of all the possibilities, this is the one that requires the least credulity to accept, and it's the one that believers never want to talk about when they're busy "trifurcating."
So beware of the excluded middle.
In seeing what I assume is a false dilemma in Calvinism, I found your website and wonder if the idea of inference to the best conclusion relates to Ockam's Razor and how they both apply, if they do, to the person of Jesus and all you discussed with the McDowell quote. As in: "What is the best inference considering the history of the Christian movement?" the best
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and what do you make of his followers who went to their death claiming to have seen Christ risen from the dead?
were they all lying and crazy too?
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Do you seriously suppose those are the only options? I suggest you re-read my original post. It's all about bifurcation, which is exactly what you have done here. There are several much more reasonable explanations that you are not considering, including the "fictional" option, which you seem to think I intend to apply only to Jesus but not to the other people in the story. It's a story. It's a narrative. It offers no substantiation, no evidence, no attempt at consistency. A lot of the details don't line up from one gospel to another. Pretty bad for a true-life account by people who claimed to have seen all this stuff firsthand, but exactly what you would expect from an aggregation of popular mythology that's being molded into a single religious system.
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ehh? how in the world did you get bifurcation from my question? i was just wondering what you thought of the martyrdom of the Apostles?
i don't know what you think of Christ's followers, that's why i was asking dude. how do i know?
of course the details don't line up--it's an eye-witness account. ask a cop about an accident report and they'll tell you none of the eye-witness details are ever exactly the same, but they're all essentially the same. the details not lining up in fact lend credibility to the texts. if they were just a story or a narrative, they'd be perfect.
i'm having a hard time buying the fictional option also because i'm thinking of all the works of antiquity which talk about Christ and His followers going to their deaths. works by Tacitus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Ignatious of Antioch, etc. works outside the Bible by Roman Historians and enemies of Christianity who wrote about Christ.
Tacitus wrote more about Christ than he ever wrote about Ceasar, yet no one thinks Ceasar was a myth?
anyways, i was just trying to gauge your thoughts on these additional historical works. sometimes people think the Bible is the only thing that ever talked about Christ. it's funny, no one ever questions that George Washington existed, but the same science of history that tells us GW and Julius Ceasar existed, tells us Christ existed.
take care
-Tyler
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I'll ignore the disingenuous first comment.
I love this comment: "of course the details don't line up--it's an eye-witness account." Leaving aside the absurdity of anyone thinking the writers of the gospels actually saw the events they describe, does this mean you're not one of those "the-Bible-is-the-inerrant-word-of-god" people? Because that presents a problem for the believer. If the Bible IS inerrant as so many claim, why don't the accounts line up? And if it is NOT inerrant, then in how is it God's word? And in what sense can it be used as a reliable source of belief? I mean, how do you decide what's a simple, unimportant discrepancy (if there can be such a thing) and what is a steaming pile of crap designed to lead people astray? It's not as if John wrote footnotes to explain the silliness--not to say impossibility--of some of his accounts.
The "works of antiquity" that you refer to are a problematic lot. Many have been doctored by pious gits. Others are used to say more than the actually do. In total, non-biblical references to Jesus (typically they say "Christ" or some version of that word; they seldom actually use his name--a telling detail in itself) are thin evidence of anything. Whether a person named Jesus existed is not really the point. The point is whether the stories about him are true.
You mention George Washington--an excellent example of what I mean here. No serious person, and certainly no historian, would dispute Washington's existence. Yet there has been a great deal of legend-building around this august personage. Washington Irving and Parson Weems both created stories about Washington that passed into the "knowledge" about our first President--that he had wooden teeth, that he could throw a dollar across the Potomac, that he chopped down his father's cherry tree and uttered the famous words, "I cannot tell a lie...I did it with my little hatchet." And so on. All widely known stories, written down and repeated for generations. They are in your public library. Many people today believe them implicitly.
They are complete bullshit. They are made-up stories, intended to magnify the myth and, in some cases, to provide moral instruction. (If that sounds familiar, it should.) Sure, Washington really lived and really did a lot of remarkable things which we should remember. But failure to discriminate between what we know and what we merely want to be true cheapens the memory and debases knowledge.
So, how will you determine which stories about Jesus (or anyone else in the Bible) are historically reliable? It can't be done. The Bible is a mess, and to assume anything else is to surrender intellect and discernment for a very unreliable outcome.
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(part 1 of 2)
Why so condescending? Is it necessary?
I'll apologize in advance for the multi part reply, but you've levied quite a number of accusations now that have to be addressed. Perhaps we can stick to fewer points per post for the sake of brevity.
-I'll ignore the disingenuous first comment.
actually, i wasn't trying to be disingenuous, I sincerely did not understand how you were getting bifurcation from my response, but now i think I see where our miscommunication was. one could read my original statement as a bifurcation, or one could read it as I intended it which was inquiring as to one option in a given set of options without making an assumption as to the other options. the latter was the case here. sorry for any ambiguity on my part.
you know what's interesting that i just thought of though? everything is technically a bifurcation. there is always some "other" option we are excluding (though that option may not be probable). I think Descartes perhaps went down this line of sorts before he finally arrived at “i think therefore I am”.
i actually learned a lot from your article. i found it when i was searching for logical fallacies online. then it started attacking Christianity etc and here we are. :)
-Leaving aside the absurdity of anyone thinking the writers of the gospels actually saw the events they describe
that depends on the book right? Genesis? no.. Paul's letters? Yes. The NT was substantially complete within the lifetime of the Apostles (~100 AD).
-does this mean you're.. because that presents .. --of some of his accounts.
Roman Catholic. Since the Church's authority determined the canon of Scripture at the Synod of Hippo, I'll quote the same authority in regard to discrepancies:
"In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things that he wanted. Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error that truth that God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation" (Dei Verbum 11: http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html ).
Thus, the Bible is inerrant in the truths it teaches for the sake of salvation. As an aside though, many of the discrepancies we might be thinking of result from translation difficulties between Aramaic and Greek. In many places where the Greek differs, the underlying Aramaic is the same. I think you may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here.
(to be continued...)
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(part 2)
-The 'works of antiquity' that you refer to are a problematic lot.
i said "all the works of antiquity". are all the works of antiquity problematic? I don't think we are referring to the same things here. No one would take you seriously if you meant that.
-Yet there has been a great deal of legend-building around [Jesus]
False. There are over 5000 copies of the Greek NT documents alone. The originals were produced within, from the standpoint of historical research, a satisfactorily short span of time after the events occurred. There are also writings by enemies of Christians and the Early Church Fathers. In all of these, even in the apocryphal gospels written by later sects with axes to grind, there is a consistent picture of Jesus the Messiah, and the messianic significance of all that He said and did. If this was Legend, where are the historical documents that point to Jesus as "just a man"? To conclude that Jesus as God was a later addition would be intellectually dishonest. The first Christians and the Apostles certainly believed Jesus was God; and that is no small point. The evidence for the NT writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning.
-Washington Irving and ..repeated for generations.-
Misinformation about GW is clearly traceable and/or disprovable by historical record. The same goes for misinformation about Jesus (the gnostic gospels for example). Here you are comparing GWs teeth to JW's divinity though. That's an apples to oranges comparison in terms of historical records. A more suitable comparison might be GWs presidency to JW's divinity. We can sight some legend about GW's teeth that is historically shaky, that doesn't discount or even compare to the historical attestation to his presidency. We can cite some legend about Jesus being married that is historically shaky, that doesn't discount or even compare to the historical attestation to his divinity.
"But failure ... be true…"
i agree. at what point do we accept anything from history though? we accept many other things as fact from history that have exponentially less information to back them up.
It's one thing to choose not to believe the historical record, but it's quite another to say the record is inaccurate. The evidence for the historical accuracy of the NT is rather daunting, and attempts to discount its authenticity as legend lack any real substance. I might recommend F.F. Bruce's “New Testament Documents, Are they Reliable” (which I have used to help me write this reply) if it would not offend you.
At any rate, I know we disagree on this, and that's ok. It makes for good debate when it remains respectful. No point in going round and round on it though. Perhaps, precisely because we can struggle with our faith at times, we have events like Our Lady of Guadalupe, Fatima, Lourdes; the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne etc. today.
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I can't be bothered even to read this. How on Earth can you have an email discussion that takes place at a slower pace than if it were conducted via semaphore?
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