A fallacy of presumption.
This fallacy is sometimes called the false dilemma or the bifurcation fallacy. When you are presented with only two possible options check carefully that you are not being offered a false dichotomy. Maybe there is one or more unstated additional possibilities.
You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.
You have probably heard the above. It is of course entirely possible that you are just an innocent bystander and part of neither the solution nor the problem.
Further examples include…
If you’re not a conservative, then you must be a liberal.
These are not the only two political positions that someone can hold, if indeed they have any particular political views at all.
Either use Lynx deodorant or you’ll stink. You don’t want to stink, so you’d better use Lynx.
Of course in this case you could simply wash or use a competitor brand of deodorant.
If science can’t explain those strange lights in the sky it must have been alien space craft.
Just because something hasn’t been explained so far doesn’t mean that it won’t be – it certainly doesn’t leave aliens as the only possible explanation.
The dichotomy/dilemma could have more than two parts and become a trichotomy/trilemma. C.S. Lewis posed a famous trilemma in his book Mere Christianity. It is rather a long quote but the bit in blue in the middle is where you are presented with three choices – God, Mad or Bad.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
Lewis fails to offer any of the other possible explanations for Jesus’ character in the bible – what he is reported to have said might not be what he actually said, he might be sincere but deluded, he might be an amalgam of different characters constructed by the author – the list goes on. Lewis’s argument fails because he falsely tries to narrow the range of possibilities to steer you in the direction he wants.
The following is included as an example of CS Lewis’s writing and thoughts on religious ideas. It is not meant to be an example of any particular fallacy although I do think that his reasoning is faulty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJu0oYvi-cY
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These are rather nicely drawn and very well read. I don’t think that one-sided arguments with imaginary friends are likely to yield much of real depth. CS Lewis responds quite weakly to his own points which makes his argument seem more convincing; although you may disagree!
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