I HAVE ALWAYS liked caricatures, and I’m envious of artists who are good at drawing them. But I don’t much like to be the one caricatured. I am worried that in our society today, especially in the wake of such tragic idiocy as the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, it is altogether too easy for some journalists, skeptics, and others whose faith is all wrapped up in having, supposedly, no faith, to paint anybody who is a Christian and serious about it as being one short step away from wild-eyed cult membership. ‘Tain’t so!
Now I admit that some Christians who love the Lord “with all of their hearts” but have failed to love him “with all of their minds” as well make tempting targets.
And I would suggest that Christians would do well to spend much more time learning the core principles of historic Christianity well-delineated, say, in the Nicene Creed, than they would speculating about the latest book-selling prophecy-monger’s theory regarding Revelation, a theory which a good course on “apocalyptic” (end-times) literature would show to be absolute hogwash.
But most of the millions whose faith is ultimately in Someone bigger than man and wiser than Science are not fruitcakes. When a television commentator arrogantly implies that all faith is foolishness (except, of course, his own non-faith faith), he’s painting with too broad a brush. And he’s falling prey to an old fallacy in reasoning.
The “either/or” fallacy begins with a fact and then assumes that because of that fact, either A or B must be true. Now, if the “fact” is true, and if there really are only two possible options which derive from that fact, this is a fine approach, not fallacious at all. It becomes a fallacy, though, the moment it ignores any other valid possibilities lurking somewhere between C and Z.
We see people tripping over this fallacy all of the time.
Fact: Joe wasn’t at church Sunday. Conclusions: He must either have been sick or playing golf. Come now, are there really no other options?
Fact: Helen Keller was blind. Conclusions: She must either have had rhetinitis pigmentosa or she didn’t eat her carrots. Really?
Fact(??): People should be vegetarians. Conclusions: You are
either a vegetarian or you are as bloodthirsty as
Nowhere is the “either/or” fallacy more rampant than in religion, but I’ll let you think of those examples.
It is a sad fact that recently some seriously-deluded cult members overdosed first on fallacious prophecy and then on pills. But it does not follow from that fact that the only logical options men and women have in this world are either to scrap faith altogether or to embrace a crazy one.