Justified True Belief

(●) A false dilemma offers two options as the only two when there are more. + "Dilemma" is Greek for "two premises", and its horns are the two choices it leaves you. The fallacy is a dilemma with a horn missing. (1) The shape of the move is a menu with an item left off. - The school board treasurer stands up: "Either we cut the music programme or we raise the levy." Then a parent at the back asks about the maintenance fund nobody has touched in three years, and his sentence stops being true. - The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what they are meant to support is the conclusion. The treasurer's first premise is an either-or sentence, which logicians call a disjunction, and his argument runs: either music or the levy; not music; so the levy. - That argument is valid, since the conclusion follows if the premises are true, but not sound, because soundness needs true premises as well. Patrick Hurley files the move, as false dichotomy, among the fallacies of presumption: arguments whose premise assumes something not yet shown, here a complete menu. - One distinction is worth carrying away. Contradictories are a pair of which exactly one must be true, "the light is on" and "the light is not on", because nothing sits between a claim and its denial. That is Aristotle's law of excluded middle. Contraries cannot both be true but can both be false: "the wall is black" and "the wall is white", and most walls are neither. A false dilemma dresses contraries as contradictories. (2) It tempts because two options feel like clarity. - Some either-ors are real: a woman is pregnant or she is not. Genuine two-way choices are the fallacy's cover, since an either-or looks like the world being simple rather than the speaker being sly. - A dilemma is usually absorbed rather than argued. "Either science or faith" has been in the air since the Victorian histories that told the past as a long war, and the essays Ronald Numbers collected in Galileo Goes to Jail (2009) show its best stories, Galileo in a dungeon and the flat-earth church, to be myths. The scientist who prays on Sunday is the third option it hides. (3) The name is a medieval picture, and the family has two cousins. - Medieval logicians called it the argumentum cornutum, the horned argument, and the classroom replies keep the picture: grasp a horn, taking one option and denying that the bad result follows; answer with a counter-dilemma; or escape between the horns by naming a third option. Copi, Cohen and Rodych still teach all three, and bifurcation and black-and-white thinking name the same fallacy. - The false trilemma is the same move with a longer menu: three options are no more exhaustive than two if the field has four, which is why "liar, lunatic or Lord" needs a closer look. - The middle ground fallacy is the opposite error, assuming the truth must lie between. The garage says the car is worth ten thousand, the buyer says four, and nothing follows about seven. Therefore, a false dilemma is not a lie about either option. It is a lie about the count.

(●) Simple example: "Either you're with us or you're against us." + A neighbour at the residents' meeting says he has not made up his mind about permit parking. The chairwoman answers. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that he must back the scheme, and the support is a disjunction: with us or against us. (2) Why the support does no work. - A third option exists that is no disguise of the other two: "undecided until the council quotes a price". So the premise is false. The contradictory of "with us" is "not with us", which covers him; "against us" does not. (3) What the reply was really doing. - Forcing a vote by removing the exit. A man who cannot say "neither" has to say "yes". - Jesus said it too, "Whoever is not with me is against me" (Matthew 12:30), and on another day the reverse, "For the one who is not against us is for us." (Mark 9:40) Neither is a false dilemma. On allegiance to him there is no neutral ground; on a stranger doing good in his name there is. Whether a field has a middle belongs to the subject, not the grammar.

(●) A critic says: "Either God commands things because they're good, so you don't need God for morality, or things are good because God commands them, so morality is arbitrary." + The oldest dilemma in the philosophy of religion, and the one a Christian who says "morality comes from God" hears within the minute. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that God cannot be the foundation of morality, and the support has two horns. If God commands kindness because kindness is already good, goodness stands above God and he is only reporting it. If kindness is good only because God commands it, he could have commanded cruelty instead, so morality is arbitrary. - The ancestor is Plato's Euthyphro (10a), where Socrates asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or is pious because they love it. Bertrand Russell gave the modern form in "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927): if the difference between right and wrong is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and calling God good means nothing. Against a Christian who has said "good means whatever God says", that has real force. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - In the disjunction. "Above God" and "arbitrary will" are contraries rather than contradictories, and between them sits the position Christians have held since the early church: God commands kindness because he is kind. - Goodness is his own character, and his commands express it the way a musician's playing expresses her ear. Robert Adams gives the position its fullest modern statement in Finite and Infinite Goods (1999), and William Lane Craig defends it in Reasonable Faith. - Escape between the horns and the argument is over as stated. Could God have commanded cruelty? No more than a circle could have corners. Is goodness independent of God? No. It is God, seen from the side of what he asks of us. (3) The sound version. - The critic's real move is to press on the third option. Wes Morriston argues in Religious Studies (2012) that grounding goodness in God's nature only relocates the question. Either there is a reason God's nature counts as good, in which case that reason is the real standard, or there is none, and "God is good" says only "God is like God". - That is no false dilemma but a hard question: is the third option a resting place or a corridor? The moral argument owes it a full answer, and nobody wins that debate with a disjunction. (4) How to answer it. - "Those aren't the only two. Here's the third: God commands what's good because he is good, and his character isn't a rule above him or a coin he flipped. If you think that collapses back into one of yours, show me where, and then we'll be arguing about the thing that matters." See also: Natural Theology: The Moral Argument Common Objections: Binding of Isaac Dilemma

(●) A Christian says: "Jesus claimed to be God. So he was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Which is it?" + The most famous argument in popular apologetics, and the one most likely to meet a fourth option nobody saw coming. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that Jesus is God. The support is a trilemma, three horns instead of two: a man who claimed to forgive sins, to have existed before Abraham and to be the coming judge of the world was either lying, deluded, or telling the truth, and the first two do not fit the man in the Gospels. - The ancestor is C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, book 2, chapter 3, written against the "great moral teacher and nothing more" verdict. A mere man who said those things, Lewis wrote, would be a lunatic, "on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg", or else the Devil of Hell. That much is true: no sane and honest man claims deity lightly. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The menu is one item short, and the missing item is the one most critics order. Liar, lunatic and Lord are the options for a man who said these things. The fourth is that he did not, and that the churches wrote the claims onto his lips a generation later. - Bart Ehrman's How Jesus Became God (2014) states it: Mark, the earliest Gospel, has no "before Abraham was, I am", and the highest claims cluster in John, the latest. - This should be granted plainly. Said across a table with no answer ready for the fourth option, the popular trilemma is a false dilemma, and the critic who answers "legend" has escaped between the horns. (3) The sound version. - Lewis scoped the argument himself. His sentence begins "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said", a conditional, an if-then claim about what follows once that is granted. The popular version drops the if. - He answered the fourth option separately, in "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" (1959), arguing from a lifetime of reading ancient literature that the Gospels do not read like legend, and that the critics' reconstructions of what "really" lay behind the text were guesses nobody could check. - The sound version is two arguments in sequence. First, that Jesus made the claims, where the early dating, the marks of eyewitness testimony, and the divine claims already in Mark and in Paul's letters do the work. Then Lewis's three options, and the case that only one fits. (4) How to answer it, when a fellow Christian says it. - "He's going to say there's a fourth: the church made it up later. He's right that we owe him an answer before the trilemma bites. Let's start with how early the claims are, and then Lewis's argument can do its work." See also: Christian Evidences: Early Dating and Eyewitness Proximity of the New Testament Christian Evidences: Internal Marks of Eyewitness Testimony and Verisimilitude

(●) A charge that misses: "Craig says the cause of the universe must be either an abstract object or an unembodied mind. That's a false dilemma dressed up as an inference." + The sentence really is an either-or, so the name is tempting. It is not one. (1) What the charge claims. - The Kalam cosmological argument runs: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; so the universe has a cause. - That cause made space, time and matter, so it is spaceless, timeless and immaterial, and the only things we know of that fit are abstract objects, such as numbers, and minds. Numbers cause nothing, so the cause is a mind. The charge is that the "only two" was never shown, and Wes Morriston pressed a version of it in Faith and Philosophy (2000), asking why the cause must be personal at all. (2) Why the charge misses. - A dilemma is false when a third option exists, not when nobody has thought of one yet. The critic of the Kalam has to do what the parent at the back did with the maintenance fund: name a candidate that is timeless, immaterial and able to cause something. - The candidates on offer keep failing that description. A quantum vacuum is physical and in time. A law of nature is either an abstract description, which brings back the first horn, or a summary of how things already behave, which needs the things. So far the filter has left exactly two. - The line runs between a disjunction asserted and one argued for. Only a claim and its denial are exhaustive by logic alone, which is the law of excluded middle; every other either-or needs an argument that the field has been covered. Hurley's rule is that the fallacy is committed when the alternatives are not in fact jointly exhaustive, so ask of any either-or: can you state a third option that is not one of the two in disguise? - The charge lands on one thing, and it should be granted. The step from "not abstract" to "a mind" rests on a sub-argument, that minds are the only other immaterial causes we know of, and "we know of" is doing real work. Morriston's impersonal necessary cause is a genuine try at a third horn. The standard reply, which William Lane Craig argues in Reasonable Faith, is that an eternal impersonal cause would have produced an eternal effect, and the universe is not eternal; but that reply has to be argued rather than assumed. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - A third candidate that passes the filter, or a reason those properties were wrongly derived. Suspicion of either-ors is not evidence: the fallacy is a false count, and the count has to be shown false. (4) How to answer it. - "It's only a false dilemma if there's a third option. Name one that's timeless, immaterial, and can cause a universe, and we'll test it against the filter the other two passed. If none turns up, the two weren't a trick. They were what was left." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument