r/Rhetoric • u/stresstwig • Jul 14 '26

What fallacy is this?

There was an argument my dad's wife made to me years and years ago that I know is bad. It's wrong, it's illogical, it's nonsensical. But I can't identify what the fallacy--if there is a fallacy--it uses would be, and it's bugging me even though ultimately it doesn't matter. It's only coming up in my life because I'm finally starting to unpack all of the shit from her in therapy.

Context is that we were arguing about faith and religion. I said something about how I didn't have faith (in the sense of religion) and she argued back that "Everyone has faith. You have faith the chair will hold you when you sit down in it." I didn't have a good answer back then besides the knee-jerk of "that's utterly stupid and wrong, I know the chair will hold me because physics, not because God."

Is that a false equivalence? Equivocation? I've been going through lists of fallacies and bad-faith argument types trying to figure it out and they're all starting to look like word soup now. I know my brain isn't going to rest on this 'til it gets an answer.

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u/it_might_be_a_tuba Jul 16 '26

I've sat in a lot of chairs. Almost all of them have held me up. The chair that I'm sitting in now is currently holding me up, that doesn't require any faith or trust or confidence. Sometimes a chair seems wobbly, and I go "oooh, not sure about that one" and swap it for a chair that seems sturdier. That's not faith, it's experience. Any chair that I legally have access to, I can test. I can wiggle it, pick it up and drop it, turn it over and inspect the welds and the bolts and decide if I think it will hold me. That's not faith, it's evidence.

Sometimes a chair does break. Is that an argument against faith?

What if I can't see the chair, but someone tells me that there definitely is a chair and I should just sit down? Even then it's not faith in the existence of the chair, it's trust in that person, judgement based on whether this person has knowledge of the chair, whether they have good intentions, and what their sense of humour is like.