⬅️ Critical Thinking
- The appeal to authority is a fallacy of irrelevance when the authority being cited is not really an authority. E.g., to appeal to Einstein to support a point in religion would be to make an irrelevant appeal to authority.
- Einstein was an expert in physics, not religion. However, even if he had been a rabbi, to appeal to Rabbi Einstein as evidence that a god exists would still be an irrelevant appeal to authority because religion is by its very nature a controversial field.
- Appealing to non-experts as if they were experts, or appealing to experts in controversial fields, as evidence for a belief, are equally irrelevant to establishing the correctness of the belief.