1) Correlation does not = causation
It can also be factor C such as people who have cancer tend to change their believe in Christianity because it help!
Just because there are more patient in hospital, does the hospital is the source of sickness.
Above is a valid line of reasoning provided by CS Lewis.
To see wether he is right, we will need to see the change, if any, when people enter and leave the religion. A special phenomenon of hosptital is that people tend to leave the hospital as a healthier person. This is not applicable to religion as they claim that only those who are sick will leave.
The other phenomenon is that people who is entering the hospital tends to get heathier. Now THIS, is observable.
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2) Factors, factors. We do not need to find identical individual, but we will need to take factors away one at a time. Such as smoking, age, sex, habit, diet, etc
We will need quite large a samples set to reach anything conclusive.
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3) To dissect even further to see which ritual of religion causes cancer, we will need even further study in great detail. It can be that seeing the cross causes cancer beause cross is made of cancer cauing material
Or perhaps being happy is the reason, and religion make people happy (again, a different type of reason C)
Maybe the baptism water is contaminated with radioactive material.
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For smoking causes cancer, it is quite conclusive as there is massive amount of data on the second point in the same direction. If it is only a few anedote evidence, it cannot be very conclusive.
But how sure are we? No quite. Since you are studying econ, you already know, what is a cost analysis without benefit? What is the benefit of smoking to balance out the risk? For the God damn Christian, the benefit is eternal life... |