Whoa-oh! The Things People Say

I’m imagining this as a song, you see. People say the darndest things. It keeps life interesting, creates fascinating dialog in stories, and just as often as causing confusion or laughter, annoys us deeply. Okay, this post is not about a collective. I will rephrase that. On occasion, I get annoyed by the things people say, usually the pat or disingenuous answers. There are a couple of modern aphorisms that especially annoy me, and I happened to hear/read two of them last week. Not that they are unusual. They are not. I will give a third just to be as contrary as possible.

The first: Correlation does not equal causation. There are, of course variations on this theme, but it’s a really, really dumb aphorism no matter how it’s formed. This week, I read it in the first comment on an informative article by Alex Berenson about cannabis use causing psychosis. It was a pinned comment; that’s why it was first. I’m pretty sure it was pinned to ward away any other nerds who felt they should whine that way. Mr. Berenson’s response: “Yeah, I don’t. And neither do the psychiatrists and researchers who have been studying this relationship for 40 years.” His response, naturally, was ignored and followed by some other whopping good logical fallacies, such as, “Yeah, what about alcohol?!” Well, he wasn’t discussing alcohol, nitwit. He was discussing cannabis and its use by this latest shooter who simply walked into a school and psychotically shot up a bunch of children.

My problem with this aphorism — and yes, I do think it counts as an aphorism by now — is that studying correlations is how scientists get to causation. Yes, there are some idiotic correlations that can be made, but that doesn’t mean that scientists write off correlations as unimportant. If they did, they would be like infants, which is how I view people who run around whining that “correlation does not equal causation.” Actually, even infants understand basic correlation, such as pain that comes from certain activities like sticking fingers in electrical outlets or touching hot pans. But they are just narcissistic enough that they often don’t see the correlation at all and blame their pain on their caregivers or siblings. I’ve seen it happen; I’ve watched young children trip and fall ten feet from their mothers and still cry out, “You made me fall!” This is how I view people who, instead of thoughtfully examining a correlation being made, cry out, “Correlation doesn’t equal causation!” Can you imagine for a moment a world in which scientists abandon correlation and search for completely unrelated phenomena to answer life’s pressing issues? For example: “This is what happens when African elephants die from the pox; disenfranchised American homosexuals go on shooting sprees.” And then they might go on to demonstrate charts of elephants dying at the exact moment killers picked up guns. Wait, don’t answer that because I’m 100% positive you’re going to come up with real-world examples of academics doing exactly that.

The second: All that matters is the truth! This one is generally found in conservative Christian circles, and it sound wonderful until you realize it’s completely meaningless. This came up in the quasi debate we were having about sola scriptura the other night. When Protestants pull this out of their hats, I know the conversation is over, even if it will wearingly continue on with the quoting of noncorrelated Bible verses (see previous paragraph about elephants and their pox). I always feel a bit like Pontius Pilate when I ask, “What is the truth?” There is a big difference between me and Pontius Pilate, however. I use the article the for a start. There are obviously numerous differences between me and a Roman statesman from centuries past, but the main difference is that I actually want an answer to my question. I don’t want the truth to go undefined.

I don’t want to mock well-meaning people who really do follow Jesus and have a strong sense of right and wrong; I do believe, however, that there is some disingenuousness with proclaiming that truth is all that matters, and then leaving the truth undefined. It goes along with the ideal of sola scriptura and wanting desperately for there to exist one infallible interpretation of the Bible that we will understand if only we pray and ask for the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I’m sure there is one infallible interpretation of Scripture, but which group of Christians has that? How do we know if the Holy Spirit has guided us to this purity of truth? As it’s evident that spirit-filled believers around the world and throughout the centuries have arrived at different interpretations, how do we know the one we believe is the truth? This is why I rarely get an answer to my question answering after the truth. Christians like to make general proclamations but are often too humble to go into details. They don’t want to be wrong before God. That’s a good thing.

The third annoyance I dedicate to a person I’ll call Bob. Bob outlined a hypothetical for the others in the room. Normally, I’m not annoyed by hypotheticals, as they are an attempt to distance people from the very real emotions that are coloring their arguments, and I even appreciated Bob’s attempt at using one. They become annoying only when they aren’t actually hypothetical. So, in essence, this phrase can be anything that starts with “Hypothetically speaking, …”. In this case, he wasn’t being hypothetical. Hypothetically speaking, I was a Catholic who believed in purgatory, and the other person in the room (we’ll call her Sue) was a Protestant who believed that to be absent from the body is to be in the presence of Christ. But I am a Catholic, and Sue is a Protestant (that leads to another oddity, if not annoyance, and that is the very prevalent modern protest of Protestants that they aren’t Protestant; they are, rather, Bible-believing Christians. Sure, that might be true if one were to erase history. I digress, though…). And I do believe in purgatory, and Sue does not. Bob’s hypothetical went like this: “You are (pointing at me) a Catholic who believes in purgatory, and you are (pointing at Sue) a Protestant who doesn’t. Which position is the truth, and which one is a false interpretation?”

Bob’s hypothetical was meant to be helpful to my anti sola-scriptura stance. Despite his not being Catholic, Bob doesn’t outright accept sola scriptura. Instead of appreciating his attempt at helping my position, I immediately recoiled because the vast majority of Protestants don’t know what purgatory means. Thus, his hypothetical elicited an emotional response from me; it was not right to bring up a subject that is so misunderstood and pit it against a verse taken directly out of the Bible that doesn’t by itself defeat purgatory. Of course, Sue had an immediate emotional reaction to being called a Protestant (see parenthetical phrase above) who believes xyz. She didn’t appreciate being put in a box and being told what she believes.

It was just a hypothetical! Bob pleaded. Perhaps that is ultimately the phrase that gets my ire up, as there are few subjects that can be relegated to hypotheticals without being slightly disingenuous. It reminds me of the way lawyers speak when they demand that the witness on the stand only answer yes or no. The lawyer knows he is being disingenuous and trying to elicit a specific answer, even if that answer doesn’t fully encompass the truth and can even subvert it. For the record, though, Bob was doing the opposite of that: trying to demonstrate that we probably don’t know the difference between truth and interpretation. Well, that’s kind of laweryly, too, to be honest. But who is the judge? Who is the judge? That night, nobody. And eventually, we all decided to go to bed and leave it alone.

I love Bob and Sue. They are people I want in my life, regardless of differences. I can’t imagine having friends or family who unpack correlation doesn’t equal causation. God forgive me, but it’s true. And honestly, Protestants should try to understand purgatory before arguing against it.