Many times I have seen this type of thing, where someone wants to lead (or mislead) another person to a conclusion and the same tactic is used over and over. At first, this may sound insignificant, but when practiced, it creates arguments that are convincing and appear to have proof while the substance of the argument is hollow. That tactic is the belief that an observation can show a cause and effect relationship.
Truth: Cause and effect relationships cannot be formed based on an observation.
This tactic takes two events or circumstances which do, in fact, coincide, and ignores something called a “confounding variable”. These two events that coincide are in the same “field”, but their existence is independent of the other.
Examples
A pretend example is where you say that most car accidents involve people wearing socks, therefore socks cause accidents. We know that socks are not related to accidents, however the simple observation shows a connection. But just because they occur together does not mean that one caused the other.
In real life, there are examples, as well. Two fine examples of this tactic that are in effect today are with global warming and evolution.
Global Warming
This is a hot topic. The power brokers of the world have successfully made it into common thinking that we little humans can exhale the world to death. They have turned it into a “green” agenda, where you either agree that we should prevent global warming by being good to the Earth, or you obviously hate the Earth. People who aren\’t sure about it jump on the bandwagon saying, “Well, even if global warming is fake, it\’s good to stop pollution, so I\’ll go along with their agenda.”
How did they convince so many people that the world is near boiling? By a movie called “an inconvenient truth” by Al Gore, where they show images of a glacier melting, which has to happen since they are floating in UNFROZEN water! Secondly, they use a red filter on the images of the pollution smoke stacks, implying that they are roasting the Earth.
People see these images and their feeble brains believe what the narrator is saying! They really think that they saw it with their own eyes! They believe that the TV is real, when it is just an amusement park. They are fooled.
The Cause and Effect Misapplied
What Al Gore did in his famous movie was he showed a graph of carbon dioxide levels and the Earth\’s temperature. They seemed to have a relationship, therefore one caused the other, according to him.
By this rational, socks cause car accidents because nearly 100% of accidents involve drivers who have socks on. Shingles cause house fires because nearly 100% of house fires involve houses with shingles. I\’m sure I could go on, but the point is made. Just because something occurs with another event does not mean that one caused the other.
[to be continued]