Starters, Nonstarters & False Starts

The Post Hoc Fallacy

Imagine you’re out for Chinese food. You get a fortune cookie with your bill. You crack it open, and the fortune says, “Something really great is coming your way.” You’re not superstitious, so you make nothing of it. But your boss emails you later that day to tell you that you are getting a raise. You probably won’t infer a connection between the fortune and the good news. But it does give you pause.

Remember Your Umbrella?

If you did conclude that the fortune was somehow causally linked to the good news, you would be committing the false cause fallacy. This is a broad category of fallacies that draws a causal connection between two things when the evidence is too limited to draw such a conclusion. This fallacy is often summed up by the cliché, “Correlation doesn’t entail causation.”

A common form of the false cause fallacy is stated as post hoc ergo propter hoc—Latin for “after this, therefore because of this.” This fallacy assumes that because A preceded B, A therefore caused B. Silly examples include believing that fortune cookies predict the future or that it only rains when you forget your umbrella.

Quick To Blame

During the 2024 presidential campaign, both candidates—Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris—committed the post hoc fallacy at times during their live “debate.” Consider Mr. Trump’s statement about the economy: “I had no inflation, virtually no inflation; they had the highest inflation, perhaps in the history of our country, because I’ve never seen a worse period of time.” The simple fact that the economy was good under his administration and bad under his successor’s doesn’t mean that the Biden administration caused the bad economy. To establish that, further reasons would need to be given. To be fair, those reasons might exist, but the president-elect didn’t trot them out during the debate. (It doesn’t help that the format only allows the candidates a few minutes to speak on a given issue.)

Now for Ms. Harris. She claimed that “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Donald Trump left us the worst public-health epidemic in a century.” Setting aside the truth value of the statements, she implies that he was responsible for the high unemployment rate and the public-health epidemic. But just because Covid hit during his presidency doesn’t mean he caused it or even handled it poorly. As a matter of fact, Covid and the unemployment rate are related: unemployment was low prior to Covid, and there was high unemployment during shutdown. But how Covid and unemployment were related is a bit more complicated. If she wants to pin these events on him, she must provide evidence that he is responsible for them. She did not do so during the debate.

In my own life, I sometimes assume that when something bad happens it’s due to my sin. It could be. But sometimes we suffer through no fault of our own. Job, for example, went through great difficulties. His friends supposed that he was suffering due to his sin, but the Lord rebuked them. On the other hand, if things go well, it doesn’t mean that God is rewarding us for good behavior. Even the wicked experience good gifts from God through common grace. Trying to pin every bad outcome on bad behavior and every good outcome on good behavior are both instances of the false cause fallacy.

Only a Start

While establishing a causal relationship between two things is difficult, identifying correlations is a start—A cannot cause B unless it’s somehow correlated with B. But correlation is only a start, and starts can be false. Remember, correlation does not equal causation. To establish a causal relationship between two events, more work must be done.