Sunday, March 22, 2020

Sick churchgoers

During the pandemic, suppose two things happen:

i) A Christian goes to church

ii) The same Christian develops the coronavirus

Is the presumption that he got sick by going to church? Or is that the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy?

Consider some other activities the Christian may have engaged in that week:

• Went to the supermarket

• Went to the drug store

• Got takeout from a Chinese joint

• Got delivery pizza

• Spoke face-to-face with some residents in his apartment complex or condo complex

• Checked in on an elderly neighbor to see how they were doing

• Walked his dog, in the course of which he got into a conversation with someone else walking their dog

• Self-quarantined with his wife and three kids

The list could be easily extended. Each of these encounters is a potential transmission vector. He might contract the virus from the pizza delivery boy, or the cashier at the drug store or Chinese takeout joint, or from shoppers at the supermarket, or the elderly neighbor he checked in on, or a family members, and so on and so forth.

So why do critics single out church attendance as the default culprit? What if that's sheer coincidence, given a multiplicity of transmission vectors? Rationally, you could only pin it on church attendance by ruling out all the other transmission vectors. Are critics in a position to work through that process of elimination? Or is singling out church a reflexive indication of their bigotry?

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