Just to make that more concrete: people who own more cars live longer. Why? Rich people buy more cars, and rich people have higher life expectancies. Both cars and long life are caused by a hidden third variable, wealth. Trying to increase your chances of getting into Heaven by being virtuous is as futile as trying to increase your life expectancy by buying another car.
This reasoning only works because buying cars is not perfectly correlated with living longer. If buying cars guaranteed that you would live longer, would you do it?
If buying cars guaranteed that you would live longer, would you do it?
Of course, but then you have made the correlation imply causation, and it doesn’t. If number of cars owned and life expectancy was perfectly correlated, with no counter examples, that would be strong evidence for causation in either one direction or the other, but that isn’t the case, and also wasn’t the point of the example.
This reasoning only works because buying cars is not perfectly correlated with living longer. If buying cars guaranteed that you would live longer, would you do it?
Of course, but then you have made the correlation imply causation, and it doesn’t. If number of cars owned and life expectancy was perfectly correlated, with no counter examples, that would be strong evidence for causation in either one direction or the other, but that isn’t the case, and also wasn’t the point of the example.