Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

Well, what is the data that suggests that they do? How localized is the correlation? How good is the correlation? Does it work at the level of individual ice cream trucks? How far away are the drownings and the trucks?

More specifically, suppose that I hypothesize that ice cream trucks cause drownings, what sort of data would e that hypothesis? And have we collected data in that context?

How does any of that matter?  Every summer drownings correlate with ice cream trucks being in the neighborhood.  It being local or not is irrelevant because the speed of light need not be violated by the causative effect of ice cream trucks.  QM postulates statistical effects so the idea that ice cream trucks correlates with drownings need not occur at the individual level.  Additionally, that assumes that 100% of drownings are caused by ice cream trucks and that there is no delay, fixed or random, in the mechanism.  It hypothesizes exactly what we see, a rise in frequency of nearby ice cream trucks correlating to a rise in drownings.  The fact is things correlate with other things regardless of how near or far, aggregate or individual, or any of this other crap.  You're trying to add other factors on top of correlation as being necessary to establish causation, but your prior argument doesn't allow for that.  Your Humean skepticism has led you to a dead-end in which you can't rule out anything as a cause of anything else.  I just burped.  Somewhere in the world, somebody fell off a building.  And according to you, I caused that, because my burp correlated with them falling off a building.

We have two hypotheses:

1. Ice cream trucks cause drownings.

2. Both ice cream trucks and drownings occur mostly in summer.

So what we need is an observation that will distinguish between these two hypotheses.

The most obvious one would be to rent a bunch of ice cream trucks in the winter and see if drownings increase then as well. Even better, do this at various different times of the year and in various locations. Then see if the correlation persists.

You are right, the correlation is primarily observational.  But when there is more than one active hypothesis (and there almost always is), the key is to find some setup where the two hypotheses give different predictions and see which one is wrong.

This is yet another reason why a single experiment is not enough to overthrow a theory. The experiment needs to be conducted in a variety of situations to explore when the observed correlation (or lack) is there.

I think the basic problem is the expectation that science will give a 'mechanism' for all 'causes'. And that is simply false. In fact, the whole idea of 'mechanism' assumes a metaphysics that is very likely to be wrong.