Sure… there may be a clear correlation between people who throw their money solely into annuities and bonds going bankrupt, but are we sure it is causal?
Sure… GDP per capita, long life expectancy, democracy, low corruption, and high press freedom are highly correlated, but how do you know it is causal?
Sure… vaccinated people have fewer instances of catching disease, spreading disease when they get sick, and have less severe symptoms, but how are we certain it is causal?
Correlation doesn’t equal causation! Sciencism is anti-human!
All of this is absolute nonsense.
We have no alternative universe to test gravity. How do we know gravity exists?
First of all, people never say correlation doesn’t equal causation about things they believe in, only things they doubt.
Second, it is the most annoying phrase in the English language.
Third, it doesn’t really matter.
There are multiple ways scientists use to find information. Sometimes scientists can do double blind experiments, setup identical situations in two Petri dishes, and change one variable and see how the bacteria react to one change. This gives very precise information and is great when it can be done. But most fields don’t have the ability to have granular control like microbiology.
The obvious problem is in practically all of physics. You can’t create a parallel universe. So you cannot create two situations with and without fundamental forces of the universe to test how they impact things the same way a microbiologist can test the impact of various environmental factors in infections.
Fortunately, there are other ways to run experiments that show very clearly that things are related with enough certainty to determine that yes, there probably is a causation between sex and babies.
Statistics does a pretty good job of controlling for variables in large datasets to the point where only a fool would deny the findings of science.
If there is an alert that a heating pad in my house is known to malfunction and create a house fire, I’m not going to snarkily say “correlation doesn’t equal causation” and continue to use it… I’m going to throw the damn thing in the trash.
So yeah, while it’s nice to know causation when we see instances of clear trends it’s really not worth it to say “You haven’t proven causation so you have nothing”. Maybe you want to try running the analysis again while putting in more variables, but ultimately if someone shows that using a website correlates with your credit card number showing up on the black market, maybe instead of saying “you haven’t proven it” you should just get off it and use a more reputable website, even if they haven’t exposed the actual emails from the website to the black market.
It’s nice when we can definitively say one action causes another action, but ultimately, it’s not necessary to create a parallel universe to know that magnetism exists.