[schoen]

Philosophers have worried for a long time about whether we can actually observe causation.

David Hume was famous for arguing in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that we can't observe it and we instead have a "custom" or habit of expecting effects to follow causes.

> After the constant conjunction of two objects—heat and flame, for instance, weight and solidity—we are determined by custom to expect the one from the appearance of the other.

Religious philosophers have sometimes gone to the extreme of occasionalism, where they've maintained that patterns and regularities in nature were just habits or customs that God chooses to follow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism