Eli5: In science, can you establish causation without knowing the causal mechanism?

Question

Pretty much the title

In: 210

Answer 1

If you don’t know the mechanism then you have a correlation, it could be a great correlation but still you don’t know the cause. To establish causation you need to have a mechanism and an underlying theory that explains the phenomena, e.g. gravity for things falling. Even then causation is very hard to achieve, perhaps impossible, since at the end of the day it’s always a correlation of experimental observations.