Physical Effects Do Not Require Physical Causes

The expected outcome of throwing a glass object like a bottle against a wall is the object's fracture, as many people would readily affirm.  As the glass comes into contact with the wall, it breaks into pieces, losing its prior form.  Just as they would collectively predict these results, many people would say that it was the impact of the glass with the wall that caused the object to break.  However, this is only an assumption: not only can sensory observations of sequential events not establish exact causal relationships, but they also cannot even demonstrate that a given cause is physical to begin with.

The fact that the glass shatters upon colliding with another solid physical substance cannot even prove that a physical cause shattered the glass; instead, it simply establishes empirically that glass can break.  This only means that the act of hurling the glass at the wall is correlated with the physical fracture of the object.  It is comparatively simpler to realize that correlation is not identical to causation than it is to realize that common physical events do not even necessarily have physical causes!  The latter is a foreign concept to many, and yet it is entirely legitimate.

After all, it is possible, although seemingly improbable, that a strictly immaterial force or entity is responsible for the damage to the glass.  A divine or otherwise purely spiritual being with the ability to manipulate matter, for instance, could have caused the glass to break apart and yet waited until precisely when it hit the wall to do so.  That there is nothing logically impossible about this means that it is irrational to believe that correlations of physical events prove that the causes of material events are themselves physical--of course, believing that it seems as if harsh contact between glass and a wall causes the former to break is entirely sound.

Every event has some sort of cause, as nothing produces nothing, and yet repeated observation cannot even prove whether the cause of a phenomenon like the shattering of glass is physical or immaterial.  Logic proves that the effect must have a cause of some sort, even if it cannot ultimately be identified, but neither reason nor science reveals what the exact nature of that cause is.  While everyday occurrences appear to have causes located in the external world, their causes might very well be nonphysical.