If you take a statistics class, one of the very first things that are taught is to be careful not to infer a wrong cause-effect relation when presented with a "correlation".

A typical example is "given any city, there is a strong correlation between number of churches and number of crimes commited." This is pretty much true everywhere in the world but that does not imply one is causing the other. This correlation can simply be the natural outcome of more populous cities having both in higher numbers compared to less populated ones.