It's not just the order but the distance that matters. If you want to say that X caused Y, but X happened a thousand years before Y, chances are that you're at the very least ignoring a lot of additional causes.

In the end, I think, dates are important. It's only the arbitrary positioning of a starting date (e.g. Christian vs. Jewish vs. Chinese calendar) that genuinely doesn't matter; but even that much is useful for us to talk about historical events. I.e. it doesn't really matter where we put year 0, but it matters that we agree to put it somewhere. (Ideally we would have put it somewhat further back in time, maybe nearer the beginning of recorded history, so we didn't have to routinely do BCE/CE conversions in our heads, but that ship has sailed.)