The apostle James summed up our situation best when he wrote, “You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14).

In the insurance and business worlds, you’ll hear people refer to “acts of God.” This phrase often appears in contracts to limit liability for injuries, damages, and losses caused by events outside human control. It’s a recognition that when natural disasters strike, nobody is at fault. (Even when human actions may have contributed to disaster’s likelihood.) Some events in our fallen world are subject only to the sovereign hand that governs the universe.

The idea of “acts of God” remains important for insurance purposes. But it has nearly disappeared from our national conversations around disasters. People increasingly assume we can control everything, so they blame each other when bad things happen. This illusion of human omnipotence has been especially evident in the last year, and it’s vital to challenge it.

Disaster Blame Game

Consider the reactions to the historically devastating hurricanes in 2024. By any standard, Hurricane Helene was a force beyond human control, plowing through the Carolinas and other states after making landfall in Florida—carving a swath of flooding and death like nothing else in the region’s living memory.

Yet before the waters had receded or the public had comprehended the death toll, social media was buzzing with claims that nefarious actors in the government had manipulated the weather, spinning up the storm to drown or displace rural Americans. These rumors became so widespread that U.S. representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina issued a statement attempting to quell them and calm his constituents. That didn’t stop a fellow member of Congress, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, from stoking similar fears days later about Hurricane Milton, pointing to small-scale cloud-seeding as proof that man-made, continent-sized cyclones are possible.

Left-leaning journalists and scientists, for their part, were quick to blame man-made climate change, reciting a script used nearly every time a natural disaster strikes. Some even tried to pin the storms on specific officials, as in Florida, where reporters implied the governor Ron DeSantis bore fault for the devastation brought by Helene and Milton because he expresses skepticism about the human causes of climate change. Whatever the merits of the global warming explanation for weather-related disasters, the idea that the governor of a state with one of the lowest per-capita carbon emissions is particularly to blame for the state of the climate is strange.

Or consider January’s devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, which were fueled by a “perfect storm” of seasonal winds, historically dry conditions, and the accumulation of dense brush in a naturally fire-prone landscape. Most of these factors were outside local officials’ control and have contributed to countless fires in the past. Such events stretch back millennia before California was urbanized, characterizing the “chaparral” ecosystem that depends on periodic fires and burns under natural conditions.

None of these facts stopped politicians or pundits from blaming the fires on the negligence of specific people.

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