There are no “acts of God” anymore

Why do disasters happen?

The ancient Greeks had an all-purpose explanation, as I’ve been learning from my Greek myth-mad 7-year-old son: the gods.

Bad harvest? The gods. Plague? The gods. Drought? The gods. Sea monster ravages your city? Definitely the gods — specifically that jerk Poseidon, who once sent a sea monster to raze Troy because its king Laomedon refused to pay him for building the city walls. 

At a time when understanding of the mechanics of the natural world was as poor as its cosmology was rich, the idea that the catastrophes were the result of the actions of higher beings must have brought some sense to the senselessness of suffering. And that idea — that we should distinguish between events that had a clear human cause and those that did not — stuck around, even as paganism gave way to monotheistic religion, and humans developed legal systems and codes meant to judge liability and guilt. 

By the 16th century, the term “act of God” had entered the English lexicon, meaning any natural event or disaster that was seen as both beyond human understanding (or prediction) and a direct manifestation of divine will. An “act of God” meant that no person or business could be held legally liable for any resulting damage from such an event — a distinction that became increasingly important as the modern insurance industry took root in late 17th-century England.

Originally, an “act of God” was largely a way for insurers to get out of paying claims. At a time when risk assessment and prevention was still primitive, natural disasters and other acts of God were generally not covered, because there was no way to insure against what was still unforeseeable. 

But as both the insurance industry and risk prediction matured, that category began to shrink. Storms could be forecast; seismic zones could be identified; flood zones could be calculated. Insurers could price specific policies for specific risks with greater and greater confidence; if we couldn’t always prevent a disaster, increasingly we could at least see it coming and know why, and therefore prepare. It wasn’t the gods or God who made the earth move — it was the movement of tectonic plates.

Risk still existed, just as it did for the ancient Greeks. The difference is that it was comprehensible. God was mostly out of the picture. Right?

Not exactly.

Who’s at fault?

The wildfires still burning in Los Angeles are shaping up to be one of the most expensive disasters in US history, with early estimates putting the toll at $250 billion or more. The question of who will ultimately pay that bill and what might be done to prevent such a catastrophe in the future is an enormous one, with no shortage of possible answers.

Perhaps it’s the fossil fuel companies that’ve helped create the climate change that turbocharged the fires, as many environmental advocates argue. Or maybe it’s the fault of the federal government for decades of fire suppression that has led to an overaccumulation of flammable fuel in forested areas. 

Or it could be the government of Los Angeles’s failure to properly fund water infrastructure and firefighting. Or perhaps it’s California’s fault for restricting housing construction, which has pushed more and more development into wildfire-prone areas. Or the insurance companies for taking away coverage connected to climate change?

Or maybe we can trace it all the way back to William Mulholland’s decision in the early 20th century to build a massive aqueduct to bring water to the parched Los Angeles, which directly enabled the rapid growth of what would become America’s second-biggest city on the site of what is essentially a roulette wheel of different natural disasters?

What all these causes have in common is that at their root is human action, or inaction. Which, in a way, is a comfort. There’s no known antidote to divine retribution, but if human action is at the root of this and other disasters, then human action can remedy it. We’re a long way from blaming the gods here, unless by gods, we’re talking about ourselves.

The problem of evil

I was an English major with a concentration in creative writing, which means I can parse some iambic pentameter and, if I’m feeling particularly sadistic, show you the 400-page novel I wrote as my senior thesis. But my most memorable class over those four years was the only one I took in the religion department. It had the very metal name “The Problem of Evil,” which I think was the main reason I signed up. (That, and it fulfilled my ethical thought requirement.)

In its formulation, the problem of evil is a simple one: How can an omniscient, omnipotent and all-good God allow evil and suffering to occur in the world? Why, in other words, do disasters happen — or perhaps better, are allowed to happen?

To the ancient Greeks, the problem of evil wasn’t a problem at all. Their gods weren’t omniscient, weren’t omnipotent, and definitely weren’t all good. They were like us — immortal and powerful, but beset by recognizably human passions and emotions. Above all else, they could and did make mistakes, much as we can and do make mistakes.

In the postwar era, the problem of evil increasingly became a secular one. It wasn’t just because humanity itself had become less religious, or that the war itself and especially the Holocaust had revealed evil on such a titanic scale that the very premise of an all-powerful and all-good God seemed absurd to so many. Rather, it was because scientific and technological progress had put humanity center stage. 

Whether it was creating nuclear bombs capable of ending life on this planet, or astronauts leaving footprints on the moon, we were the gods now. When things happened — good, bad, or otherwise — were the ones who made them happen.

We are as gods

The environmentalist and tech thinker Stewart Brand has a quote that always stuck with me: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” It appeared in the opening statement of the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, at the height of the space program and the Cold War, when the first glimpses of what would become the modern tech industry, born in California, were becoming visible. It was a celebration of human agency and creativity.

In 2009, in his book Whole Earth Discipline, Brand modified the line: “We are as gods, and HAVE to get good at it.” The 1960s-era egotism in that earlier vision was tempered. We had to accept our power over the Earth, and we had to use it wisely. We had to be good gods. The alternative was destruction.

The problem is, we are not good at it. Being gods, I mean — not yet. I believe that the Los Angeles wildfires are largely the result of human action, or inaction. The greenhouse gases we’ve pumped into the atmosphere, contributing to the “hydroclimate whiplash” that primed LA’s forests to burn. The housing and insurance policies that put too many homes in a wildfire danger zone, too many of which were built to burn. The small mistakes of judgement in the governmental response to the fires, and the bigger errors of overconfidence that made it possible to believe that such a place as Los Angeles could exist where it did, and everything would be fine.

But the precise combination of factors that led to the fires, and the precise series of actions to take Los Angeles into a safer future — that is much, much harder to know. Which doesn’t stop the avalanche of voices who are perfectly confident in exactly who is at fault and what we should do. It’s a pattern I see in global challenge after global challenge, from artificial intelligence to pandemics to climate change. And I believe that attitude is why, increasingly, the aftermath of a disaster isn’t unity, but division. Each side is convinced they alone know who is at fault, and they alone know how to fix it.

But the truth is that our power to affect the world greatly exceeds our ability to understand and anticipate the effects of what we do, as much as we might be convinced otherwise. So if we’re gods, we’re blind gods, but so wrapped up in hubris that we believe we can see.    

The ancient Greeks knew hubris well, and they knew what followed it: “nemesis,” or divine retribution. But there are no gods to punish us. Instead, we have to live with our mistakes, if we can. So perhaps, as we sift through the ashes in Los Angeles, we can embrace the opposite of hubris: humility. Not about our power, but about our vision.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!