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(OPINION) Periodically a natural disaster hits. Innocent people die. Homes and businesses are destroyed. Our hearts rip open.

And many of us look skyward, clench our fists and shout: Why? Where were you, God?

In my home state, 10 years ago a tornado tore through West Liberty, Kentucky, leaving behind death and splintered buildings. Since 2020, we’ve lost more than 16,500 Kentuckians to COVID-19. Less than a year ago, an EF4 tornado hit Mayfield, flattening that town as if it had been carpet bombed by B-52s.

Lately, flood waters wreaked havoc across eastern Kentucky. Thirty-nine people died, including four children in one family who were swept out of their parents’ arms as they all desperately clung to a tree.

Where’s the justice in any of this? If there is a God, why didn’t God intervene? These are among the oldest questions posed by mankind. They date to biblical times and before.

Still, we humans keep demanding answers, and if we can’t get real answers, we make some up. We want this crazy world to make sense.

After a new disaster strikes, atheists invariably argue that the winds or floods prove there’s no God. A benevolent God would protect us, they say.

Someone else concludes there is a God and that God cares but that God isn’t very powerful. God would like to help, God weeps with us in such tragedies, but God is, like us, unable to stop evil.

Deists maintain that long ago God wound up the universe up like a clockmaker, then walked away. He’s no longer involved.

The more judgmental sects of Christians say God is indeed all-powerful, but he’s perpetually angry and punishes us for our sins by sending tornadoes, plagues and floods to indiscriminately strike people down.

Milder Christians argue that, no, God is loving, and God is good. God loved the victims so much he called them home to glory and turned them into angels.

Or they point to the 1,300 eastern Kentucky flood survivors rescued by national guard units and law enforcement agencies as proof God redeems so much good from tragedies — people selflessly helping others — that it outweighs the devastation.

You may have used some of these explanations yourself. None of us is above inventing truths if they help us sleep at night. We tend to see what we’re predisposed to see, or what we need to see at the moment.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve mainly quit trying to make sense of disasters. Here’s my explanation now for such matters:

I. Don’t. Know.

I don’t know for sure there’s a God. I believe there is — I preach about him every Sunday. But I can’t prove his existence to you and don’t care to try. If I’m right and God is real, then I also lean toward a God who’s endlessly loving and endlessly powerful.

That creates problems of its own. If God’s got the power to prevent suffering and also embodies a profound love, why does he sometimes let children drown instead of rescuing them? What kind of love is that? What kind of power?

I don’t know.

If you’re being honest, neither do you. The atheists don’t know. The most pious Christians, Jews or Muslims don’t know.

Ours is a big old complicated universe.

The sun is an average-size star — yet it’s 300,000 times larger than Earth, which is 92.7 million miles away. If Earth were a golf ball on the carpet in a large room, one writer said, Pluto would be a pea eight miles away. The sun would touch an eight-foot ceiling.

Our sun is an infinitesimal part of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains 100 to 400 billion such stars. There are up to 50 times as many stars just in our galaxy as there are people on Earth.

And the observable universe holds at least 100 billion such galaxies. There may be twice that many.

At the other end of the scale, each human body contains 37 trillion cells, says Smithsonian Magazine. Some estimates claim there are 70 trillion.

Cells are so small it would take 10,000 of them to cover the head of a pin. Yet, somehow, each cell contains 46 chromosomes, 5-7 feet of DNA and billions of chemicals. A single human cell contains enough information to fill 100 million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, says an entry from that encyclopedia I copied down years ago.

Every human body, then, viewed from a certain perspective, houses its own universe.

The point is, the cosmos is complex beyond our imagination. We can’t understand the wonders going on beneath our own skin, much less in the vast heavens.

How complex, then, must be the God who created all that?

As St. Augustine famously observed, if you can understand it, it’s not God.

God and his handiwork remains mysterious. We may know God, so far as our capabilities allow. We may love God, or fear God or doubt God.

But we can’t explain God. At some point, we must bow to the mystery.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was the Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He’s the author of four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.