And just last month darkness descended on the land as the moon erased the sun. Everyone thought the eclipse was awesome, but now we’re not so sure — for all the recent ruin seems deeply, darkly not coincidental.

If you thought that, you would be wrong, of course. As any scientist will tell you, nature doesn’t work that way.

Spates of hurricanes, even major ones, are common in late summer and early fall, the height of hurricane season. Especially destructive hurricanes are not unknown either, and climate change may be making more of them. Irma, in size and strength, is near the top of the charts, but not yet off them and its fury can be explained by scientific principles.

Wildfires have been happening out West for millenniums, though humans have made things worse. Climate change plays a role here, too, plus our desire to live next to nature, not to mention decades of firefighting policies that have made large fires more likely.

And earthquakes — they happen all the time, and the numbers of quakes, from weak to powerful, is unwavering when averaged over time. There is roughly one “great” quake, of magnitude 8 or higher, per year. Mexico was the unlucky winner this time.

But still.

Clearly for a lot of people, science is not enough when the stakes seem so high.

“For so many years, talking about the weather was talking about nothing,” said Terry Tempest Williams, the author and naturalist who is currently a writer in residence at Harvard Divinity School. “Now it really is our survival.”

But how we talk about it is reflective of our worldview – and has been for a long time, said Christiana Zenner Peppard, an associate professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University.

“With unexpected cataclysmic weather events, people across time and space have always looked for explanations,” she said.

“The fact is it is attractive to certain segments of the population to look at unforeseen apocalyptic-style events as fitting into a particular kind of narrative,” she added.

While the sense of some gathering apocalypse is not sending people into bunkers, it lingers even in secular minds, if not always consciously.

“We are all much more superstitious than we recognize, and it takes a lot of logical thinking not to believe that this part of the world is not being somehow persecuted,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.

In deeply religious communities, the recent sequence of catastrophic events and threats — terror and nuclear weapon tests, as well as natural disasters — can be understood more easily through prophecy than logic.