Tort, theology, and the colonial mind: rethinking the ‘act of god’

What does it mean to attribute a flood, a landslide, or a gas leak to an “Act of God”? The question appears legally sound, conceptually coherent, and culturally neutral. We question this neutrality. This paper examines the doctrine of “Act of God” not as a universal legal category but as a concept with Christian-European origins that was later secularized and widely adopted, sometimes by colonial transplantation and sometimes by selective legal borrowing. That the doctrine of “Act of God” today appears self-evident, even in societies where neither “God” nor “religion” exist as native categories, is not evidence of universal agreement, but of a significant transformation in how legal systems reason about misfortune. This paper traces how tortious liability and disaster jurisprudence, as they travel across legal cultures, carry with them a theological residue that modern law has neither shed nor acknowledged. That non-European societies today either mimic these categories or resist them by asserting equivalence does not constitute decolonization. The solution, therefore, must begin not with better laws, but with better questions, questions that emerge from within the conceptual worlds of the societies being governed. Methodologically, this is a conceptual-historical and comparative jurisprudence analysis; no empirical data are used.