"Act of God" has a specific legal meaning and its use does not mean that insurers hold any theistic ideas.

Excellent advice!!

it's just language. it has a specific meaning and it usually refers to nature, not deities. when i hit my toe and yell "oh shit" i am not deluded into thinking i have encountered a pile of poop, nor am i trying to direct anyone to defecate; if i hear about something awful and i say "jesus" i am not invoking that likely fictional character who has at any rate never been a part of my life. "act of god" doesn't offend me either. if the company tried to make this in some way literal, that would be different. it quite obviously isn't meant to be taken literally.

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I've seen that on warranty cards in the us. Insurance companies will try to get out of any claim. They are designed to fuck you. I had a crop insurance claim a few years ago. Totally legit. Finally paid about half of what I should have got. My premium was about 30k a year. They want their money upfront, but when you have a claim, it takes damnation and a day to get a penny.

I was under the impression that this was just their catch all term for extrinsic/natural causes, ie certain policies are meant only to cover accidents where a human being is at fault. They try to put in fine print so that you’d have to buy multiple types of insurance. Homeowners insurance can get away with not covering lightning strikes, floods, tornadoes and tropical storms, car insurance can sell you a separate type of insurance for floods etc. It’s poor semantics that you can argue down, but if they have their meaning explicitly defined in the contract to spell out these differences I doubt there’s anything you can do about it in the US at least. The legal issue isn’t about the existence of god, it’s about the existence of problems that humans didn’t cause.

I fear Americans may not have the same outcome in Court as you did.

Just goes to show that even God is not above the law. Slightly encouraging that its grip is loosening.

You wouldn’t have achieved that ruling 30 years ago!

I would be very shocked if the actual legal contract had “act of god” without specifying that it simply means the same thing as “natural causes”.

they may try it in the USA but I would be very surprised if any insurance company tried that in the UK. that clause has been removed from policies here many years ago.

I would absolutely fight, and win against, any kind of "act of god" argument.