An Act of God in the Gulf?

It's mostly because I "collect" this sort of feature:

Rick Perry: Oil spill may be 'act of God' (Politico)

The Republican governor, speaking at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, warned against a “a knee-jerk reaction” to the spill and said the government doesn’t know what caused the leak, which took 11 lives and threatens the Gulf coast’s vast fishing industry.


“We don’t know what the event that has allowed for this massive oil to be released,” Perry said alongside several other governors on a panel Monday. “And until we know that, I hope we don’t see a knee-jerk reaction across this country that says we’re going to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, because the cost to this country will be staggering.”


Perry questioned whether the spill was “just an act of God that occurred” and said that any “politically driven” decisions could put the U.S. in further economic peril.


“From time to time there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented,” Perry said.

Or, the cost of human errors such as the ones that likely resulted in this catastrophe could be staggering. I'm loathe to put an economic value on some of the potential damage that could be done by a man-made disaster like this, particularly because some things aren't translatable to money. Tell me what the value of sea turtles are, and how we bring a species back from the brink. Tell me about how shrimp and oyster beds recover, and when we get back fishing as a resource and Gulf-area fisherman can count on that as a livelihood.

That's BP's oil, Transocean's rig, and Halliburton's fractured cement job billowing out crude to the tune of 5000 barrels a day. I don't think it's necessary to go blaming God--did he knock something over with an earthquake? Not that any seismologists noticed. And why would he, if we're bringing him up? Saying something like this is an "act of God" is like pre-emptively absolving the nearest parties of culpability. It seems to me that a halt to assess what went wrong would be necessary to understand how similar events can be prevented, and whether it really is safe to continue. That isn't a knee-jerk liberal response--that's just a common-sense safety response. It's also not a bad assessment for the oil companies to take heed of, because this could be hellaciously expensive for BP--and I think they should want to learn, if they can, from any possible human mistakes, so they don't also take on a similar burden.

Like most invocations of "God's will" to explain events, this is convenient to an agenda, and not especially helpful from a practical standpoint. (And in my opinion, tells me a certain Governor is ready to bend over backwards for corporations at the expense of his state's coastline. That's so lame, Gov. Perry.)