If God is good, why does "Acts of God" refer to bad things?

I've often wondered about the phrase "Acts of God", which is used in legal and insurance writing to mean disasters like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires...

What are we thinking with a God that routinely does such things when the usual idea is that God is good? What does it say about our opinion of God? Accurate, or confused?

The phrase is not about good or bad. The phrase is about being within human control or not. It is a legal term of art, not interpreted literally as shifting blame to a "god." No god fills any role in the meaning of the phrase, not even as a legal fiction.

Various uses of the phrase "act of God" in the legal context are given in the Oxford English Dictionary:

1648: "This difference betwixt the Act of God, and the Act of the party."

1740: "If Condition be subsequent, it is become impossible by Act of God ..."

In the legal context, "Act of God" merely means something unavoidable, or unattributable to human responsibility. It tends to have a negative connotation only because of how it would arise in a dispute. If no dispute occurred, there would be no event to consider. It is generally only when something has gone wrong, that one has to categorize the cause.

If a contract becomes impossible to execute, one might argue an "act of God" prevented it. If an accident was inevitable, one might argue it was due to an "act of God" rather than any negligence of a party. Etc.

And certainly an "act of God" that creates the "impossibility" to execute the contract may very well be "good," all things considered. It is only a negative in the context of the ability to execute the contract.

A »good God« is a Christian presupposition because 'God' with a capital 'G' means (Judeo)Christian God. (Ive said this quite often of late; excuse the repetitiveness). If you want to get out of that narrow bracket, try replacing 'God' by a random selection from {Krishna, Tao, Allah, Buddha-mind, Wakan-Tanka...}1. If you want to stay in the bracket this is a Christian question not a philosophy one.

Choose?

1 If you want a slightly non random choice I'd recommend the God of one of the heterodox (beheaded) Christian sects like the Gnostics. Then the choice is stark:

Which is actually quite close to Hinduism — Vishnu the maintainer is worshipped but mostly in his descents, Ram and Krishna. Shiva the destroyer is universally worshipped, Brahma the Creator is very rarely worshipped.

From Wikipedia:

In legal usage in the English-speaking world, an act of God, act of nature, or damnum fatale ("loss arising from inevitable accident") is an event caused by no direct human action (e.g. severe or extreme weather and other natural disasters) for which individual persons are not responsible and cannot be held legally liable for loss of life, injury, or property damage.[2][3][4][5] An act of God may amount to an exception to liability in contracts (as under the Hague–Visby Rules),[6] or it may be an "insured peril" in an insurance policy.[7] In Scots law, the equivalent term is damnum fatale,[8] while most Common law proper legal systems use the term act of God.[9]

It is legally distinct from—though often related to—a common clause found in contract law known as force majeure.[10] In light of the scientific consensus on climate change, its modern applicability has been questioned by legal scholars.[11]

[...]

Recently, human activities have been claimed to be the root causes of some events previously considered natural disasters. In particular:

As a general principle of act of God,[17] epidemic can be classified as an act of God if the epidemic was unforeseeable and renders the promise discharged if the promisor cannot avoid the effect of the epidemic by exercise of reasonable prudence, diligence and care, or by the use of those means which the situation renders reasonable to employ.[18]

Not to be confused with divine intervention:

Divine intervention is an event that occurs when a deity (i.e. God or gods) becomes actively involved in changing some situation in human affairs. In contrast to other kinds of divine action, the expression "divine intervention" implies that there is some kind of identifiable situation or state of affairs that a god chooses to get involved with, to intervene in, in order to change, end, or preserve the situation.[1]

The phrase "act of God" is one among a number of phrases — e.g., "God works in mysterious ways", "it's all part of the divine plan" — which suggest that the workings of God are not necessarily comprehensible to human minds. The phrases are usually offered as a form of comfort in the face of some inexplicable, tragic loss, to reassure the bereaved that that they haven't been abandoned by God but are merely experiencing part of some broader plan that is beyond their immediate understanding. It aims to temper the loss by giving it a sense of divine purpose.

This particular phrase was picked up in contract law to cover cases of non-compliance that are absolutely beyond the anticipation and control of the contracting parties. It became a particular caveat of insurance contracts, because insurance companies explicitly cover losses to individuals or other companies. Insurers want to make clear distinctions between human acts that cause loss (theft, arson, vandalism, negligence, malfeasance, etc) and loss events outside human control (lightning strikes, blizzards, floods, etc) because making such distinctions affects their bottom line. The original intent of comforting the bereaved with a sense of a divine plan has been coopted to comfort the financial worries of CEOs, which is a bit of a pity. But such is life…

First of all, this isn't a legal question; it's a question on the boundary between religion and reason.

Just as masturbation is make-believe fulfillment of the mating instinct without actually providing any mate, religion is make-believe understanding of what the hell is going on without providing any actual understanding.

The god myth provides an explanation for bad weather, as long as you leave it at that and after the storm, you clean up the mess.

Another example. The Adam and Eve myth provides a context for why we were children, then suddenly needed to mate all the time and were thrown out of our safe families into the real world where we have to grow old and die.

It doesn't make any sense at all, but that's OK as long as you leave it at that and after mating, you clean up the mess.

How this relates to your question:

In reality, there can be no contradictions. But in the land of make-believe, these imaginary objects can collide.

In the present case, the god myth provides context to the very early memory of the infant, before memories were laid down in a network that provided context.

Praying is an interpretation by the adult of the infant's memory of crying until it gets satisfied by a mysterious god that comes down from the sky and grants its wishes.

The God character is presented as a parent, as in the footprints in the sand / carrying you story. God is taking care of his children.

Height ratio is parent to infant

Note that if this is what's really going on, the relation wouldn't necessarily be parental.

For instance, there might be more than one of them, making it an alien super-race fucking with us, and the relation to us might be as experimenters to lab rats. But the myth provides an emotional context that is integratable into the rest of the brain's neural network.

The problem addressed in this question arises because make-believe can be inconsistent.

If all this was real, one could ask a god, "Say, why do you destroy your children In a furious rage? Are you actually Satan?"

If God is good, why are "Acts of God" bad things?

Because there is no God and the whole thing is an inconsistent, pretend, fantasy story. Any attempt to make it consistent is a fool's errand. There were countless fools in the last 2,000 years, and there are even more of them on the Internet.

The inconsistency created what I call a "context fault," which is a very useful concept that I'd like to talk about sometime.

Usually this occurs when the make believe world crashes into the real one and it can't be covered up. This will happen when Trump's fantasy that China pays tariffs makes prices explode next year.

Sometimes these fantasy worlds collide, and you have a religious war. But they've learned to stay out of each other's way and ignore the contradiction.

This is a rare example a make believe object crashing into itself. Two distinct instances of this god object, conjured out of nowhere, but were created for 2 different purposes:

The two pretend objects collided.

Frankly, I don't believe it's the The Philosophers' job to clean up their mess.