Act of God?

Is God wroth with the Ark Encounter? We cannot know for sure, but it is entirely possible that he or she visited an admittedly minor act of God upon Ark Encounter LLC. The insurers of Ark Encounter LLC, all six of them, may or may not have thought so, but they refused to pay for a landslide along a road leading directly to the “Ark.” Ark Encounter, in its turn, prayed for relief, not to God, but to the United States District Court (see the link in the caption).

Dan Phelps, a nearby Kentucky geologist, notes, “Any competent geologist would have told them that landslides are a consequence of building on the shales of the Kope Formation,” and expresses surprise that they did not have access to one. He further explains that the photograph, which we got from the text of the lawsuit, “is a textbook example of a landslide occurring in the Late Ordovician Kope Formation of northern Kentucky. The Kope is typically more than 50% shale. If the Kope gets wet and is on a steep slope, it is very much vulnerable to landslides.”

It seems likely that Ark Encounter’s geologists are no better than their staff astrophysicists, though their failure is perhaps more obvious and more meaningful.