Not a canonical miracle, but a tremendously lucky break that the Captain had the skill, the temperment and the window of opportunity to get the bird down without any fatalities or critical injuries.
I think that saying God intervened is an insult to everyone who ever died in a plane crash, including the 9/11 victims.
A scenario that the pilot has trained for over and over occurs, with a suitable river for landing nearby. Sorry, not a miracle, but training. A miracle that no one was badly hurt, alright, but I credit good training here. I believe in God, and she wouldn’t waste a miracle with that pilot aboard. She is thrifty.
Fox Noise is working hard to be the third Christian fundamentalist network, rivaling TBN and CBN for the top spot. It is an interesting blend of harsh market fundamentalism and intolerant Christian fundamentalism, a marriage of convenience, or maybe a match made in heaven.
Between UFOs and militant nationalism, God is exalted to expose the wicked sinners on the left who hate their country, reject UFOs, and refuse to bury statues upside down in the garden for good luck.
Everyone knows that the Freezer provides more delights and longevity than worshiping a being so simple as a Fridge! The freezer is a higher power than the fridge- search your kitchens, you know it to be true…
I wonder if Bill-O has worked out the odds of a catastrophic bird strike taking out both engines.
I mean, birdstrikes happen all the time. If it involves a single, small bird, it’s generally not a problem for anyone but the bird. Even if a birdstrike event results in one engine failing, the crew can generally just tell the tower, Oh shit, bird strike, we lost an engine, we’re coming back in. And no one much cares except for the passengers and crew who have to change planes and maybe have their schedules screwed up. What are the odds against the incident being severe enough to take out two engines on a two-engined plane?!? Clearly God was trying to kill these people!
(And now I’ve got Jon Stewart’s comments on the Air France runway overshoot in Toronto stuck in my head. “If the plane had burned for eight days…”)
I have no idea how many pilots fly gliders, but I can say in all confidence the “trillion to one” number is bullshit. Anyone else remember the Gimli Gliderincident? These pilots are highly trained and this pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, deserves the praise he is getting. “Miracle?” Hell no.
That’s not the case. I postulate a god that does not interact with the material world and will never choose to; how is this god not unknowable?
Anyway, the problem is if all means of knowing are in question. If we can never be sure of our tools of knowing, then that which is studied by them cannot be taken for granted to be correct - we don’t know if we’re getting a false positive or not. If we have no accurate means of determining knowableness, then logically something can only be unknowable - it doesn’t matter that we may hit on the correct answer, or even if our tools of knowing are 100% accurate, because we have no way to check and so must continually question the results.
Well, obviously that just means that we had a rare flight of 155 straight people.
-Joe
Because people have been feeding it for over 50 posts in this thread.
-Joe
Blasphemer! The Fridge and the Freezer are but two aspects of the holy three-in-one: Fridge the Cooler, Fridge the Freezer, and Fridge the Maker of Ice.
Except that the alternative to Divine Intervention is not ‘random event.’ That’s the problem here. Assuming that if it weren’t for God there would be no reason for anything to happen at all. The fact that my car starts when I turn the key is either a miracle or it’s a big coincidence?
Sure. But you can’t know that such a God exists, and you can’t know its choices. If you did then you would know which would mean that it’s not unknowable.
Since you’re just postulating you can’t be sure that you’re right. That means that you can’t be sure that it’s unknowable.
In short, the only way you could be sure such a God was unknowable would be if you already knew the answer which makes the question moot.
Yes, but WHICH refrigirator is the right one?, Kennmore, Tappan, MagicChef, Whirlpool, Amana, GE?..
When you read the words “Thou shalt have no other Boxes of Ice Before Me”, whicvh one is the right one
If my Whirlpool tells me to go out and vent the Freon from all other refrigerators, how do I know it’s right, what makes The Gospel of the Whirling Pool any more right than the Gospel of the Lonely Repairman?
Otherwise known as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Frost.
:groan: *
Just for that I called for proper punishment, stay put…
[A knight appears in armor with a frozen fish, smacks Robot Arm in the face]
I used to work for a local television station. To my regret, and though I often considered it, I never went up to a reporter who characterized something as “miraculous” and said: “I’m impressed! How did you get God to go on the record and comfirm that He did indeed perform a miracle?”
It’s that precise inability to know that i’m right that makes it unknowable. Even if I weren’t postulating, I couldn’t be sure. By the very fact that I could be wrong about it being unknowable does it become unknowable, because if it turns out i’m wrong then logically my ability to understand such things is flawed, and I cannot trust that answer, either. The problem with your objection is that there is no “if you did” possible.
Note that the Websters definition is very much a Christian viewpoint of atheism. As a practising atheist, I would say that I do not believe in God, Allah, Zeus, Bramha, Buddha (as anything other than the historical Indian Prince Siddhartha), any and all other gods/goddesses, kami, loas, ancestor spirits, etc. I do not “deny” their existence, I simply fail to believe in them, a much more passive worldview, much as I also fail to believe in flying pink unicorns, despite years of living with a daughter with a My Little Pony fetish. (Denial v.s. disbelief - Richard Dawkins reacts to a mention of God by passionately denying his/her/its existence, I react by saying “Meh”.)
Richard Dawkins does not positively assert that God does not exist. He essentially self-identifies as a weak atheist. In The God Delusion, he devises a 7 point “scale of belief” ranging from strong theist to strong atheist and identifies himself as a 6 (“I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there”) and stops short of 7 ("I know there is no God).
Indeedy. One of my colleagues is a keen glider pilot. A very large number of the members of his club are commercial pilots. I’m guessing the odds of a commercial pilot like Sully also being a glider pilot aren’t even particularly long, let alone astronomical.
Interestingly, this same colleague reviewed the available video of the landing and before even hearing of Sully’s background said “that guy’s *gotta *be a glider pilot” just from his technique.