"It's A Miracle!"

[Jokerman]

The other day on "Seconds From Disaster" they were examining the Columbia shuttle disaster and the investigation that followed. One of the hurdles the investigators faced was finding the flight data recorder in a debris field that crossed two states.

Using a computer, they programmed in the trajectory and the position of the recorder in the in-tact shuttle relative to parts that had been found. The computer was able to identify the general area within the debris field where the the recorder was likely to have landed. A number of volunteers were sent to re-canvass the area and after three weeks, the recorder was found.

I'm watching this, fascinated by the methods they used when the NASA investigator pops up and says that finding the recorder was a "miracle".

No burning bush, no booming voice of god, no pythonesque finger descending from the sky pointing at the recorder. Just human ingenuity and hundreds of hours of labor that somehow qualifies as a divine act.

As a member of one of our greatest scientific institutions he may have just been using a common, inaccurate cliche. I like to think that was the case but I just don't know anymore.

[Goblinmonger]

1. What you just don't understand

is that god was guiding the algorithms in the computer and making the volunteers go to certain places in order to make the recorder found.

You are just blinded by your disdain for all things holy.

[progressoid]

2. Yeah, I would like to think he was being sarcastic but it's hard to say.

Maybe he's one of them "mediums".

[Goblinmonger]

3. I don't know about sarcastic,

but I think people sometimes use miracle to mean something that happens when there is a very minute statistical chance of it actually happening. The real concern is how many fundies out there thought he meant the "animated finger of god" when he used the term.

It's like tragedy. That word has come to mean something so different than it's original literary meaning (little girl falling in a well is not tragic; Bill Clinton's/Richard Nixon's rise and subsequent fall is tragic).