It's a nice story about how apparently natural events "Inexplicably" combine to achieve a good result.
This is of course a made up story, and so of course it comes out underlining the point the writer wanted to make.
But this sort of thing is the "events in their lives" that are often presented as proof of God. And if it doesn't turn out so well....that's just forgotten. Hold hands in the ruins of your house and say a tearful prayer to God. The church collapsed, but the statue stood up. Even that can be wagged about as evidence for God, though of course it's nothing of the kind (1).
"Count the hits and ignore the misses" is the name of the game. it's a clear chain of illogic in 3 steps
(1) God exists (faith -claim)
(2) look round for evidence to support the claim ("This is the conclusion;what evidence can we find to support it?").
(3) fiddle the facts to make it look like evidence. The analogy is Fire an arrow into a tree and then paint a target around it. This is done every time by fiddling the evidence from creationism and Bible validity to 'prayer works' and the evidence for design. They all require an element of selecting the hits (and fiddling it to make it look like a hit) and ignoring the misses, (such as the evidence that might undermine the claim. Explaining it away by any means (2) is standard apologetic procedure.
An obvious example is funny feelings. They might be contact with a god or they might not. But 'might not' is dismissed and it becomes Unquestionable Evidences, and anyone who suggests that it might be imagination is slapped dow as biased and closed - minded.
Or the supposed statistical evidence for Design. 1,0000.0000 to one, they say. But Only if you assume an intended result to start with. If you assume that the result is just the result, the statistics are 1/1. It was the same with the Mars (Cydonia) face - the statistics were astronomical against Random Chance producing an image of a human face. But if you don't assume it is Like a human face and it was seeing faces in wallpaper (3,) then it looking how it looked naturally was 1/1. Exactly the same wrong reasoning.
This really is the basic Faith -based illogic of the theist position in just about every apologetic i can think of. And finding God' hand in everyday events is just another of them. Just fix on one or two lucky coincidences or things that look bad turning out ok, and ignoring it when it turns pout bad or nothing happens.
And if nothing happens a bit too often, there are religious apologetic -laden episodes of little house on the Prarie or the Waltons to write a story that will support the belief in God intervening in Mysterious ways that the viewer so dearly wants to see supported.
(1) And of course hurt and aggrieves denunciations of anyone pointing out that this isn't evidence are easy if it is a tragedy and people are looking for comfort. "How can you be so heartless as to rob them of their cherished illusions?"
(2)"Witnesses don't always agree" and "Lucy is a handful of scattered bones" are two examples of invalid dismissal of the evidence against.
(3) this is why keeping it a gap for god/unexplained/a Mystery is so important. The subsequent photos of the Mars face were so unlike a face that the believers screamed 'cover -up'. They screamed denial over the NAMI Ark. They are still in denial about crop circles. They are still in denial about Archaeopteryx (4) . In each case the Faith-claim has been debunked and the scientific/natural claim validated.So (apart from the diehard denialists) they drop that and rummage around for the next bit of "Evidence". NDEs is the Flavour of the Month evidence for God atthe moment and any Alternative explanations are of course dismissed as closed minded skeptical bias.
(4) - i luv doing that
- before the feathers were validated, they were dismissed by anti -evolutionists ("Fakery") and it was clearly a "Lizard". Now the feathers are validates, it is a "Bird" and the reptilian features are simply ignored.
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