week 9 discussion post #4

To put things in context, Ariella wrote:

The thought strikes me, that the thing about miracles is that they are rare. This is why they are miracles. So what happens then if something is so rare that it has only ever happened once, and it happened to occur a long time ago, and this doesn't give scientists the chance to study it...?

How are people then to know about the scientific possibility or impossibility of this thing...? Could it not be that it is scientifically possible, but everyone thinks it is scientifically impossible, and only a myth, because it hasn't happened again, and so doesn't seem feasible or provable...?

I hope this made sense. I am not sure that it does :)


My repsonse (Slightly edited for the purposes of this blog):

I think I can see where Ariella is coming from with this suggestion, and I like the idea.

It makes sense to me that a scientist would have difficulty understanding an event that occurs, say every 1-in-50 years, because scientific experiments (to me) are all about repetition and comparing against a 'control' of some sort.. so anything that can't be reperformed and tested is classed into the 'miracles' group, simply because scientists don't have the ability to gather additional information about such an event..