The story does not prove that faith always saves. Twenty-nine people who had faith died; sixteen people who had faith survived. The survival was not a reward for faith any more than the deaths were a punishment for its absence.
The story does not prove that determination always succeeds. Some of the people who died were determined. Some of the people who survived benefited from circumstances — where they were seated on the aircraft, the specific timing of the avalanche, the weather conditions on December 22 — that had nothing to do with their determination or lack of it.
What the story shows is something less tidy and more true: that human beings in extremity are capable of things they would not have thought possible; that collective effort under terrible conditions can produce outcomes that individual effort cannot; that the ethical decisions required in extreme circumstances can be made — imperfectly, with struggle, with ongoing uncertainty — by ordinary people who have no prior training for them; and that the people who make it through carry with them an obligation to those who do not.
The sixteen survivors have lived with that obligation for more than fifty years. They have expressed it through the books they have written, the foundation they have built, the interviews they have given, the films they have consulted on, the memorial they funded at the crash site, and the lives they have led.
None of them asked to be in the mountains. None of them chose the decisions the mountains forced on them. What they chose was to keep going — and then, after they came home, to keep speaking about what it had meant.