Once again, thank you for a fair and even-handed treatment of this.
"I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad."
Hoo-boy, Crazy (And Heretical) Mariology could be an entire post of its own. When Catholics go nuts, it tends to be in the "mystical visions and revelations" side (rather than things like the Satanic Panic of Evangelical American Protestants). One of the objections to Lourdes (I am recalling off the top of my head) was that there had been previous, small-scale, similar alleged apparitions which must have primed St. Bernadette to see something similar.
Medjugorje itself is *very* controversial; apart from the turf war between the local Franciscans (who backed the visionaries) and the local bishop (who very much did not), it's highly unusual, to say the least, for apparitions to take place over so long a period. The Vatican has currently split the difference by saying "yes you can go there on pilgrimage, no we're not saying anything supernatural happened there".
No apocalyptic predictions, it only lasted one evening, and while it's a pilgrimage site it's nowhere on the same level as Lourdes or Fatima. It's unusual too in that it was a silent apparition - no messages, no speaking to those who saw it.
That too has been the subject of attempted debunking, with one claim that the entire thing was a magic lantern show (possibly hoaxed up by the parish priest). On the other hand, if you've ever been to Knock (and I got dragged there on pilgrimage during the 80s by my mother), it rains. A lot. Good luck trying to keep a magic lantern alight, in the evening/night, during rain and wind, while you remain hidden enough to secretly project images on the wall of the church in the hopes someone will be passing along and see them:
(That's one of the times the explanation for a miracle makes less sense than the miracle itself, like my personal and long-standing favourite, Ice Floe Jesus for the walking on water).
Human physicist: the Mie scattering point is correct. It does indeed skew forward. Generally, scattering phenomena in the atmosphere are very complicated, especially in mesoscopic regimes (Object size many, but not TOO may wavelengths) where the very large and very small approximations break down.
Astrophysicist, agreed. The argument being made is that while Ethan is correct that there are many scatterings in the cloud, those scatterings won't go in a random direction but will preferentially have the light go out in the same direction that it came in. As a result, you'll have a somewhat resolved, disk-like Sun produced by lots of scattered photons that just didn't change direction much.
Relatedly, I have also regularly seen the disk Sun through clouds, although I never stared at it much. I associate those observations most with Utah in the winter, when presumably the clouds are somewhat icy and the particles are somewhat large.
The problem is that either it wont attenuate by enough to get below the threshold for discomfort OR it will obscure the disc. I dont deny that you can get a “somewhat resolved, disc-like Sun” through clouds with optical depth less than 4-5. Look up nimbostratus and you’ll see what kind of clouds you need to attenuate by 10^6 cd/m2
Didnt Scott explain this though? You are correct that if you assume a simple Beer’s law attenuation, e^-α, of the light, then the reduction factor you state has α=14. But, according to the testimonies of a bunch of people above, they are able to stare at the sun with markedly less cloud cover than this implies. Thus, the details of the atmospheric scattering are not so important, instead the assumption that you REQUIRE α=14 appears to be contradicted by testimony. Something’s wrong with this estimate.
Edit: Ah, sorry one other thing. The point about Mie scattering was that the scattering also does not have to destroy the coherence of the light in the Mie regime, allowing you to preserve the sharp disk while also attenuating the absolute brightness.
I doubt the veracity of the testimony. I think you can get something close to this when Sun is near the horizon + thin clouds + haze, and I dont expect people to be good at remembering the precise details + they seem to be primed and strongly motivated to commit a memory error/mandela effect
Idk, that seems like it undermines your broader point that relies entirely on testimony being reliable. But would you agree that if I have dominantly single scattering events only, then i can attenuate the light as much as I want, and the sharpness of the image is completely unchanged? This is what the Mie regime point is about.
But my point doesnt “rely entirely” on testimony being reliable - I dont know how anyone who read my posts could say that. And not all testimony is created equal - there are ways to discriminate between reliable/unreliable testimony (e.g, multiple attestation to a specific event, statement against interest/bias, coarse detail rather than fine detail, temporally proximate to event, etc…) You have to overturn much more credible testimony than specific details reported about unspecific recollections in Scott’s discord polls to reject the miracle, so it is weird that you put so much stock in this kind of anecdote.
Physically realistic scattering from clouds with optical depths >9 will inevitably disturb (probably extinguish) the solar disc… perfect forward scattering is not realistic and is what you need for the multiple scattering not to blur/smear the light… of course, it is strongly forward - but that isnt what you need.
you distinctly remember seeing the Sun near its zenith as a pale, moonlike disc that was painless to stare at without squinting?
photos are totally believable - but no glare in iphone camera doesn't mean no glare in the naked eye (the discomfort glare is driven by scattering within the human eye - with the right filters, you can take a no glare photo of the sun in a clear sky)
Interesting that you mention Utah - I must've seen this a dozen times a year when I was working as a ski bum out in Colorado, enough that I distinctly noted it as a cool phenomenon in its own right.
It's *more* obvious if the sun is low in the sky and right in front of you on the horizon, *easier* if you're wearing polarized goggles, etc. But it's also something that very definitely occasionally is visible to the naked eye at ~2pm!
I think Utah is a bit farther south than Portugal - do you remember what month it would be? Maybe October in Portugal and February in Utah are similar midday elevation of the sun.
I'm pretty sure that this case is a simple matter of a good fraction of the light getting scattered zero times, which explains the sharp boundary instead of getting convolved with something.
I vaguely remember sometimes seeing a slightly brighter splotch in the clouds where the sun is when it was too overcast to see the sun as a disk with a distinct outline, this is probably what the forward bias in scattering looks like.
Is your point that if it were explained by forward scattering, then that would noticeably blur/distort the disc?
Can you weigh in on my point about the tradeoff between attenuation and optical depth. If I am right that the optical depth has to be 11-14 to get the attenuation you need, I feel like the debate is over.
I feel like e^11 is a lot. Attenuating by enough for the unscattered light to be maybe 1x the brightness of the clouds would be enough. Which would by definition not hurt since looking at the clouds doesn't hurt and so 2x the clouds shouldn't hurt either.
Optical depth would be something around ln(angular area of sun) or something like that. I also live on the east coast and like looking at clouds, so I see this effect every couple of days...
I also live on the East Coast. There is zero chance that you see the midday Sun as pale, moonlike disc that is painless to gaze at “every couple of days”
Also, that isnt how optical depth/cloud attenuation works. See my NASA reference in my original post.
Reading your original post more closely I think you are making a unit error.
The point is that the sun is big enough that you can see it as a visible disk. Therefore, the correct measure to use is brightness. An object that takes a larger visual area with the same cd/m^2 would be easier to look at. (Otherwise your calculation would say that a white piece of paper that occupies the same visual area as the sun would be too bright to look at [sun is ~1e-2 radians, so going by your numbers a square piece of paper 1m away of sun size would get 1e-4*1e9 = 1e5 cd, going into a 2 pi m^2 area gives a bit over 1e4 cd/m^2])
But yes, this is somewhere around 1e3-1e5 attenuation by the clouds, which would mean that that the cloud would look pretty opaque but the sun is bright and that's how much is needed to bring the sun down to the same order of magnitude as the surrounding clouds.
What is the unit error? Luminance is brightness per area per unit solid angle. That is directly related to perceived brightness/comfortable viewing.
Your paper calculation mixes up quantities. You first convert luminance (cd/m²) to luminous intensity (cd) by multiplying by area; that’s irrelevant to visual comfort, which depends on luminance. Then you “spread” that intensity over a hemisphere and write 2π m², conflating solid angle (steradians) with area. That’s a dimensional error. Luminance concerns radiance per solid angle in the viewing direction; hemispheric averaging can’t be used to recover a meaningful cd/m² for what the eye sees.
I think you are right that the optical depth must be in a 11-14 sweet spot
Below is a PRBT4 simulation file of a spherical "sun" and scattering layer of optical depth=10, SSA=0.9, g=.877 that nevertheless produces a crisp disk. (it's a little more absorptive and thin than I'd prefer, but more scattering == more compute so have mercy)
The key point is that at these optical depths, the "blur filter" is maxed out and the whole cloud is lit. At which point the contrast is between the ambient brightness of the cloud and the directly-transmitted, zero-scattering, lottery-winner rays.
Similarly, if you use a point-source you will never get a "halo" on the other side of the cloud in these conditions. Scattered light gets completely distributed
Make the cloud thinner and then you can get a halo, but then the sun would be too bright
Thanks for checking out our poll from ACX Discord.
For people unfamiliar with Discord, I think it would help to clarify that it's a different server (not channel) from the one you featured in the last post, with different people voting.
> Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on.
I don't agree. Surely the chance of you blacking out briefly, and someone taking your pen; or simply you personally hallucinating (I know you're not entirely convinced of mass hallucination as a phenomenon, but you certainly do believe in single-person hallucination) is larger than the probability of a miracle.
I admit the Pope blowing up mountains needs some explanation and is worth thinking about, although I still wouldn't want to leap to divinely-inspired miralcle, even then.
But what if "tangible evidence" is available afterwards? I once ended up with a case-hardened steel file that was bent at the tip of the tang. I can't, however, guarantee that the bend hadn't been there previously...but I've never seen one before or since. (I got this while investigating a "spoon bender" friend, who on being presented with the evidence quit the activity. [Rumors had said that sometimes other things would bend in the presence of the "spoon bender" activity...so I went looking.]) I ended up convinced that the friend was a fake, but unable to explain the bent file.
So does anyone know of case-hardened steel files that are manufactured with a bend at the tip of the tang? (It might be done to enable a handle to be molded around the tang, so I can invent a good reason...I've just never seen another.)
I'm not an expert on file manufacturing specifically. But from a little research it appears they undergo multiple hardening and tempering processes, some of which involve quenching by dipping, presumably by the tang. It seems possible that the tang is not subject to the full hardening process. Indeed a very hard tang doesn't seem desirable, being prone to breakage, so it might intentionally be preserved in an annealed state.
If a file is e.g. stepped on while resting against the tang, it seems like the overall stiffness would place a large bending moment towards the tip. If the tip is less hard than the rest of the file, a bend there would not be surprising.
Well, it didn't *look* different and it didn't feel different. And it was about 1/8 inch thick, so it would need a lot more force than that to bend it. But if hardened steel looks exactly the same as unhardened steel, that would be a possible explanation, but one that was quite unsatisfactory. It would be much more satisfactory if someone could point to files that were made that way.
Normally hardened files are more likely to break than to bend. And I believe that the hardening process changes the color of the metal.
Also, the word miracle comes with extra religious baggage. If the pen disappears, it suggests that some unexplained phenomenon is happening, but that may not have anything at all to do with religious miracles, prophets, and whatnot.
Lately, I've mostly jokingly been considering all the little unexplained phenomena signs of glitches in the matrix. Maybe the Fatima people just accidentally triggered the deep fire kasina meditation code loop? Maybe it's just a little perceptual bug that is hard to reproduce consistently. That seems at least as likely as a random religious miracle.
Assorted thoughts and musings on how I find myself relating to this miracle report:
1. From my memory of the description many of the people (especially the children) had been meditating together in some sense for many days or weeks straight. With the large crowd and the spiritual atmosphere it's easy to imagine many people there in quite an altered state, which makes the fire kasina angle seem more likely to me personally.
2. I'm sympathetic to something like "indirect realism" as a metaphysical position. That is, we each live inside a personal simulation built by our nervous system/ brain, which is usually strongly coupled to external reality but not always (better explanation with pictures here: https://qualiacomputing.com/2022/12/28/cartoon-epistemology-by-steven-lehar-2003).
A way to get an intuition for this perspective I find helpful is the look at the sky and imagine it being such that "Behind the sky is my skull". When I do this there's a shift, and a sense that everything I have direct access to is inside my simulation and "me" in some sense. This way of seein is particularly palpable with things like fire kasina.
I find indirect realism a useful frame for understanding both fire kasina and miracles like this where reality itself seems to change in ways that physics does not allow for.
3. The notion that they were all meditating / in an altered state and the indirect realism frame fails to explain the shared aspect though (and utterly fails re the reports of nearby villages experiencing the miracle, or random lawyers showing up to witness. I imagine they were not pseudo meditating for days?).
I remember Dr Ingram on a podcast mentioning that while on retreat (in a castle if I remember correctly) he drew a neon orange shape in the air with his finger (having meditated enough such that this was as real to him as anything) and his friend absently remarked on the orange colour (and maybe the shape also? I don't recall) without having been told by Daniel at all.
Embarrassingly through other tidbits I've picked up and some personal experiences I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of cross emination happening on what some people might call a "group field" or "telepathy". I have no good models or justification for this and acknowledge it sounds crazy if you're not already sympathetic to such things being possible.
I guess the way I interpret the miracle is "a fire-kasina-like experience that spread via the vibe".
4. Lastly, I was struck by people saying things like "I didn't see it, but just being there (just being exposed to the vibe) was enough for me to believe".
This resonates for me with a sense of what I understand miracles to be "about". That is "coming into direct contact with the mysterium tremendum, updating some hyper prior related to reality being more deeply subject to our preconceptions / shared preconceptions than we thought".
"Encountering the unexpected power to shared belief to deeply alter how we experience the world"?
"An unexpected update that something very different is possible" maybe.
If something as stable as "my experience of the sun" can alter so drastically on account of prayer and belief (and not just for me but everyone around me) then maybe "I can't possibly love my intolerable neighbour / forgive my ex / accept that my son died and it's ruining my life" could also change.
This sort of shifts the perspective on miracles from "God did something that defies physics thus he must be real" to "When we congregate and pray in earnest we can common knowledge a direct experience of an enchanted world where the impossible becomes possible" (the kingdom of heaven).
Indirect realism and miraculous vibes are not how many (most?) believers understand miracles, but they're currently the lenses that come up for me :)
+1 for qri and indirect realism. You can experience some very interesting and somewhat fun mental states while thinking about "behind the sky is my skull" while on psychedelics. Especially in a hammock on a beautiful day 😏
just... make sure going into it that you have a strong grasp on epistemology, and have a deep understanding why indirect realism doesn't mean there is no reality outside your mind, and why even if solipsism is true you should be a good person. Idk, to me it was fun and interesting, but after writing it I realized it could easily send someone in a bad direction. Be careful before taking psychedelics
This is a cool idea, but I suspect it’s applying a very intense-Buddhist-insight-meditation frame to a religion that contains very little like that. Catholicism is really not very mystical for the vast majority of adherents, certainly for Gilded Age peasants, and it’s violently opposed to insights like “behind the sky is my skull.”
Yes it’s entirely possible to see the sun through cloud at a comfortable light level and still see a clear disk. I’ve seen this multiple times (indeed on one occasion I saw an unusually large sun-spot group, and verified this by looking at online images from a solar telescope that day). Now this does depend on the cloud — so presumably on the size of the water droplets.
If I recall the elevation was about 30 degrees, and, yes, there was no discomfort or glare, owing to the attenuation by cloud (such conditions are rare, and again this is presumably to do with droplet size, but they do occur.
Droplet size is just an input to optical depth. I have yet to see someone address the paradox of depth - you wont get the attenuation you need without an optical depth that would disturb the disc (and I found a mathematician that made same argument as me in context of Fatima).
It’s not just optical depth. For starters, as the above GPT-5 quote suggests, droplet size affects whether it is in the Rayleigh scattering regime or the Mie scattering regime. And if we were talking about high-altitude ice crystals then their shape (as well as size) becomes relevant.
The scattering angle also matters, whether it is isotropic, or forward scattered, or whatever (and if we’re considering ice crystals, that might have non-spherical shapes, it’s not straightforward).
I've also seen this. There is someone who took a photo of the sun through fog (saying that they could see sun spots with the naked eye) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/naYged4a7M This photo reflects well what I remember seeing: that the clouds look almost like black smoke in front of the sun and that you can see movement in the clouds.
Now, the picture is through fog, not clouds, which might change the physics, but I'm not really sure why it would.
I associate this phenomenon with a relatively low sun though, as in winter time.
Seconded. I grew up in an area with heavy fog in the winter and I would regularly be able to painlessly see the disc of the Sun when the fog had burned off the right amount. Well maybe not *regularly* but I definitely have clear childhood memories of being able to look at it and forcing myself not to because I thought it was harmful.
I think I basically agree with John Schilling: UFOs in the original sense are a label for a steady stream of both culturally-mediated mass observation events as well as isolated observations with impeccable tools and credentials. Many of these will get post-hoc probable explanations, like the now-frequent drone panics or Petrov's detections. But we know that quite a few won't even get that much and that's just something we have to live with. At the end of the day, no number of UFOs have yet converted into a single First Contact situation; I leave it to the reader to tweak their Bayesianism to be able to distinguish those qualitatively different forms of evidence.
*Yes*, this is a nearly-fully generalized way to dismiss sightings without having to put much thought into it. But I'd argue whether or not that strikes you as convenient or extremely aggravating points to different forms of engaging with the problem: is this something to argue about over the internet, or are we trying to predict reality? If on a regular basis I fire up my telescope, or my Mk. 1 eyeball, or my cutting-edge early warning radar, as a pragmatic question: how much effort do I need to put towards screening out false positives?
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Actually, speaking of AESA ghosts that reminds me of something unrelated - what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant? I'm comparing this to how I would feel about one (1) scientist who tells me about three (3) meta-analyses covering (100) one hundred studies between them with 70,000 patients. It seems to me that you have to let the thinnest part of the chain of evidence dominate your belief in the strength of evidence, but I'm not sure I've seen a thorough approach to that sort of meta-credibility.
>what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant?
Eye color. Brown eyes protect you against intense light. So there's easily a couple of orders of magnitude difference in how much light will cause discomfort.
The argument about luminance given by Ethan is an instance of Eulering: trying to dazzle with a sciency-sounding explanation. The argument itself boils down to: Nu-uh.
Keep in mind that light perception is logarithmic. 10^3 vs 10^9 isn't as big of a jump as Ethan is trying to imply.
i'm one of the testimonies from "the latter witnesses" (number 6) and i've got very blue very light eyes, lol. overall awareness to discomfort is very different between people also! stated not as a refutation to eye color being significant, but that it isn't required.
I know from experience that you can have cloud cover so intense that you can’t locate the sun at all, so I think there must be something wrong with Ethan’s analysis.
ETA: I see from other comments that I have been unfair to Ethan’s analysis. I can’t say I understand even now why it should be so impossible for cloud cover to give you a perceptible disk but protect you from pain, but it’s not like Ethan just ignored the possibility.
I disagree with the premise of Ethan's argument that for this to be a "Miracle" it must not have been the actual Sun that moved. As a "believer" in general (though not in particular about Fatima) I think this point misunderstands the nature of miracles.
God created natural things and is capable of acting through his creations. There is no need to invoke unnatural false Suns. He can manipulate the actual Sun, or at least the light from it or the air through which the light passes. This may be supernatural in the sense that things we consider miracles are unlikely to occur naturally, but they still make use of natural things.
Almost analogous is the old argument with fundamentalists about evolution. The fundamentalists posit convoluted stories like the Earth is very young and dinosaur bones are red herrings to test peoples faith. Catholics are generally fine with the idea of evolution - God created the world and evolution was a means to doing that. You don't even need to invoke the idea that God "guided" evolution, he's smart enough to set things up to end up where he wanted them to go. Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument.
My point is only - you don't need bizarre nonphysical objects to account for the Sun miracle.
In my view, even if the Fatima miracle was the result of something like the Kasina meditation, the miracle of Fatima may be that so many believers saw it at the same time. It is less supernatural, but they still had a profound religious experience that changed many of their lives.
In the Bible Jesus fed thousands of people with the loaves and fishes. Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?
Where did I assert that premise? I think we have specific evidence that favors a localized emitter as the explanation for Fatima, but I never said that, in principle, a miracle couldnt be implemented by manipulating light from the Sun.
I am sorry if I have misunderstood your point. I admit that I have read your arguments only second hand through Scott's blog. I will have a look at the source.
"Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument."
...no? That seems to be the heart of the argument. The Universe exists and the forces within it interact in certain predictable ways. Sometimes those forces are created by conscious creatures like us: we can use fans to create an updraft that lifts things, or we can apply evolutionary pressure to breeding organisms. Other times, those forces are "natural" (i.e., not human), like wind and natural selection. It's fundamentally non-falsifiable to say that *the entire thing* is a miracle and a creation (billions of years ago) by an external eternal consciousness.
Clearly when ordinary people use the term in ordinary language they're talking about the idea that that consciousness is named "God" and interferes *today*, putting its thumbs on the scales of its creation to produce certain outcomes at certain times and places. So the crucial question is, "does this action accord with natural processes [or natural processes under the influence of human force] or does it require the hand of God?"
When ordinary people debate the existence of God, it's not whether a conscious entity introduced the original Big Bang energy, it's whether that consciousness is still guiding our lives today and responds to our prayers and resurrects our consciousness after death. So yes, it matters whether it was a natural phenomenon or whether God himself produced that light in that way at that time, by "hand".
As a non-believing teenager, I once promised to myself/God that if He put a mark on the back of a street sign I was looking at, then I would believe in his existence. I thought of that since I knew that marks, stickers, graffiti were relatively common on signs and so it would be a discreet enough of a sign that God might stoop to doing it for me. Lo and behold, there was writing on the back of the street sign. Of course this striking miracle caused a big updates in my belief: I was wrong that I would believe in God after seeing this and should never have told myself otherwise.
· In my childhood, when I'd close my eyes for a while (e. g. trying to fall asleep), I'd see afterimages of light and just various random shit, and I could totally make it do stuff without anyone prompting me, I was just a lil guy like that. I have not tried it recently, though, because I've been preoccupied with other things outside of the tiny world of childhood "where things were so much themselves". (Okay, I tried just now, with the afterimage of the laptop screen; I had lousy control, but the afterimage definitely changed shape to something circular. I think I need to, like, relax and focus to make it work better, right now it was kind of hurried. Unless memory fails me, I used to be able to make it bright, make it move as I like...)
· I now sleep in a quiet room, but when I used to fall asleep to some monotone noise, I had hypnagogic hallucinations where the noise changed to unintelligible voices. I don't think I had anything visual like that ever, but I guess seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky in the Moon is the next level of difficulty.
· See the story of looking for Trotsky's face, swastikas and other dangerous magical things drawn by enemies on regular objects like matchboxes etc.: https://spokus.eu/en/urban-legends-ussr-soviet-russia/ (one source I could find in English).
There is no other way about it. I think we need to start a post-ironic meme egregore to get hundreds of people to go to a specific place at a specific time to see if mass psychology + staring at the sun is sufficient to replicate the miracle
Unironically yeah. I appreciate the ethics are a little dodgy but surely Scott has enough clout to get a couple dozen weirdos to go try this in a park or something. Not me though.
The best I can do here is emailing the Georgia Skeptics and asking about the telescope thing, but at this point I'm not sure who is still around. The author of that article did pass away, but I was able to find Long's email. There's almost no chance she replies but It's a curious enough story that it's worth trying.
If people in a religious vision see something similar to what expert mediators see in their spiritual visions, that does not make for a good argument against both being valid.
It suggests they're really experiencing something, but it also suggests that one or both groups are fundamentally mistaken in their interpretation of the meaning and origin of the experiences.
> the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Doesn't seem that way to me. Meditation is clearly subject to environmental factors: stimuli such as loud or erratic noises can make it more difficult, deliberately arranged rooms make it easier. There's lots of random variation in natural environments, so a particular place and time might have been multiple standard deviations better for cultivating the relevant mindset. That doesn't make everyone who benefited from those rare conditions an expert, any more than trying to juggle during a once-per-century windstorm turns someone into a world-class baseball pitcher.
I commented on the original post - I do meditation that mostly involves closing my eyes or staring at statues, but I've had similar experiences to what the kasina meditators described.
Quick point -
The Fatima phenomenon was either:
1. A physical phenomenon
2. A mental phenomenon
3. A supernatural phenomenon
In the Three Body Problem adaptation, when the stars blink, Saul concludes that hypothesis A (a real physical phenomenon) is impossible as an explanation. A mental phenomenon - where our perception is changed - is the only answer.
But isn't that analogous to a physical phenomenon?
My unprovable opinion: events like this do not involve supernatural physical events. That is why they are supernatural mental events - the association of the Virgin Mary with this event and the Christian idea of Grace (that God can just kind of randomly seek you out) is suggestive to me. Not saying the children literally spoke to the Virgin Mary, but if we suppose that there were some sort of entity that was perceived as such ... My suggestion would be there was "something" involved, but that the "something" would not in any way be physically measurable. Sad!
Sorry, but the whole fire kasina saga of "I tried it out and didn't experience Fatima, so probably this couldn't be it" is a complete non-proof for me! Are you really saying that the failure of a 21st century Bay Area Rationalist who crams a 5 minute meditation sesh of alone time into his busy schedule to finally cross "explaining Fatima" from his To Do list is a strong piece of evidence against a phenomenon experienced in the midst of an excited crowd in a rural area in the early 20th century?
I would strongly expect members of a vast crowd of thousands of mostly pious and devout Catholics from the early 20th century Portuguese country side who believe in the reality of miracles and the Virgin Mary and spend part of their leisure time in semi-meditative prayer sessions and who are in a heightened state of frenzy, maybe even in a trance like state after hours of communal praying and hymn singing and ready to experience and be showered in the power of the Almighty to have a slightly higher perceptiveness for uncommon phenomena as me and you while living our day-to-day life.
I mean, do you ever listen to the Beatles and conclude that, given that you neither started shrieking, sobbing and peeing your pants, Beatlemania might be only explicable by divine intervention as you could not satisfactory conjure the state of hysteria by listening to the Beatles by yourself? No, because obviously there was more to it as "just" the music. So I would assume that there was more to it in Fatima as well. The mere fact that not everybody can conjure the described images up willy-nilly does not disprove that given the right circumstance a good chunk of people out of a huge group would experience the phenomenon. But as usually big groups of people do not stare at the sun simultaneously, it simply feels odd because we do not have enough evidence to conclude with certainty that yes, 18%, 36%, 72% of the population would experience Fatima-like phenomena when starring in the sun under certain metereological conditions while being in a kind of religious semi-trance.
No, you cannot assume that Portuguese peasants in the twenties were doing anything sufficiently related to fire kasini meditation for the comparison to be relevant.
There is clear photographic evidence of a sharply defined, yet completely harmless to look at sun disk, when it's behind light clouds or smoke. Personally I've seen this maybe a dozen times over my life, and I don't even go out that much. I always thought this was a somewhat rare but otherwise completely normal phenomenon, and to see someone argue against the very existence of it with the dead-certainty of math bewilders me.
This was the point at which I formed a strong prior that Ethan is more interested in winning debates than seeking truth. Also:
"In a private conversation, Ethan continued to assert that I was misremembering, and that all the Discord users and commenters who agreed with me had been contaminated by my testimony and become victims of suggestibility. I think this is a pretty crazy point to suddenly convert to the doctrine of eyewitness fallibility, contamination, and suggestibility - but I leave further discussion to people who understand optical physics."
I havent seen credible evidence that you can get the conjunction of (i) high solar elevation, (ii) comfortable fixation, (iii) no blurring/distortion. Physical reasoning leads me to doubt that the conjunction of those effects is possible, but I am willing to abandon that claim if a credible counterexample is found or someone shows a flaw in my reasoning.
You infer from this that I am not seeking truth? It seems that you are more interested in discrediting me than charitably engaging with my arguments (which is also consistent with the rest of your behavior).
If my quoting Scott seems like an effort to discredit you, then we are similarly impressed with the quote.
How have you updated from the direct testimony in this thread? From the explanations by people who apparently understand the physics? From the linked pictures which directly illustrate the phenomenon at issue? A little? A lot?
My claim is as follows: When the Sun is at a 42° elevation, attenuation by a factor of 10^6 presupposes clouds with a vertical optical depth of about 10. When the Sun is at a 10° elevation, attenuation by a factor of 10^6 only presupposes clouds with a vertical optical depth of about 2.
The most credible people that have claimed to see the pale, moonlike Sun have all said that they saw it when the Sun was low on the horizon. For instance, the guy that drew a painting of it after he saw it in the early morning through fog in one of the comment threads.
I haven't seen any credible, specific testimony that people have seen it at midday. There is a guy in the comments that ran a computer simulation that seems to confirm my claim about it. The pictures are completely irrelevant to the discussion that we are having.
It seems pretty clear that you dont even understand the argument that I am making, yet you are so confident about your position that you are willing to infer bad faith. I didn't say the quote of Scott was an effort to discredit - he didn't claim that I must not be seeking the truth, even though he didn't fairly characterize the conversation that we had in DMs, since he omitted that I believe that be saw something that approximated what he was reporting, but he was wrong about time of day or the fine details.
You dont understand the difference between discomfort glare and camera glare.
Also, I agknowledge that it is possible when the Sun is low on the horizon. I am not convinced it can happen when the Sun is at a high angular elevation.
The most credible testimony that I have found is about sun is low on the horizon + dense fog. It is not clear that the solar elevation at the tome is salient to the people replying to these polls.
I certainly wasn't arguing that miracles are an exception to Bayesianism. To put it in Bayesian terms, it seems to me like your model for how we update our priors given a strange event is maybe a little naive, because it is not sufficiently taking into account the relevant background knowledge we have accumulated about strange events. Given our background information, Pr (Naturalism) | (some magic trick) is unchanged, since we know magic tricks are natural phenomena. Given that UFO's, ghost sightings and purported miracles have a long history of being debunked when they are investigated carefully, any change to our Pr(naturalism) should be very small, since the hypothesis 'they have some natural explanation' is the best explanation of them, given our background knowledge.
Of course, this is defeasible. If the Pope starts blowing up mountains on demand, or we see Words of Fire blazing in the sky spelling out the Lord's Prayer, by all means update our confidence in naturalism. But the Miracle of the Sun isn't like that. It's more interesting than the vast majority of miracles, but (without going into a long explanation of why), I was I think justifiably convinced even before I read your article that if someone smart looked into it, a natural explanation would end up appearing plausible. And, hey, that's what happened. That will also be the case for the next purported miracle, unless it is clearly on its face something pretty different from the sort of things we are used to (visions, suggestible crowds, items of dubious provenance).
If the Pope announced a high-level policy change related to the miraculous healing of amputees, and shortly afterward, all over the world, patients in Catholic-backed hospitals started making extremely well documented appearances with limbs that were medically unremarkable apart from having been missing the day before, that'd be a lot more persuasive than blowing up mountains on demand. I mean, there are fairly straightforward ways to blow up a mountain using existing tech - hydrogen bombs can be scaled to arbitrarily high yield with only a small fission primer.
I mean, there's lots of really good miracles that would be persuasive to a naturalist like me. Weird that we only ever get these shitty ones that have natural explanations, like crowds of convinced Catholics seeing something weird and saying it was Jesus. At least give us a crowd of convinced Muslims seeing the virgin Mary and converting, something that's a LITTLE harder to square with normal human psychology and the propensity for weird stuff to happen sometimes.
Thank you! I thought your post was exactly right, and was clear about all this, and Scott was misreading it. Basically, his Pr (Naturalism) should be extremely high - virtually unflappable - but he's writing as if it isn't, and reported strange observations are the sort of evidence that could cause notable updates to his prior when they really shouldn't.
I think people experience a lot of “supernatural” phenomena, even skeptics. I never heard the Imam on the Moon story before, and I think it’s charming that the woman who had that vision first also found one of the Prophet’s hairs in her Quran. Some people live in a world of wondrous miracles and I kind of envy them.
The paper example was set up to send exactly the same pattern of light into the eye as an attenuated sun. Surely they can't be different if what the eye sees is the same?
I haven't read Hume's original and I agree with your criticism of the "strong" version of Hume-ism, but I'd put forward a modified version.
Which is that, if you're questioning whether some event was a miracle or some natural phenomenon, oftentimes people dismiss the natural explanation as being unlikely. But, in line with Bayes, our prior for miracles should usually be *even lower* than our prior for the unlikely thing.
E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I would submit the above is true even if it's a random street corner is on the other side of the globe! So strong should our prior be against telepathy, even "IDK man I just wanted to bop into this random spot in Kaga-Bandoro, Central African Republic" is more likely.
Relatedly, by Bayesian view of the original article is that there are lots of claimed sun miracles, vast majority have natural explanations, that raises my prior that a particular sun miracle is not a miracle.
>E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I agree: but what if you asked your friend why he knew to meet me there, and he told you that at the exact same time you were trying to communicate telepathically to him he had an experience of hearing your voice telling him to go to that particular street corner at that particular time?
Hume argues that we should still assume it wasn't telepathy. In fact, argues that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments". In other words, even if you have testimonial evidence in favor of a miracle that is so unimpeachable that it would be impossible for it to be wrong, you should still consider it 50:50 odds at best that the miracle happened. And that's just silly!
No, Hume's argument is that, if that happened, you should expand your scope of natural phenomena to include telepathy! But then you have to take the good with the bad: telepathy is now a natural phenomena subject to investigation by the usual scientific means; it's not just a once-off exception to the rules of nature
If, instead of trying telepathy, you prayed to God that you would meet your friend, and when you met he he told you that he heard the voice of God telling him to be there, would you then agree that you should expand your scope of possible phenomena to include the existence of a God who answers prayers?
If yes, then Humes argument fails to do the job people set it to: arguing against the existence of miracles.
I attend a Quaker meeting and, while this is not a universal or even majority view among unprogrammed Quakers, some people describe Quaker meetings as like a group meditation that unlocks more than solo meditation. That isn't exactly how I'd describe it, but it does provide a good analogue to how a giant crowd of people doing fire kasina meditation would get more dramatic results than a single person doing fire kasina meditation.
My grandmother and grandfather have experienced the Miracle of the Sun about a month ago in Medjugorje. My grandmother is a devotee of Medjugorje, and I consider her gullible and biased on this topic, but my grandfather is not; he is a very rational person and not given to sentimental devotions. So I asked him specifically about the phenomenon, and he corroborated my grandmother's testimony: the Sun "dancing" in the sky, spinning, pulsating, and changing color.
He also corroborated that the crowd around him saw the same thing. Note also that the crowd gathered there (early in the morning) because one of the seers announced the day before that the Virgin Mary would work miracles there.
>We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it.
Something that you gloss over: just because we have decent understanding of many extremely rare/weird natural phenomena, it doesn't follow that this well has been exhausted. To me it's quite obvious that there's plenty of obscure stuff still out there, which isn't supernatural in the least. On these priors, it doesn't seem that Fatima-like stuff is particularly good evidence for supernatural, certainly not anywhere near Pope armed with super-nukes.
>The luminance of the solar disc at its zenith is on the order of 10⁹ cd/m².1 The maximum luminance that an on-axis, compact source can have without causing observers to experience discomfort glare is on the order of 10³ cd/m².
This part of Ethan's rebuttal struck me as giving off fishy vibes, so I checked the original source. As I predicted, the actual claim made by the source is much narrower and more qualified than Ethan's summary.
Ethan's citation goes to "Video Displays, Work, and Vision: National Research Council (US) Panel on Impact of Video Viewing on Vision of Workers". These numbers appear to come from Table 5.1, titled "Borderline Between Comfort and Discomfort (BCD) Luminance for Intermittent Directly Viewed Glare Sources". Note the "intermittent" -- the numbers in the table are about the effects of staring into a *flashing* light, and the book explicitly says that they cannot be safely generalized to a stable light source (which is what we're interested in). Quote:
>These values are glare source luminances. Values above the BCD values in the table would induce discomfort. (Note, however, that Guth used a flashing glare source. It is not clear how much the BCD values from steady sources in natural settings would differ. Eye movements and blinks would interrupt the retinal images of steady sources.)
Even under the conditions actually tested, the book is also careful *not* to claim that the thresholds reported will be universally valid for all observers. The comments on the table say: "Assuming that these data accurately represent discomfort glare thresholds for **at least some** VDT operators, it can be seen from Table 5.1 that some situations would induce discomfort" (emphasis mine). So it could just be that those reporting being able to look without discomfort have higher-than-average thresholds for it.
> The Medjugorje witness who I interviewed said the sun was spinning instantly, the moment he started looking at it, which is troublesome for explanations that rely on retinal bleaching, near-blindness, and other complicated entoptic phenomena. The same witness understood what normal afterimages look like, and was very convinced it wasn’t just normal afterimages.
I don't find this particularly credible, because it happened so long before the interview. Human memory is highly suggestible over long periods, and especially to someone who was a believer at the time and thus ascribed this event significance, of course they're going to remember it as being more vivid than their more recent, non-supernatural occurrences.
I think that the very concept of miracles is a logical trap, or a "brutal self-own" as the kids these days say. Assuming that miracles occur, they do so either in a somewhat predictable fashion, or completely at random.
If miracles are predictable to some extent, then, a la Hume, their existence is governed by some kind of rules; and we have developed mental tools that help us model these hidden rules with some degree of accuracy. For example, we can model gravity to some extent, even if we know that our model does not give the right answers in most cases. We can even model the behaviour of intelligent agents, such as humans, well enough to e.g. perform actionable market research.
On the other hand, if miracles are a priori unpredictable and thus effectively random, then no amount of clever tricks will allow us to model them (except perhaps in aggregate, and likely not even then). But if that is the case, then we cannot extract any information from a miracle, other than perhaps "God is great". We cannot interpret any miracle as a sign or a message or anything else; at least, not absent personal revelation (in which case we don't even need the miracle).
Theologically speaking, both horns of the dilemma are problematic. In the latter case, miracles are essentially pointless; in the former case, they are on the slippery slope to being "trivialized" in the theological sense (I use "scare quotes" here because it sounds odd to call phenomena like gravity or the electromagnetic force "trivial"). I do understand that the canonical response to such dilemmas it to say "you must have faith", but that is just an oblique way to invoke personal revelation once again -- a perfectly respectable move, but not one that is likely to convince any heretic or unbeliever.
If the evidence of miracles allows you to attempt to predict the behavior of God with a reasonable degree of accuracy, then great! You believe in God, and a God who performs miracles! So do I, so does the Catholic Church, so does more than half the world. Glad you could join us. So where is the first horn of the dilemma?
As I'd said (in agreement with Hume), it reduces miracles to yet another predictable phenomenon, like gravity (or perhaps ice cream flavor preference). On the plus side, it opens the path to many new areas of "theological engineering": now that we have uncovered a new force of [super-]nature, we can apply it, perhaps ushering in the next technological revolution. On the minus side (theologically speaking), miracles cease to be special and unique messages from God to his believers (and unbelievers alike, perhaps). In a world where miracles are predictable, something like the event we're discussing (the Miracle of Fatima) would still be front-page news, but it would share that front page with volcano eruptions, supernovae, hurricanes, and other such events -- for a short while, until the next remarkable event comes along. This is AFACT close to what Christians mean when they say that definitive proof of God would override human free will: yes, everyone would believe; but what would they believe in ?
Tell me, if you got to know your neighbor Steve well enough that you could generally predict what he's going to do, would that open up the path to many new areas of "Steve engineering"?
It's called "Theology" when we do it to God, and we've been working on that longer than we've worked on any scientific field. Believing in God and believing that understanding God will allow you to better predict miracles is not a problem for believing in miracles! If anything it's a bonus. So I still don't see where your "first horn" is coming from. There's no problem in studying theology in order to better predict when God will intervene in nature.
Reading through some of the bits about how difficult kasina meditation is, something is bugging me. Isn't meditation noticeably more difficult for the type of person who wants to meditate? The intention is to quiet the thoughts in your head, and come to a sort of inner peace, right? This is primarily desirable to people who constantly have thoughts running through their heads. Difficulty with meditation might be the same as difficulty with exercise. The people who reap the greatest benefits are also the people that struggle the most to perform the task. Your average joe doesn't struggle nearly as much, but they also don't need it in the first place, so why struggle at all?
Correct me if I'm misguided, of course. But I am a bit worried that ACX is misunderstanding why meditation is difficult, and accidentally using that misunderstanding to bump the credibility of the miracle.
Many years of research have proven that people who are dedicated to meditating find it much easier to meditate. Confirming my priors. Nor is it clear to whether they have more or less need of meditation.
I think you sidestepped my actual point, there. I'm not talking about the amount of experience someone has with meditation, I'm talking about the "personality type" (not sure if this is the perfect term for it) that meditation tends to attract.
Yeah, exactly. Because the crowd at Fatima contained many personality types, but meditation attracts a certain, specific personality type, there's a discrepancy here. Fatima may have shown different, "miraculous" results because most of the people who are attracted to meditation also happen to struggle with meditation. That's the hypothesis, anyway.
And chill a bit, yeah? I'm trying to have an open conversation here, not dictate mine will of truth to the world.
Something like this fits my observations. I've seen a fair amount of people who were very susceptible to meditation when they tried it, and got quick spectacular effects. The same people also dropped off from doing meditation very soon, because the spectacular experiences got too uncomfortable and scary.
And there is the paradox that when you intentionally strive to achieve meditative states they become much harder to reach. I believe that explains the common experience that you try a new technique and get a really strong effect, but then when you try it again, grasping after the same effect, you cannot reach it.
I also have the impression that people that stick with a disciplined meditation practice tend to be more the striving, intentional kind of person - which has a harder time of achieving certain states. But after enough practice they can overcome this, in part by reducing the striving.
Yeah, it's almost like meditation has beginner's luck baked in, makes it a really interesting practice. Difficult to pin down. That's part of what makes me nervous, when it's being used as evidence for supernatural events.
Isn’t “falling to earth” what you would see if the sun was too bright, you dropped your gaze and possibly shut your eyes, and the afterimage stayed in the middle of your vision?
I appreciate the fair-mindedness as others do but I think you're frankly being a little TOO charitable here. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that it's not only been reproduced when there's no veridical referent, but that some people have been able to reproduce it at will (including people who were at the ACTUAL MIRACLE) is game, set, and match. The rest is detail. Do we know EXACTLY why it happened? No. But the probability of anything remotely supernatural goes way way down with that in mind. IMO, healing miracles like the one Bentham's Bulldog posted a few weeks ago are harder to explain than this.
PS, if you're interested in other miracle accounts which are reasonably well-attested, I've just written an essay on one (https://substack.com/home/post/p-176774210) and mean to do a few more, time permitting.
EDIT: like others in the thread, I'm skeptical it's even fair to speak of "70,000 witnesses." I think we actually have only a little over a hundred testimonies, yeah? And I just counted the testimonies in your doc on the OP and just over half of them weren't even taken down until at least a year after the alleged miracle. I know you didn't include EVERY extant testimony in that doc, but it it seems like really we might only have 30 - 50 testimonies from within hours/days/weeks of the events. It's easy to imagine someone ten, twenty, forty years later remembering they'd seen the miracle with everyone else when in fact they hadn't. So how do we know those other 69,950 people actually saw anything? I'm not saying a lot, maybe even most, didn't, but...you state that "the original investigators looked extra-hard for negative statements to record" but...is that actually true? I mean, maybe they say they did, but how do we verify that?
Yeah, it seems to me that there’s a really interesting question of precisely what conditions give rise to this experience, but it really seems like a replicable thing, if we can just figure out how.
Yes, we know there are psychological phenomena like the ones experienced in Fatima (Kasina, more direct replications). We just don't know under what conditions they occur, because we dont know a lot about psychology. This is similar to how we couldn't explain natural phenomena before the natural sciences were well developed. And the conditions at Fatima seemed ripe for mass psychological contaigon (like the khomeinei moon, or various cases of mass psychosis) at a high level, even if we don't know the exact mechanisms.
I'll just address the comment you made regarding me, as I'm pretty uncertain about Fatima.
//If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided.//
But the various Y questions are not independent. There is one basic fact: there are natural laws that operate without concern for value, and these--barring exceptional circumstances at least--are universally adhered to, rather than violated in cases where it would be good. If you can give an explanation of why God would allow that, then you answer all the why questions. As an analogy, if there's a guy who shows up at his neighbors house every day at 7 am, there's some sense in which you have a new why question every day, but obviously explaining the first few days will probably explain the rest. Same here.
In contrast, atheism's explanation of how there's fine-tuning does not carry over the consciousness or anthropic stuff or moral knowledge.
What if a guy shows up at his next door neighbor's house every day at 7 am for ten days, then on day 11 he shows up at the house across the street instead? You could say that that's still one question—on all 11 days, he showed up at some house at 7 am and we don't know why. But when he was just showing up at one house, we thought we saw a pattern, even if we couldn't explain the pattern. Now that the pattern has been broken, the number of possible explanations has multiplied. Similarly, a world in which God never (let's say, never since the Resurrection) intervenes in supernatural ways to demonstrate His existence or address some evil is hard to explain, but it at least is a consistent pattern. A world in which God almost never manifests but sometimes chooses to raises more questions and admits of more possible explanations, so incurs a complexity penalty.
It's true that this shifting pattern will have a lower prior. But the same is true on atheism. Any specific apparent miracle pattern is unlikely. And to explain it as a theist, you just need a third explanation: God rarely performs miracles and small ways. That theory predicts the data as well as atheism and isn't extremely improbable conditional on the other 2.
But this seems ad hoc. I think it's not quite foldable into the Problem of Evil, because while there's a moral question (why does God do good things for some and not others?) there's also just the amoral question of "why does God sometimes 'violate' his own laws but usually not?" which seems separate. You can always appeal to "he has sufficient reasons" but again, I think it's pretty ad hoc that God always has sufficient reasons to do whatever weird thing we observe, especially since it has 0 predictive power for when a miracle will occur.
I agree it's a bit surprising. But a lot of things are true and surprising. It's surprising, a priori, that the world is mostly populated by invisible dark matter, but I believe that.
Any theory has little predictive power for the specific distribution of miracles. Neither a theist or atheist would have guessed a priori that, say, Barbara Cumiskey would be healed or people in Portugal would see a moving solar disk.
I guess the underlying assumption here is "miracles (roughly defined as weird things that seem to violate natural laws as we understand them) are more probable in a theistic universe than an atheistic one." And that certainly DOES seem true intuitively but I'm not sure it is.
Miracles so-defined aren't IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, just super unlikely. Let's say Jesus' resurrection for example. I've argued a lot about that one and I have been regularly told that IF your prior for theism is 0, then the evidence for Jesus' resurrection can't overcome it ofc, but if your prior for theism is HIGHER than zero, then the evidence for the Resurrection is really good*. But a resurrection isn't actually IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, in the sense that A = not-A is impossible. Surely there's some weird one in several quadrillion quantum fluctuation or whatever that would just happen to reorganize the atoms in Jesus' body in such a way to restore him to life.
On the flipside, maybe the probability of miracles in a THEISTIC universe is 0. You know how they say God, despite being omnipotent, can't do evil because it would contradict his character, and if he could do evil he wouldn't be God? Maybe God would never, ever violate the laws he established, never, ever raise somebody from the dead or heal somebody from an otherwise completely incurable disease. He set those laws for a reason, after all. Is there any reason that couldn't be the case?
So it actually seems possible to me that probability of miracles COULD be HIGHER on atheism than on theism. Worth considering at least.
I think you've argued in the past that in an atheistic universe where weird stuff just happens sometimes, we wouldn't expect the weird stuff to have specifically religious content. But I think it's unestablished that "weird stuff" actually happens in a religious context at a higher rate in a religious than non-religious context. When you take into account not usually categorized as "miraculous" but still paranormal phenomena like ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, psi, etc. is that really the case? Someone (not me) would have to collect data I guess.
I wonder if somebody could make an ATHEISTIC argument from miracles. Something like "if there really was an omnipotent Supreme Lawgiver, we would expect all his laws to hold at all times. But since we sometimes observe weird breakdowns, there probably isn't a Supreme Lawgiver." I'm not going to make or defend such an argument (at least not right now) because I'm sure it has a thousand. holes in it but maybe somebody could.
*I actually think that conditional on benevolent theism the evidence is still not very good, but that's another story
I don’t think “rarely” has any explanatory or predictive power! We have no way of saying when it is likely to happen, what form it is likely to take, or why it happens. And the point I was making is that the “why” is more difficult when the explanation is “rarely” than when it’s “never.”
Of course rarely has predictive power. It predicts there would sometimes be miracles but they wouldn't be too common. It doesn't predict which specific miracles there'd be reported--say, whether there'd be a disk in the sky--but neither does atheism.
I think conditional on God existing and being able to do miracles, the odds he'd do them rarely isn't much different from the odds he'd do them never.
Are we talking about odds? I thought we were talking about whether theists have one question to answer, or several. If God never intervened, then "why didn't God heal my aunt?" would truly only have one answer: "Because God doesn't do that." Even though we would still have the question of WHY God doesn't do that, that is still one question. But if God intervenes to heal some people (you mention Cumiskey), but not others, now "why didn't God heal my aunt?" has a much wider range of possible answers: "Because Cumiskey was more pious," "Because healing Cumiskey created more utilons," "Because healing Cumiskey was more likely to lead to a broader increase in faith," etc. But while each of those possible answers might distinguish between Cumiskey and my aunt, we would then have to see if they applied to every other case, so you've got "Why didn't God heal Aunt-1," "Why didn't God heal Aunt-2," "Aunt-3," etc. And any time you find that, say, Aunt-3 was even more pious than Cumiskey, you're back to the drawing board on possible explanations.
Under atheism the explanation is just, random variation. Atheism doesn't need to explain it any more than it needs to explain the exact pattern of a series of coin flips; but if your explanation is "God willed these specific coin flips" then you do need to say something about those specific ones
Yes, in fact, "[p]eople are extremely suggestible and have terrible memory. There are as-yet-barely-plumbed psychological phenomena where sometimes a very suggestible person can cause many seemingly-careful observers to make correlated errors. Historians constantly exaggerate and bury negative evidence, so all of these errors and confabulations come down to us as seemingly-ironclad evidence of the paranormal."
The only problem with all these recent religion-themed posts is now I've got Marian hymns rattling around my noggin, and we Catholics do not have hymns as good as the Orthodox for this.
> and look for the miracle themselves in various contexts - what questions would you want them to ask, and what experiments should they perform?
If you meet a divine-looking being, the first question to ask is about a few still-undiscovered digits of some well-known mathematical constant: <https://www.skytopia.com/project/knowledge/knowledge.html>. I guess it might get tricky to specify that you mean pi, rather than tau, or short-scale septillionth (increase as necessary to make it a still-undiscovered digit) as opposed to long-scale septillionth, or even that you want base-ten digits.
I will never understand calling the event at Fatima "creepy." That's kind of incredible to me. Whether divine intervention was involved or not, I can only ever see the event as joyous and life affirming. I thought everybody liked pretty colors.
I guess it has to do with how one was raised and how one relates to miracles and Christianity. I rejected Christianity and miracles in a flat, non-affective way. It was not an emotional process. I did not feel relieved or freed. If anything, it left me with a slight feeling of disappointment and yearning. I would absolutely be thrilled to find definitive evidence of the religion I was raised in.
You theory might be true given that I, indeed, was raised Catholic and I rejected it pretty emotionally, but I don't quite see what was your reasoning process here/how you connected these.
I would hate to learn that there is an all-powerful being who has no problem torturing people who don't obey its dumb opinions about what's right for eternity and I would feel obligated to fight against it (and, obviously, I'd probably lose given that it's all-powerful)
I think the biggest mistake in Christianity was deciding that God was all-powerful. This must have been an asset during a more hierarchical time, but it was a poison pill that would ultimately backfire.
Regardless of God's hypothetical power level, the morality of the bacteria does not apply to the human being. When I scrub my countertops, I have little regard for the death and suffering of microbes. (Nor does it matter to me that the bacteria is deemed by us to be incapable of autonomy, intelligence and self-reflectiveness. I can imagine a being with such vastly superior faculties that in comparison, humanity's cognitive abilities are infinitesimal and irrelevant)
Fair enough. I guess it is natural some people would see the whole story as a package deal. I was thinking of the actual psychedelic phenomenon in the sky, and if that was confirmed to be a miracle, it wouldn't follow that everything the child-seers reported was true.
With respect to Hume, his argument wasn’t actually that miracles are definitionally impossible (though I agree that’s how Kenny Easwaran characterized his argument). You can read his argument (in appropriately antique type) at https://davidhume.org/texts/e/10, but the gist of it is much closer to the comment from Jefferson you quote earlier about how he has known Yankee ministers to prevaricate more often than he has seen rocks drop from the sky. As Peter van Inwagen points out (even quoting the same story about Jefferson!), it’s a little hard to tell exactly what Hume’s argument is, but one fair reading of him is that whether or not miracles actually happen, you shouldn’t ever (or hardly ever) believe in them because the existence of miracles is more “contrary to experience” than that the people reporting the miracles are wrong (whether because they’re lying, or sincerely mistaken, or exaggerating, or something else). Then he also makes a bunch of garden variety criticisms of actually-existing miracle reports.
Van Inwagen makes the reasonable point that it’s hard to give content to the term “contrary to experience” in a way that preserves the argument: https://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Of_Of_Miracles.pdf But Hume isn’t making the facile point that the laws of nature can never be violated because any supposed violation would itself be part of the laws of nature.
I’m not saying Hume says miracles are “impossible” - the one step in Scott’s characterization I dispute is the idea that a law is something that can’t be violated. Hume doesn’t believe in objective laws! For Hume, “law” is a *subjective* term, not an objective one. For *you* to *call* a generalization a law is for you to be inclined to doubt any particular observation that claimed to violate it, rather than doubting the generalization. That doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong - with enough new observations you could give it up. But you would no longer treat it as a law, and you would no longer treat the violation as a miracle.
If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
(Hume would be hypothetically open to someone proving that there is a god by finding the psychological laws of this being.)
You seem to be treating the word “miracle” as synonymous with “visible violation of the laws of nature,” but that’s not how Hume defines it. He provides an express definition in the text itself: “A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” That’s why he can say that something is a miracle even if no one realizes it’s miraculous (as when God causes a feather to rise a bit more than the wind, unaided, would have done).
He’s pretty clear, for example, that if Elizabeth I were to be resurrected through divine interposition, that would be an honest-to-Hoyle miracle. He just says that even the unanimous agreement of historians would be insufficient evidence that it occurred. He does *not* say that the conclusion you should draw from the unanimity of historians is that there’s no law that everyone who dies stays dead. And he certainly doesn’t say more generally that a miracle *definitionally* can’t occur because seemingly miraculous observations should simply cause you to revise your notion of what the laws of nature are.
>If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
From my post:
"The reason why people cite Hume’s argument against miracles is to say that God does not exist, or if He does exist He does not do such things. If your argument against miracles allows for the existence of God actively making things happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, then it’s a pretty weak argument against miracles!"
> By far the biggest problem with this theory is that fire kasina meditation is hard and time-consuming.
Why is that a problem.
Lets say there exists some underlying mechanism. Some, as yet unspecified, neurochemical detail and specific circumstances that trigger the effect.
Ancient meditation practitioners found some way to trigger the effect. But maybe not the easiest way.
Maybe the fire kasina meditation is easier under conditions of high air pressure, or when you have an unusually salty diet, or something.
If the people of fatima had unusually salty diets, and salt helps the effect trigger more easily, and most kasina meditators aren't eating that much salt, then this all fits. And it doesn't need to be salt, it could be any unknown variable.
You're kind doing this thing that Scott has condemned multiple times in this series. You're doing "There must be some logical explanation so what's all the fuss about? There's nothing to see here." Until you present a specific explanation that 95 percent of us can get on board with, there's something to "see here."
I agree that we shouldn't circularly dismiss paranormal phenomena as impossible on the grounds that paranormal phenomena are impossible, but in this particular case I think Scott and others have marshaled enough evidence that there's a plausible naturalistic explanation for this "miracle," even if all the details aren't exactly known. I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect an explanation that accounts for every point of detail; historical events are not repeatable after all.
Yeah, and I think the case is stronger than this. Meditation phenomena are strongly affected by psychological states - and the Fatima witnesses had a lot of relatively relevant psychological properties. Like strong faith, expectation that something spectacular would happen and some degree of group trance.
The descriptions of the moments when a light of a specific color appeared to be temporarily bathing the entire scene seem to explicitly state that the shadows were of an identical hue. ("Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground.")
Had the incoming light been actually purple-colored (so either a mixture of red and blue wavelengths or something violet+; Perception of purple is weird in humans in general...) the shadows should appear complementary - i.e. greenish-brown. Typical example: Shadows turn progressively blue as sunlight shifts from white, to yellow, to red, during a sunset. Shadows are the *unilluminated* places. There is still some reflection from surrounding surfaces, but to the degree that the shadows actually appear darker, they *subtract* the hue shift of the incoming light from the background.
This suggests the perceived changes in color may be an internal phenomenon downstream of the retina, rather than something happening objectively in the external world. Color perception is surprisingly weird, the eye cones are very low res and most of your qualia originate from neural post-production that auto-corrects for hue and luminosity all the time. If your eyes are a bit tired and a perhaps temporarily overloaded all throughout the spectrum (meaning all three cone types overstimulated and sending in static), the processing system could conceivably become unmoored and start wandering.
Does fighting antisemitism, a worthy goal, demand that we unilaterally absolve the Rothschild family of their documented evils? Seems like the kind of thing one would only do if they lived in a narrow information bubble.
My interpretation of Hume’s central argument on miracles is just the combination of the semantic point (the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle, even if you want to call it a shmiracle when staff raisings part seas) and the Bayesian point. And Bayesian points tend to be somewhat trivial anyway - there’s nothing that tells you what the right prior to have is, it’s just that things go predictably bad for you if you predict you’ll update your bets in ways that violate conditionalization.
>the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle,
There's only no miracle if you define miracle in a way contrary to how people use the word, and to how it's normally defined. If God parted the Red Sea when Moses raised his staff, that's a miracle. You can only say it's not a miracle if you define miracles as "Things that don't happen."
In this case, it’s obviously something about atmospheric lensing, rather than something about the neurophysiology of eyes in bright light, but I don’t think anyone has figured out why it’s common here, and not in other locations, and how it gives rise to the particular strange patterns of lights that it does.
Oh, I've had fire-kasina like stuff happen since I was a kid, I figured it was a normal thing. It happens sometimes at night when it's totally dark, or I have my eyes closed, and I have some kind of not-an-external-image thing in my visual field. That can be an after-image, or the kind of blotches you get if you poke your closed eye with your finger, or anything like that. If you focus your visual attention very intently on that kind of thing, it will move around, change colors, generate strong colors that spread out and fill the visual field, and sometimes have weird spinning or scintillating patterns. Wild I didn't make the connection when reading the first post. This just happens pretty reliably for me when I strongly focus my visual attention on a vision artifact. I never trained this as a mediation technique or anything, it's just something I've often done while bored and looking at the inside of my eyelids while waiting to fall asleep.
I think we need more info on the newspaper strike. First I think we should significantly discount something if it just happened during an interlude when record keeping was harder, secondly it seems odd even if there was a complete newspaper strike in Iran that Iraqi, Lebanese, French or American newspapers didn't seem to report on it all of whom would have journalists on the ground.
This afternoon there was a nice smattering of various cloud types at about sun-height. I was able to observe a round sun through more wispy clouds twice. The first time it was only for a fraction of a second before I looked away. The second time it was more obscured and I looked for a few seconds before looking away out of caution. Both times, when I closed my eyes, the after image was circular. I'd seen the sun in this way before, but it was nice to confirm that my memory wasn't tainted. I don't understand how someone could claim it's impossible.
For my money, Scott's theory that the colors were created by just the right cloud cover is quite primitive. I'll give him an A for Effort but if that's all I had to go on, I'd keep it close to the vest.
The simplest explanation to me is the kids saw a real UFO then lied about what they saw.
All it takes is one popular kid with an overactive imagination and desire to be at the center of something special for him to start exaggerating, then all his friends start exaggerating, and now if you're the one holdout who says, "All I saw was a smudge in the sky", everyone will make fun of you for being a party-killer.
Sixty might be an unusually high number of kids to all go along with it, but still falls well within my expectation of human behavior, and unusual cases do happen.
You propose treating the Khomeini moon vision as your control group, but if we consider miracles as a form of divine communication, then it makes sense that Allah would show believers the rightful ruler of Iran. Why would the Christian God put on a light show? There's no message in it other than "Hey, check out what I can do with the sun!" and even the connection to Catholicism is only circumstantial.
Don't let the implications of this for you as someone associated with the Great Satan bias your judgement.
Once again, thank you for a fair and even-handed treatment of this.
"I admit excommunication of the seers/believers is not proof that some of the other miracles were fake, but the Necedah one, where Mary gave warnings about the Rothschilds, and the “seer” also talked to the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, seems pretty bad."
Hoo-boy, Crazy (And Heretical) Mariology could be an entire post of its own. When Catholics go nuts, it tends to be in the "mystical visions and revelations" side (rather than things like the Satanic Panic of Evangelical American Protestants). One of the objections to Lourdes (I am recalling off the top of my head) was that there had been previous, small-scale, similar alleged apparitions which must have primed St. Bernadette to see something similar.
Medjugorje itself is *very* controversial; apart from the turf war between the local Franciscans (who backed the visionaries) and the local bishop (who very much did not), it's highly unusual, to say the least, for apparitions to take place over so long a period. The Vatican has currently split the difference by saying "yes you can go there on pilgrimage, no we're not saying anything supernatural happened there".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medjugorje#The_Medjugorje_pilgrimage_site
As for other accepted but minor Marian apparitions, there's one in Ireland: Our Lady of Knock:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_Shrine
No apocalyptic predictions, it only lasted one evening, and while it's a pilgrimage site it's nowhere on the same level as Lourdes or Fatima. It's unusual too in that it was a silent apparition - no messages, no speaking to those who saw it.
That too has been the subject of attempted debunking, with one claim that the entire thing was a magic lantern show (possibly hoaxed up by the parish priest). On the other hand, if you've ever been to Knock (and I got dragged there on pilgrimage during the 80s by my mother), it rains. A lot. Good luck trying to keep a magic lantern alight, in the evening/night, during rain and wind, while you remain hidden enough to secretly project images on the wall of the church in the hopes someone will be passing along and see them:
https://curator.ie/knock-apparition-or-slide-show/
https://www.shrineknock.com/knockmagiclant.html
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/an-apparition-or-a-magic-lantern-what-happened-at-knock-140-years-ago-1.3992756
(That's one of the times the explanation for a miracle makes less sense than the miracle itself, like my personal and long-standing favourite, Ice Floe Jesus for the walking on water).
Human physicist: the Mie scattering point is correct. It does indeed skew forward. Generally, scattering phenomena in the atmosphere are very complicated, especially in mesoscopic regimes (Object size many, but not TOO may wavelengths) where the very large and very small approximations break down.
See Fig 5.46 at (this random textbook chapter) https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128053577/basic-optics
Astrophysicist, agreed. The argument being made is that while Ethan is correct that there are many scatterings in the cloud, those scatterings won't go in a random direction but will preferentially have the light go out in the same direction that it came in. As a result, you'll have a somewhat resolved, disk-like Sun produced by lots of scattered photons that just didn't change direction much.
Relatedly, I have also regularly seen the disk Sun through clouds, although I never stared at it much. I associate those observations most with Utah in the winter, when presumably the clouds are somewhat icy and the particles are somewhat large.
The problem is that either it wont attenuate by enough to get below the threshold for discomfort OR it will obscure the disc. I dont deny that you can get a “somewhat resolved, disc-like Sun” through clouds with optical depth less than 4-5. Look up nimbostratus and you’ll see what kind of clouds you need to attenuate by 10^6 cd/m2
Didnt Scott explain this though? You are correct that if you assume a simple Beer’s law attenuation, e^-α, of the light, then the reduction factor you state has α=14. But, according to the testimonies of a bunch of people above, they are able to stare at the sun with markedly less cloud cover than this implies. Thus, the details of the atmospheric scattering are not so important, instead the assumption that you REQUIRE α=14 appears to be contradicted by testimony. Something’s wrong with this estimate.
Edit: Ah, sorry one other thing. The point about Mie scattering was that the scattering also does not have to destroy the coherence of the light in the Mie regime, allowing you to preserve the sharp disk while also attenuating the absolute brightness.
I doubt the veracity of the testimony. I think you can get something close to this when Sun is near the horizon + thin clouds + haze, and I dont expect people to be good at remembering the precise details + they seem to be primed and strongly motivated to commit a memory error/mandela effect
Idk, that seems like it undermines your broader point that relies entirely on testimony being reliable. But would you agree that if I have dominantly single scattering events only, then i can attenuate the light as much as I want, and the sharpness of the image is completely unchanged? This is what the Mie regime point is about.
But my point doesnt “rely entirely” on testimony being reliable - I dont know how anyone who read my posts could say that. And not all testimony is created equal - there are ways to discriminate between reliable/unreliable testimony (e.g, multiple attestation to a specific event, statement against interest/bias, coarse detail rather than fine detail, temporally proximate to event, etc…) You have to overturn much more credible testimony than specific details reported about unspecific recollections in Scott’s discord polls to reject the miracle, so it is weird that you put so much stock in this kind of anecdote.
Physically realistic scattering from clouds with optical depths >9 will inevitably disturb (probably extinguish) the solar disc… perfect forward scattering is not realistic and is what you need for the multiple scattering not to blur/smear the light… of course, it is strongly forward - but that isnt what you need.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/150ox56/fog_this_morning_was_so_dense_that_the_sunspots/
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i8dl0n/no_glare_photo_of_the_sun/
Not my photos so no guarantees on non-manipulation, but count me as another unreliable witness who saw this exact phenomenon several times in my life.
you distinctly remember seeing the Sun near its zenith as a pale, moonlike disc that was painless to stare at without squinting?
photos are totally believable - but no glare in iphone camera doesn't mean no glare in the naked eye (the discomfort glare is driven by scattering within the human eye - with the right filters, you can take a no glare photo of the sun in a clear sky)
Interesting that you mention Utah - I must've seen this a dozen times a year when I was working as a ski bum out in Colorado, enough that I distinctly noted it as a cool phenomenon in its own right.
It's *more* obvious if the sun is low in the sky and right in front of you on the horizon, *easier* if you're wearing polarized goggles, etc. But it's also something that very definitely occasionally is visible to the naked eye at ~2pm!
I think Utah is a bit farther south than Portugal - do you remember what month it would be? Maybe October in Portugal and February in Utah are similar midday elevation of the sun.
Another physicist:
I'm pretty sure that this case is a simple matter of a good fraction of the light getting scattered zero times, which explains the sharp boundary instead of getting convolved with something.
I vaguely remember sometimes seeing a slightly brighter splotch in the clouds where the sun is when it was too overcast to see the sun as a disk with a distinct outline, this is probably what the forward bias in scattering looks like.
Is your point that if it were explained by forward scattering, then that would noticeably blur/distort the disc?
Can you weigh in on my point about the tradeoff between attenuation and optical depth. If I am right that the optical depth has to be 11-14 to get the attenuation you need, I feel like the debate is over.
I feel like e^11 is a lot. Attenuating by enough for the unscattered light to be maybe 1x the brightness of the clouds would be enough. Which would by definition not hurt since looking at the clouds doesn't hurt and so 2x the clouds shouldn't hurt either.
Optical depth would be something around ln(angular area of sun) or something like that. I also live on the east coast and like looking at clouds, so I see this effect every couple of days...
I also live on the East Coast. There is zero chance that you see the midday Sun as pale, moonlike disc that is painless to gaze at “every couple of days”
Also, that isnt how optical depth/cloud attenuation works. See my NASA reference in my original post.
Reading your original post more closely I think you are making a unit error.
The point is that the sun is big enough that you can see it as a visible disk. Therefore, the correct measure to use is brightness. An object that takes a larger visual area with the same cd/m^2 would be easier to look at. (Otherwise your calculation would say that a white piece of paper that occupies the same visual area as the sun would be too bright to look at [sun is ~1e-2 radians, so going by your numbers a square piece of paper 1m away of sun size would get 1e-4*1e9 = 1e5 cd, going into a 2 pi m^2 area gives a bit over 1e4 cd/m^2])
But yes, this is somewhere around 1e3-1e5 attenuation by the clouds, which would mean that that the cloud would look pretty opaque but the sun is bright and that's how much is needed to bring the sun down to the same order of magnitude as the surrounding clouds.
What is the unit error? Luminance is brightness per area per unit solid angle. That is directly related to perceived brightness/comfortable viewing.
Your paper calculation mixes up quantities. You first convert luminance (cd/m²) to luminous intensity (cd) by multiplying by area; that’s irrelevant to visual comfort, which depends on luminance. Then you “spread” that intensity over a hemisphere and write 2π m², conflating solid angle (steradians) with area. That’s a dimensional error. Luminance concerns radiance per solid angle in the viewing direction; hemispheric averaging can’t be used to recover a meaningful cd/m² for what the eye sees.
I think you are right that the optical depth must be in a 11-14 sweet spot
Below is a PRBT4 simulation file of a spherical "sun" and scattering layer of optical depth=10, SSA=0.9, g=.877 that nevertheless produces a crisp disk. (it's a little more absorptive and thin than I'd prefer, but more scattering == more compute so have mercy)
The key point is that at these optical depths, the "blur filter" is maxed out and the whole cloud is lit. At which point the contrast is between the ambient brightness of the cloud and the directly-transmitted, zero-scattering, lottery-winner rays.
Similarly, if you use a point-source you will never get a "halo" on the other side of the cloud in these conditions. Scattered light gets completely distributed
Make the cloud thinner and then you can get a halo, but then the sun would be too bright
https://imgur.com/a/tOTfavj
https://imgur.com/m1qdIZb (thin cloud (optical depth=2) halo)
```
Integrator "volpath" "integer maxdepth" [10000]
Sampler "sobol" "integer pixelsamples" [131072]
Film "rgb"
"integer xresolution" [64]
"integer yresolution" [64]
"string filename" "sun_disk.exr"
#Reverse X axis.
Scale -1 1 1
LookAt
#Eye
0.0 900.0 0.0
#Target
0.0 100.0 0.0
#Up vector
1.0 0.0 0.0
# Actual sun in 0.5 degrees, but I don't want the numbers to be too extreme
Camera "perspective" "float fov" 5
WorldBegin
# The sun as a spherical light source
AttributeBegin
AreaLightSource "diffuse" "rgb L" [ 100000 100000 100000 ]
Translate 0 -1000 0
Shape "sphere" "float radius" [50]
AttributeEnd
AttributeBegin
AttributeBegin
MakeNamedMedium "cloud1" "string type" "homogeneous"
# Scattering albedo ~0.9
"spectrum sigma_a" [200 0.1 900 0.1]
"spectrum sigma_s" [200 0.9 900 0.9]
# Anisotropy parameter
"float g" [0.877]
AttributeEnd
# Cloud top boundary
AttributeBegin
Rotate 90 1 0 0
Material "interface"
MediumInterface "" "cloud1"
Shape "disk" "float radius" [1500]
AttributeEnd
# Cloud bottom boundary
AttributeBegin
Translate 0 -10 0
Rotate 90 1 0 0
Material "interface"
MediumInterface "cloud1" ""
Shape "disk" "float radius" [1500]
AttributeEnd
AttributeEnd
```
This is awesome, thanks for this.
Also, point of clarification - do you agree the sun would look like a diffuse bright patch to a human observer in your optical depth 10 simulation?
Thanks for checking out our poll from ACX Discord.
For people unfamiliar with Discord, I think it would help to clarify that it's a different server (not channel) from the one you featured in the last post, with different people voting.
There's also an invite link: https://discord.gg/6nHJ4u4ByT
> Something as simple as my pen vanishing from my desk, in plain sight, while I am looking straight at it, should completely demolish all of my priors against miracles and make me near-certain that something beyond normal physical law is going on.
I don't agree. Surely the chance of you blacking out briefly, and someone taking your pen; or simply you personally hallucinating (I know you're not entirely convinced of mass hallucination as a phenomenon, but you certainly do believe in single-person hallucination) is larger than the probability of a miracle.
I admit the Pope blowing up mountains needs some explanation and is worth thinking about, although I still wouldn't want to leap to divinely-inspired miralcle, even then.
But what if "tangible evidence" is available afterwards? I once ended up with a case-hardened steel file that was bent at the tip of the tang. I can't, however, guarantee that the bend hadn't been there previously...but I've never seen one before or since. (I got this while investigating a "spoon bender" friend, who on being presented with the evidence quit the activity. [Rumors had said that sometimes other things would bend in the presence of the "spoon bender" activity...so I went looking.]) I ended up convinced that the friend was a fake, but unable to explain the bent file.
So does anyone know of case-hardened steel files that are manufactured with a bend at the tip of the tang? (It might be done to enable a handle to be molded around the tang, so I can invent a good reason...I've just never seen another.)
I'm not an expert on file manufacturing specifically. But from a little research it appears they undergo multiple hardening and tempering processes, some of which involve quenching by dipping, presumably by the tang. It seems possible that the tang is not subject to the full hardening process. Indeed a very hard tang doesn't seem desirable, being prone to breakage, so it might intentionally be preserved in an annealed state.
If a file is e.g. stepped on while resting against the tang, it seems like the overall stiffness would place a large bending moment towards the tip. If the tip is less hard than the rest of the file, a bend there would not be surprising.
Well, it didn't *look* different and it didn't feel different. And it was about 1/8 inch thick, so it would need a lot more force than that to bend it. But if hardened steel looks exactly the same as unhardened steel, that would be a possible explanation, but one that was quite unsatisfactory. It would be much more satisfactory if someone could point to files that were made that way.
Normally hardened files are more likely to break than to bend. And I believe that the hardening process changes the color of the metal.
This prompted me to inspect one of my files with a removable handle, and in fact a distinctive color change is evident partway up the tang. See here:
https://imgur.com/jWt0qr0
I can accept that your file had that color change. The one I'm referring to did not.
Noted, and I'm not trying to extrapolate to all files. But it is supporting evidence for the theory!
Also, the word miracle comes with extra religious baggage. If the pen disappears, it suggests that some unexplained phenomenon is happening, but that may not have anything at all to do with religious miracles, prophets, and whatnot.
Lately, I've mostly jokingly been considering all the little unexplained phenomena signs of glitches in the matrix. Maybe the Fatima people just accidentally triggered the deep fire kasina meditation code loop? Maybe it's just a little perceptual bug that is hard to reproduce consistently. That seems at least as likely as a random religious miracle.
Assorted thoughts and musings on how I find myself relating to this miracle report:
1. From my memory of the description many of the people (especially the children) had been meditating together in some sense for many days or weeks straight. With the large crowd and the spiritual atmosphere it's easy to imagine many people there in quite an altered state, which makes the fire kasina angle seem more likely to me personally.
2. I'm sympathetic to something like "indirect realism" as a metaphysical position. That is, we each live inside a personal simulation built by our nervous system/ brain, which is usually strongly coupled to external reality but not always (better explanation with pictures here: https://qualiacomputing.com/2022/12/28/cartoon-epistemology-by-steven-lehar-2003).
A way to get an intuition for this perspective I find helpful is the look at the sky and imagine it being such that "Behind the sky is my skull". When I do this there's a shift, and a sense that everything I have direct access to is inside my simulation and "me" in some sense. This way of seein is particularly palpable with things like fire kasina.
I find indirect realism a useful frame for understanding both fire kasina and miracles like this where reality itself seems to change in ways that physics does not allow for.
3. The notion that they were all meditating / in an altered state and the indirect realism frame fails to explain the shared aspect though (and utterly fails re the reports of nearby villages experiencing the miracle, or random lawyers showing up to witness. I imagine they were not pseudo meditating for days?).
I remember Dr Ingram on a podcast mentioning that while on retreat (in a castle if I remember correctly) he drew a neon orange shape in the air with his finger (having meditated enough such that this was as real to him as anything) and his friend absently remarked on the orange colour (and maybe the shape also? I don't recall) without having been told by Daniel at all.
Embarrassingly through other tidbits I've picked up and some personal experiences I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of cross emination happening on what some people might call a "group field" or "telepathy". I have no good models or justification for this and acknowledge it sounds crazy if you're not already sympathetic to such things being possible.
I guess the way I interpret the miracle is "a fire-kasina-like experience that spread via the vibe".
4. Lastly, I was struck by people saying things like "I didn't see it, but just being there (just being exposed to the vibe) was enough for me to believe".
This resonates for me with a sense of what I understand miracles to be "about". That is "coming into direct contact with the mysterium tremendum, updating some hyper prior related to reality being more deeply subject to our preconceptions / shared preconceptions than we thought".
"Encountering the unexpected power to shared belief to deeply alter how we experience the world"?
"An unexpected update that something very different is possible" maybe.
If something as stable as "my experience of the sun" can alter so drastically on account of prayer and belief (and not just for me but everyone around me) then maybe "I can't possibly love my intolerable neighbour / forgive my ex / accept that my son died and it's ruining my life" could also change.
This sort of shifts the perspective on miracles from "God did something that defies physics thus he must be real" to "When we congregate and pray in earnest we can common knowledge a direct experience of an enchanted world where the impossible becomes possible" (the kingdom of heaven).
Indirect realism and miraculous vibes are not how many (most?) believers understand miracles, but they're currently the lenses that come up for me :)
+1 for qri and indirect realism. You can experience some very interesting and somewhat fun mental states while thinking about "behind the sky is my skull" while on psychedelics. Especially in a hammock on a beautiful day 😏
just... make sure going into it that you have a strong grasp on epistemology, and have a deep understanding why indirect realism doesn't mean there is no reality outside your mind, and why even if solipsism is true you should be a good person. Idk, to me it was fun and interesting, but after writing it I realized it could easily send someone in a bad direction. Be careful before taking psychedelics
This is a cool idea, but I suspect it’s applying a very intense-Buddhist-insight-meditation frame to a religion that contains very little like that. Catholicism is really not very mystical for the vast majority of adherents, certainly for Gilded Age peasants, and it’s violently opposed to insights like “behind the sky is my skull.”
My grandpa used to say the moon looks like Stalin. He had been a teenager in Eastern Europe during the postwar Soviet occupation.
Yes it’s entirely possible to see the sun through cloud at a comfortable light level and still see a clear disk. I’ve seen this multiple times (indeed on one occasion I saw an unusually large sun-spot group, and verified this by looking at online images from a solar telescope that day). Now this does depend on the cloud — so presumably on the size of the water droplets.
the sun was near its zenith? you didnt experience any discomfort glare at all? you didnt squint?
If I recall the elevation was about 30 degrees, and, yes, there was no discomfort or glare, owing to the attenuation by cloud (such conditions are rare, and again this is presumably to do with droplet size, but they do occur.
Droplet size is just an input to optical depth. I have yet to see someone address the paradox of depth - you wont get the attenuation you need without an optical depth that would disturb the disc (and I found a mathematician that made same argument as me in context of Fatima).
It’s not just optical depth. For starters, as the above GPT-5 quote suggests, droplet size affects whether it is in the Rayleigh scattering regime or the Mie scattering regime. And if we were talking about high-altitude ice crystals then their shape (as well as size) becomes relevant.
optical depth results from the scattering regime and is the parameter of interest for this discussion
The scattering angle also matters, whether it is isotropic, or forward scattered, or whatever (and if we’re considering ice crystals, that might have non-spherical shapes, it’s not straightforward).
I've also seen this. There is someone who took a photo of the sun through fog (saying that they could see sun spots with the naked eye) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/naYged4a7M This photo reflects well what I remember seeing: that the clouds look almost like black smoke in front of the sun and that you can see movement in the clouds.
Now, the picture is through fog, not clouds, which might change the physics, but I'm not really sure why it would.
I associate this phenomenon with a relatively low sun though, as in winter time.
Seconded. I grew up in an area with heavy fog in the winter and I would regularly be able to painlessly see the disc of the Sun when the fog had burned off the right amount. Well maybe not *regularly* but I definitely have clear childhood memories of being able to look at it and forcing myself not to because I thought it was harmful.
I think I basically agree with John Schilling: UFOs in the original sense are a label for a steady stream of both culturally-mediated mass observation events as well as isolated observations with impeccable tools and credentials. Many of these will get post-hoc probable explanations, like the now-frequent drone panics or Petrov's detections. But we know that quite a few won't even get that much and that's just something we have to live with. At the end of the day, no number of UFOs have yet converted into a single First Contact situation; I leave it to the reader to tweak their Bayesianism to be able to distinguish those qualitatively different forms of evidence.
*Yes*, this is a nearly-fully generalized way to dismiss sightings without having to put much thought into it. But I'd argue whether or not that strikes you as convenient or extremely aggravating points to different forms of engaging with the problem: is this something to argue about over the internet, or are we trying to predict reality? If on a regular basis I fire up my telescope, or my Mk. 1 eyeball, or my cutting-edge early warning radar, as a pragmatic question: how much effort do I need to put towards screening out false positives?
---
Actually, speaking of AESA ghosts that reminds me of something unrelated - what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant? I'm comparing this to how I would feel about one (1) scientist who tells me about three (3) meta-analyses covering (100) one hundred studies between them with 70,000 patients. It seems to me that you have to let the thinnest part of the chain of evidence dominate your belief in the strength of evidence, but I'm not sure I've seen a thorough approach to that sort of meta-credibility.
>what's the N value of the Fatima observers? The number 70,000 was thrown around pretty often in this Highlights post, but I was frustrated by the equivocation between that number, the number of testimonies, and the number of independent miracle events - if we're trying to do a formal update on the evidence, which of these is most relevant?
Seconding this question
Eye color. Brown eyes protect you against intense light. So there's easily a couple of orders of magnitude difference in how much light will cause discomfort.
The argument about luminance given by Ethan is an instance of Eulering: trying to dazzle with a sciency-sounding explanation. The argument itself boils down to: Nu-uh.
Keep in mind that light perception is logarithmic. 10^3 vs 10^9 isn't as big of a jump as Ethan is trying to imply.
i'm one of the testimonies from "the latter witnesses" (number 6) and i've got very blue very light eyes, lol. overall awareness to discomfort is very different between people also! stated not as a refutation to eye color being significant, but that it isn't required.
I know from experience that you can have cloud cover so intense that you can’t locate the sun at all, so I think there must be something wrong with Ethan’s analysis.
ETA: I see from other comments that I have been unfair to Ethan’s analysis. I can’t say I understand even now why it should be so impossible for cloud cover to give you a perceptible disk but protect you from pain, but it’s not like Ethan just ignored the possibility.
The exchange with Daniel Ingram gives me strong yes-Socrates-I-suppose-it-must vibes.
If you get spaceX to install the right hat on the moon, you may have better luck seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky's face there.
I disagree with the premise of Ethan's argument that for this to be a "Miracle" it must not have been the actual Sun that moved. As a "believer" in general (though not in particular about Fatima) I think this point misunderstands the nature of miracles.
God created natural things and is capable of acting through his creations. There is no need to invoke unnatural false Suns. He can manipulate the actual Sun, or at least the light from it or the air through which the light passes. This may be supernatural in the sense that things we consider miracles are unlikely to occur naturally, but they still make use of natural things.
Almost analogous is the old argument with fundamentalists about evolution. The fundamentalists posit convoluted stories like the Earth is very young and dinosaur bones are red herrings to test peoples faith. Catholics are generally fine with the idea of evolution - God created the world and evolution was a means to doing that. You don't even need to invoke the idea that God "guided" evolution, he's smart enough to set things up to end up where he wanted them to go. Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument.
My point is only - you don't need bizarre nonphysical objects to account for the Sun miracle.
In my view, even if the Fatima miracle was the result of something like the Kasina meditation, the miracle of Fatima may be that so many believers saw it at the same time. It is less supernatural, but they still had a profound religious experience that changed many of their lives.
In the Bible Jesus fed thousands of people with the loaves and fishes. Some people say "maybe people brought dinner with them and Jesus just got them to share". Would that make it less of a miracle?
Where did I assert that premise? I think we have specific evidence that favors a localized emitter as the explanation for Fatima, but I never said that, in principle, a miracle couldnt be implemented by manipulating light from the Sun.
I am sorry if I have misunderstood your point. I admit that I have read your arguments only second hand through Scott's blog. I will have a look at the source.
"Of course then an Atheist can ask, why bring God into it in the first place? But that is a different argument."
...no? That seems to be the heart of the argument. The Universe exists and the forces within it interact in certain predictable ways. Sometimes those forces are created by conscious creatures like us: we can use fans to create an updraft that lifts things, or we can apply evolutionary pressure to breeding organisms. Other times, those forces are "natural" (i.e., not human), like wind and natural selection. It's fundamentally non-falsifiable to say that *the entire thing* is a miracle and a creation (billions of years ago) by an external eternal consciousness.
Clearly when ordinary people use the term in ordinary language they're talking about the idea that that consciousness is named "God" and interferes *today*, putting its thumbs on the scales of its creation to produce certain outcomes at certain times and places. So the crucial question is, "does this action accord with natural processes [or natural processes under the influence of human force] or does it require the hand of God?"
When ordinary people debate the existence of God, it's not whether a conscious entity introduced the original Big Bang energy, it's whether that consciousness is still guiding our lives today and responds to our prayers and resurrects our consciousness after death. So yes, it matters whether it was a natural phenomenon or whether God himself produced that light in that way at that time, by "hand".
As a non-believing teenager, I once promised to myself/God that if He put a mark on the back of a street sign I was looking at, then I would believe in his existence. I thought of that since I knew that marks, stickers, graffiti were relatively common on signs and so it would be a discreet enough of a sign that God might stoop to doing it for me. Lo and behold, there was writing on the back of the street sign. Of course this striking miracle caused a big updates in my belief: I was wrong that I would believe in God after seeing this and should never have told myself otherwise.
· In my childhood, when I'd close my eyes for a while (e. g. trying to fall asleep), I'd see afterimages of light and just various random shit, and I could totally make it do stuff without anyone prompting me, I was just a lil guy like that. I have not tried it recently, though, because I've been preoccupied with other things outside of the tiny world of childhood "where things were so much themselves". (Okay, I tried just now, with the afterimage of the laptop screen; I had lousy control, but the afterimage definitely changed shape to something circular. I think I need to, like, relax and focus to make it work better, right now it was kind of hurried. Unless memory fails me, I used to be able to make it bright, make it move as I like...)
· I now sleep in a quiet room, but when I used to fall asleep to some monotone noise, I had hypnagogic hallucinations where the noise changed to unintelligible voices. I don't think I had anything visual like that ever, but I guess seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky in the Moon is the next level of difficulty.
· See the story of looking for Trotsky's face, swastikas and other dangerous magical things drawn by enemies on regular objects like matchboxes etc.: https://spokus.eu/en/urban-legends-ussr-soviet-russia/ (one source I could find in English).
There is no other way about it. I think we need to start a post-ironic meme egregore to get hundreds of people to go to a specific place at a specific time to see if mass psychology + staring at the sun is sufficient to replicate the miracle
Unironically yeah. I appreciate the ethics are a little dodgy but surely Scott has enough clout to get a couple dozen weirdos to go try this in a park or something. Not me though.
No!
The best I can do here is emailing the Georgia Skeptics and asking about the telescope thing, but at this point I'm not sure who is still around. The author of that article did pass away, but I was able to find Long's email. There's almost no chance she replies but It's a curious enough story that it's worth trying.
If people in a religious vision see something similar to what expert mediators see in their spiritual visions, that does not make for a good argument against both being valid.
What do you mean by "valid" in this context?
It suggests they're really experiencing something, but it also suggests that one or both groups are fundamentally mistaken in their interpretation of the meaning and origin of the experiences.
> the difficulty in explaining how everyone immediately became an expert fire kasina meditator is almost as tough as explaining the original miracle.
Doesn't seem that way to me. Meditation is clearly subject to environmental factors: stimuli such as loud or erratic noises can make it more difficult, deliberately arranged rooms make it easier. There's lots of random variation in natural environments, so a particular place and time might have been multiple standard deviations better for cultivating the relevant mindset. That doesn't make everyone who benefited from those rare conditions an expert, any more than trying to juggle during a once-per-century windstorm turns someone into a world-class baseball pitcher.
I commented on the original post - I do meditation that mostly involves closing my eyes or staring at statues, but I've had similar experiences to what the kasina meditators described.
Quick point -
The Fatima phenomenon was either:
1. A physical phenomenon
2. A mental phenomenon
3. A supernatural phenomenon
In the Three Body Problem adaptation, when the stars blink, Saul concludes that hypothesis A (a real physical phenomenon) is impossible as an explanation. A mental phenomenon - where our perception is changed - is the only answer.
But isn't that analogous to a physical phenomenon?
My unprovable opinion: events like this do not involve supernatural physical events. That is why they are supernatural mental events - the association of the Virgin Mary with this event and the Christian idea of Grace (that God can just kind of randomly seek you out) is suggestive to me. Not saying the children literally spoke to the Virgin Mary, but if we suppose that there were some sort of entity that was perceived as such ... My suggestion would be there was "something" involved, but that the "something" would not in any way be physically measurable. Sad!
Sorry, but the whole fire kasina saga of "I tried it out and didn't experience Fatima, so probably this couldn't be it" is a complete non-proof for me! Are you really saying that the failure of a 21st century Bay Area Rationalist who crams a 5 minute meditation sesh of alone time into his busy schedule to finally cross "explaining Fatima" from his To Do list is a strong piece of evidence against a phenomenon experienced in the midst of an excited crowd in a rural area in the early 20th century?
I would strongly expect members of a vast crowd of thousands of mostly pious and devout Catholics from the early 20th century Portuguese country side who believe in the reality of miracles and the Virgin Mary and spend part of their leisure time in semi-meditative prayer sessions and who are in a heightened state of frenzy, maybe even in a trance like state after hours of communal praying and hymn singing and ready to experience and be showered in the power of the Almighty to have a slightly higher perceptiveness for uncommon phenomena as me and you while living our day-to-day life.
I mean, do you ever listen to the Beatles and conclude that, given that you neither started shrieking, sobbing and peeing your pants, Beatlemania might be only explicable by divine intervention as you could not satisfactory conjure the state of hysteria by listening to the Beatles by yourself? No, because obviously there was more to it as "just" the music. So I would assume that there was more to it in Fatima as well. The mere fact that not everybody can conjure the described images up willy-nilly does not disprove that given the right circumstance a good chunk of people out of a huge group would experience the phenomenon. But as usually big groups of people do not stare at the sun simultaneously, it simply feels odd because we do not have enough evidence to conclude with certainty that yes, 18%, 36%, 72% of the population would experience Fatima-like phenomena when starring in the sun under certain metereological conditions while being in a kind of religious semi-trance.
No, you cannot assume that Portuguese peasants in the twenties were doing anything sufficiently related to fire kasini meditation for the comparison to be relevant.
>Ethan says I must be mis-remembering, because my claimed experience is physically impossible:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i8dl0n/no_glare_photo_of_the_sun/
There is clear photographic evidence of a sharply defined, yet completely harmless to look at sun disk, when it's behind light clouds or smoke. Personally I've seen this maybe a dozen times over my life, and I don't even go out that much. I always thought this was a somewhat rare but otherwise completely normal phenomenon, and to see someone argue against the very existence of it with the dead-certainty of math bewilders me.
This was the point at which I formed a strong prior that Ethan is more interested in winning debates than seeking truth. Also:
"In a private conversation, Ethan continued to assert that I was misremembering, and that all the Discord users and commenters who agreed with me had been contaminated by my testimony and become victims of suggestibility. I think this is a pretty crazy point to suddenly convert to the doctrine of eyewitness fallibility, contamination, and suggestibility - but I leave further discussion to people who understand optical physics."
Daaaamn!
I havent seen credible evidence that you can get the conjunction of (i) high solar elevation, (ii) comfortable fixation, (iii) no blurring/distortion. Physical reasoning leads me to doubt that the conjunction of those effects is possible, but I am willing to abandon that claim if a credible counterexample is found or someone shows a flaw in my reasoning.
You infer from this that I am not seeking truth? It seems that you are more interested in discrediting me than charitably engaging with my arguments (which is also consistent with the rest of your behavior).
If my quoting Scott seems like an effort to discredit you, then we are similarly impressed with the quote.
How have you updated from the direct testimony in this thread? From the explanations by people who apparently understand the physics? From the linked pictures which directly illustrate the phenomenon at issue? A little? A lot?
My claim is as follows: When the Sun is at a 42° elevation, attenuation by a factor of 10^6 presupposes clouds with a vertical optical depth of about 10. When the Sun is at a 10° elevation, attenuation by a factor of 10^6 only presupposes clouds with a vertical optical depth of about 2.
The most credible people that have claimed to see the pale, moonlike Sun have all said that they saw it when the Sun was low on the horizon. For instance, the guy that drew a painting of it after he saw it in the early morning through fog in one of the comment threads.
I haven't seen any credible, specific testimony that people have seen it at midday. There is a guy in the comments that ran a computer simulation that seems to confirm my claim about it. The pictures are completely irrelevant to the discussion that we are having.
It seems pretty clear that you dont even understand the argument that I am making, yet you are so confident about your position that you are willing to infer bad faith. I didn't say the quote of Scott was an effort to discredit - he didn't claim that I must not be seeking the truth, even though he didn't fairly characterize the conversation that we had in DMs, since he omitted that I believe that be saw something that approximated what he was reporting, but he was wrong about time of day or the fine details.
I've never seen the sun like that, so I can believe Ethan, but then, I live in the Caribbean, maybe sun's too bright here.
You dont understand the difference between discomfort glare and camera glare.
Also, I agknowledge that it is possible when the Sun is low on the horizon. I am not convinced it can happen when the Sun is at a high angular elevation.
The most credible testimony that I have found is about sun is low on the horizon + dense fog. It is not clear that the solar elevation at the tome is salient to the people replying to these polls.
I certainly wasn't arguing that miracles are an exception to Bayesianism. To put it in Bayesian terms, it seems to me like your model for how we update our priors given a strange event is maybe a little naive, because it is not sufficiently taking into account the relevant background knowledge we have accumulated about strange events. Given our background information, Pr (Naturalism) | (some magic trick) is unchanged, since we know magic tricks are natural phenomena. Given that UFO's, ghost sightings and purported miracles have a long history of being debunked when they are investigated carefully, any change to our Pr(naturalism) should be very small, since the hypothesis 'they have some natural explanation' is the best explanation of them, given our background knowledge.
Of course, this is defeasible. If the Pope starts blowing up mountains on demand, or we see Words of Fire blazing in the sky spelling out the Lord's Prayer, by all means update our confidence in naturalism. But the Miracle of the Sun isn't like that. It's more interesting than the vast majority of miracles, but (without going into a long explanation of why), I was I think justifiably convinced even before I read your article that if someone smart looked into it, a natural explanation would end up appearing plausible. And, hey, that's what happened. That will also be the case for the next purported miracle, unless it is clearly on its face something pretty different from the sort of things we are used to (visions, suggestible crowds, items of dubious provenance).
If the Pope announced a high-level policy change related to the miraculous healing of amputees, and shortly afterward, all over the world, patients in Catholic-backed hospitals started making extremely well documented appearances with limbs that were medically unremarkable apart from having been missing the day before, that'd be a lot more persuasive than blowing up mountains on demand. I mean, there are fairly straightforward ways to blow up a mountain using existing tech - hydrogen bombs can be scaled to arbitrarily high yield with only a small fission primer.
I mean, there's lots of really good miracles that would be persuasive to a naturalist like me. Weird that we only ever get these shitty ones that have natural explanations, like crowds of convinced Catholics seeing something weird and saying it was Jesus. At least give us a crowd of convinced Muslims seeing the virgin Mary and converting, something that's a LITTLE harder to square with normal human psychology and the propensity for weird stuff to happen sometimes.
>Muslims seeing the virgin Mary
I'm pretty sure that this is entirely in accordance with Islamic dogma, they are just more excited about stuff that's unique to them.
Ok, fair. Substitute Jews or Hindus.
Thank you! I thought your post was exactly right, and was clear about all this, and Scott was misreading it. Basically, his Pr (Naturalism) should be extremely high - virtually unflappable - but he's writing as if it isn't, and reported strange observations are the sort of evidence that could cause notable updates to his prior when they really shouldn't.
I think people experience a lot of “supernatural” phenomena, even skeptics. I never heard the Imam on the Moon story before, and I think it’s charming that the woman who had that vision first also found one of the Prophet’s hairs in her Quran. Some people live in a world of wondrous miracles and I kind of envy them.
The paper example was set up to send exactly the same pattern of light into the eye as an attenuated sun. Surely they can't be different if what the eye sees is the same?
I haven't read Hume's original and I agree with your criticism of the "strong" version of Hume-ism, but I'd put forward a modified version.
Which is that, if you're questioning whether some event was a miracle or some natural phenomenon, oftentimes people dismiss the natural explanation as being unlikely. But, in line with Bayes, our prior for miracles should usually be *even lower* than our prior for the unlikely thing.
E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I would submit the above is true even if it's a random street corner is on the other side of the globe! So strong should our prior be against telepathy, even "IDK man I just wanted to bop into this random spot in Kaga-Bandoro, Central African Republic" is more likely.
Relatedly, by Bayesian view of the original article is that there are lots of claimed sun miracles, vast majority have natural explanations, that raises my prior that a particular sun miracle is not a miracle.
>E.g., say I need to meet my friend in person and have no way to contact him, so I try to communicate telepathically to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time. And sure enough I go there and he shows up. Can I actually communicate telepathically? No - as unlikely as this coincidence is, it's far *more* likely than me suddenly having telepathy.
I agree: but what if you asked your friend why he knew to meet me there, and he told you that at the exact same time you were trying to communicate telepathically to him he had an experience of hearing your voice telling him to go to that particular street corner at that particular time?
Hume argues that we should still assume it wasn't telepathy. In fact, argues that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments". In other words, even if you have testimonial evidence in favor of a miracle that is so unimpeachable that it would be impossible for it to be wrong, you should still consider it 50:50 odds at best that the miracle happened. And that's just silly!
No, Hume's argument is that, if that happened, you should expand your scope of natural phenomena to include telepathy! But then you have to take the good with the bad: telepathy is now a natural phenomena subject to investigation by the usual scientific means; it's not just a once-off exception to the rules of nature
If, instead of trying telepathy, you prayed to God that you would meet your friend, and when you met he he told you that he heard the voice of God telling him to be there, would you then agree that you should expand your scope of possible phenomena to include the existence of a God who answers prayers?
If yes, then Humes argument fails to do the job people set it to: arguing against the existence of miracles.
I attend a Quaker meeting and, while this is not a universal or even majority view among unprogrammed Quakers, some people describe Quaker meetings as like a group meditation that unlocks more than solo meditation. That isn't exactly how I'd describe it, but it does provide a good analogue to how a giant crowd of people doing fire kasina meditation would get more dramatic results than a single person doing fire kasina meditation.
My grandmother and grandfather have experienced the Miracle of the Sun about a month ago in Medjugorje. My grandmother is a devotee of Medjugorje, and I consider her gullible and biased on this topic, but my grandfather is not; he is a very rational person and not given to sentimental devotions. So I asked him specifically about the phenomenon, and he corroborated my grandmother's testimony: the Sun "dancing" in the sky, spinning, pulsating, and changing color.
He also corroborated that the crowd around him saw the same thing. Note also that the crowd gathered there (early in the morning) because one of the seers announced the day before that the Virgin Mary would work miracles there.
So, did he stare at the sun for a while before it started happening?
>We have two hypotheses: First, that the world acts entirely according to natural law. Second, that sometimes it includes divine intervention (or very surprising natural laws that we wouldn’t have predicted beforehand). We start with a high prior on the first hypothesis based on our long history of seeing only natural events. When we see evidence that is more likely on the second hypothesis than the first, we update in favor of it.
Something that you gloss over: just because we have decent understanding of many extremely rare/weird natural phenomena, it doesn't follow that this well has been exhausted. To me it's quite obvious that there's plenty of obscure stuff still out there, which isn't supernatural in the least. On these priors, it doesn't seem that Fatima-like stuff is particularly good evidence for supernatural, certainly not anywhere near Pope armed with super-nukes.
>The luminance of the solar disc at its zenith is on the order of 10⁹ cd/m².1 The maximum luminance that an on-axis, compact source can have without causing observers to experience discomfort glare is on the order of 10³ cd/m².
This part of Ethan's rebuttal struck me as giving off fishy vibes, so I checked the original source. As I predicted, the actual claim made by the source is much narrower and more qualified than Ethan's summary.
Ethan's citation goes to "Video Displays, Work, and Vision: National Research Council (US) Panel on Impact of Video Viewing on Vision of Workers". These numbers appear to come from Table 5.1, titled "Borderline Between Comfort and Discomfort (BCD) Luminance for Intermittent Directly Viewed Glare Sources". Note the "intermittent" -- the numbers in the table are about the effects of staring into a *flashing* light, and the book explicitly says that they cannot be safely generalized to a stable light source (which is what we're interested in). Quote:
>These values are glare source luminances. Values above the BCD values in the table would induce discomfort. (Note, however, that Guth used a flashing glare source. It is not clear how much the BCD values from steady sources in natural settings would differ. Eye movements and blinks would interrupt the retinal images of steady sources.)
Even under the conditions actually tested, the book is also careful *not* to claim that the thresholds reported will be universally valid for all observers. The comments on the table say: "Assuming that these data accurately represent discomfort glare thresholds for **at least some** VDT operators, it can be seen from Table 5.1 that some situations would induce discomfort" (emphasis mine). So it could just be that those reporting being able to look without discomfort have higher-than-average thresholds for it.
> The Medjugorje witness who I interviewed said the sun was spinning instantly, the moment he started looking at it, which is troublesome for explanations that rely on retinal bleaching, near-blindness, and other complicated entoptic phenomena. The same witness understood what normal afterimages look like, and was very convinced it wasn’t just normal afterimages.
I don't find this particularly credible, because it happened so long before the interview. Human memory is highly suggestible over long periods, and especially to someone who was a believer at the time and thus ascribed this event significance, of course they're going to remember it as being more vivid than their more recent, non-supernatural occurrences.
I think that the very concept of miracles is a logical trap, or a "brutal self-own" as the kids these days say. Assuming that miracles occur, they do so either in a somewhat predictable fashion, or completely at random.
If miracles are predictable to some extent, then, a la Hume, their existence is governed by some kind of rules; and we have developed mental tools that help us model these hidden rules with some degree of accuracy. For example, we can model gravity to some extent, even if we know that our model does not give the right answers in most cases. We can even model the behaviour of intelligent agents, such as humans, well enough to e.g. perform actionable market research.
On the other hand, if miracles are a priori unpredictable and thus effectively random, then no amount of clever tricks will allow us to model them (except perhaps in aggregate, and likely not even then). But if that is the case, then we cannot extract any information from a miracle, other than perhaps "God is great". We cannot interpret any miracle as a sign or a message or anything else; at least, not absent personal revelation (in which case we don't even need the miracle).
Theologically speaking, both horns of the dilemma are problematic. In the latter case, miracles are essentially pointless; in the former case, they are on the slippery slope to being "trivialized" in the theological sense (I use "scare quotes" here because it sounds odd to call phenomena like gravity or the electromagnetic force "trivial"). I do understand that the canonical response to such dilemmas it to say "you must have faith", but that is just an oblique way to invoke personal revelation once again -- a perfectly respectable move, but not one that is likely to convince any heretic or unbeliever.
I wish this forum had “likes” for comments.
If the evidence of miracles allows you to attempt to predict the behavior of God with a reasonable degree of accuracy, then great! You believe in God, and a God who performs miracles! So do I, so does the Catholic Church, so does more than half the world. Glad you could join us. So where is the first horn of the dilemma?
As I'd said (in agreement with Hume), it reduces miracles to yet another predictable phenomenon, like gravity (or perhaps ice cream flavor preference). On the plus side, it opens the path to many new areas of "theological engineering": now that we have uncovered a new force of [super-]nature, we can apply it, perhaps ushering in the next technological revolution. On the minus side (theologically speaking), miracles cease to be special and unique messages from God to his believers (and unbelievers alike, perhaps). In a world where miracles are predictable, something like the event we're discussing (the Miracle of Fatima) would still be front-page news, but it would share that front page with volcano eruptions, supernovae, hurricanes, and other such events -- for a short while, until the next remarkable event comes along. This is AFACT close to what Christians mean when they say that definitive proof of God would override human free will: yes, everyone would believe; but what would they believe in ?
Tell me, if you got to know your neighbor Steve well enough that you could generally predict what he's going to do, would that open up the path to many new areas of "Steve engineering"?
Yes, absolutely. Politicians and salesmen do this all the time, as do hackers. It's even called "Social Engineering" when they do it.
It's called "Theology" when we do it to God, and we've been working on that longer than we've worked on any scientific field. Believing in God and believing that understanding God will allow you to better predict miracles is not a problem for believing in miracles! If anything it's a bonus. So I still don't see where your "first horn" is coming from. There's no problem in studying theology in order to better predict when God will intervene in nature.
What then is the principal difference, if any, between miracles and e.g. gravity or electricity ?
Reading through some of the bits about how difficult kasina meditation is, something is bugging me. Isn't meditation noticeably more difficult for the type of person who wants to meditate? The intention is to quiet the thoughts in your head, and come to a sort of inner peace, right? This is primarily desirable to people who constantly have thoughts running through their heads. Difficulty with meditation might be the same as difficulty with exercise. The people who reap the greatest benefits are also the people that struggle the most to perform the task. Your average joe doesn't struggle nearly as much, but they also don't need it in the first place, so why struggle at all?
Correct me if I'm misguided, of course. But I am a bit worried that ACX is misunderstanding why meditation is difficult, and accidentally using that misunderstanding to bump the credibility of the miracle.
Many years of research have proven that people who are dedicated to meditating find it much easier to meditate. Confirming my priors. Nor is it clear to whether they have more or less need of meditation.
I think you sidestepped my actual point, there. I'm not talking about the amount of experience someone has with meditation, I'm talking about the "personality type" (not sure if this is the perfect term for it) that meditation tends to attract.
Found
It sounds like the crowd at Fatima contained many personality types.
Yeah, exactly. Because the crowd at Fatima contained many personality types, but meditation attracts a certain, specific personality type, there's a discrepancy here. Fatima may have shown different, "miraculous" results because most of the people who are attracted to meditation also happen to struggle with meditation. That's the hypothesis, anyway.
And chill a bit, yeah? I'm trying to have an open conversation here, not dictate mine will of truth to the world.
Something like this fits my observations. I've seen a fair amount of people who were very susceptible to meditation when they tried it, and got quick spectacular effects. The same people also dropped off from doing meditation very soon, because the spectacular experiences got too uncomfortable and scary.
And there is the paradox that when you intentionally strive to achieve meditative states they become much harder to reach. I believe that explains the common experience that you try a new technique and get a really strong effect, but then when you try it again, grasping after the same effect, you cannot reach it.
I also have the impression that people that stick with a disciplined meditation practice tend to be more the striving, intentional kind of person - which has a harder time of achieving certain states. But after enough practice they can overcome this, in part by reducing the striving.
Yeah, it's almost like meditation has beginner's luck baked in, makes it a really interesting practice. Difficult to pin down. That's part of what makes me nervous, when it's being used as evidence for supernatural events.
Isn’t “falling to earth” what you would see if the sun was too bright, you dropped your gaze and possibly shut your eyes, and the afterimage stayed in the middle of your vision?
I appreciate the fair-mindedness as others do but I think you're frankly being a little TOO charitable here. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that it's not only been reproduced when there's no veridical referent, but that some people have been able to reproduce it at will (including people who were at the ACTUAL MIRACLE) is game, set, and match. The rest is detail. Do we know EXACTLY why it happened? No. But the probability of anything remotely supernatural goes way way down with that in mind. IMO, healing miracles like the one Bentham's Bulldog posted a few weeks ago are harder to explain than this.
PS, if you're interested in other miracle accounts which are reasonably well-attested, I've just written an essay on one (https://substack.com/home/post/p-176774210) and mean to do a few more, time permitting.
EDIT: like others in the thread, I'm skeptical it's even fair to speak of "70,000 witnesses." I think we actually have only a little over a hundred testimonies, yeah? And I just counted the testimonies in your doc on the OP and just over half of them weren't even taken down until at least a year after the alleged miracle. I know you didn't include EVERY extant testimony in that doc, but it it seems like really we might only have 30 - 50 testimonies from within hours/days/weeks of the events. It's easy to imagine someone ten, twenty, forty years later remembering they'd seen the miracle with everyone else when in fact they hadn't. So how do we know those other 69,950 people actually saw anything? I'm not saying a lot, maybe even most, didn't, but...you state that "the original investigators looked extra-hard for negative statements to record" but...is that actually true? I mean, maybe they say they did, but how do we verify that?
Yeah, it seems to me that there’s a really interesting question of precisely what conditions give rise to this experience, but it really seems like a replicable thing, if we can just figure out how.
Yes, we know there are psychological phenomena like the ones experienced in Fatima (Kasina, more direct replications). We just don't know under what conditions they occur, because we dont know a lot about psychology. This is similar to how we couldn't explain natural phenomena before the natural sciences were well developed. And the conditions at Fatima seemed ripe for mass psychological contaigon (like the khomeinei moon, or various cases of mass psychosis) at a high level, even if we don't know the exact mechanisms.
I'll just address the comment you made regarding me, as I'm pretty uncertain about Fatima.
//If you’re a theist, you have a free option to convert any how question to a why question. How? Because God did it! Your interlocutor can’t object, because we know God can do anything. But in exchange, you now have a why question - why did God do that, and not something else? The sum of all why question - the fact that the real world doesn’t look like it was optimized for some specific plausible motive like goodness - is the problem of evil. Thus, it is exactly equivalent to all the inconvenient “how” questions you hoped you’d avoided.//
But the various Y questions are not independent. There is one basic fact: there are natural laws that operate without concern for value, and these--barring exceptional circumstances at least--are universally adhered to, rather than violated in cases where it would be good. If you can give an explanation of why God would allow that, then you answer all the why questions. As an analogy, if there's a guy who shows up at his neighbors house every day at 7 am, there's some sense in which you have a new why question every day, but obviously explaining the first few days will probably explain the rest. Same here.
In contrast, atheism's explanation of how there's fine-tuning does not carry over the consciousness or anthropic stuff or moral knowledge.
What if a guy shows up at his next door neighbor's house every day at 7 am for ten days, then on day 11 he shows up at the house across the street instead? You could say that that's still one question—on all 11 days, he showed up at some house at 7 am and we don't know why. But when he was just showing up at one house, we thought we saw a pattern, even if we couldn't explain the pattern. Now that the pattern has been broken, the number of possible explanations has multiplied. Similarly, a world in which God never (let's say, never since the Resurrection) intervenes in supernatural ways to demonstrate His existence or address some evil is hard to explain, but it at least is a consistent pattern. A world in which God almost never manifests but sometimes chooses to raises more questions and admits of more possible explanations, so incurs a complexity penalty.
It's true that this shifting pattern will have a lower prior. But the same is true on atheism. Any specific apparent miracle pattern is unlikely. And to explain it as a theist, you just need a third explanation: God rarely performs miracles and small ways. That theory predicts the data as well as atheism and isn't extremely improbable conditional on the other 2.
>God rarely performs miracles and small ways.
But this seems ad hoc. I think it's not quite foldable into the Problem of Evil, because while there's a moral question (why does God do good things for some and not others?) there's also just the amoral question of "why does God sometimes 'violate' his own laws but usually not?" which seems separate. You can always appeal to "he has sufficient reasons" but again, I think it's pretty ad hoc that God always has sufficient reasons to do whatever weird thing we observe, especially since it has 0 predictive power for when a miracle will occur.
I agree it's a bit surprising. But a lot of things are true and surprising. It's surprising, a priori, that the world is mostly populated by invisible dark matter, but I believe that.
Any theory has little predictive power for the specific distribution of miracles. Neither a theist or atheist would have guessed a priori that, say, Barbara Cumiskey would be healed or people in Portugal would see a moving solar disk.
I guess the underlying assumption here is "miracles (roughly defined as weird things that seem to violate natural laws as we understand them) are more probable in a theistic universe than an atheistic one." And that certainly DOES seem true intuitively but I'm not sure it is.
Miracles so-defined aren't IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, just super unlikely. Let's say Jesus' resurrection for example. I've argued a lot about that one and I have been regularly told that IF your prior for theism is 0, then the evidence for Jesus' resurrection can't overcome it ofc, but if your prior for theism is HIGHER than zero, then the evidence for the Resurrection is really good*. But a resurrection isn't actually IMPOSSIBLE in an atheistic universe, in the sense that A = not-A is impossible. Surely there's some weird one in several quadrillion quantum fluctuation or whatever that would just happen to reorganize the atoms in Jesus' body in such a way to restore him to life.
On the flipside, maybe the probability of miracles in a THEISTIC universe is 0. You know how they say God, despite being omnipotent, can't do evil because it would contradict his character, and if he could do evil he wouldn't be God? Maybe God would never, ever violate the laws he established, never, ever raise somebody from the dead or heal somebody from an otherwise completely incurable disease. He set those laws for a reason, after all. Is there any reason that couldn't be the case?
So it actually seems possible to me that probability of miracles COULD be HIGHER on atheism than on theism. Worth considering at least.
I think you've argued in the past that in an atheistic universe where weird stuff just happens sometimes, we wouldn't expect the weird stuff to have specifically religious content. But I think it's unestablished that "weird stuff" actually happens in a religious context at a higher rate in a religious than non-religious context. When you take into account not usually categorized as "miraculous" but still paranormal phenomena like ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, psi, etc. is that really the case? Someone (not me) would have to collect data I guess.
I wonder if somebody could make an ATHEISTIC argument from miracles. Something like "if there really was an omnipotent Supreme Lawgiver, we would expect all his laws to hold at all times. But since we sometimes observe weird breakdowns, there probably isn't a Supreme Lawgiver." I'm not going to make or defend such an argument (at least not right now) because I'm sure it has a thousand. holes in it but maybe somebody could.
*I actually think that conditional on benevolent theism the evidence is still not very good, but that's another story
I don’t think “rarely” has any explanatory or predictive power! We have no way of saying when it is likely to happen, what form it is likely to take, or why it happens. And the point I was making is that the “why” is more difficult when the explanation is “rarely” than when it’s “never.”
Of course rarely has predictive power. It predicts there would sometimes be miracles but they wouldn't be too common. It doesn't predict which specific miracles there'd be reported--say, whether there'd be a disk in the sky--but neither does atheism.
I think conditional on God existing and being able to do miracles, the odds he'd do them rarely isn't much different from the odds he'd do them never.
Are we talking about odds? I thought we were talking about whether theists have one question to answer, or several. If God never intervened, then "why didn't God heal my aunt?" would truly only have one answer: "Because God doesn't do that." Even though we would still have the question of WHY God doesn't do that, that is still one question. But if God intervenes to heal some people (you mention Cumiskey), but not others, now "why didn't God heal my aunt?" has a much wider range of possible answers: "Because Cumiskey was more pious," "Because healing Cumiskey created more utilons," "Because healing Cumiskey was more likely to lead to a broader increase in faith," etc. But while each of those possible answers might distinguish between Cumiskey and my aunt, we would then have to see if they applied to every other case, so you've got "Why didn't God heal Aunt-1," "Why didn't God heal Aunt-2," "Aunt-3," etc. And any time you find that, say, Aunt-3 was even more pious than Cumiskey, you're back to the drawing board on possible explanations.
Under atheism the explanation is just, random variation. Atheism doesn't need to explain it any more than it needs to explain the exact pattern of a series of coin flips; but if your explanation is "God willed these specific coin flips" then you do need to say something about those specific ones
Yes, in fact, "[p]eople are extremely suggestible and have terrible memory. There are as-yet-barely-plumbed psychological phenomena where sometimes a very suggestible person can cause many seemingly-careful observers to make correlated errors. Historians constantly exaggerate and bury negative evidence, so all of these errors and confabulations come down to us as seemingly-ironclad evidence of the paranormal."
The only problem with all these recent religion-themed posts is now I've got Marian hymns rattling around my noggin, and we Catholics do not have hymns as good as the Orthodox for this.
> and look for the miracle themselves in various contexts - what questions would you want them to ask, and what experiments should they perform?
If you meet a divine-looking being, the first question to ask is about a few still-undiscovered digits of some well-known mathematical constant: <https://www.skytopia.com/project/knowledge/knowledge.html>. I guess it might get tricky to specify that you mean pi, rather than tau, or short-scale septillionth (increase as necessary to make it a still-undiscovered digit) as opposed to long-scale septillionth, or even that you want base-ten digits.
I will never understand calling the event at Fatima "creepy." That's kind of incredible to me. Whether divine intervention was involved or not, I can only ever see the event as joyous and life affirming. I thought everybody liked pretty colors.
Sure, but I like my basic conception of reality even more.
I guess it has to do with how one was raised and how one relates to miracles and Christianity. I rejected Christianity and miracles in a flat, non-affective way. It was not an emotional process. I did not feel relieved or freed. If anything, it left me with a slight feeling of disappointment and yearning. I would absolutely be thrilled to find definitive evidence of the religion I was raised in.
You theory might be true given that I, indeed, was raised Catholic and I rejected it pretty emotionally, but I don't quite see what was your reasoning process here/how you connected these.
I would hate to learn that there is an all-powerful being who has no problem torturing people who don't obey its dumb opinions about what's right for eternity and I would feel obligated to fight against it (and, obviously, I'd probably lose given that it's all-powerful)
I think the biggest mistake in Christianity was deciding that God was all-powerful. This must have been an asset during a more hierarchical time, but it was a poison pill that would ultimately backfire.
Regardless of God's hypothetical power level, the morality of the bacteria does not apply to the human being. When I scrub my countertops, I have little regard for the death and suffering of microbes. (Nor does it matter to me that the bacteria is deemed by us to be incapable of autonomy, intelligence and self-reflectiveness. I can imagine a being with such vastly superior faculties that in comparison, humanity's cognitive abilities are infinitesimal and irrelevant)
Well purportedly the Virgin showed the children visions of human souls being tormented by demons in hellfire forever I’d say that’s pretty creepy
Fair enough. I guess it is natural some people would see the whole story as a package deal. I was thinking of the actual psychedelic phenomenon in the sky, and if that was confirmed to be a miracle, it wouldn't follow that everything the child-seers reported was true.
With respect to Hume, his argument wasn’t actually that miracles are definitionally impossible (though I agree that’s how Kenny Easwaran characterized his argument). You can read his argument (in appropriately antique type) at https://davidhume.org/texts/e/10, but the gist of it is much closer to the comment from Jefferson you quote earlier about how he has known Yankee ministers to prevaricate more often than he has seen rocks drop from the sky. As Peter van Inwagen points out (even quoting the same story about Jefferson!), it’s a little hard to tell exactly what Hume’s argument is, but one fair reading of him is that whether or not miracles actually happen, you shouldn’t ever (or hardly ever) believe in them because the existence of miracles is more “contrary to experience” than that the people reporting the miracles are wrong (whether because they’re lying, or sincerely mistaken, or exaggerating, or something else). Then he also makes a bunch of garden variety criticisms of actually-existing miracle reports.
Van Inwagen makes the reasonable point that it’s hard to give content to the term “contrary to experience” in a way that preserves the argument: https://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Of_Of_Miracles.pdf But Hume isn’t making the facile point that the laws of nature can never be violated because any supposed violation would itself be part of the laws of nature.
I’m not saying Hume says miracles are “impossible” - the one step in Scott’s characterization I dispute is the idea that a law is something that can’t be violated. Hume doesn’t believe in objective laws! For Hume, “law” is a *subjective* term, not an objective one. For *you* to *call* a generalization a law is for you to be inclined to doubt any particular observation that claimed to violate it, rather than doubting the generalization. That doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong - with enough new observations you could give it up. But you would no longer treat it as a law, and you would no longer treat the violation as a miracle.
If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
(Hume would be hypothetically open to someone proving that there is a god by finding the psychological laws of this being.)
You seem to be treating the word “miracle” as synonymous with “visible violation of the laws of nature,” but that’s not how Hume defines it. He provides an express definition in the text itself: “A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” That’s why he can say that something is a miracle even if no one realizes it’s miraculous (as when God causes a feather to rise a bit more than the wind, unaided, would have done).
He’s pretty clear, for example, that if Elizabeth I were to be resurrected through divine interposition, that would be an honest-to-Hoyle miracle. He just says that even the unanimous agreement of historians would be insufficient evidence that it occurred. He does *not* say that the conclusion you should draw from the unanimity of historians is that there’s no law that everyone who dies stays dead. And he certainly doesn’t say more generally that a miracle *definitionally* can’t occur because seemingly miraculous observations should simply cause you to revise your notion of what the laws of nature are.
>If we become convinced that the Red Sea parts when Moses raises his staff, then that’s the new law, and it’s no longer a miracle in the relevant sense, even though it raises a lot of questions.
From my post:
"The reason why people cite Hume’s argument against miracles is to say that God does not exist, or if He does exist He does not do such things. If your argument against miracles allows for the existence of God actively making things happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, then it’s a pretty weak argument against miracles!"
Yes, this is my impression of the core of Hume's argument against miracles too, after studying philosophy.
Science cannot address the unique; it can only assess the replicable.
> By far the biggest problem with this theory is that fire kasina meditation is hard and time-consuming.
Why is that a problem.
Lets say there exists some underlying mechanism. Some, as yet unspecified, neurochemical detail and specific circumstances that trigger the effect.
Ancient meditation practitioners found some way to trigger the effect. But maybe not the easiest way.
Maybe the fire kasina meditation is easier under conditions of high air pressure, or when you have an unusually salty diet, or something.
If the people of fatima had unusually salty diets, and salt helps the effect trigger more easily, and most kasina meditators aren't eating that much salt, then this all fits. And it doesn't need to be salt, it could be any unknown variable.
You're kind doing this thing that Scott has condemned multiple times in this series. You're doing "There must be some logical explanation so what's all the fuss about? There's nothing to see here." Until you present a specific explanation that 95 percent of us can get on board with, there's something to "see here."
I agree that we shouldn't circularly dismiss paranormal phenomena as impossible on the grounds that paranormal phenomena are impossible, but in this particular case I think Scott and others have marshaled enough evidence that there's a plausible naturalistic explanation for this "miracle," even if all the details aren't exactly known. I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect an explanation that accounts for every point of detail; historical events are not repeatable after all.
If we don't strive for clarity in most cases, we will find clarity in no cases.
Yeah, and I think the case is stronger than this. Meditation phenomena are strongly affected by psychological states - and the Fatima witnesses had a lot of relatively relevant psychological properties. Like strong faith, expectation that something spectacular would happen and some degree of group trance.
A point on shadows and color:
The descriptions of the moments when a light of a specific color appeared to be temporarily bathing the entire scene seem to explicitly state that the shadows were of an identical hue. ("Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground.")
Had the incoming light been actually purple-colored (so either a mixture of red and blue wavelengths or something violet+; Perception of purple is weird in humans in general...) the shadows should appear complementary - i.e. greenish-brown. Typical example: Shadows turn progressively blue as sunlight shifts from white, to yellow, to red, during a sunset. Shadows are the *unilluminated* places. There is still some reflection from surrounding surfaces, but to the degree that the shadows actually appear darker, they *subtract* the hue shift of the incoming light from the background.
This suggests the perceived changes in color may be an internal phenomenon downstream of the retina, rather than something happening objectively in the external world. Color perception is surprisingly weird, the eye cones are very low res and most of your qualia originate from neural post-production that auto-corrects for hue and luminosity all the time. If your eyes are a bit tired and a perhaps temporarily overloaded all throughout the spectrum (meaning all three cone types overstimulated and sending in static), the processing system could conceivably become unmoored and start wandering.
Does fighting antisemitism, a worthy goal, demand that we unilaterally absolve the Rothschild family of their documented evils? Seems like the kind of thing one would only do if they lived in a narrow information bubble.
My interpretation of Hume’s central argument on miracles is just the combination of the semantic point (the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle, even if you want to call it a shmiracle when staff raisings part seas) and the Bayesian point. And Bayesian points tend to be somewhat trivial anyway - there’s nothing that tells you what the right prior to have is, it’s just that things go predictably bad for you if you predict you’ll update your bets in ways that violate conditionalization.
>the new law we believe is that the Red Sea only parts when Moses raises his staff, there’s no miracle,
There's only no miracle if you define miracle in a way contrary to how people use the word, and to how it's normally defined. If God parted the Red Sea when Moses raised his staff, that's a miracle. You can only say it's not a miracle if you define miracles as "Things that don't happen."
As I said before, I think the Marfa Lights are a similarly replicable not-fully-explained luminous phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights?wprov=sfti1
In this case, it’s obviously something about atmospheric lensing, rather than something about the neurophysiology of eyes in bright light, but I don’t think anyone has figured out why it’s common here, and not in other locations, and how it gives rise to the particular strange patterns of lights that it does.
Oh, I've had fire-kasina like stuff happen since I was a kid, I figured it was a normal thing. It happens sometimes at night when it's totally dark, or I have my eyes closed, and I have some kind of not-an-external-image thing in my visual field. That can be an after-image, or the kind of blotches you get if you poke your closed eye with your finger, or anything like that. If you focus your visual attention very intently on that kind of thing, it will move around, change colors, generate strong colors that spread out and fill the visual field, and sometimes have weird spinning or scintillating patterns. Wild I didn't make the connection when reading the first post. This just happens pretty reliably for me when I strongly focus my visual attention on a vision artifact. I never trained this as a mediation technique or anything, it's just something I've often done while bored and looking at the inside of my eyelids while waiting to fall asleep.
I think we need more info on the newspaper strike. First I think we should significantly discount something if it just happened during an interlude when record keeping was harder, secondly it seems odd even if there was a complete newspaper strike in Iran that Iraqi, Lebanese, French or American newspapers didn't seem to report on it all of whom would have journalists on the ground.
This afternoon there was a nice smattering of various cloud types at about sun-height. I was able to observe a round sun through more wispy clouds twice. The first time it was only for a fraction of a second before I looked away. The second time it was more obscured and I looked for a few seconds before looking away out of caution. Both times, when I closed my eyes, the after image was circular. I'd seen the sun in this way before, but it was nice to confirm that my memory wasn't tainted. I don't understand how someone could claim it's impossible.
For my money, Scott's theory that the colors were created by just the right cloud cover is quite primitive. I'll give him an A for Effort but if that's all I had to go on, I'd keep it close to the vest.
Re UFOs in Zimbabwe:
The simplest explanation to me is the kids saw a real UFO then lied about what they saw.
All it takes is one popular kid with an overactive imagination and desire to be at the center of something special for him to start exaggerating, then all his friends start exaggerating, and now if you're the one holdout who says, "All I saw was a smudge in the sky", everyone will make fun of you for being a party-killer.
Sixty might be an unusually high number of kids to all go along with it, but still falls well within my expectation of human behavior, and unusual cases do happen.
Make me the pope and I’ll blow up multiple mountains by pointing my staff at them
You propose treating the Khomeini moon vision as your control group, but if we consider miracles as a form of divine communication, then it makes sense that Allah would show believers the rightful ruler of Iran. Why would the Christian God put on a light show? There's no message in it other than "Hey, check out what I can do with the sun!" and even the connection to Catholicism is only circumstantial.
Don't let the implications of this for you as someone associated with the Great Satan bias your judgement.