A solar miracle video I particularly like is this[1] one, from another Philippines church - a very small one with a congregation in the dozens, admittedly, rather than a huge crowd in the thousands, sourced from an obscure Catholic millenarian YouTube channel. One of the speakers earlier in the video explicitly compares parts of it to Fatima. Skip to the timestamp 15:36 (at the end of the video) for a live sample of another alleged solar miracle. I like this one despite the small gathering size because of the profound-seeming emotions sweeping over of the gathering; I take it to be a kind of microscopic sample of what it would've felt like to be at Cova da Iria that day in 1917.
I had to google it but 30.000 words is 100 Pages! An this topic has only really been trending on substack for the last couple weeks or so. (Evidence for a miracle some might say?)
It's real - he got kind of obsessed and we have dozens of his letters, which he sent to everyone in Portugal even slightly associated with Fatima, miracles, or the the Church.
Jaki did an amazing job collecting and analyzing testimonies, but his ice lens theory doesn't survive any of the other apparitions where some people saw it and others didn't. I'm confused how he can be so rigorous and scholarly and also miss the point so hard at the same time. I think maybe he was writing pre-Internet, had only very vague knowledge of any of the other apparitions, and whatever sort of library/archive research system he was using didn't lend itself very well to taking tangents to Necedah or Lubbock.
The meditative practice of staring at a candle flame, "fire kasina" practice, is well-known to induce psychedelic-like visual hallucinations among various other wild effects. Daniel Ingram (of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha fame) has gotten really into it and has a whole site around his experiences:
A snippet from the first report I happened to click on:
> I was walking on the beach at night on a somewhat cloudy night and suddenly noticed yellow light dancing across the ridges of sand on the beach, like someone was raking it with a flashlight held low to the ground. I looked around: nobody there, no lights on, nothing but a bit of silver moonlight through the clouds, nothing that would produce yellow flickering light to illuminate the beach. The light would come and go, wax and wane, shimmer, flicker, dance, and finally became a moderately bright steady glow that momentarily convinced me there must be a vehicle pulling up behind me on the beach and this must be its headlights, so I looked around, but nothing was there but the light without a source.
Some of the reports from deep kasina meditators are themselves kinda wooey (Daniel's talked about experiencing shared visual hallucinations with other people in the same space), but it does at least seem like suggestively similar territory to the phenomena reported here!
Yeah, I agree it's got to be something like this. I still think the mystery is why thousands of people got the full fire kasina experience after staring at the sun for one second, even though most meditators will probably take months to get anywhere.
A lifetime of immersion in religious culture[1], months-long prophetic edging, and finally dropping the proverbial bass at an appointed time and place. I imagine that could prime you real good for a sensation that otherwise takes a lot of conscious practice to get ready for. This unstructured way of "practicing" might also help explain why more or less everyone reports/emphasizes something different from their experience because no "fire kasina master" told them what to focus on.
[1] Whether or not you called yourself an atheist at the time because apparently, as evident from the interlude, even atheists could get pretty damn emotional about their non-belief.
Maybe at the very LEAST we should update against the idea that mystics who start religions are necessarily madmen or liars. Maybe even that sex pest cult leader might have experienced something very strange. And started his religious community with the best of intentions, before his primal urges got the best of him
I wonder if the effect in the Mercy Hills video is because of changes in the air's index of refraction, which changes with temperature, pressure, and humidity.
Something about the hills might trap an unstable front, where the index of refraction could oscillate as the air between the viewer and the sun oscillates between hot and cold.
A front interacting with the mountains, could explain why the Ghiaie miracle can only be seen along the mountain line, and fronts in general could cause the wind mentioned in Reis's account.
Changes in the index of refraction of a smaller air volume might also cause the edge of the sun to appear to swirl and move, as it does above a hot object.
How much do we have to update towards a belief in God if we have not fully explained an apparent miracle naturalistically?
The Bayesian analysis noted in the article requires fairly drastic updates. But, prior to reading this article, I had thought that the most likely explanation was something physical/psychological not yet discovered—and that is where the article ultimately points as well (after much great reasoning).
I guess my question really is—do we really need a full naturalistic explanation of why the apparent miracle isn’t a miracle, or can we get off this train early by inferring the explanation’s existence even without full details? When is such shortcutting legitimate—is it really always a trapped prior to think like this?
I suppose this is more of a question for dealing with apologists in general, since their supply of arguments is endless—with Fatima it seems like the juice is worth the squeeze, since you’ll have done significant damage to miracle-believers if your research program is successful.
What it means to be a miracle is that it's a violation of the laws. What it means to be a law is just that it's a phenomenon that's so well-attested that you would doubt an observation rather than doubt the law. So if someone tells you they've seen a miracle, you should doubt them, unless you investigate so much that you become convinced it's real, and now it's no longer a law that's been violated, but just something we used to think was a law.
I never found this convincing. If you believe in God, it seems straightforward that God can create laws that hold in all natural cases, but suspend them occasionally for purposes of His own. If you see a miracle, you should think "I guess there is a God and He chose to suspend that natural law".
Hume has a radically empiricist view of "laws". He doesn't think there is *anything* that *could* be a "law" in the sense of some innate power that actually makes things happen. He thinks that all there is is one damn thing after another. In David Lewis's terms, Hume's view is that the universe is just a "Humean mosaic" and the "laws" are just apparent patterns that happen to be there, but don't have anything more to them than just, we are convinced the pattern is real.
On this view, if we became convinced that Newton's laws hold except when God feels like suspending them, then the *real* law would be "F=ma and all the rest, except when God suspends it". The supposed "miracle" would just be a part of the new law. (There's also part of the chapter where he gives arguments that the standard religious miracles didn't happen, and the standard religions aren't true, but I think that's not the core argument on miracles.)
This seems like a weird definitional dispute. It still seems like there is a big difference between:
A. Natural phenomena are all there is, ever
B. Natural phenomena usually hold, but there's also God, and He suspends them sometimes
...and talking about miracles seems like a great way to discuss this distinction! If Hume wants to reserve the word "miracle" for something that even God's actions don't qualify as, I don't see what this buys us except confusion.
I see the main point here as being that Hume thinks our psychology is such that we look for laws, whether those laws are the psychological laws that we think tell us how to understand human behavior or the physical laws that we think tell us how to understand the material world. If we become convinced that psychology and the material world aren't all there is, we will still look for laws. No matter how supernatural someone says God is, if they convince us that this thing does exist, we'll want to understand it, and maybe we'll come up with laws for how it works.
Someone will tell us they saw a deviation, and call it a super-duper miracle of the super-dupernatural. But while we believe in the law, we won't believe this, and once we believe in this, we will no longer believe in the law.
He's trying to dissolve what he sees as a terminological confusion in lots of discussions of miracles, where people somehow want to believe in both the law and the miracle.
Hume is arguing that it would be hard to prove Christianity to an atheist by reports of miracles, as Paley (of pocketwatch lying in the forest fame) did in a well known book of the time. Hume does *not* intend to try to prove that miracles are impossible;that's different.
He would admit that it is equally hard to disprove Christianity to a Christian by pointing out how seldom we see miracles nowadays.
He’s not exactly trying to argue they’re impossible - he’s arguing that it’s never reasonable to believe something is a miracle. It’s not just about Christian miracles, and it’s not attempting to disprove religion - just argue the general point that you wouldn’t get to the point of believing the miracle while still believing the law.
It still kind of circumscribes which miracles God can perform. Like no one’s claiming that the fact that quantum mechanics and GR are both apparently true and also incompatible is a divine miracle
Hume's argument is circular. He argues that miracles go against the unanimous experience of humanity that laws of nature always hold, therefore any miracle claim is to improbable to consider. Yet we don't have unanimous experience that laws of nature always hold: we have all these miracle claims saying there were times when they didn't hold! Hume dismisses all those claims as too improbable to believe. And why are they too improbable to believe? Because we have unanimous experience that the laws of nature always hold!
It's *meant* to be circular! If you really become convinced that there's a bright dot behind a solid sphere in a single beam of light, or that an ordinary piece of glass can turn sunlight into a rainbow, then you no longer think these things are miracles, but part of a new law that may or may not have been fully explained.
The real argument is - if you still say the thing is a law, then *you* don't believe in the miracle (that's what it is to say the thing is a "law"); but once you believe in the event, you've stopped believing in the law, so the event is no longer a "miracle".
That's the other issue with Hume's argument: he defines a miracle as an exception to the laws of nature, and then defines the laws of nature as things with no exceptions. Yet that's not how the religious define a miracle! They define a miracle as the intervention in nature by a supernatural power! There's nothing illogical about saying that the game has rules that we can't break, but the one who made the game can when he wants to. Do you stop believing in the rules of a video game because you saw a mod noclipping?
I'd have to look back at the text to see if he uses the phrase "law of nature" or just the word "law". The religious people are at least sometimes talking as though there is a natural order, and an occasional intervention from outside that natural order.
Hume's point is just that, if you start thinking that sort of thing can happen, you had better start theorizing that, and figure out the laws explaining when it does occur. And once you have that, the intervention of the non-natural into the natural is no more miraculous than any other case where a system that usually operates undisturbed sometimes gets disturbed by outside events.
I think we should definitely take the prophecies into account here when deciding whether a miracle took place at Fatima: with the "second secret," Lucía predicted the Second World War, the Pontificate of Pius XI, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Except -- this prediction was not made public until 1941, well after all of these things had already come to pass. I think this is too convenient by more than half and does serious damage to the overall case. Though it is of course not dispositive, and again says nothing one way or the other about the phenomenon itself, the fact that the supposed prophecies of Fatima are (to me) obviously ex eventu ones lowers my general credence that there is anything supernatural going on here at all.
The ex eventu part really isn't specific enough to be that bad, but what makes it seem dubious to me is that, if it refers to World War II, the part about Russia having been converted hasn't come true and probably should have. I do agree that there's no good reading of the second secret that seems suitably supernatural, and the third secret is kind of vague.
I think it's pretty bad. I mean, God gives a genuine prophecy of future earthshaking geopolitical developments, but prevents its publication until the entire prophecy has already been fulfilled? Come on.
Yeah, it's not great, but it's not really worse than the general problem that it's weird for God not to tell us everything, unless I'm missing something.
To me "I totally predicted this but I can't offer any timestamped proof of my prediction from before the thing I predicted actually happened" just smacks particularly strongly of fabrication. Especially since ex eventu prophecy is something that's pretty common through history, including in the Bible itself.
I don't think that moves the needle much, if at all. Suppose there exist some people with the power and desire to fabricate evidence of miracles. (I think this is very likely.) Some of them will fabricate whole-cloth, but others will "find" evidence for miracles already attested. Now assume there are some real miracles and some fake miracles. (I understand that Catholics believe this.) There's nothing to stop our miracle-fabricator from picking a real miracle to "enhance". Even if Fatima was real, the same motivations would exist for someone to tell lies about it.
True, but in this case the fabricator and the recipient of the original miracle are the same person (Lucía dos Santos). So you would have to believe God/the Virgin transmitted true visions to Lucía and confirmed the authenticity of her visions by performing a spectacular public miracle witnessed by tens of thousands. And THEN, they permitted her to flagrantly lie years later (or more charitably, deceive herself), with the effect of deceiving millions of sincere believers about the content of the (real) visions. Is that possible? Sure. But if a "prophecy" is actually a fake prophecy concocted after the fact, I think that should lower our credence that there's anything to the OTHER supernatural claims surrounding this same seer.
Oh, I missed that it was actually her who said it -- I assumed it was a "look, I found this letter in her basement that I definitely didn't just write" type of deal.
"And THEN, they permitted her to flagrantly lie years later (or more charitably, deceive herself), with the effect of deceiving millions of sincere believers about the content of the (real) visions."
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that he would allow this to happen. For the same reason he allows anything evil to happen in the world.
"But what about God's plan!" What if according to his plan, the miracle at Fatima wasn't FOR the world. Maybe it wasn't even for the Catholic Church. Maybe it was for those specific people in that specific place in 1923. Maybe the Virgin Mary wasn't involved at all, just God, and the Marian aspects of the story are what happens when a god communicates with you and the signal is distorted due to interference.
Deist here, one who doesn't believe in miracles or a "plan." But I'm astonished at the limited imagination of most atheists when it comes to imagining different types of potential Gods. The only conception of God they seem to want to grapple with is the god of the Bible. So limiting.
Further down in the thread I actually agree that even IF Fatima is unexplainable in "naturalistic" terms, a supernatural explanation that does not entail the specific truth of Christianity is still more likely than one that does.
But insofar as this miracle is used to argue the truth of Catholicism in particular, which it is, I think this is a notable problem
The caption on the Checker shadow illusion is wrong. (This isn't just pedantry, I think it's an important point that I'm going to keep making until I stop needing to). The caption says "Squares A and B are the same color", and this is not true, the squares are obviously different colors. They only appear to be the same color in the image, because one of the squares is in the shade and the other is in direct light. I understand the point you're trying to make, but you have to be clear about how you say it. In the *scene*, the squares are different colors. In the *image*, they're the same color, but they're also not squares! They're parallelograms or whatever. To say "the squares are the same color" is to accept the premise of the image in terms of 3d geometry, but reject it in terms of lighting, which is an arbitrary and very unnatural way to think about an image.
This is very common when people talk about various optical illusions, they get confused about whether they're talking about the image or the scene, when this relationship is central to the nature of the illusion.
Completely correct. And just to be explicit, the right thing to say is of course "the pixels in region A have the same RGB values as the pixels in region B".
I'm really glad to see that other people have the exact same criticism of this particular illusion. I was worried I must be missing something since I'd never seen someone else point out they're not squares.
Anyone interested in a more in depth explanation of why this distinction is so important for understanding color as a psychophysical phenomenon should definitely check out http://www.huevaluechroma.com/index.php
Re updating towards the existence of God... I would not update on the Fatima Sun Miracle barely at all. To be honest, I think as bayesians we go astray when we let other people generate our theories for us. The power to inject theories into other people's brain is an immensely powerful capability of language, but also extremely abuseable- for instance, I don't think you should be vulnerable to Pascalian Mugging at all unless you let other people tell you words, assemble these words into a theory, and then consider the theory as if your own cognition had produced it.
In this case, even before you closed in on the natural explanations, I'd already said "why would I think that this has the signature of divine intent?" Like, why would God, wanting to convince me of his existence, choose to make the sun seem to oscillate? Why not at least use the oscillation to write "I am the Lord your God, repent and sin no more" in firey letters across the sky? To begin with, this phenomenon simply has all the signature of a natural effect.
There are multiple optical phenomena that I cannot satisfactorily explain. As a child, I saw dancing lights across the sky at night. Was it aliens? Did some neighbors take a disco light machine outside? I have no answer, but it seems to me that the latter is not just more parsimonious but also more convincing- aliens *could* make a lightshow, but it's unclear why they would do so.
As an adult, I noticed a curious phenomenon. The house across from us has a very intense nightlight on their doorbell. Looking out the window, I noticed that if I relaxed my eyes in a certain way, without affecting the rest of my vision, I could make this light appear in my visual periphery up to twenty degrees away from where I knew its source to be.
My prior is thus: the human eye is very weird, and strong light in an atmosphere is also very weird, and the human eye reacting to strong light in an atmosphere doing weird things is probably not surprising. So here's one experiment I wish someone would run (except not really because you did make me promise to not look at the sun):
- wait for a bright sunny day
- occlude the sun with a large controllable filter pane that makes it dark enough to look at
- look at it until your eyes have acclimated
- pulse the filter- that is, for instance, compose it of two layers, and briefly pull one of the layers to the side and then put it back.
I suspect if there's an optical effect, it happens when a bright object that we are focused on suddenly flares or oscillates in brightness, such as might be caused by clouds moving across the sun- or possibly even just a branch waving in front of the sun, as I suspect causes the flashing in that first mobile phone video. This would fit the only camera-visible aspect of this being oscillation in the sun's brightness.
>In this case, even before you closed in on the natural explanations, I'd already said "why would I think that this has the signature of divine intent?"
Because there was a prophecy claiming to come from the Virgin Mary saying it would happen at a specific day and time, and then it happened at that day and time. That would be the main reason people attribute divine intent to the phenomenon.
That's kind of what I mean by letting people put hypotheses in your head though. Apparently it's happening not that rarely? Maybe it was frequent in that area, and it happened to the kids first and that set this whole thing in motion.
The part about it happening every month from May to October may explain some things. Did the children witness the first one then thought there'd be other ones next months? Does this phenomenon can only happen when the sun is high enough? (Can't happen in winter).
Just as a suggestion for the shadow analysis: Zemax or CodeV are the appropriate ray tracing programs for assessing illumination conditions (Blender might also work?).
I would caution that cameras/lenses can heavily distort relative apparent positions, and that even without a camera, complex scenes with topography and perspective can have really odd looking shadow directions. The best example I know of is the moon landing conspiracy theories, where indeed the shadows in the Apollo pictures do not look parallel, despite being illuminated by a very distant source.
I found an example here, scroll to “Why don't the shadows on the Moon look right in Apollo photos?”
Please feel free to DM me with optics/physics questions that are related! My PhD was a lot of optics and while I’ve never done photo analysis looking for sources, I am happy to chat and have a lot of expertise in the area.
I hope I wasn't one of the people you were referring to as dismissive skeptics. While I am also fascinated by the material, and would indeed believe in it if different ontology were required, my prior on the supernatural (specifically, the entirety of the Catholic canon being true) is very low, lower than 1%--and with that in mind I don't see why it'd be a big Bayesian update toward belief (see: https://substack.com/home/post/p-173584923).
I see this often enough that I think it should have a name: it's the fallacy that 1% is the smallest number that isn't 0, and 99% is the biggest number that isn't 100%. (I'm pretty sure Scott would admit that he wasn't speaking super-accurately, but plenty of so-called Baysian computations do this.)
Thank you so much for this! This article got to a place I wasn't expecting early on - in fact, some of your early parts made me not expect the whole /r/sungazing thing that happened. (It actually sort of reminds me of the Jennifer 8. Lee documentary "In Search of General Tso", where the first few minutes makes us think that this is just a mythical character serving as a hook for a great documentary about the history of American Chinese food, but at the end we realize that in fact there's a very clear story about who General Tso is and precisely when and where his chicken got its name.)
I agree there was a little bit of bait and switch there. It was a combination of:
1. I wanted people to have the same experience of doubt and confusion that I had reading the original story.
2. I actually didn't find the really good r/sungazing anecdotes until I was mostly done with the post, and decided not to rewrite everything around them.
I read the whole thing and found it quite interesting, but I'm rather confused as to why the _premise_ here seems to be "the Fatima sun thing was a miracle unless we can figure out an exact naturalistic explanation for it."
A bunch of people went to a place, expecting *something* to happen. They have widely varied accounts of what exactly happened, or whether something happened at all. The main thing that seems to have happened is "weird visual effects and some fraction of people having ecstatic visions."
Okay? This closely resembles many "supernatural" experiences (ghosts, UFOs, whatever): an odd experience that may only be replicable in limited conditions, influenced by physical and cognitive quirks of perception, with a strong element of suggestion.
Presumably, if an all-powerful God wanted to give _evidence_ - like, the "raised a guy from the dead in front of you" kind of evidence that He supposedly used to give - He could do better than that! Why is "a bunch of people had weird and varied experiences" something that cries out for either explanation or worship, when there was neither a specific advance prediction of what would happen, or an event that _very clearly_ wasn't something that could happen naturally, like everyone present simultaneously hearing "Jesus is Lord" inside their heads? Why is "anything we can't precisely explain is maybe supernatural" still such a prevalent idea?
Building on this, I would like to point out something that is pretty much never addressed in the endless skeptic-Christian internet back and forth: strict materialistic atheism and Christianity are NOT the only two possible ways in which the cosmos might be ordered. It is entirely possible for the supernatural to exist and for Christianity to still be false. It is even possible that events such as the Resurrection of Jesus or the dancing sun at Fatima took place, and for Christianity to still be false. Conditioning on supernaturalism being true AND the aforementioned miracles having actually taken place, it may STILL not be more likely for Christianity to be true than for non-Christian supernaturalism to be true. I am happy to expound on that, but for now I'll just say it's always bothered me that the possibility is almost never even considered, either by Christian apologists or unbelieving counterapologists
Ethan argued, I think correctly, that it would be pretty weird for a non-Christian supernatural entity to pretend to be the Virgin Mary, especially in a way that successfully converted thousands of people to Catholicism. This is just the general argument against false flags. I agree it can't be completely ruled out though.
I think you would have to be pretty confident about what supernatural entities are or are not likely to do before claiming that any given act would be weird for one to perform. With respect to Ethan, I don't think he can have that confidence any more than I can.
I'm reminded of the work of certain UFOlogists, like Jacques Vallée and John Keel. I'm not sure how familiar you are with that particular rabbit hole, but the upshot is there are a whole lot of UFO testimony cases from the last century or so, and like Fatima, at least a few of them are pretty weird and difficult to dismiss out of hand. Guys like Vallée and Keel came to the conclusion that, while experiencers of "the Phenomenon" were experiencing something real, what they were experiencing was almost certainly not actual flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials from another galaxy coming to earth in metal saucers. It's less "ET" and more "the Fae." Some kind of nonhuman, powerful intelligences that have probably been here for a very long time, and interact with humans sporadically for reasons difficult if not impossible to discern (and not necessarily benevolent-- a lot of conservative Christians believe alien encounters are demonic), but which interaction human beings tend to filter through their own cultural contexts and expectations, whether that be spacemen from Mars in middle America, 1955 or the Virgin in Portugal, 1917.
I'm not exactly sold on UFOlogy either, but granting a supernatural occurrence (and putting aside that I'm skeptical "supernatural" is a coherent category) , something like that seems to me more plausible than "Christianity is true," since it would explain the miraculous occurrence, without committing us to believe any of the (what appear to me to be) manifest falsehoods contained in the supposedly-perfect scriptures or traditions of the Church, or any of the philosophically difficult aspects of God as conceived by orthodox Christianity.
My only half-joking theory is that these are some sort of auto-regressive hallucination in the AI simulating the universe; if enough people expect something strongly enough, some sort of bias kicks in and the AI sputters a little before its usual error-correction mechanisms kick in and it limits the damage to some small number of people and series of poorly-observed events.
Having read the full article now, there's an interesting connection here: the Buddhist model is that reality is karma manifesting, and karma is essentially predictive processing. Since we can only come to know reality is through the models (even logic is a karmic manifestation), and since humans share basically the same models, which lends itself to objective verification of subjective phenomena through comparison, then a shared illusion like Fatima is neither supernatural nor natural: since *everything* is illusory, an illusion is real to the extent the model takes it as real (more likely when it's shared, which is why the lone sungazers report that they *saw* the sun act weird, while the crowd of Fatima observers exchanging their observations with each other report that the sun *acted* weird). Consequently, it's an illusion to the extent that the model takes it to be an illusion.
The main divergence from materialism, as I see it, is that the materialist stance is material -> predictive processing, whereas the Buddhist view is predictive processing -> imputation of material. I.e., if you have a model that predicts matter, you will get matter — and it *is* real matter by any definition of the word. The substrate itself is never really interrogated, so it's not clear whether this fits into an idealist, materialist, dualist, etc., stance (Dan Lusthaus's Buddhist Phenomenology is an interesting book on this topic).
Although this is obviously extremely speculative, I get the sense that there could be something here that can unify the illusion part of Fatima-type miracles with the seemingly objective part (the videos of the sun). It wouldn't fit cleanly into any current model, but it would be closer to the naturalist view than the miraculous Fatima narrative is.
I don't think it's necessarily all that weird, but I do think it's a bit of a stretch given some of the statements the apparition made. Although I'm not a Mahayana Buddhist myself (I'm Theravada), I know some of the basics of their doctrines, and one of the fundamental tenets is that bodhisattvas use culturally relevant skillful means to lead people closer to the truth according to their capabilities. Even as a Theravadin, I almost want to be convinced by Christianity sometimes because overall it offers a cleaner and easier path: you can get married, have kids, enjoy things like music and entertainment, drink, be part of a community, find churches everywhere you go, indulge your righteous anger, explore the supernatural, immerse yourself in a deep philosophical tradition, and always know that there's a being who loves you unconditionally looking over your shoulder, guiding you towards the right path. In comparison, Buddhism can seem quite depressing on the surface.
From that perspective, if I were a bodhisattva who wanted to save the most people in a Western context, I would sooner choose to manifest as a culturally-recognized figure and direct people towards a path that is somewhat realistic than Avalokitesvara. I think most Portuguese people simply wouldn't be receptive to some entity from an entirely different cultural context telling them to devote their lives to renouncing the world entirely. However, what the apparition said about Russia doesn't fit within this narrative.
The big sticking point for me is that I think the past-life memory cases collected by Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker, and others are equally, if not more, compelling than miracles like Fatima, and rebirth is incompatible with Christianity. In fact, it is probably the only thing that could empirically disprove Christianity: if rebirth were confirmed, Christianity would be disproven. So long as I believe in rebirth, I actually cannot convert to Christianity even if I want to, as I can't affirm what's needed during a baptism. I haven't yet found a satisfying way of reconciling the Catholic miracle set and the rebirth data. Among rebirth-friendly religions, Hinduism is out, I think, because another theistic religion would have that deity prioritize Hindu miracles, not Catholic ones. Buddhism remains and already posits that there is a god who misconceives of himself as God, so it would make sense that he would prioritize a single religion, like Catholicism. Combine that with Catholic selection bias given their unmatched body of miracle investigators, which could skew the data, and I tend to lean towards the view that Buddhism better accommodates both the rebirth and Catholic miracle data than Catholicism, either with a skillful-means or deluded-god explanation. But it still remains odd that there are so many Catholic-specific miracles.
I have also been confounded by the Stevenson reincarnation research, which I think is much stronger than all but a few Christian miracle claims (perhaps including Fatima). Moreover, there are also a number of relatively well-attested PROTESTANT miracles (see Craig Keener's hefty book Miracles). I have brought this up to Catholics in discussion, and it has usually been dismissed with the assertion that God can work miracles in other faiths if he likes. Surely he CAN, but it seems strange to me that he would confuse things by putting his imprimatur on a false religion.
This is why, granting there are no "natural" explanations for at least some miracle claims, I think some kind of supernaturalism that nevertheless does not entail the truth of any particular revealed religion is most likely.
As for why there are so many Catholic-specific miracles, I would say part of this is down to publicity. Catholicism, like Christianity in general, is an evangelizing religion. Any miracles that take place in a Christian context are likely to be trumpeted from the rooftops, while miracles that take place in the context of a non-evangelizing religion, or of no religion at all, might never get off the ground.
I agree overall. Even as a Buddhist, I think that the texts we have are likely corrupted by now, so even if the Buddha did figure out the truth, it's unlikely we have what he discovered. For example, one sutta says that his teachings would be corrupted within 500 years, and it's now been ~2,600. Some Buddhists try to dodge this issue by saying that this prediction is itself a corruption, but that really only serves as further proof that the texts aren't fully reliable. That doesn't mean we can't still figure out the remaining parts ourselves, as I think we have a decent basis to work with, but just that there aren't clear boxes to tick anymore, and a lot of Buddhist teachers will get it wrong, so we have to use a lot of discernment.
I think, however, that we don't necessarily need complete accuracy to get far enough. I've remained a Buddhist despite these concerns because of Buddhism's "empirical" strain. When it comes to miracles, for example, the Buddha says that one should not judge a religious system by its miracles, but instead by its spiritual fruits. It's very difficult, I think, for someone to disagree that the basic virtues of Buddhism are bad and that mindfulness and meditation have no value. Since there's no creator god in Buddhism, it sidesteps many of the hurdles to belief, like the problem of evil. The Buddha presents his own version of Pascal's wager in the suttas, which is essentially that, whether or not there's an afterlife, practicing in this life confers numerous benefits, so there's no reason not to.
All that said, I think Christianity offers a lot of benefits too. So I take the stance that there is likely more than the naturalistic worldview would have us believe, and that practicing in *some* religion that has some decent moral principles is a good bet.
I think what's missing here is that most of the reports of Mary are filtered through Lucia, a devout Catholic, and the other ones are also from Catholics. Conditional on Lucia seeing something, it doesn't really tell us much that she thought it was Mary, because of course that's what a Catholic would say. Similarly, if a miracle is supposed to prove Catholicism, it should expound Catholic teachings to non-Catholics, not Catholics; obviously Catholics are going to interpret any miracles in line with their faith.
The apparition that Lucia saw looked like Mary in every respect, down to the color of her clothing, claimed to be Mary, and talked mostly about sin, repentance, and prayer.
I can imagine a model where the supernatural is some kind of formless energy that gets filtered through the mind of whoever encounters it, takes whatever form they find most plausible, and speaks to them just as that form would speak - but that seems like an extra step.
Maybe this is just a difference in what we're expecting, but I think, conditional on something supernatural happening (like seeing a strange woman in the trees) some Catholic doctrine being tacked on is really not that surprising.
I disagree that's an extra step. I actually think it's more parsimonious than the "Catholicism is true" explanation. Like I said above, it neatly sidesteps any of the other myriad historical, scientific, and philosophical problems with the truth claims of Christianity. Conditioned on the supernatural existing, I think "all human beliefs about the supernatural have been wrong, except for the dogmas of the Catholic Church which are 100% right about everything" is much less plausible than "all or most of mankind's experiences with the supernatural are an imperfect apprehension of some other dimension of reality which we can glimpse only through a glass darkly." What do you think?
EDIT: the supernatural wouldn't necessarily have to be a kind of formless energy. It could be a whole parallel ecosystem full of all sorts of different beings/intelligences, as well as maybe non-conscious "energies" or whatever. Whether such a being, collection of beings, energy projection or what have you was INTENTIONALLY presenting itself as the Virgin or whether that was just the way easiest way for the seers' brains to process it (or is there even a difference when talking about intelligences we can't comprehend?), who knows? Obviously that is all total speculation which I don't really believe, but is it less plausible than "this was the immortal soul of a Jewish virgin who 2000 years ago gave birth to the incarnate son of a Semitic sky-god"? I don't think so.
Let me steelman Nick Keller's argument. The God/entity could be "Christian" in a VERY broad sense, while having qualities that violate fundamental teachings of the Bible. maybe the entity had nothing to do with the creation of the Bible but converted to Christianity!
Maybe the entity didn't care whether those people converted to Catholicism, and he was just using Catholicism as a tool promote his obscure purpose, and the conversions were a side effect.
Moving the goalposts? Nah, more like asking who installed these cumbersome goal posts in the first place. They are so arbitrary.
And even better, it's pretty possible for the Resurrection of Jesus or the dancing sun at Fatima took place, and for Christianity to be true, and for Catholic Christianity as practiced in Portugal of 20th Century to still be false. I guess one reason why materialism tends to reject every single thing supernatural is that, if you shed the ground a little bit, you'll instantly fall into a fractal unfalsifiable world where you can't really tell what causes what. Because the combinatorics of possible phenomenon becomes really endless.
The accounts aren't that varied, and as I mentioned in the mass hallucination section, we really don't have any other examples of a true mass hallucination. This would have to be the only one. I think if we learned that sufficiently strong expectancy effects could produce a universal, coordinated mass hallucination, that would still be pretty fascinating!
As it is, I don't think we have that expectation. Suppose I claimed to be a wizard. You and your friends agreed to test me, and, in front of all of you, I shot a fireball out of my bare hands. Would you say "whatever, we could have all been hallucinating", or would you agree this was impressive and at the very least evidence for some kind of expectancy effects beyond the usual?
I don't think everyone hearing "Jesus is Lord" inside their heads would be any more or less convincing than this - hearing voices is a typical hallucination, after all!
Ethan has a theory that God wants people to have faith but not certainty, and calibrates His miracles to convince open-minded people but leave open the possibility of skepticism.
The fireball question is just "what if I showed you strong evidence of a supernatural claim", when my point is that the evidence for the supernatural claim here - "a bunch of people experienced something weird when some kids said they would" -> "God did a miracle after telling those kids that he would" - is quite weak!
Wizards shoot fireballs out of their bare hands; that's a classic thing they do, that you would say in advance that a fantasy wizard might do, and that is totally unlike anything a normal person could do. Weird stuff happening with the sun for ten minutes is not something that the child seers could say in advance would happen, it's not like any of the miracles from the Bible, and it *is* like a bunch of other strange experiences people have reported - this could very easily be a UFO sighting story instead of a miracle story
"God doesn't give strong evidence, he only gives weak evidence to allow for faith and doubt" is certainly a common and convenient apologetic claim, but I don't see why we're obliged to give it the time of day. The Bible is full of extremely clear miracles, and never (to my knowledge) says "from now on, I'm not doing any more really obvious ones." Allowing believers to tell you what your epistemic standard should be - that never, ever receiving any strong evidence for an extremely strong claim is fine - is tantamount to accepting the belief in itself.
What an incredible write up. You manage to take the case seriously, but slowly build into giant cases against the ‘Fatima Miracle’. The evidence is so clear, and I believe we have enough. The ‘miracle’ happening all the time is enough to strongly disbelieve the ‘miracle’. The Reddit thread from sungazing is the nail in the coffin.
A phenomenon can only be a supernatural miracle if it is rare and unexplained. If it is common and unexplained it’s just an unexplained phenomenon. What’s left for there to be a miracle here?
How aspirin works is often quoted as something humanity doesn’t understand but is very rarely quoted as a “miracle”. Because it happens every day and is easily replicated. Seems like a similar situation here though slightly less frequent.
How does this differ from the "god of the gaps" thing? Does the history of unexplained phenomena eventually coming to have mundane explanations not lead you not to assume miracles until proven otherwise?
When atheists talk about "God of the Gaps," it feels like a cheap and easy way to shut down the discussion. So what if a person is using motivated reasoning to try to demonstrate that God exists? Is that really a reason to not take them seriously? Shouldn't you still be willing to address specific arguments they raise, even if you know you can never "convince" them? Isaac Newton approached science with this main purpose: to glorify the Christian God and to demonstrate his existence. I guarantee nobody could have talked Newton out of believing in God, but that doesn't mean his ideas weren't worthy of grappling with.
GIANT cases? Scott carefully explained these were BABY cases that need to be nurtured into something real. I think it's on that you were impressed by Scott's reasoning in this post, EXCEPT for the part where he said that this is still a big mystery.
I've been to Marfa three times, and once it was too cold to go out at night, but the other two times I definitely saw the lights at the viewing spot.
Wikipedia makes it seem like it's a simple thing - just car headlights refracting in the desert air.
On some level that has to be right. The phenomenon comes in basically two colors, that are basically "car headlight" and "car taillight". But it takes very strange forms. The lights move in weird directions, and sometimes there are one or two of them, and at least one time I saw precisely three of them pulsing and wobbling closer and farther, remaining collinear even though the angle of the line was changing. Nothing I've seen has explained why lights would do this thing, and why it would be so common at this one spot by the highway near Marfa and uncommon anywhere else.
But if the Sun Miracle is equally common at Medjugorje, then maybe there's really a lot of atmospheric effects that we just haven't figured out!
God's big solar miracle was creating the sun in the first place. And the entire cosmos around it. Compared to that, Fatima and all other miraculous illusions are paltry stuff. Fatima isn't about the existence or non-existence of God, it's about whether, if there were a god capable of creating the universe, he would have no better way of inspiring belief than some David Copperfield trick. I can hear Him saying, "What, you think Fatima was a miracle? You want to see a miracle? Wait until you learn about the immune system, black holes, DNA ..."
I had just finished watching a terrible sci fi movie, The Fifth Element, in which a sunlike object is hurtling twd earth and is stopped at the last minute by our hero learning to love.
Bruhh we already moved on to Lanciano... Get with the times🙄 Fr tho this was an amazing article, well researched yet humble in its conclusions and making way for further research to be done. Thank you for doing this
Since I haven't seen anyone else discussing it yet, I discovered when I was a child that by pressing against my eyeballs (with my eyes shut) I could trigger visual noise type images that I found fascinating. They included a sense of spinning or rotation, a sense that the images were coming towards me (I had formerly interpreted them as a sense that I was going towards Them) and a central darker area and bright corona - all similar to the images of the sun the you've described in the Fatima case (although I guess I should also say I don't tend to see strong colours). Is this a typical experience, or am I unusual in this?
These are phosphenes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene ! I get them too, and they're oddly beautiful, but they're not that similar to the Fatima event, and as far as I know aren't caused by staring at the sun.
I think there's clearly a lot of interpersonal variation in proneness to these things. If I press on my eye, I can see a bright spot opposite where I press. I don't really get any of the other stuff. I also have aphantasia (or severe hypophantasia, at least); and I have never (while awake) experienced any sort of real visual hallucinations (and not entirely for lack of trying.)
Meanwhile, I had a friend once who could apparently see all kinds of stuff just by closing her eyes, like hyperphantasia I guess. I found that pretty weird; but then, I can hear polyphonic music in my head, and I can summon the sounds of my friends' voices in my head at will (though not their faces), and sometimes have ~involuntary earworms, which I guess is not universal either...
Hah, yeah! I discovered that too, as a young child. I told my mother about it as a funny story, and the next thing I knew I was in the emergency room getting a cat scan.
Science depends on replication - if a phenomenon cannot be observed repeatedly under different conditions, then it's useless to try to model it. This remains true even if the phenomenon is real in the material world. Something which cannot be reproduced cannot be included in our models, so we might as well not worry about it. Of course, if this phenomenon *can* be reproduced, which is the point of recording evidence of similar events elsewhere in the world, then we may have something. What we need to do now is artificially recreate a Marian sighting, without telling people that is what is being done, and see if we can reproduce sightings of Mary. The conditions under which we can do this will tell us a lot about what is actually going on.
However, as a so-called liberal christian (I worship Jesus but do not believe that miracles occur today), I also come at this from an entirely different direction. There is nothing in the stories of the Jesus I believe in (a humanitarian-minded itinerant Jewish prophet) that would suggest that God the Father often appears at random times and places and produces phenomenon that seemingly accomplish nothing. If real, what good did the Fatima event do in the world? And if God is inclined to mass convert people using inexplicable natural phenomena, why send his only son into the world? According to Christian doctrine God could, if he wanted, write his name in the sky with the stars, but he doesn't. According to the gospels themselves, belief is a matter of choice, not miracles ("To this generation no sign will be given"). So a literal interpretation of Fatima is counter to my belief system (I did say I was a liberal). If God did this, he's acting inconsistently and weird. So I am disinclined to believe it. I put my prior at maybe some fraction of 1% that Fatima is real, before seeing any evidence. Having read Scott's entire post, I have not changed that assessment.
Maybe the Portuguese who were devout Catholics in 1923 happened to be the most devout Christians that have ever lived, and he decided to give Portugal a treat. There's no earthly way to measure devoutness, but SOME group of Christians had to be the most devout in history. Why not this one?
Another incredible entry for MMTYWTK. The moment I saw the title, I drop everything to read it until finish, and I'm not disappointed. I'm looking forward for the answers to those followup questions. Looks like it'll truly shed the remaining doubt regarding this phenomenon.
I'm in Indonesia, and I can testify that in my life, I can see sun clearly behind thin cloud painlessly at least 2-3 times. I can remember those because it was novel to me at that time, but after the third time it becomes just another normal phenomenon. Like purple sunset.
I'd add that we have at least one verified case where a sun miracle was occuring, and an actual group of fedora wearing atheists were present with a modified telescope, and did not see anything interesting.
>At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).
The other miracles aren't independent events, the others happened after Fatima and were clearly influenced by it. Fatima being extraordinary, famous and well attested creates the environment for the others (not sure why Mary/sun/demons/UFOs would cooperate with religious leaders to create similar events)
Are there any things slightly similar that happened before or outside a Christian religious context?
I did include some of the pre-October-13 Fatima cases. But I think that if it's possible to, given some past suggestion, hallucinate a spinning sun, then it's possible to hallucinate a spinning sun full stop, and Fatima happening without prior cases should only be slightly impressive.
"All the balls started from the sun, as if they had come out from behind it. When they started from the bottom of the sun, they were a little elongated like lemons, then they grew bigger; but they diminished as they came towards us, until they became very small. (NOTE: sounds like astral objects coming from behind the sun, but not like anything we know considering they diminish in size as they approach the earth. This may be a completely never before seen cosmic phenomena.)
They swayed then; one meter of earth (...) Everyone was covered: they (i.e the strange balls) were in countless quantities.
There were some green ones, some rose, some dark blue, some black (of a black of lead mine), some yellow, colour of flame, fire ... some came in large numbers to us, others went to all sides."
This is good. I hope I don’t sound like one of the dismissive internet atheists (not least since I’m a strong Christian), but you have to come in with a low probability here just by virtue of the fact that it seems odd that God would choose a miracle involving visual effects attendant to staring at the sun. There’s just an obvious category of purely naturalistic phenomena related to staring at the sun. Couple that with group psychology effects (some people interpret these experiences and others in the crowd become likelier to interpret them as significant because their neighbors are weeping and cowering) and the effects of post hoc exaggeration and it’s fairly easy for me to see a general story of how this could happen in a naturalistic context. By contrast, it seems odd that God would select this sort of phenomenon as a demonstrative miracle. Certainly very different from the principal miracles of the apostolic age, and the phenomena don’t have the intrinsic character of really relating to what is supposed to be verified in any interesting or satisfying way. With all that context, it would would probably take a lot to move the needle for me.
I remember reading the Times obituary of Lúcia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos, the one surviving child seer. It is an extraordinary story, three kids convincing a community, then two dying young and her spending the rest of her life in a covenant with bishops bothering her for more info. It feels unusual that the instigators were kids and ones who were shy about publicity rather than charismatic religious figures
A lot of Christians are very invested in making other people Christians. Seems likely some of them would lie and say they saw Mary or Jesus in order to trick others into becoming Christians.
Scott: I have Needham and Taylor (2000). If even I can access it, I presume someone else has probably already sent it on to you, but in case no-one has, where should I send it?
This account reminds me of a semi-famous UFO encounter, covered well here: https://youtu.be/VIwyW83-riA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident. Basically, ~60 kids saw a "silver craft" descend, and aliens (of debatable description) came out and did various things (described differently by participants). Oddly similar to the silver sun -> hallucinations.
We don't usually think of UFO/alien encounters as "miracles," but really, they are. They simply take place in the a different cultural-religious context than Catholic Christianity.
And just like with Fatima, most of the skeptical explanations strike me as a little lame (puppets, really?)
Am I the only one who sees dancing purple spots in his vision after accidentally exposing my eyes to bright light ? I thought this was a pretty common phenomenon...
By the way, if you ever get a C-shaped thing blind spot that looks like you just stared at a bright light in that shape, but you didn't, it's probably an "ocular migraine without headache" and should go away in about 20 minutes. The check is to note that you see it in both eyes, so it's not retinal. It's a neurological electrical disturbance and despite how that sounds, not a problem (unless it happens a whole lot, I guess). Just sharing.
And if you get a a sudden off-center blindspot like that in just one eye (although I think not typically C-shaped), it could be https://eyewiki.org/Acute_Macular_Neuroretinopathy . It's supposed to be quite rare, but apparently there was a surge during the pandemic. The cause is unknown, but it may be associated either with viral illness or with stimulant drugs (such as pseudoephedrine, commonly used for viral illness.) In my case it fully resolved on its own (but it lasted long enough for my opthalmologist to find objective evidence in my retina a few days after it first happened, though the subjective symptoms had greatly improved already.)
I've repeatedly had everything darken or turn pale green, for seemingly no reason at all. Inside outside, upsi- well not upside-down, but inside and outside.
oh thank god, I was getting stressed considering whether or not to convert when I know I don’t have the analytical chops to decide if the miracle is a knock down argument. since this conclusion is easier to believe & conveniently reinforces my unfounded priors, I’m just gonna choose to believe it! 😁
I don't find the 2010 Phillipines video any better than the other ones. Eyeballing it, the sky appears much brighter as the camera points down, and more normal as it points up, plus some delay as the camera adjusts. There clearly seems to be brightness correction going on in the camera that stops when the camera points away from the sun entirely (6:00) and restarts when the camera turns back toward the sun (6:25).
As for crowd reactions: I honestly don't see what the crowd is even cheering on. They certainly aren't reacting when the sky uniformly turns to night (4:03) or to the brightness of 10 H-bombs (4:23). Sure there is some synchronized clapping, but I don't see what caused it, and have you never felt the urge to join clapping in a crowd of friendly people gathering for a shared reason?
I've commented elsewhere that I think the problem with miracle claims are not metaphysical, but in fact epistemological. What substantially can I draw from isolated second hand experiences to inform my own beliefs? Am I to adopt a philosophy based on the veracity of the given claim or is the veracity of the given claim a start to lead me into a greater search. If it's the first then I would say that is simply not how we come to believe things. How often to we disregard 99.9% of our experience to adopt the .1 as truly representing reality? If it's the second then I am thrust back into the some problem as I had when I was a Catholic raised teenager, nothing else within its dogma made any consistent sense to me so I am left being forced to believe contradictions on blind faith.
Or even more what about first hand experience? What do I make of certain Calvinist figures who tell me that they have had firsthand experiences of God so veridical that it is impossible to be wrong about them and what God has told them is the Catholic Church is actually a satanic cult. What if I am one of those Calvinists. Do I simply disregard what God is directly telling me and also not question why a God who is supposed to on my side allowing me to believe that in the first place?
Wait, why is Lubbock a surprising place for a miracle? Having grown up there, I didn't actually find its inclusion in the list surprising at all. People were constantly telling me about miracles they believed they'd experienced, throughout my childhood. It's an incredibly churchy place. (Mostly Protestant, granted, but also the sort of place where Protestants see Catholics as important allies in the fight against Worldly Evil, who just happen to be tragically going to Hell).
On an a completely (though also not at all) unrelated note, this reminded me a bit of something I experienced as a child. One night, maybe around 2:00 AM, my mom woke up me and my sister and, in hushed and frightened tones, asked us to look at something in the back yard. There, through a screen door, I witnessed one of the strangest things I'd ever seen. Something bizarre was draped over our back fence. It was green and glowing, like a an uneven blob of cartoon radioactive waste, or a mass of blankets covered in bioluminescent moss.
After a minute of staring in which the word "alien" might have been spoken, I decided to go outside and approach it, to the strong objections of my mom and sister. As I got close enough to make out the details, there was a moment of confusion as it seemed that the mass was surprisingly translucent, and then illusion collapsed. The entire thing was light from our neighbor's porch lamp, broken up by random shadows, not actually green, but the muddy yellow-green of a cheap fluorescent bulb. I don't even think it was a new porch lamp- we'd just never looked at the pattern of light and shadow before with an expectation of seeing something otherworldly.
When I informed my mom and sister, they didn't believe me at first- it took repeated reassurances to convince them to approach for a better look. Many years later, as an adult, I brought up the experience while visiting, thinking it might have been a dream, but both of them remembered it vividly. I think it may have contributed to my eventual decision to become an atheist- in a way, kind of a miracle in reverse.
Maybe this is my coastal elite snobbery talking. I haven't been to Lubbock, but I've been to some other parts of Texas pretty close by, and I don't know - it just looked like a lot of McDonalds, parking lots, and cow farms with silly names. Somehow it seems like a city should have either McDonalds or apparitions of the Virgin Mary, not both at once. It also has - sorry, no offense - a silly name.
Or actually, you know what—I'll summarize here, to save you the trouble... because that's just how considerate West Texans are, *amigo* (& also we're not passive-aggressive or anything, either–):
Lubbock is actually probably my favorite city, out of all of 'em in which I've lived (& I *think* I've lived in an unusually large number of different places!). Life in Lubbock is just... extremely *convenient,* you know? Doesn't have any of the shit I had to learn to deal with elsewhere: everything from toll roads to icy ones, from rude clerks to unfriendly neighbors, from non-spicy "hot" sauce to non-existent breakfast-burrito stands/food-trucks (if you can imagine)...
I love the people—both the rubberheads¹ & the rednecks—and the weather, too. Sure, the scenery ain't much to look at... but I don't really bother going outside, 'less I can't help it; and—if you *are* forced to leave the dim cool quiet of your sanctum sanctorum—you can't beat that dry, hot sun... IMO!
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¹(aka: Hispanic/Mexican oilfield workers. at least, that's what my coworkers—9/10th Hispanic, mostly Mexican but with some Cubans & one Honduran thrown in—would call each other, jokingly; I'D never heard it before & have no idea whence it is derived, heh.)
re: "Cloud coronae are caused by quantum diffraction of sunlight as it enters clouds" -- I don't think you need anything "quantum" here, I think you only need "light is a wave", which classical physicists knew
I agree -- the "quantum" stuff comes from what seems to be a single passage of text, copied and pasted across many sketchy online sources, for which I had trouble identifying the origin. Wikipedia makes no mention of it.
I am impressed, and filled with admiration, that you would dedicate so much time to faithfully investigating an idea like this, despite having a very high prior that it is false.
I once did a (much lesser) analysis like this when I was younger. There is a passage in the Qur'an which appears to approximate the speed of light to a very high accuracy. But it turns out that because of the way this passage was worded and the way time dilation works, that there was nothing impressive about the approximation: almost any number would have resulted in a close approximation. This occurs because in order to get any really big time dilation you have to be going really close to the speed of light, which means that any description of time dilation (hours for weeks etc), if you back the numbers out, will spit out something really close to the speed of light.
After that I adjusted my prior for "weird thing I can't explain is not a miracle" very, very high. I think the numbers you offer in your example bayesian are probably off -- 1% chance of their being a god who works miracles like the fatima sun thing sounds way, way too high to me. First of all given the number of miracles and weird events that people claim versus the number that are debunked, 1% seems HUGE. But also it isn't just that there are alternative natural explanations for this phenomenon: there are also alternative supernatural phenomenon. It could be a wizard who is bored and decides to mess with some people in Portugal. It could be Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, who is just being super misunderstood.
I think the LHC physicists were demanding improbability levels of something like 1 x 10 ^ -10. I'm not sure exactly where my prior against weird unexplained stuff being divine providence is, but I would imagine it's something at least that extreme.
I would also point out that my phrasing here was intentionally specific: "weird thing I can't explain is not a miracle" is chosen because a) it's gotten debunked a lot but also b) MIRACLES DON'T LOOK LIKE WEIRD STUFF! If you read any holy text, any mythology, no gods are ever doing weird stuff. The God of Moses does not make the sun wiggle for unclear reasons: he acts directly, obviously, and often extremely militarily. He parts the sea that is blocking your retreat. He kills the children of your enemies. He makes clear demands of political leaders! Similarly, the Gospels contain accounts of the messiah, clearly and plainly stating his will prior to effecting miraculous action for clear purpose. And when you get out of Judeo-Christian mythology matters only become clearer still. Zeus is not subtle!
I think that's way too extreme in the *other* direction. Put it this way: how many like judgements do you think you can make before getting one wrong? Do you think you could make ten billion such claims and be right every single time? If no, then "1 / 1 × 10¹⁰" seems too certain.
Good point about the way miracles are reported in holy texts—either the Intervention Budget has been dialed back a good bit, or something else is going on...
I suppose one could say something such as "maybe these Fatima-style miracles were going on all the time back then too, we just don't hear about them because they didn't seem all that unusual to the believers of the time & the major miracles got top billing anyway"... but then (even granting, arguendo, that standards for "miracle" have slipped), you're left with "well, but why have the major sort seemingly tapered off since then?"
Probably some Catholic & Muslim theologians have noticed & addressed this—perhaps "miracles were for the time before Jesus/Muhammad, but now we have the New Covenant / Final Miracle"?—but I don't actually know what they say!
Yes, I think I could get ten billion and get them all right. There are eight billion people in the world, and most of them are superstitious. I am very confident that if we went through those claims we would get well over ten billion, and fewer than one in ten billion would be true. Probably far fewer.
And that's sort of my point: the number of false claims of supernatural causes if you go looking for them is ENORMOUS. You need an appropriately big filter or you get epistemically mugged.
I spent years of my life writing a book on the paranormal where the gimmick was to intensely pursue leads on stories only from people known to me, who I would not dismiss as liars. Filing FOIs, travelling to interview people who were there, etc.
The result, paradoxically, was that I became more open to some unknown phenomena existing (a couple of them were really hard to explain) but much more skeptical of any particular case. Honest people are just way more easily contaminated by suggestion than I could've imagined.
What I don't love about the Miracle of the Sun is God's style. "Hey everyone, look what I can do! Trippy, eh? NOW do you believe?" Feels like stage magic, rather cheap. Even if it does prove a supernatural power, I doubt it's God. Has the signature of a lower deity, an adolescent deity, one I don't trust.
A plausible motive would make the miracle claim more likely to be true, since the claim is of an intentional act. Whether a death is ruled a homicide or an accident can hinge on the presence of a plausible motive, for instance.
Plausibility is a different bar. Stage magic has a plausible motive, let alone a miracle. The plausible motive in Fatima is showing "I control the sun and sky, so respect me."
Plausibility also requires an upper limit of human comprehension. If you limited intelligence to "things that make sense to your cat" you'd probably throw out most of the economy. A cat will never respect the decision to buy batteries. They may or may not respect shoes.
Fantastic post! In this pattern of reasoning "E seems extraordinary and like good evidence for X, but we actually have a bunch more E hanging around that hasn't been accounted for", there seems to be some generalizable principle, but I'm not sure what it would be exactly. Reminds me of the Mormonism-as-a-control-group idea.
Twenty-nine *thousand* words on this subject, and none of them are "unidentified", "flying", or "object". Well, OK, there are a few uses of that last, but in the strained phrasing of "UFO-like object", as if we are preemptively discounting the possibility that sun miracles are actually UFOs.
Sun miracles are actually UFOs, full stop. Not "flying saucers", not "alien spaceships", maybe "divine miracles", but definitely "unidentified flying objects". We invented that last phrase for a reason, and this is exactly that reason.
Which means, the thing I learned from this is that the younglings have completely forgotten all that was learned in the Before Times about UFOs. And that, in this context, Scott is a youngling - UFOs seem to have faded from pop culture in the 1990s. Thanks for making me feel old, Scott :-)
With the benefit of age and experience, I read the first few paragraphs, made the tentative conclusion that this was almost certainly [see section 6], but figured Scott wouldn't be doing this deep a dive if it was that simple. And here we are. It probably is just that simple, and now we can back that up with a fairly exhaustive look at the alternatives. For which, unironically, thank you Scott. It's good to sometimes double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the obvious conclusion.
But for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, who were "rationalists" when rationalism hadn't been invented and we had to call ourselves "skeptics", UFOs were as important a subject of rationalist/skeptical inquiry as is AI risk today (and for about the same reason). People learned an awful lot in those days. One of those things is that most people don't spend much time really looking at the sky and will consistently fail to recognize even slightly-unusual phenomena, like the sun partially veiled by clouds. And the other, more important thing is that when presented with an image they don't recognize, people will very predictably see what their culture has taught them to expect to see.
In 1880s-1890s America, any weird thing in the sky was clearly a fantastic airship, built by some mad scientist out of a Jules Verne novel, and was perceived with a wealth of surrounding detail all aligned with that model. 1950s-1980s America, the same things were clearly "flying saucers", fantastic alien spaceships piloted by little green or grey men, with the same level of impossible detail. And anywhere you've got ten thousand devout Catholics fervently hoping to see a Miracle involving the Sun, and the weather makes the sun look a bit wonky...
For an old-school skeptical experiment at understanding this effect,
TL, DR, a gathering of UFO enthusiasts expecting to see a flying saucer in the night sky, are presented with thirty seconds of a monochromatic point source of light at ground level, stationary and unchanging except for one brief interruption. What is perceived, is an object high in the sky with finite angular size and geometric shape, of multiple colors, and conspicuously moving, all consistent with the pop-culture concept of a flying saucer and not some prankster with a spotlight.
I considered the UFO angle (I was looking for an excuse to have the section title "Virgin Galactic"), but I couldn't get anything out of it. Yes, you can think of the weird dancing sun as a UFO. What does that demonstrate? That it was aliens? Seems unlikely - all of this was predicted by a vision of the Virgin who said a lot of stuff about which Catholic prayers people should say when. Why would aliens pretend to be the Virgin Mary, appear to a young girl, and tell her lots of things about which Catholic prayers to say?
Who said anything about aliens? I explicitly said "not alien spaceships". And the 'U' in "UFO" means "not any specific thing that we know of". UFOs are almost certainly not alien spaceships, and are only mistaken for alien spaceships who've been watching too much mid-20th-century Sci Fi. UFOs, are just people seeing something they don't understand and trying to interpret it by an overweighted, culturally-transmitted prior. Which differs from culture to culture.
And that's something we know a lot about. Which you seem to have independently rediscovered, but I can't help thinking you'd have got there a lot faster if you'd had a proper map of the territory. A map which includes no aliens outside of the imaginary sort.
Does saying "UFO" communicate anything interesting without the alien angle?
I.e., if one means only, literally, "an unidentified object in the sky"—well, we got as much from the description of the event; using explicitly the initialism "U.F.O." seems merely a matter of taste, after that.
I really don't think it was aliens (among many, many other reasons, why did so many people see the flying object and so many others not?) - but the "why'd they do this?" would be pretty solid! They're playing nasty games! Same reason so many later abductees got anally probed, and same reason so many farmers' crops got knocked down in circles!
Ra appeared in order to display His glory to an errant local population. He revealed Himself that he might turn them away from the false gods (three in number) that they had been worshipping. If it was a test, they flunked. They could describe their experiences only in terms of the stories they had learned as children. In sadness, Ra paddled his barque back to Heliopolis, there to recover from the whole exhausting (and deflating) experience. He will try again when He again believes that humanity has evolved sufficiently to apprehend His glory, but he's beginning to be concerned that this belief might be merely a delusion rooted in his own mishegas. The Fatima experience was a tough one for Him and He'll likely give it a rest for a while.
For a long time scientists dismissed ancient accounts of rocks falling from the sky as fanciful myths.
"The celestial origin of meteoric iron had been recognized at an early date, although it was disregarded subsequently. A fall of meteorites in 644 B.C. is noted in Chinese records. Another famous meteorite is the one that fell in 466 B.C. at Aegospotamos in Thrace, as recorded on the Parian marble. It is mentioned by Pliny and Plutarch. ... In 1794 the German philosopher Chladni drew attention to the extra-terrestrial source of such iron masses, but his explanation was rejected by scientific men. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century these wanderers from outer space were regarded as mere eccentricities, the French Academy of Science going so far as to vote that there was no such thing as celestial metal. Directors of museums were ashamed to exhibit specimens reported as having fallen from the sky. Not until the great shower of meteorites fell on April 26, 1803, at L’Aigle, in Normandy, was the question definitely settled. That strange spectacle was witnessed by thousands of persons, and focused the attention of scientific men, so as to prompt serious inquiry. The Minister of the Interior sent the scientist Biot to the spot to make a careful investigation, the result of which was a report, to the National Institute of France, confirming the extra-terrestrial origin of the stones. These facts must have escaped the notice of the American public, for in 1807 when President Jefferson was told that Professors Silliman and Kingsley had described a fall of stones from the sky at Weston, in Connecticut, he remarked: “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors will lie than to believe that stones will fall from heaven.” At L’Aigle more than two thousand meteoric fragments fell over an area of twenty square miles. They were stony in substance, but they contained 10 per cent of nickel-iron."
T. A. Rickard, Man and Metals, volume 2, p. 847-848
What about that African elementary school where like a hundred kids all saw a UFO land and reported it and the aliens very consistently? This kind of thing happens to big groups all the time. A couple of hundred eyewitness accounts is nothing.
I think that's a good bit weaker due to (a) a smaller number of people, (b) those people being only rural school-children, and (c) no distant eyewitnesses outside the crowd. Are there many other events that share the "hundreds or thousands of witnesses, including many well-educated sorts, and including witnesses not in the main crowd" trifecta?
(Note that this is meant to explain the *allure* of Fatima, in particular—i.e., whether or not it is *actually the case,* it's at least *commonly reported* that some people in other towns & in the countryside also witnessed the phenomenon: hence why it might seem more unusual than the African Schoolchildren Claim UFO Sighting case... although that one is *also* interesting, heh; I'd not, heretofore, ever heard of it.)
a) 65 is still a lot, same OOM in terms of actual number of *accounts* if not attendees - I'm very skeptical of the number of attendees reported - why wouldn't everyone have an incentive to vastly exaggerate the number of attendees at Fatima?
b) rural Portuguese semi-peasants would have made up the vast majority of attendees, titles at the time like doctor, lawyer, mathematician were vastly less gatekept than today, not sure how much better that is than kids -- deeply susceptible to mass bias
c) distant eyewitnesses thoroughly debunked/explained in this particular case (Fatima) by Scott's thoughts, imo, while of course alien abduction/visitation witnesses are probably the only thing more common than sun miracle witnesses across the world
UFOs and greys need more explanation than sun miracles, from my perspective
Here’s my theory for what explains the two different light sources seen in the sky:
> The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning.
> So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space.
> The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude.
Ok I have a theory here that, combined with the psychological priming, uncommon weather phenomenon, and somewhat inconsistent testimony, that might explain why this looked the way it did.
The object that was about 2 miles high, and possibly rotating was a World War 1 observation balloon covered in either cellulose dope, or linseed oil. When freshly applied (and these were both used to make the fabric observation balloons hydrogen-tight) they can give a glossy look (or possibly some sort of rubber). Now the balloons we have pictures of are all painted in drab colors to be less visually distinct, but it’s completely possible a balloon could be painted in a shiny/reflective color, or a balloon covered in a rubberized covering of some sort that gathered a lot of condensation and thus became reflective.
Combine this with both the sun and this balloon passing behind the clouds, and you might see the sun jump from one place to another, between the reflecting balloon and the sun itself. If the balloon was of the round sort it could be rotating by the wind to slightly alter the angle of reflection, making it look like it was shimmering in a way no one had seen before. It would also explain why some people would claim to see the clouds pass behind this “sun.”
This might also explain it coming down to earth. The balloon landed somewhere nearby.
The reason this balloon was there could be anything from some military men wanting to get a good look at the miracle that was about to happen, (ChatGPT says Portugal did have weather balloons during WW1), to a nefarious actor attempting to pull of some sort of con to make you Catholic, to someone just wanting to make a prank and it being way more effective than they thought.
Most people would never have seen a balloon at this time, and if it was up in the clouds and a different color than normal, then those few who knew what a balloon normally looks like might not know what they were seeing.
Anyway that is my theory to fill in the gaps for the stranger claims you see with this. I honestly think that the claims made are very weak, as it’s totally legitimate to say that “Just because I can’t explain exactly what happened, doesn’t mean your explanation of a miracle happening is correct.” If our ignorance of an explanation of a thing (either due to lack of information or lack of current understanding) equates to the claim of a miracle happening, then in this very big world there are going to be unlikely events that for one reason or another lack explanation, and thus miracles are almost certainly to happen with or without divine intervention.
Very interesting analysis, only read about 1/3 so far - beginning and the end, but pleased with the level of rigor here, thanks for putting the work in
I will say that I find it interesting that so many of the testimonies seem to focus on the collective nature of the event (ie. what the people around the viewer were seeing and experiencing) as much as what the viewer themselves is experiencing. By default, I might assume that if I were to view such an impressive and miraculous event, I would have a much stronger recollection of the event itself, and my own reactions, than the reactions of those around me. To me, this provides some amount of evidence for the power of suggestion being a major piece in this puzzle. You can think of a domino effect, where the experiencing of being surrounded by people in awe only serves to intensity your own mental imagery.
Is there any accounting for the kids knowing this was something that happened there? Otherwise that needs explaining. (I basically believe in non miraculous miracles)
The fundamental issue I have with this seems to be an assumption that is never addressed. How valuable is a bunch of eyewitness testimony? You model seems to be presuming validity which can be properly lowered by psychological factors and not properly lowered by the idea of "mass hallucination" because the evidence for such a phenomenon is very low.
The problem is this isn't an accurate model, eyewitness testimony is actually baseline awful. If you went out and got a hundred testimonies of an event and asked how many people could give you a roughly accurate description of the event without any false data you'd be moderately lucky to get one and there's no chance you'll get more than five.
Let's take for example this chart of witness statements about the killing of Michael Brown that happened in 2014.
If you have this chart and try to estimate how many shots were fired, if you're like me you'll probably center around eight, and then you may read news reports, as many of the people did, saying two shots were fired in the car and Brown was shot six times and conclude this makes sense.
Except we know the actual answer and the actual answer is twelve. An answer that literally does not appear on the chart (except for the 'at least' answers which range from 3-7 who get technically correct awards).
Now you can still tease out some information from these accounts, though unlike our Fatima accounts these have already been selected for not getting basic details wrong or contradicting themselves, but you must treat this data with an extreme amount of suspicion. Now, I picked a relatively fraught example because it had the media attention to do things like make nice charts, but this effect reproduces everywhere.
This doesn't feel like the way our brains work, it doesn't feel like if you're looking at people in a police lineup your error rate will go up if you look at all the options at once instead of sequentially, but that's the case. It doesn't feel like a bunch of people's memories will change just because they read a news report the next day but that's the case.
Taken in this light the evidence for a miracle is much, much weaker
I think there's a large difference between "multiple people *forgetting or misremembering some details within the framework of a real, well-agreed-upon event"* (e.g.: witnesses seemed to agree that shots were fired & merely disagreed on the number), and "multiple people *confabulating an entire event from start to finish."*
I.e., taking the Brown shooting example as our guide, we'd say that we expect that (a) the eyewitnesses did see something and reported the basic skeleton of the event correctly, and (b) the individual details draped upon that skeleton are likely to be mixed up or incorrect in particulars. This pattern, applied to Fatima, still leaves us with quite a mystery (& even sort of explains away some of the skeptical objections as to "why do people report different colors in different orders, if it was real?" & the like)!
No, for real, it's great! I have lived an unusually large number of places (when I was a kid, the longest my parents stayed in a single location was three years; as an adult, my longest-held job involved moving wherever they told me; and I also briefly lived in South America & Europe for love, or "love", respectively–)...
...and my favorite place of all—the city I'd probably live in could I live anywhere—is Lubbock, TX. If it didn't have motherfcuking tornadoes, it'd be perfect.
Granted, I'm a bit of a weirdo, in many respects (after ND & WA, I never want to live somewhere that isn't hot, dry, and sunny, *ever again*); but still—I've just never lived anywhere...
...*easier,* if you know what I mean. Friendly people, who stay out of your business if you don't want 'em to be in it & are always ready to help if you do; flat & open country, with good roads, mild traffic, lots of space, lots of parking; "shorts & T-shirt" weather most of the year; great (Tex-)Mexican food (& great Norteño & cumbia music on the radio!)—plus lots of pretty college Latinas; good service, good variety, everything's open when you want it to be¹...
Love it, man. It's the best. Wish I hadn't moved away!
¹(after Germany, I'll never take that for granted again—same reason I mention parking, heh; wouldn't have been on my wish-list, before... I'm traumatized forever by Wiesbaden–)
Thinking about my prior on miracles and the divine, it would be weird if God were real and manifested Himself to 100,000 people a year in such an arbitrary way. We also have a suspiciously low number of miracles that aren't purely experiential. So my prior is "trapped" in the sense that I'm not going to start updating on God if we keep hearing that small numbers of believers directly experienced something; if He starts conjuring monolithic crosses of depleted uranium or Christian countries start winning every war I'm open to the possibility.
In the "one good video", it does seem to me like the brightness of the sun seems correlated with the orientation of the camera: when the camera is pointing closer toward the ground the sun gets brighter, and when the camera goes up (pointing toward the sky) the sun gets dimmer. This makes it look like it might be an artifact of the camera somehow (although it still seems weird, since the changes seem too dramatic to just be a brightness adjustment)
This is my first comment - I'm planning on making a couple more. In this comment, I am going to focus on responding to Scott's rebutting defeaters to Dalleur's reconstruction in Section 4.
re Objection #1: "Why don't we have more testimony from distant witnesses?"
--(Sampling bias) Whereas there were systematic efforts to elicit and record the testimony of witnesses at the Cova, the same can't be said for witnesses in surrounding villages.
--(Cloud cover) A source at 1.5km could be obstructed by cloud decks with bases in the same range. Meteorological data and eyewitness testimony agree that the region was under a stratocumulus deck during the Miracle of the Sun. You agknowledge this point later.
--(Line-of-sight) If LSa was only 1–2 km above the terrain, then its apparent elevation drops sharply with distance. Most towns around Fátima sit in hilly terrain. Local ridges rise 2–4° above the horizon as seen from many village centers. At 20km away, the source would be at a 4° apparent elevation which could easily be obstructed by ridges, trees, and buildings.
You write "Against this, the child 6 miles from Fatima and the schoolboy 8 miles from Fatima both described huddling in terror, thinking the world was coming to an end. This doesn’t sound like something only slightly visible as an odd flickering on the horizon. If Dalleur’s location hypothesis is correct, then the child is only 3 miles from the event source - the same distance as Fatima - but the schoolboy is still about 10 miles. Dalleur must believe that the event seemed cataclysmic up to at least a 10 mile radius. So where are all the other distant witnesses?"
The Lourenço brothers were not alone. They were part of a larger company that included their schoolteacher, her daughter, other teachers, and several inhabitants of Alburitel. They claim that there were alarmed by cries in the street, implying that it was a communal event, not something that only they saw. That demonstrates that there is a reportage bias - we only have recorded testimony from a small fraction of the distant witnesses that we know of.
re Objection #2: "What about the negative testimony from Leonor?"
First, Alburitel would have seen the source about ~1–1.5° higher than Torres Novas - which is a big deal when you are dealing with low angles. Alburitel sits on higher ground with gentler relief on the azimuth toward the Fatima plateau. Torres Novas is in a basin ringed by the ridges of the Serra de Aire. Leonor’s car was stuck in a ditch on uneven terrain. The nearby bank itself could have completely obscured a low-horizon object like LSa. Leonor mentions that there was persistent rain at her location while she was stuck in the ditch - her slice of sky never opened. These factors could easily explain why it was visible from Alburitel but not from Torres Novas.
Second, inattentional blindness is real and powerful. Leonor wasn't expecting a sky miracle, she didn't know in advance the time the event was supposed to occur, she was on the move, and she clearly would have been distracted by the fact that she was delayed/her car had broken down. It is totally possible there was something visible in the sky from her vantage point and she didn't notice. We have examples of a driver that was within a hundred meters of the crowd at the Cova and was oblivious to the fact that a massive crowd had worked itself up into a frenzy.
You say "Believers argue that Torres Novas’ view of the event was blocked by the hills. But as we saw above, if we believe Dalleur’s location, we can use trigonometry to estimate the light source’s elevation at >1 mile. This could not have been blocked by the small hills near Torres Novas, and so the explicit negative evidence from Constancio - not to mention the implicit negative evidence from the other 40,000 residents of Torres Novas - becomes damning."
This is misleading. What matters is not the absolute altitude of the source, but its apparent angular elevation from Torres Novas. From ~18 km away, a source 1–1.5 km above the Fátima plateau appears at only 3–5° above the horizon. That’s extremely low. The sightline to a 1.5 km-high source crosses ~335–420m asl at 3 km. Those are exactly the elevations of the nearby ridges north of Torres Novas. So it is expected that from many vantage points in town, a 4° object would be hidden by surrounding relief. Leonor's eye level would have been several meters lower than the general terrain. Her viewing position was as unfavorable as possible.
re Objection #3: "Why didn't LSa heat the area directly beneath it?"
This objection assumes uniform, isotropic IR emission. Dalleur's analysis indicates that the IR flux from LSa was directional. If it were diffuse, it wouldn't have produced the IR shadows that are depicted in the certified photographs - that suggests a collimated beam aimed at the Cova.
re Objection #4 "Given the cloud cover, how could distant witnesses have seen anything at all?"
Each location’s line of sight to the luminous source pierced the cloud deck at a different distance and angle, so each town required its own local gap. Stratiform rain clouds naturally form such patchy, kilometer-scale breaks, so it is not unrealistic that some places (Cova, Minde, Alburitel) had clear corridors while others (Torres Novas) remained under rain. The cloud breaks needed at each town would not have to have been exotic or improbably coordinated (but it wouldn't be too much of a problem for the miracle hypothesis if they were).
re Objection #5 "Dalleur claims the light source was not the sun at all, but some sort of artificial miraculous object. But if this were true, how did the miracle end? No witness describes seeing the pale sun disappear. They only say it went back to its usual place in the sky. Later in the day, the clouds cleared and it became a normal sunny day. But nobody reports seeing two suns. At some point, either the first light source must have vanished (which would have been noticed), or there must be two suns in the same sky (which would also have been noticed). Therefore, it seems like the miraculous light source must have been the sun after all, which throws Dalleur’s calculations into disarray."
The witness accounts describe an abrupt transition where the light source went from being 'pale and moonlike' to regaining its former brilliance. There are also reports of vertical motion throughout the event. Those observations support the 'optical blending' theory of how the miracle ended: as LSa shifted in brightness and apparent position, it was choreographed to 'merge' with the true solar disk hidden behind a thin cloud. From the perspective of observers, the distinct pale 'sun' did not vanish in midair or split into two bodies, but instead seemed to 'return back to normal' when the two images merged. Rival theories have a hard time accommodating an abrupt transition 'back to normal.'
re Objection #6 "Mark Grant disagrees with Dalleur's analysis of the photographs."
Mark Grant is very smart - he is the skeptic that I respect the most - but I think that his analysis of the photographic evidence is flawed (especially his analysis of the IR shadows). I plan to respond to him at length, but that will require me to write an entire article.
This is nice, but I'm lazy and I want correct answers quickly. Many people dismissed the miracle on much less work than this - correctly, I think you'd say - but you also (correctly, IMO) criticise their reasoning. So what gives?
I think there are really obvious errors in Ethan's analysis of the testimonies. He says - well it could be one of 5-odd very specific kinds of event that causes people not to tell the truth, and we have evidence against them all, so they must have been telling the truth. But we know that reliable lie detection is very hard, and that regular people are super bad at it, so we've extremely strong reasons to think the efforts of the few amateurs who interviewed them can't be very informative on this and the details of how they were interviewed are relatively unimportant*, and so the records aren't sufficient to rule out the possibility that the girls were, for one reason or another, saying things that weren't true. So how did he err? Well I think centrally the problem was what I described above: he decided that the only way to say something that isn't true is to be exhibiting one of 5-ish very specific psychological conditions and so finding inconsistencies with any of these conditions was sufficient to establish truthfulness.
This seems to be a robust general crankish tactic: make your preferred argument flexible and your opposition brittle. I fell for it with LK-99: I thought well, there's strong measured diagmagnetism (ruling out ferromagnetism, I thought), and it floats (ruling out known non-superconducting forms of diamagnetism, I still think) so it must be something novel and exotic or a superconductor. But actually diagmagnetism and ferromagnetism often co-occur. I thought I'd laid out the whole opposition, but I'd inadvertently strawmanned it. At the same time I did allow flexibility on the "LK-99 is superconducting" side. No-one had measured 0 resistance after all, so already any naive theory of it being a superconductor was ruled out. I think it's generally best to be flexible on both sides: yes, God can grant specific people visions, but yes also kids can fool adults, or be confused in ways that aren't specifically described in published psychology papers, or be a bit confused and embellish a bit as well.
So what then about the harder to explain weird sun stuff? Well Ethan at least employs the same tactic as for the kids truthfulness: consider a few specific explanations, dismiss them. But for exactly the same reason, this isn't compelling. This much I'd thought already.
On further reflection: I think you could in principle make a compelling argument that this was a very extraordinary event: to start with, it was a "called shot" so it would be surprising if it were even a particularly uncommon natural event (unless it's the sort of thing that can be expectation-induced), and there was a lot of attestation so it can't be something that depends on some individual person being weird. So all you'd need, in some sense, is a compelling case that the attested phenomena–or anything that could be mistaken for them with a bit of priming–were very unusual among cases of Sun-inspection. This hypothesis really does cover "all natural explanations", or at least does a much better job of it than the grab bag of ad-hoc alternatives. But this is hard to show precisely because Sun-inspection is rare, and we might suspect that this difficulty is not independent of the miracle's having come to our attention in the first place.
So the general rule I'm advocating is: if someone's advocating an unexpected claim on the grounds that all of the alternatives fail, expect them to start with a compelling argument that they've actually caught *all* of the alternatives, at least to a certain level of probability, and surveys, brainstorms, convenient samples and lists of alternatives do not rise to that standard.
*save that they involved no surprising concordances in testimony on facts which the girls could not have coordinated on in advance
Fantastic article, but I think there's not enough discussion of the fact that this is their best miracle. If there were 75 better miracles we'd be talking about those instead. So we shouldn't be asking how this miracle updates our priors. Instead we should be asking how does finding out this is what people think is the most compelling miracle update our priors. Personally, I think conditional on religion being true I would expect much more compelling miracles. Conditional on religion being false I think this is about what I would expect for most compelling miracle (quite compelling if it was the only thing to have ever happened, but history is long and our knowledge very incomplete, so I'd expect some strange, unexplained phenomena). From this perspective, I think it's more reasonable than you argue for a skeptic to dismiss it without having a plausible alternative explanation.
Here are some rough numbers for how I think about it. Say we're the first human on Earth. What should our estimated odds on Christianity be. Extremely low. I'll make up something like 10^-100. There are many, many totally crazy claims and it is also just extremely specific, so if no one had every conceived of it, it would have extremely, extremely low odds. On the other hand there are probably like 10^90 equivalently strange religions possible. So the odds one of them is true is like 10^-10 (If you think this is too low, consider that this is before there was any evidence for any religion at all except the existence of the planet. Under these conditions I think the idea that there is a religion as strange as Christianity is extremely low). Now consider that we're given information on the strength of the evidence for the most convincing miracle for the most common religion in the world.
In this case Fatima. I'll call it a 60/100 (if you think this is low consider that we could have the entire sky filled with CHRISTIAN GOD IS TRUE. I WILL NOW MY SON JESUS CHRIST TO EVERY MAN ALIVE. The sun dancing seems to be much less obvious than what you expect for the best miracle 3 millions years ago if Christianity was true, even if you think it is extremely convincing.)
So what are the prior distributions on best miracle for our two scenarios. For me something like:
Christianity True: 70% 100 (why wouldn't god make it obvious) 30% uniform from 50-100
Christianity False: uniform from 30-70
So basically there was like a 25% chance that we'd see a best miracle this good if Christianity is false and only like a 6% chance we'd get a best miracle so poor if Christianity is true. This is all overwhelmed by my 10^-10 prior against, but if anything I consider it evidence against Christianity.
More convincing for our guy from 3 million years ago is actually that billions of people believe it. I would have put low priors on that. That should be a solid update (though it is also mixed up with the miracles as well. People are more likely to believe if the miracles are good, so you don't want to double count). But we know it can't be too big because Christianity and Islam can't both be true, so clearly billions can believe without truth. Still I'll randomly update to like 10^-6 split between Christianity, Islam, other religions, and the nameless 10^90 relatively equally.
> at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused.
I would be grateful if you would say more on this. I feel I have a sufficiently strong prior (maybe a "trapped prior") that I can't see myself tilting towards the belief of "God being real" such that I'll alter my behaviour.
May only apply to Fatima and not an independent explanation, but there was significant hunger and food shortage at the time. This might have created a population more likely to experience this phenomenon or for it to have greater intensity.
Well, I may have been nerd-sniped, but I don't actually have the leisure time to be nerd-sniped all in one go. So having read only the first few paragraphs, I'm going to register a prediction on my future mindset when I finish (which may be several days, or possibly weeks).
Conditional on this article convincing me that The Miracle doesn't have any remotely-plausible non-supernatural explanation, I still won't update my belief that it was caused by YHWH[1] to any higher than third place, after "aliens" or "glitch/test/Easter Egg in the matrix," not necessarily in that order.
The reasons being twofold. First, both of the former two require smaller updates away from my belief in a lawful, reductionist-materialist universe. Admittedly it's not *a lot* smaller for "reality is a simulation" type hypotheses, but as broad and fuzzy as a category as "simulation" is, it implies SOME degree of consistent rules and limits. I've programmed simulations and even with full freedom to tinker with the source code, you cannot *trivially* make them do arbitrary things. Aliens, meanwhile, require a pretty small update: mostly just updating my probabilities around whether an interstellar species would choose to leave a visible footprint in the cosmos. Meanwhile YHWH is claimed to be all-knowning and all-powerful, which means that the universe as a whole can fundamentally *have no limits*. It only has whatever structure YHWH decides He wants for today, which He is definitionally isn't consistent about (or he wouldn't be an agent at all, he'd be another name for the laws of physics).
Second, motives. Aliens could have any motive or no motive at all (in that the alien(s) perpetrating the hoax could be insane in some fashion that precludes anything we'd regard as a motive). Likewise, many, many motives for simulating a universe could exist, and so too for messing with the simulation in an apparently unprecedented way. Meanwhile YHWH is allowed exactly one fundamental motive: to the extent that the lore about Him is consistent at all, his most fundamental, agreed-upon attribute is Love for His Creation, which is supposed to inform all things He Does. Taken in isolation an incident like this could be in keeping with that motive, but taken in the context of a world where things like this are puzzling, bizarre exceptions to the often much more grim and horrifying realities, this still make no bloody sense. If He's speaking to me through this incident, He's knowingly chosen to speak not only in a language I can't understand, but in one that comes across as the intellectual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
I'll add that having the miracle heralded by (apparently) human children *does* cause a relative update in favor of YHWH, compared to a universe where the Event had occurred unheralded, or heralded in some less human fashion. But it can't be a large update because...well...you can fit SO much "sufficiently advanced technology" in the gap between "understanding exactly how it happened" and conceding "I guess it was literal magic."[2]
[1] I'll usually write "The God of Abraham," but YHWH sports the twin advantages that it's shorter to type repeatedly and (thanks to Unsong), I can choose to pronounce it in my head as "YEEHAW!"
[2] This isn't a Fully General Counterargument, though I'll understand if religious folks react to it like one. Yes, there is *some* threshold of evidence at which I'd have to start rapidly updating towards "YHWH did it." But that threshold doesn't look like scattered reports of miracles (even well-attested ones). It looks like Unsong.
I'm not very impressed with the meteorological explanation but this was a great article, good job. I'm probably 80 percent sure right now that these mass visions are a supernatural phenomenon. Maybe I'm an easy "mark," since I think dualism is plausible and it has merit, although I'm far from totally convinced on that.
Do I think these visions have something to do with religiosity? Yes. How much do I think they have anything to do with the Christian God or the Devil? God: 20 percent. Devil: zero percent. It's hard for me to imagine that the Christian God, as I conceive of him in potential existence, would ask people to hurt their eyes in order to see a vision. (The Christian God, as I conceive of him in potential existence, did not tell Abraham to sacrifice his son, did not tell Israel to genocide Amalekites, and generally did not do the horrible things he is reported to have done in the Bible). The devil is a literary device and does not have the power to cause visions.
If upon further knowledge and reflection, I were to become 100% sure that this was a vision sent by the Christian God, I would not consider this an endorsement of the truthfulness of the Catholic sect over any other sect of Christianity. I would just update to think that Catholics are especially pious for some reason, whether or not the specific doctrines of the Vatican are true. I believe and hope that the Christian God, if he exists, would reward people strictly according to their personal piety/ethics, regardless of their theological beliefs.
Interesting synchronicity: just yesterday I was watching Part 2 of an interview with Michael Talbot about the 'Holographic Universe', and he discusses his theory that paranormal phenomena may actually be a projection of individual and collective psyches, so essentially as I interpret it, this experience described in 1917 may have been both created by, and simultaneously experienced by, members of the crowd gathered there.
> Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III
I've ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th.
> There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988)
Emailed you both.
P.S. Small plug: check out `pdf-to-markdown-cli` (available via `pip install`) for converting large PDFs with complex formatting (no monetary affiliation, I just wrote a CLI wrapper).
Oh hell yeah this is the most insane miracle I love this one
A solar miracle video I particularly like is this[1] one, from another Philippines church - a very small one with a congregation in the dozens, admittedly, rather than a huge crowd in the thousands, sourced from an obscure Catholic millenarian YouTube channel. One of the speakers earlier in the video explicitly compares parts of it to Fatima. Skip to the timestamp 15:36 (at the end of the video) for a live sample of another alleged solar miracle. I like this one despite the small gathering size because of the profound-seeming emotions sweeping over of the gathering; I take it to be a kind of microscopic sample of what it would've felt like to be at Cova da Iria that day in 1917.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrZlda3Gcjc
I had to google it but 30.000 words is 100 Pages! An this topic has only really been trending on substack for the last couple weeks or so. (Evidence for a miracle some might say?)
I remember an old B.C. cartoon:
Caveman #1: I've been starting at the sun all day!
Caveman #2: What did you learn?
Caveman #1 (walks into tree): Not to stare at the sun all day.
The mathematician speaks how people who are not mathematicians imagine mathematicians speak. (Ofc it could be real)
It's real - he got kind of obsessed and we have dozens of his letters, which he sent to everyone in Portugal even slightly associated with Fatima, miracles, or the the Church.
Just got my copy of Jaki's book (from a proper Catholic library) via interlibrary loan.
Jaki did an amazing job collecting and analyzing testimonies, but his ice lens theory doesn't survive any of the other apparitions where some people saw it and others didn't. I'm confused how he can be so rigorous and scholarly and also miss the point so hard at the same time. I think maybe he was writing pre-Internet, had only very vague knowledge of any of the other apparitions, and whatever sort of library/archive research system he was using didn't lend itself very well to taking tangents to Necedah or Lubbock.
Read one of his papers and it gave me the impression he was an interesting person and writer. A latter day William of Baskerville.
Incredible
The meditative practice of staring at a candle flame, "fire kasina" practice, is well-known to induce psychedelic-like visual hallucinations among various other wild effects. Daniel Ingram (of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha fame) has gotten really into it and has a whole site around his experiences:
https://firekasina.org/
A snippet from the first report I happened to click on:
> I was walking on the beach at night on a somewhat cloudy night and suddenly noticed yellow light dancing across the ridges of sand on the beach, like someone was raking it with a flashlight held low to the ground. I looked around: nobody there, no lights on, nothing but a bit of silver moonlight through the clouds, nothing that would produce yellow flickering light to illuminate the beach. The light would come and go, wax and wane, shimmer, flicker, dance, and finally became a moderately bright steady glow that momentarily convinced me there must be a vehicle pulling up behind me on the beach and this must be its headlights, so I looked around, but nothing was there but the light without a source.
Some of the reports from deep kasina meditators are themselves kinda wooey (Daniel's talked about experiencing shared visual hallucinations with other people in the same space), but it does at least seem like suggestively similar territory to the phenomena reported here!
Yeah, I agree it's got to be something like this. I still think the mystery is why thousands of people got the full fire kasina experience after staring at the sun for one second, even though most meditators will probably take months to get anywhere.
A lifetime of immersion in religious culture[1], months-long prophetic edging, and finally dropping the proverbial bass at an appointed time and place. I imagine that could prime you real good for a sensation that otherwise takes a lot of conscious practice to get ready for. This unstructured way of "practicing" might also help explain why more or less everyone reports/emphasizes something different from their experience because no "fire kasina master" told them what to focus on.
[1] Whether or not you called yourself an atheist at the time because apparently, as evident from the interlude, even atheists could get pretty damn emotional about their non-belief.
Now this (and the Joan of Arc review) have me wondering if there are any comparable final boss events for other religions.
Wait what is this Joan of Arc review?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-joan-of-arc
Maybe at the very LEAST we should update against the idea that mystics who start religions are necessarily madmen or liars. Maybe even that sex pest cult leader might have experienced something very strange. And started his religious community with the best of intentions, before his primal urges got the best of him
You’ve actually managed a “much more than you wanted to know” with substantially more than I wanted to know
I wonder if the effect in the Mercy Hills video is because of changes in the air's index of refraction, which changes with temperature, pressure, and humidity.
Something about the hills might trap an unstable front, where the index of refraction could oscillate as the air between the viewer and the sun oscillates between hot and cold.
A front interacting with the mountains, could explain why the Ghiaie miracle can only be seen along the mountain line, and fronts in general could cause the wind mentioned in Reis's account.
Changes in the index of refraction of a smaller air volume might also cause the edge of the sun to appear to swirl and move, as it does above a hot object.
How much do we have to update towards a belief in God if we have not fully explained an apparent miracle naturalistically?
The Bayesian analysis noted in the article requires fairly drastic updates. But, prior to reading this article, I had thought that the most likely explanation was something physical/psychological not yet discovered—and that is where the article ultimately points as well (after much great reasoning).
I guess my question really is—do we really need a full naturalistic explanation of why the apparent miracle isn’t a miracle, or can we get off this train early by inferring the explanation’s existence even without full details? When is such shortcutting legitimate—is it really always a trapped prior to think like this?
I suppose this is more of a question for dealing with apologists in general, since their supply of arguments is endless—with Fatima it seems like the juice is worth the squeeze, since you’ll have done significant damage to miracle-believers if your research program is successful.
I think that Hume's account of miracles still holds. (https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/hume1748_3.pdf)
What it means to be a miracle is that it's a violation of the laws. What it means to be a law is just that it's a phenomenon that's so well-attested that you would doubt an observation rather than doubt the law. So if someone tells you they've seen a miracle, you should doubt them, unless you investigate so much that you become convinced it's real, and now it's no longer a law that's been violated, but just something we used to think was a law.
I never found this convincing. If you believe in God, it seems straightforward that God can create laws that hold in all natural cases, but suspend them occasionally for purposes of His own. If you see a miracle, you should think "I guess there is a God and He chose to suspend that natural law".
Hume has a radically empiricist view of "laws". He doesn't think there is *anything* that *could* be a "law" in the sense of some innate power that actually makes things happen. He thinks that all there is is one damn thing after another. In David Lewis's terms, Hume's view is that the universe is just a "Humean mosaic" and the "laws" are just apparent patterns that happen to be there, but don't have anything more to them than just, we are convinced the pattern is real.
On this view, if we became convinced that Newton's laws hold except when God feels like suspending them, then the *real* law would be "F=ma and all the rest, except when God suspends it". The supposed "miracle" would just be a part of the new law. (There's also part of the chapter where he gives arguments that the standard religious miracles didn't happen, and the standard religions aren't true, but I think that's not the core argument on miracles.)
This seems like a weird definitional dispute. It still seems like there is a big difference between:
A. Natural phenomena are all there is, ever
B. Natural phenomena usually hold, but there's also God, and He suspends them sometimes
...and talking about miracles seems like a great way to discuss this distinction! If Hume wants to reserve the word "miracle" for something that even God's actions don't qualify as, I don't see what this buys us except confusion.
It's definitely all definitional.
I see the main point here as being that Hume thinks our psychology is such that we look for laws, whether those laws are the psychological laws that we think tell us how to understand human behavior or the physical laws that we think tell us how to understand the material world. If we become convinced that psychology and the material world aren't all there is, we will still look for laws. No matter how supernatural someone says God is, if they convince us that this thing does exist, we'll want to understand it, and maybe we'll come up with laws for how it works.
Someone will tell us they saw a deviation, and call it a super-duper miracle of the super-dupernatural. But while we believe in the law, we won't believe this, and once we believe in this, we will no longer believe in the law.
He's trying to dissolve what he sees as a terminological confusion in lots of discussions of miracles, where people somehow want to believe in both the law and the miracle.
Hmmmm, still slightly confused, but thanks for the explanation.
Hume is arguing that it would be hard to prove Christianity to an atheist by reports of miracles, as Paley (of pocketwatch lying in the forest fame) did in a well known book of the time. Hume does *not* intend to try to prove that miracles are impossible;that's different.
He would admit that it is equally hard to disprove Christianity to a Christian by pointing out how seldom we see miracles nowadays.
He’s not exactly trying to argue they’re impossible - he’s arguing that it’s never reasonable to believe something is a miracle. It’s not just about Christian miracles, and it’s not attempting to disprove religion - just argue the general point that you wouldn’t get to the point of believing the miracle while still believing the law.
It still kind of circumscribes which miracles God can perform. Like no one’s claiming that the fact that quantum mechanics and GR are both apparently true and also incompatible is a divine miracle
Hume's argument is circular. He argues that miracles go against the unanimous experience of humanity that laws of nature always hold, therefore any miracle claim is to improbable to consider. Yet we don't have unanimous experience that laws of nature always hold: we have all these miracle claims saying there were times when they didn't hold! Hume dismisses all those claims as too improbable to believe. And why are they too improbable to believe? Because we have unanimous experience that the laws of nature always hold!
It's *meant* to be circular! If you really become convinced that there's a bright dot behind a solid sphere in a single beam of light, or that an ordinary piece of glass can turn sunlight into a rainbow, then you no longer think these things are miracles, but part of a new law that may or may not have been fully explained.
The real argument is - if you still say the thing is a law, then *you* don't believe in the miracle (that's what it is to say the thing is a "law"); but once you believe in the event, you've stopped believing in the law, so the event is no longer a "miracle".
That's the other issue with Hume's argument: he defines a miracle as an exception to the laws of nature, and then defines the laws of nature as things with no exceptions. Yet that's not how the religious define a miracle! They define a miracle as the intervention in nature by a supernatural power! There's nothing illogical about saying that the game has rules that we can't break, but the one who made the game can when he wants to. Do you stop believing in the rules of a video game because you saw a mod noclipping?
I'd have to look back at the text to see if he uses the phrase "law of nature" or just the word "law". The religious people are at least sometimes talking as though there is a natural order, and an occasional intervention from outside that natural order.
Hume's point is just that, if you start thinking that sort of thing can happen, you had better start theorizing that, and figure out the laws explaining when it does occur. And once you have that, the intervention of the non-natural into the natural is no more miraculous than any other case where a system that usually operates undisturbed sometimes gets disturbed by outside events.
Do you mind linking to the original Portuguese version of the grupo anticlerical paper?
It's from the Critical Documents, which you can download at https://www.fatima.pt/en/documentacao/f001-documentacao-critica-de-fatima-selecao-de-documentos-1917-1930
I think we should definitely take the prophecies into account here when deciding whether a miracle took place at Fatima: with the "second secret," Lucía predicted the Second World War, the Pontificate of Pius XI, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Except -- this prediction was not made public until 1941, well after all of these things had already come to pass. I think this is too convenient by more than half and does serious damage to the overall case. Though it is of course not dispositive, and again says nothing one way or the other about the phenomenon itself, the fact that the supposed prophecies of Fatima are (to me) obviously ex eventu ones lowers my general credence that there is anything supernatural going on here at all.
The ex eventu part really isn't specific enough to be that bad, but what makes it seem dubious to me is that, if it refers to World War II, the part about Russia having been converted hasn't come true and probably should have. I do agree that there's no good reading of the second secret that seems suitably supernatural, and the third secret is kind of vague.
I think it's pretty bad. I mean, God gives a genuine prophecy of future earthshaking geopolitical developments, but prevents its publication until the entire prophecy has already been fulfilled? Come on.
Yeah, it's not great, but it's not really worse than the general problem that it's weird for God not to tell us everything, unless I'm missing something.
To me "I totally predicted this but I can't offer any timestamped proof of my prediction from before the thing I predicted actually happened" just smacks particularly strongly of fabrication. Especially since ex eventu prophecy is something that's pretty common through history, including in the Bible itself.
I don't think that moves the needle much, if at all. Suppose there exist some people with the power and desire to fabricate evidence of miracles. (I think this is very likely.) Some of them will fabricate whole-cloth, but others will "find" evidence for miracles already attested. Now assume there are some real miracles and some fake miracles. (I understand that Catholics believe this.) There's nothing to stop our miracle-fabricator from picking a real miracle to "enhance". Even if Fatima was real, the same motivations would exist for someone to tell lies about it.
True, but in this case the fabricator and the recipient of the original miracle are the same person (Lucía dos Santos). So you would have to believe God/the Virgin transmitted true visions to Lucía and confirmed the authenticity of her visions by performing a spectacular public miracle witnessed by tens of thousands. And THEN, they permitted her to flagrantly lie years later (or more charitably, deceive herself), with the effect of deceiving millions of sincere believers about the content of the (real) visions. Is that possible? Sure. But if a "prophecy" is actually a fake prophecy concocted after the fact, I think that should lower our credence that there's anything to the OTHER supernatural claims surrounding this same seer.
Oh, I missed that it was actually her who said it -- I assumed it was a "look, I found this letter in her basement that I definitely didn't just write" type of deal.
"And THEN, they permitted her to flagrantly lie years later (or more charitably, deceive herself), with the effect of deceiving millions of sincere believers about the content of the (real) visions."
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that he would allow this to happen. For the same reason he allows anything evil to happen in the world.
"But what about God's plan!" What if according to his plan, the miracle at Fatima wasn't FOR the world. Maybe it wasn't even for the Catholic Church. Maybe it was for those specific people in that specific place in 1923. Maybe the Virgin Mary wasn't involved at all, just God, and the Marian aspects of the story are what happens when a god communicates with you and the signal is distorted due to interference.
Deist here, one who doesn't believe in miracles or a "plan." But I'm astonished at the limited imagination of most atheists when it comes to imagining different types of potential Gods. The only conception of God they seem to want to grapple with is the god of the Bible. So limiting.
Further down in the thread I actually agree that even IF Fatima is unexplainable in "naturalistic" terms, a supernatural explanation that does not entail the specific truth of Christianity is still more likely than one that does.
But insofar as this miracle is used to argue the truth of Catholicism in particular, which it is, I think this is a notable problem
The Anticlerical Interlude is an excellent example of believing in a different religion while asserting its name to be Not-Religion.
The caption on the Checker shadow illusion is wrong. (This isn't just pedantry, I think it's an important point that I'm going to keep making until I stop needing to). The caption says "Squares A and B are the same color", and this is not true, the squares are obviously different colors. They only appear to be the same color in the image, because one of the squares is in the shade and the other is in direct light. I understand the point you're trying to make, but you have to be clear about how you say it. In the *scene*, the squares are different colors. In the *image*, they're the same color, but they're also not squares! They're parallelograms or whatever. To say "the squares are the same color" is to accept the premise of the image in terms of 3d geometry, but reject it in terms of lighting, which is an arbitrary and very unnatural way to think about an image.
This is very common when people talk about various optical illusions, they get confused about whether they're talking about the image or the scene, when this relationship is central to the nature of the illusion.
Completely correct. And just to be explicit, the right thing to say is of course "the pixels in region A have the same RGB values as the pixels in region B".
You remind me of this image, a parody of René Magritte's painting: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/50/4e/be/504ebed7bb8891d1897673e7d9311a89.jpg
I'm really glad to see that other people have the exact same criticism of this particular illusion. I was worried I must be missing something since I'd never seen someone else point out they're not squares.
Anyone interested in a more in depth explanation of why this distinction is so important for understanding color as a psychophysical phenomenon should definitely check out http://www.huevaluechroma.com/index.php
Re updating towards the existence of God... I would not update on the Fatima Sun Miracle barely at all. To be honest, I think as bayesians we go astray when we let other people generate our theories for us. The power to inject theories into other people's brain is an immensely powerful capability of language, but also extremely abuseable- for instance, I don't think you should be vulnerable to Pascalian Mugging at all unless you let other people tell you words, assemble these words into a theory, and then consider the theory as if your own cognition had produced it.
In this case, even before you closed in on the natural explanations, I'd already said "why would I think that this has the signature of divine intent?" Like, why would God, wanting to convince me of his existence, choose to make the sun seem to oscillate? Why not at least use the oscillation to write "I am the Lord your God, repent and sin no more" in firey letters across the sky? To begin with, this phenomenon simply has all the signature of a natural effect.
There are multiple optical phenomena that I cannot satisfactorily explain. As a child, I saw dancing lights across the sky at night. Was it aliens? Did some neighbors take a disco light machine outside? I have no answer, but it seems to me that the latter is not just more parsimonious but also more convincing- aliens *could* make a lightshow, but it's unclear why they would do so.
As an adult, I noticed a curious phenomenon. The house across from us has a very intense nightlight on their doorbell. Looking out the window, I noticed that if I relaxed my eyes in a certain way, without affecting the rest of my vision, I could make this light appear in my visual periphery up to twenty degrees away from where I knew its source to be.
My prior is thus: the human eye is very weird, and strong light in an atmosphere is also very weird, and the human eye reacting to strong light in an atmosphere doing weird things is probably not surprising. So here's one experiment I wish someone would run (except not really because you did make me promise to not look at the sun):
- wait for a bright sunny day
- occlude the sun with a large controllable filter pane that makes it dark enough to look at
- look at it until your eyes have acclimated
- pulse the filter- that is, for instance, compose it of two layers, and briefly pull one of the layers to the side and then put it back.
I suspect if there's an optical effect, it happens when a bright object that we are focused on suddenly flares or oscillates in brightness, such as might be caused by clouds moving across the sun- or possibly even just a branch waving in front of the sun, as I suspect causes the flashing in that first mobile phone video. This would fit the only camera-visible aspect of this being oscillation in the sun's brightness.
>In this case, even before you closed in on the natural explanations, I'd already said "why would I think that this has the signature of divine intent?"
Because there was a prophecy claiming to come from the Virgin Mary saying it would happen at a specific day and time, and then it happened at that day and time. That would be the main reason people attribute divine intent to the phenomenon.
That's kind of what I mean by letting people put hypotheses in your head though. Apparently it's happening not that rarely? Maybe it was frequent in that area, and it happened to the kids first and that set this whole thing in motion.
The part about it happening every month from May to October may explain some things. Did the children witness the first one then thought there'd be other ones next months? Does this phenomenon can only happen when the sun is high enough? (Can't happen in winter).
Maybe God doesn't care about you or me, but he DID care about those Portuguese citizens standing together on that overcast day in 1923.
Just as a suggestion for the shadow analysis: Zemax or CodeV are the appropriate ray tracing programs for assessing illumination conditions (Blender might also work?).
I would caution that cameras/lenses can heavily distort relative apparent positions, and that even without a camera, complex scenes with topography and perspective can have really odd looking shadow directions. The best example I know of is the moon landing conspiracy theories, where indeed the shadows in the Apollo pictures do not look parallel, despite being illuminated by a very distant source.
I found an example here, scroll to “Why don't the shadows on the Moon look right in Apollo photos?”
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/apollo-moon-landing-conspiracy-theories-crushed
Please feel free to DM me with optics/physics questions that are related! My PhD was a lot of optics and while I’ve never done photo analysis looking for sources, I am happy to chat and have a lot of expertise in the area.
I hope I wasn't one of the people you were referring to as dismissive skeptics. While I am also fascinated by the material, and would indeed believe in it if different ontology were required, my prior on the supernatural (specifically, the entirety of the Catholic canon being true) is very low, lower than 1%--and with that in mind I don't see why it'd be a big Bayesian update toward belief (see: https://substack.com/home/post/p-173584923).
I see this often enough that I think it should have a name: it's the fallacy that 1% is the smallest number that isn't 0, and 99% is the biggest number that isn't 100%. (I'm pretty sure Scott would admit that he wasn't speaking super-accurately, but plenty of so-called Baysian computations do this.)
you have trapped priors, I resist an adversarial persuasion attack.
And he has been brainwashed, just to complete the conjugation.
LOL. I am gradually picking up the jargon here and it's nice to be able to understand the humor better.
Thank you so much for this! This article got to a place I wasn't expecting early on - in fact, some of your early parts made me not expect the whole /r/sungazing thing that happened. (It actually sort of reminds me of the Jennifer 8. Lee documentary "In Search of General Tso", where the first few minutes makes us think that this is just a mythical character serving as a hook for a great documentary about the history of American Chinese food, but at the end we realize that in fact there's a very clear story about who General Tso is and precisely when and where his chicken got its name.)
I agree there was a little bit of bait and switch there. It was a combination of:
1. I wanted people to have the same experience of doubt and confusion that I had reading the original story.
2. I actually didn't find the really good r/sungazing anecdotes until I was mostly done with the post, and decided not to rewrite everything around them.
The twist of r/sungazing evidence made the journey to get there cathartic.
I read the whole thing and found it quite interesting, but I'm rather confused as to why the _premise_ here seems to be "the Fatima sun thing was a miracle unless we can figure out an exact naturalistic explanation for it."
A bunch of people went to a place, expecting *something* to happen. They have widely varied accounts of what exactly happened, or whether something happened at all. The main thing that seems to have happened is "weird visual effects and some fraction of people having ecstatic visions."
Okay? This closely resembles many "supernatural" experiences (ghosts, UFOs, whatever): an odd experience that may only be replicable in limited conditions, influenced by physical and cognitive quirks of perception, with a strong element of suggestion.
Presumably, if an all-powerful God wanted to give _evidence_ - like, the "raised a guy from the dead in front of you" kind of evidence that He supposedly used to give - He could do better than that! Why is "a bunch of people had weird and varied experiences" something that cries out for either explanation or worship, when there was neither a specific advance prediction of what would happen, or an event that _very clearly_ wasn't something that could happen naturally, like everyone present simultaneously hearing "Jesus is Lord" inside their heads? Why is "anything we can't precisely explain is maybe supernatural" still such a prevalent idea?
Building on this, I would like to point out something that is pretty much never addressed in the endless skeptic-Christian internet back and forth: strict materialistic atheism and Christianity are NOT the only two possible ways in which the cosmos might be ordered. It is entirely possible for the supernatural to exist and for Christianity to still be false. It is even possible that events such as the Resurrection of Jesus or the dancing sun at Fatima took place, and for Christianity to still be false. Conditioning on supernaturalism being true AND the aforementioned miracles having actually taken place, it may STILL not be more likely for Christianity to be true than for non-Christian supernaturalism to be true. I am happy to expound on that, but for now I'll just say it's always bothered me that the possibility is almost never even considered, either by Christian apologists or unbelieving counterapologists
Ethan argued, I think correctly, that it would be pretty weird for a non-Christian supernatural entity to pretend to be the Virgin Mary, especially in a way that successfully converted thousands of people to Catholicism. This is just the general argument against false flags. I agree it can't be completely ruled out though.
I think you would have to be pretty confident about what supernatural entities are or are not likely to do before claiming that any given act would be weird for one to perform. With respect to Ethan, I don't think he can have that confidence any more than I can.
I'm reminded of the work of certain UFOlogists, like Jacques Vallée and John Keel. I'm not sure how familiar you are with that particular rabbit hole, but the upshot is there are a whole lot of UFO testimony cases from the last century or so, and like Fatima, at least a few of them are pretty weird and difficult to dismiss out of hand. Guys like Vallée and Keel came to the conclusion that, while experiencers of "the Phenomenon" were experiencing something real, what they were experiencing was almost certainly not actual flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials from another galaxy coming to earth in metal saucers. It's less "ET" and more "the Fae." Some kind of nonhuman, powerful intelligences that have probably been here for a very long time, and interact with humans sporadically for reasons difficult if not impossible to discern (and not necessarily benevolent-- a lot of conservative Christians believe alien encounters are demonic), but which interaction human beings tend to filter through their own cultural contexts and expectations, whether that be spacemen from Mars in middle America, 1955 or the Virgin in Portugal, 1917.
I'm not exactly sold on UFOlogy either, but granting a supernatural occurrence (and putting aside that I'm skeptical "supernatural" is a coherent category) , something like that seems to me more plausible than "Christianity is true," since it would explain the miraculous occurrence, without committing us to believe any of the (what appear to me to be) manifest falsehoods contained in the supposedly-perfect scriptures or traditions of the Church, or any of the philosophically difficult aspects of God as conceived by orthodox Christianity.
My only half-joking theory is that these are some sort of auto-regressive hallucination in the AI simulating the universe; if enough people expect something strongly enough, some sort of bias kicks in and the AI sputters a little before its usual error-correction mechanisms kick in and it limits the damage to some small number of people and series of poorly-observed events.
Having read the full article now, there's an interesting connection here: the Buddhist model is that reality is karma manifesting, and karma is essentially predictive processing. Since we can only come to know reality is through the models (even logic is a karmic manifestation), and since humans share basically the same models, which lends itself to objective verification of subjective phenomena through comparison, then a shared illusion like Fatima is neither supernatural nor natural: since *everything* is illusory, an illusion is real to the extent the model takes it as real (more likely when it's shared, which is why the lone sungazers report that they *saw* the sun act weird, while the crowd of Fatima observers exchanging their observations with each other report that the sun *acted* weird). Consequently, it's an illusion to the extent that the model takes it to be an illusion.
The main divergence from materialism, as I see it, is that the materialist stance is material -> predictive processing, whereas the Buddhist view is predictive processing -> imputation of material. I.e., if you have a model that predicts matter, you will get matter — and it *is* real matter by any definition of the word. The substrate itself is never really interrogated, so it's not clear whether this fits into an idealist, materialist, dualist, etc., stance (Dan Lusthaus's Buddhist Phenomenology is an interesting book on this topic).
Although this is obviously extremely speculative, I get the sense that there could be something here that can unify the illusion part of Fatima-type miracles with the seemingly objective part (the videos of the sun). It wouldn't fit cleanly into any current model, but it would be closer to the naturalist view than the miraculous Fatima narrative is.
I don't think it's necessarily all that weird, but I do think it's a bit of a stretch given some of the statements the apparition made. Although I'm not a Mahayana Buddhist myself (I'm Theravada), I know some of the basics of their doctrines, and one of the fundamental tenets is that bodhisattvas use culturally relevant skillful means to lead people closer to the truth according to their capabilities. Even as a Theravadin, I almost want to be convinced by Christianity sometimes because overall it offers a cleaner and easier path: you can get married, have kids, enjoy things like music and entertainment, drink, be part of a community, find churches everywhere you go, indulge your righteous anger, explore the supernatural, immerse yourself in a deep philosophical tradition, and always know that there's a being who loves you unconditionally looking over your shoulder, guiding you towards the right path. In comparison, Buddhism can seem quite depressing on the surface.
From that perspective, if I were a bodhisattva who wanted to save the most people in a Western context, I would sooner choose to manifest as a culturally-recognized figure and direct people towards a path that is somewhat realistic than Avalokitesvara. I think most Portuguese people simply wouldn't be receptive to some entity from an entirely different cultural context telling them to devote their lives to renouncing the world entirely. However, what the apparition said about Russia doesn't fit within this narrative.
The big sticking point for me is that I think the past-life memory cases collected by Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker, and others are equally, if not more, compelling than miracles like Fatima, and rebirth is incompatible with Christianity. In fact, it is probably the only thing that could empirically disprove Christianity: if rebirth were confirmed, Christianity would be disproven. So long as I believe in rebirth, I actually cannot convert to Christianity even if I want to, as I can't affirm what's needed during a baptism. I haven't yet found a satisfying way of reconciling the Catholic miracle set and the rebirth data. Among rebirth-friendly religions, Hinduism is out, I think, because another theistic religion would have that deity prioritize Hindu miracles, not Catholic ones. Buddhism remains and already posits that there is a god who misconceives of himself as God, so it would make sense that he would prioritize a single religion, like Catholicism. Combine that with Catholic selection bias given their unmatched body of miracle investigators, which could skew the data, and I tend to lean towards the view that Buddhism better accommodates both the rebirth and Catholic miracle data than Catholicism, either with a skillful-means or deluded-god explanation. But it still remains odd that there are so many Catholic-specific miracles.
I have also been confounded by the Stevenson reincarnation research, which I think is much stronger than all but a few Christian miracle claims (perhaps including Fatima). Moreover, there are also a number of relatively well-attested PROTESTANT miracles (see Craig Keener's hefty book Miracles). I have brought this up to Catholics in discussion, and it has usually been dismissed with the assertion that God can work miracles in other faiths if he likes. Surely he CAN, but it seems strange to me that he would confuse things by putting his imprimatur on a false religion.
This is why, granting there are no "natural" explanations for at least some miracle claims, I think some kind of supernaturalism that nevertheless does not entail the truth of any particular revealed religion is most likely.
As for why there are so many Catholic-specific miracles, I would say part of this is down to publicity. Catholicism, like Christianity in general, is an evangelizing religion. Any miracles that take place in a Christian context are likely to be trumpeted from the rooftops, while miracles that take place in the context of a non-evangelizing religion, or of no religion at all, might never get off the ground.
I agree overall. Even as a Buddhist, I think that the texts we have are likely corrupted by now, so even if the Buddha did figure out the truth, it's unlikely we have what he discovered. For example, one sutta says that his teachings would be corrupted within 500 years, and it's now been ~2,600. Some Buddhists try to dodge this issue by saying that this prediction is itself a corruption, but that really only serves as further proof that the texts aren't fully reliable. That doesn't mean we can't still figure out the remaining parts ourselves, as I think we have a decent basis to work with, but just that there aren't clear boxes to tick anymore, and a lot of Buddhist teachers will get it wrong, so we have to use a lot of discernment.
I think, however, that we don't necessarily need complete accuracy to get far enough. I've remained a Buddhist despite these concerns because of Buddhism's "empirical" strain. When it comes to miracles, for example, the Buddha says that one should not judge a religious system by its miracles, but instead by its spiritual fruits. It's very difficult, I think, for someone to disagree that the basic virtues of Buddhism are bad and that mindfulness and meditation have no value. Since there's no creator god in Buddhism, it sidesteps many of the hurdles to belief, like the problem of evil. The Buddha presents his own version of Pascal's wager in the suttas, which is essentially that, whether or not there's an afterlife, practicing in this life confers numerous benefits, so there's no reason not to.
All that said, I think Christianity offers a lot of benefits too. So I take the stance that there is likely more than the naturalistic worldview would have us believe, and that practicing in *some* religion that has some decent moral principles is a good bet.
I think what's missing here is that most of the reports of Mary are filtered through Lucia, a devout Catholic, and the other ones are also from Catholics. Conditional on Lucia seeing something, it doesn't really tell us much that she thought it was Mary, because of course that's what a Catholic would say. Similarly, if a miracle is supposed to prove Catholicism, it should expound Catholic teachings to non-Catholics, not Catholics; obviously Catholics are going to interpret any miracles in line with their faith.
The apparition that Lucia saw looked like Mary in every respect, down to the color of her clothing, claimed to be Mary, and talked mostly about sin, repentance, and prayer.
I can imagine a model where the supernatural is some kind of formless energy that gets filtered through the mind of whoever encounters it, takes whatever form they find most plausible, and speaks to them just as that form would speak - but that seems like an extra step.
Maybe this is just a difference in what we're expecting, but I think, conditional on something supernatural happening (like seeing a strange woman in the trees) some Catholic doctrine being tacked on is really not that surprising.
I disagree that's an extra step. I actually think it's more parsimonious than the "Catholicism is true" explanation. Like I said above, it neatly sidesteps any of the other myriad historical, scientific, and philosophical problems with the truth claims of Christianity. Conditioned on the supernatural existing, I think "all human beliefs about the supernatural have been wrong, except for the dogmas of the Catholic Church which are 100% right about everything" is much less plausible than "all or most of mankind's experiences with the supernatural are an imperfect apprehension of some other dimension of reality which we can glimpse only through a glass darkly." What do you think?
EDIT: the supernatural wouldn't necessarily have to be a kind of formless energy. It could be a whole parallel ecosystem full of all sorts of different beings/intelligences, as well as maybe non-conscious "energies" or whatever. Whether such a being, collection of beings, energy projection or what have you was INTENTIONALLY presenting itself as the Virgin or whether that was just the way easiest way for the seers' brains to process it (or is there even a difference when talking about intelligences we can't comprehend?), who knows? Obviously that is all total speculation which I don't really believe, but is it less plausible than "this was the immortal soul of a Jewish virgin who 2000 years ago gave birth to the incarnate son of a Semitic sky-god"? I don't think so.
Let me steelman Nick Keller's argument. The God/entity could be "Christian" in a VERY broad sense, while having qualities that violate fundamental teachings of the Bible. maybe the entity had nothing to do with the creation of the Bible but converted to Christianity!
Maybe the entity didn't care whether those people converted to Catholicism, and he was just using Catholicism as a tool promote his obscure purpose, and the conversions were a side effect.
Moving the goalposts? Nah, more like asking who installed these cumbersome goal posts in the first place. They are so arbitrary.
And even better, it's pretty possible for the Resurrection of Jesus or the dancing sun at Fatima took place, and for Christianity to be true, and for Catholic Christianity as practiced in Portugal of 20th Century to still be false. I guess one reason why materialism tends to reject every single thing supernatural is that, if you shed the ground a little bit, you'll instantly fall into a fractal unfalsifiable world where you can't really tell what causes what. Because the combinatorics of possible phenomenon becomes really endless.
The accounts aren't that varied, and as I mentioned in the mass hallucination section, we really don't have any other examples of a true mass hallucination. This would have to be the only one. I think if we learned that sufficiently strong expectancy effects could produce a universal, coordinated mass hallucination, that would still be pretty fascinating!
As it is, I don't think we have that expectation. Suppose I claimed to be a wizard. You and your friends agreed to test me, and, in front of all of you, I shot a fireball out of my bare hands. Would you say "whatever, we could have all been hallucinating", or would you agree this was impressive and at the very least evidence for some kind of expectancy effects beyond the usual?
I don't think everyone hearing "Jesus is Lord" inside their heads would be any more or less convincing than this - hearing voices is a typical hallucination, after all!
Ethan has a theory that God wants people to have faith but not certainty, and calibrates His miracles to convince open-minded people but leave open the possibility of skepticism.
The fireball question is just "what if I showed you strong evidence of a supernatural claim", when my point is that the evidence for the supernatural claim here - "a bunch of people experienced something weird when some kids said they would" -> "God did a miracle after telling those kids that he would" - is quite weak!
Wizards shoot fireballs out of their bare hands; that's a classic thing they do, that you would say in advance that a fantasy wizard might do, and that is totally unlike anything a normal person could do. Weird stuff happening with the sun for ten minutes is not something that the child seers could say in advance would happen, it's not like any of the miracles from the Bible, and it *is* like a bunch of other strange experiences people have reported - this could very easily be a UFO sighting story instead of a miracle story
"God doesn't give strong evidence, he only gives weak evidence to allow for faith and doubt" is certainly a common and convenient apologetic claim, but I don't see why we're obliged to give it the time of day. The Bible is full of extremely clear miracles, and never (to my knowledge) says "from now on, I'm not doing any more really obvious ones." Allowing believers to tell you what your epistemic standard should be - that never, ever receiving any strong evidence for an extremely strong claim is fine - is tantamount to accepting the belief in itself.
What an incredible write up. You manage to take the case seriously, but slowly build into giant cases against the ‘Fatima Miracle’. The evidence is so clear, and I believe we have enough. The ‘miracle’ happening all the time is enough to strongly disbelieve the ‘miracle’. The Reddit thread from sungazing is the nail in the coffin.
A phenomenon can only be a supernatural miracle if it is rare and unexplained. If it is common and unexplained it’s just an unexplained phenomenon. What’s left for there to be a miracle here?
>If it is common and unexplained it’s just an unexplained phenomenon. What’s left for there to be a miracle here?
The explanation.
How aspirin works is often quoted as something humanity doesn’t understand but is very rarely quoted as a “miracle”. Because it happens every day and is easily replicated. Seems like a similar situation here though slightly less frequent.
How does this differ from the "god of the gaps" thing? Does the history of unexplained phenomena eventually coming to have mundane explanations not lead you not to assume miracles until proven otherwise?
When atheists talk about "God of the Gaps," it feels like a cheap and easy way to shut down the discussion. So what if a person is using motivated reasoning to try to demonstrate that God exists? Is that really a reason to not take them seriously? Shouldn't you still be willing to address specific arguments they raise, even if you know you can never "convince" them? Isaac Newton approached science with this main purpose: to glorify the Christian God and to demonstrate his existence. I guarantee nobody could have talked Newton out of believing in God, but that doesn't mean his ideas weren't worthy of grappling with.
GIANT cases? Scott carefully explained these were BABY cases that need to be nurtured into something real. I think it's on that you were impressed by Scott's reasoning in this post, EXCEPT for the part where he said that this is still a big mystery.
This reminds me a lot of the Marfa Lights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights
I've been to Marfa three times, and once it was too cold to go out at night, but the other two times I definitely saw the lights at the viewing spot.
Wikipedia makes it seem like it's a simple thing - just car headlights refracting in the desert air.
On some level that has to be right. The phenomenon comes in basically two colors, that are basically "car headlight" and "car taillight". But it takes very strange forms. The lights move in weird directions, and sometimes there are one or two of them, and at least one time I saw precisely three of them pulsing and wobbling closer and farther, remaining collinear even though the angle of the line was changing. Nothing I've seen has explained why lights would do this thing, and why it would be so common at this one spot by the highway near Marfa and uncommon anywhere else.
But if the Sun Miracle is equally common at Medjugorje, then maybe there's really a lot of atmospheric effects that we just haven't figured out!
God's big solar miracle was creating the sun in the first place. And the entire cosmos around it. Compared to that, Fatima and all other miraculous illusions are paltry stuff. Fatima isn't about the existence or non-existence of God, it's about whether, if there were a god capable of creating the universe, he would have no better way of inspiring belief than some David Copperfield trick. I can hear Him saying, "What, you think Fatima was a miracle? You want to see a miracle? Wait until you learn about the immune system, black holes, DNA ..."
You might like the song, "God Wrote the Rocks": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kpzSNUJSbg
I had just finished watching a terrible sci fi movie, The Fifth Element, in which a sunlike object is hurtling twd earth and is stopped at the last minute by our hero learning to love.
Incorrect. The Fifth Element is terrific.
I'm praying for your soul my friend.
Great deep dive. The thoroughness is very admirable.
Some minor formatting oddities:
> [I would hear other
This square bracket never closes.
> she shouldn’t have missed the miracle at all2!
I think this is supposed to be a footnote, but the link isn't working properly.
Thanks, fixed.
Bruhh we already moved on to Lanciano... Get with the times🙄 Fr tho this was an amazing article, well researched yet humble in its conclusions and making way for further research to be done. Thank you for doing this
Since I haven't seen anyone else discussing it yet, I discovered when I was a child that by pressing against my eyeballs (with my eyes shut) I could trigger visual noise type images that I found fascinating. They included a sense of spinning or rotation, a sense that the images were coming towards me (I had formerly interpreted them as a sense that I was going towards Them) and a central darker area and bright corona - all similar to the images of the sun the you've described in the Fatima case (although I guess I should also say I don't tend to see strong colours). Is this a typical experience, or am I unusual in this?
These are phosphenes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene ! I get them too, and they're oddly beautiful, but they're not that similar to the Fatima event, and as far as I know aren't caused by staring at the sun.
I think there's clearly a lot of interpersonal variation in proneness to these things. If I press on my eye, I can see a bright spot opposite where I press. I don't really get any of the other stuff. I also have aphantasia (or severe hypophantasia, at least); and I have never (while awake) experienced any sort of real visual hallucinations (and not entirely for lack of trying.)
Meanwhile, I had a friend once who could apparently see all kinds of stuff just by closing her eyes, like hyperphantasia I guess. I found that pretty weird; but then, I can hear polyphonic music in my head, and I can summon the sounds of my friends' voices in my head at will (though not their faces), and sometimes have ~involuntary earworms, which I guess is not universal either...
Hah, yeah! I discovered that too, as a young child. I told my mother about it as a funny story, and the next thing I knew I was in the emergency room getting a cat scan.
Parents are weird.
Science depends on replication - if a phenomenon cannot be observed repeatedly under different conditions, then it's useless to try to model it. This remains true even if the phenomenon is real in the material world. Something which cannot be reproduced cannot be included in our models, so we might as well not worry about it. Of course, if this phenomenon *can* be reproduced, which is the point of recording evidence of similar events elsewhere in the world, then we may have something. What we need to do now is artificially recreate a Marian sighting, without telling people that is what is being done, and see if we can reproduce sightings of Mary. The conditions under which we can do this will tell us a lot about what is actually going on.
However, as a so-called liberal christian (I worship Jesus but do not believe that miracles occur today), I also come at this from an entirely different direction. There is nothing in the stories of the Jesus I believe in (a humanitarian-minded itinerant Jewish prophet) that would suggest that God the Father often appears at random times and places and produces phenomenon that seemingly accomplish nothing. If real, what good did the Fatima event do in the world? And if God is inclined to mass convert people using inexplicable natural phenomena, why send his only son into the world? According to Christian doctrine God could, if he wanted, write his name in the sky with the stars, but he doesn't. According to the gospels themselves, belief is a matter of choice, not miracles ("To this generation no sign will be given"). So a literal interpretation of Fatima is counter to my belief system (I did say I was a liberal). If God did this, he's acting inconsistently and weird. So I am disinclined to believe it. I put my prior at maybe some fraction of 1% that Fatima is real, before seeing any evidence. Having read Scott's entire post, I have not changed that assessment.
Maybe the Portuguese who were devout Catholics in 1923 happened to be the most devout Christians that have ever lived, and he decided to give Portugal a treat. There's no earthly way to measure devoutness, but SOME group of Christians had to be the most devout in history. Why not this one?
Another incredible entry for MMTYWTK. The moment I saw the title, I drop everything to read it until finish, and I'm not disappointed. I'm looking forward for the answers to those followup questions. Looks like it'll truly shed the remaining doubt regarding this phenomenon.
I'm in Indonesia, and I can testify that in my life, I can see sun clearly behind thin cloud painlessly at least 2-3 times. I can remember those because it was novel to me at that time, but after the third time it becomes just another normal phenomenon. Like purple sunset.
I'd add that we have at least one verified case where a sun miracle was occuring, and an actual group of fedora wearing atheists were present with a modified telescope, and did not see anything interesting.
>At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).
https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2009/11/22164423/p14.pdf
Those mischevious aliens!
The other miracles aren't independent events, the others happened after Fatima and were clearly influenced by it. Fatima being extraordinary, famous and well attested creates the environment for the others (not sure why Mary/sun/demons/UFOs would cooperate with religious leaders to create similar events)
Are there any things slightly similar that happened before or outside a Christian religious context?
I did include some of the pre-October-13 Fatima cases. But I think that if it's possible to, given some past suggestion, hallucinate a spinning sun, then it's possible to hallucinate a spinning sun full stop, and Fatima happening without prior cases should only be slightly impressive.
Tilly, France 1901 was similar. https://greatmonarch-angelicpontiffprophecies.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_34.html
"All the balls started from the sun, as if they had come out from behind it. When they started from the bottom of the sun, they were a little elongated like lemons, then they grew bigger; but they diminished as they came towards us, until they became very small. (NOTE: sounds like astral objects coming from behind the sun, but not like anything we know considering they diminish in size as they approach the earth. This may be a completely never before seen cosmic phenomena.)
They swayed then; one meter of earth (...) Everyone was covered: they (i.e the strange balls) were in countless quantities.
There were some green ones, some rose, some dark blue, some black (of a black of lead mine), some yellow, colour of flame, fire ... some came in large numbers to us, others went to all sides."
This is good. I hope I don’t sound like one of the dismissive internet atheists (not least since I’m a strong Christian), but you have to come in with a low probability here just by virtue of the fact that it seems odd that God would choose a miracle involving visual effects attendant to staring at the sun. There’s just an obvious category of purely naturalistic phenomena related to staring at the sun. Couple that with group psychology effects (some people interpret these experiences and others in the crowd become likelier to interpret them as significant because their neighbors are weeping and cowering) and the effects of post hoc exaggeration and it’s fairly easy for me to see a general story of how this could happen in a naturalistic context. By contrast, it seems odd that God would select this sort of phenomenon as a demonstrative miracle. Certainly very different from the principal miracles of the apostolic age, and the phenomena don’t have the intrinsic character of really relating to what is supposed to be verified in any interesting or satisfying way. With all that context, it would would probably take a lot to move the needle for me.
I remember reading the Times obituary of Lúcia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos, the one surviving child seer. It is an extraordinary story, three kids convincing a community, then two dying young and her spending the rest of her life in a covenant with bishops bothering her for more info. It feels unusual that the instigators were kids and ones who were shy about publicity rather than charismatic religious figures
A lot of Christians are very invested in making other people Christians. Seems likely some of them would lie and say they saw Mary or Jesus in order to trick others into becoming Christians.
Scott: I have Needham and Taylor (2000). If even I can access it, I presume someone else has probably already sent it on to you, but in case no-one has, where should I send it?
scott@slatestarcodex.com , thanks!
Found Campo et al (1988) too, and 2013 Croatian internet random mau123 (https://www.forum.hr/showthread.php?p=45544242) points us to a presumably accurate reproduction of Nix and Apple (1987) on someone's Myspace blog: (https://web.archive.org/web/20110417161234/http://www.myspace.com/dandylynwyne/blog/215700398)
This account reminds me of a semi-famous UFO encounter, covered well here: https://youtu.be/VIwyW83-riA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident. Basically, ~60 kids saw a "silver craft" descend, and aliens (of debatable description) came out and did various things (described differently by participants). Oddly similar to the silver sun -> hallucinations.
This is one of the episodes I had in mind when I wrote this comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more/comment/162060267).
We don't usually think of UFO/alien encounters as "miracles," but really, they are. They simply take place in the a different cultural-religious context than Catholic Christianity.
And just like with Fatima, most of the skeptical explanations strike me as a little lame (puppets, really?)
Am I the only one who sees dancing purple spots in his vision after accidentally exposing my eyes to bright light ? I thought this was a pretty common phenomenon...
By the way, if you ever get a C-shaped thing blind spot that looks like you just stared at a bright light in that shape, but you didn't, it's probably an "ocular migraine without headache" and should go away in about 20 minutes. The check is to note that you see it in both eyes, so it's not retinal. It's a neurological electrical disturbance and despite how that sounds, not a problem (unless it happens a whole lot, I guess). Just sharing.
And if you get a a sudden off-center blindspot like that in just one eye (although I think not typically C-shaped), it could be https://eyewiki.org/Acute_Macular_Neuroretinopathy . It's supposed to be quite rare, but apparently there was a surge during the pandemic. The cause is unknown, but it may be associated either with viral illness or with stimulant drugs (such as pseudoephedrine, commonly used for viral illness.) In my case it fully resolved on its own (but it lasted long enough for my opthalmologist to find objective evidence in my retina a few days after it first happened, though the subjective symptoms had greatly improved already.)
I've repeatedly had everything darken or turn pale green, for seemingly no reason at all. Inside outside, upsi- well not upside-down, but inside and outside.
oh thank god, I was getting stressed considering whether or not to convert when I know I don’t have the analytical chops to decide if the miracle is a knock down argument. since this conclusion is easier to believe & conveniently reinforces my unfounded priors, I’m just gonna choose to believe it! 😁
I don't find the 2010 Phillipines video any better than the other ones. Eyeballing it, the sky appears much brighter as the camera points down, and more normal as it points up, plus some delay as the camera adjusts. There clearly seems to be brightness correction going on in the camera that stops when the camera points away from the sun entirely (6:00) and restarts when the camera turns back toward the sun (6:25).
As for crowd reactions: I honestly don't see what the crowd is even cheering on. They certainly aren't reacting when the sky uniformly turns to night (4:03) or to the brightness of 10 H-bombs (4:23). Sure there is some synchronized clapping, but I don't see what caused it, and have you never felt the urge to join clapping in a crowd of friendly people gathering for a shared reason?
https://imgur.com/ZFXAHvw
https://imgur.com/0MRHZ8h
Thanks, this precisely states the exact same impression I had of that video.
I've commented elsewhere that I think the problem with miracle claims are not metaphysical, but in fact epistemological. What substantially can I draw from isolated second hand experiences to inform my own beliefs? Am I to adopt a philosophy based on the veracity of the given claim or is the veracity of the given claim a start to lead me into a greater search. If it's the first then I would say that is simply not how we come to believe things. How often to we disregard 99.9% of our experience to adopt the .1 as truly representing reality? If it's the second then I am thrust back into the some problem as I had when I was a Catholic raised teenager, nothing else within its dogma made any consistent sense to me so I am left being forced to believe contradictions on blind faith.
Or even more what about first hand experience? What do I make of certain Calvinist figures who tell me that they have had firsthand experiences of God so veridical that it is impossible to be wrong about them and what God has told them is the Catholic Church is actually a satanic cult. What if I am one of those Calvinists. Do I simply disregard what God is directly telling me and also not question why a God who is supposed to on my side allowing me to believe that in the first place?
Wait, why is Lubbock a surprising place for a miracle? Having grown up there, I didn't actually find its inclusion in the list surprising at all. People were constantly telling me about miracles they believed they'd experienced, throughout my childhood. It's an incredibly churchy place. (Mostly Protestant, granted, but also the sort of place where Protestants see Catholics as important allies in the fight against Worldly Evil, who just happen to be tragically going to Hell).
On an a completely (though also not at all) unrelated note, this reminded me a bit of something I experienced as a child. One night, maybe around 2:00 AM, my mom woke up me and my sister and, in hushed and frightened tones, asked us to look at something in the back yard. There, through a screen door, I witnessed one of the strangest things I'd ever seen. Something bizarre was draped over our back fence. It was green and glowing, like a an uneven blob of cartoon radioactive waste, or a mass of blankets covered in bioluminescent moss.
After a minute of staring in which the word "alien" might have been spoken, I decided to go outside and approach it, to the strong objections of my mom and sister. As I got close enough to make out the details, there was a moment of confusion as it seemed that the mass was surprisingly translucent, and then illusion collapsed. The entire thing was light from our neighbor's porch lamp, broken up by random shadows, not actually green, but the muddy yellow-green of a cheap fluorescent bulb. I don't even think it was a new porch lamp- we'd just never looked at the pattern of light and shadow before with an expectation of seeing something otherworldly.
When I informed my mom and sister, they didn't believe me at first- it took repeated reassurances to convince them to approach for a better look. Many years later, as an adult, I brought up the experience while visiting, thinking it might have been a dream, but both of them remembered it vividly. I think it may have contributed to my eventual decision to become an atheist- in a way, kind of a miracle in reverse.
Maybe this is my coastal elite snobbery talking. I haven't been to Lubbock, but I've been to some other parts of Texas pretty close by, and I don't know - it just looked like a lot of McDonalds, parking lots, and cow farms with silly names. Somehow it seems like a city should have either McDonalds or apparitions of the Virgin Mary, not both at once. It also has - sorry, no offense - a silly name.
My intuition is the opposite - banal circumstances are *exactly* where/when I most expect Marian apparitions.
My expectations may have been influenced by this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYFNQyN46i0
See my comment below, *pardner.*
Or actually, you know what—I'll summarize here, to save you the trouble... because that's just how considerate West Texans are, *amigo* (& also we're not passive-aggressive or anything, either–):
Lubbock is actually probably my favorite city, out of all of 'em in which I've lived (& I *think* I've lived in an unusually large number of different places!). Life in Lubbock is just... extremely *convenient,* you know? Doesn't have any of the shit I had to learn to deal with elsewhere: everything from toll roads to icy ones, from rude clerks to unfriendly neighbors, from non-spicy "hot" sauce to non-existent breakfast-burrito stands/food-trucks (if you can imagine)...
I love the people—both the rubberheads¹ & the rednecks—and the weather, too. Sure, the scenery ain't much to look at... but I don't really bother going outside, 'less I can't help it; and—if you *are* forced to leave the dim cool quiet of your sanctum sanctorum—you can't beat that dry, hot sun... IMO!
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¹(aka: Hispanic/Mexican oilfield workers. at least, that's what my coworkers—9/10th Hispanic, mostly Mexican but with some Cubans & one Honduran thrown in—would call each other, jokingly; I'D never heard it before & have no idea whence it is derived, heh.)
Man, who would have guessed that 25K words in and the answer turns out to be...roundworm infection!
re: "Cloud coronae are caused by quantum diffraction of sunlight as it enters clouds" -- I don't think you need anything "quantum" here, I think you only need "light is a wave", which classical physicists knew
(I think this based on this convo with Claude: https://claude.ai/share/8b0c6a69-848b-4fe1-9add-cb2d4fcee8e5)
I agree -- the "quantum" stuff comes from what seems to be a single passage of text, copied and pasted across many sketchy online sources, for which I had trouble identifying the origin. Wikipedia makes no mention of it.
I am impressed, and filled with admiration, that you would dedicate so much time to faithfully investigating an idea like this, despite having a very high prior that it is false.
I once did a (much lesser) analysis like this when I was younger. There is a passage in the Qur'an which appears to approximate the speed of light to a very high accuracy. But it turns out that because of the way this passage was worded and the way time dilation works, that there was nothing impressive about the approximation: almost any number would have resulted in a close approximation. This occurs because in order to get any really big time dilation you have to be going really close to the speed of light, which means that any description of time dilation (hours for weeks etc), if you back the numbers out, will spit out something really close to the speed of light.
After that I adjusted my prior for "weird thing I can't explain is not a miracle" very, very high. I think the numbers you offer in your example bayesian are probably off -- 1% chance of their being a god who works miracles like the fatima sun thing sounds way, way too high to me. First of all given the number of miracles and weird events that people claim versus the number that are debunked, 1% seems HUGE. But also it isn't just that there are alternative natural explanations for this phenomenon: there are also alternative supernatural phenomenon. It could be a wizard who is bored and decides to mess with some people in Portugal. It could be Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, who is just being super misunderstood.
I think the LHC physicists were demanding improbability levels of something like 1 x 10 ^ -10. I'm not sure exactly where my prior against weird unexplained stuff being divine providence is, but I would imagine it's something at least that extreme.
I would also point out that my phrasing here was intentionally specific: "weird thing I can't explain is not a miracle" is chosen because a) it's gotten debunked a lot but also b) MIRACLES DON'T LOOK LIKE WEIRD STUFF! If you read any holy text, any mythology, no gods are ever doing weird stuff. The God of Moses does not make the sun wiggle for unclear reasons: he acts directly, obviously, and often extremely militarily. He parts the sea that is blocking your retreat. He kills the children of your enemies. He makes clear demands of political leaders! Similarly, the Gospels contain accounts of the messiah, clearly and plainly stating his will prior to effecting miraculous action for clear purpose. And when you get out of Judeo-Christian mythology matters only become clearer still. Zeus is not subtle!
I think that's way too extreme in the *other* direction. Put it this way: how many like judgements do you think you can make before getting one wrong? Do you think you could make ten billion such claims and be right every single time? If no, then "1 / 1 × 10¹⁰" seems too certain.
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Good point about the way miracles are reported in holy texts—either the Intervention Budget has been dialed back a good bit, or something else is going on...
I suppose one could say something such as "maybe these Fatima-style miracles were going on all the time back then too, we just don't hear about them because they didn't seem all that unusual to the believers of the time & the major miracles got top billing anyway"... but then (even granting, arguendo, that standards for "miracle" have slipped), you're left with "well, but why have the major sort seemingly tapered off since then?"
Probably some Catholic & Muslim theologians have noticed & addressed this—perhaps "miracles were for the time before Jesus/Muhammad, but now we have the New Covenant / Final Miracle"?—but I don't actually know what they say!
Yes, I think I could get ten billion and get them all right. There are eight billion people in the world, and most of them are superstitious. I am very confident that if we went through those claims we would get well over ten billion, and fewer than one in ten billion would be true. Probably far fewer.
And that's sort of my point: the number of false claims of supernatural causes if you go looking for them is ENORMOUS. You need an appropriately big filter or you get epistemically mugged.
I spent years of my life writing a book on the paranormal where the gimmick was to intensely pursue leads on stories only from people known to me, who I would not dismiss as liars. Filing FOIs, travelling to interview people who were there, etc.
The result, paradoxically, was that I became more open to some unknown phenomena existing (a couple of them were really hard to explain) but much more skeptical of any particular case. Honest people are just way more easily contaminated by suggestion than I could've imagined.
Can you tell me more? Did you ever publish the book?
What I don't love about the Miracle of the Sun is God's style. "Hey everyone, look what I can do! Trippy, eh? NOW do you believe?" Feels like stage magic, rather cheap. Even if it does prove a supernatural power, I doubt it's God. Has the signature of a lower deity, an adolescent deity, one I don't trust.
"If they were God they'd do things the way I want" is perhaps not the test people should be using.
A plausible motive would make the miracle claim more likely to be true, since the claim is of an intentional act. Whether a death is ruled a homicide or an accident can hinge on the presence of a plausible motive, for instance.
Plausibility is a different bar. Stage magic has a plausible motive, let alone a miracle. The plausible motive in Fatima is showing "I control the sun and sky, so respect me."
Plausibility also requires an upper limit of human comprehension. If you limited intelligence to "things that make sense to your cat" you'd probably throw out most of the economy. A cat will never respect the decision to buy batteries. They may or may not respect shoes.
Fantastic post! In this pattern of reasoning "E seems extraordinary and like good evidence for X, but we actually have a bunch more E hanging around that hasn't been accounted for", there seems to be some generalizable principle, but I'm not sure what it would be exactly. Reminds me of the Mormonism-as-a-control-group idea.
Twenty-nine *thousand* words on this subject, and none of them are "unidentified", "flying", or "object". Well, OK, there are a few uses of that last, but in the strained phrasing of "UFO-like object", as if we are preemptively discounting the possibility that sun miracles are actually UFOs.
Sun miracles are actually UFOs, full stop. Not "flying saucers", not "alien spaceships", maybe "divine miracles", but definitely "unidentified flying objects". We invented that last phrase for a reason, and this is exactly that reason.
Which means, the thing I learned from this is that the younglings have completely forgotten all that was learned in the Before Times about UFOs. And that, in this context, Scott is a youngling - UFOs seem to have faded from pop culture in the 1990s. Thanks for making me feel old, Scott :-)
With the benefit of age and experience, I read the first few paragraphs, made the tentative conclusion that this was almost certainly [see section 6], but figured Scott wouldn't be doing this deep a dive if it was that simple. And here we are. It probably is just that simple, and now we can back that up with a fairly exhaustive look at the alternatives. For which, unironically, thank you Scott. It's good to sometimes double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the obvious conclusion.
But for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, who were "rationalists" when rationalism hadn't been invented and we had to call ourselves "skeptics", UFOs were as important a subject of rationalist/skeptical inquiry as is AI risk today (and for about the same reason). People learned an awful lot in those days. One of those things is that most people don't spend much time really looking at the sky and will consistently fail to recognize even slightly-unusual phenomena, like the sun partially veiled by clouds. And the other, more important thing is that when presented with an image they don't recognize, people will very predictably see what their culture has taught them to expect to see.
In 1880s-1890s America, any weird thing in the sky was clearly a fantastic airship, built by some mad scientist out of a Jules Verne novel, and was perceived with a wealth of surrounding detail all aligned with that model. 1950s-1980s America, the same things were clearly "flying saucers", fantastic alien spaceships piloted by little green or grey men, with the same level of impossible detail. And anywhere you've got ten thousand devout Catholics fervently hoping to see a Miracle involving the Sun, and the weather makes the sun look a bit wonky...
For an old-school skeptical experiment at understanding this effect,
https://centerforinquiry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1980/04/22165441/p34.pdf
TL, DR, a gathering of UFO enthusiasts expecting to see a flying saucer in the night sky, are presented with thirty seconds of a monochromatic point source of light at ground level, stationary and unchanging except for one brief interruption. What is perceived, is an object high in the sky with finite angular size and geometric shape, of multiple colors, and conspicuously moving, all consistent with the pop-culture concept of a flying saucer and not some prankster with a spotlight.
I considered the UFO angle (I was looking for an excuse to have the section title "Virgin Galactic"), but I couldn't get anything out of it. Yes, you can think of the weird dancing sun as a UFO. What does that demonstrate? That it was aliens? Seems unlikely - all of this was predicted by a vision of the Virgin who said a lot of stuff about which Catholic prayers people should say when. Why would aliens pretend to be the Virgin Mary, appear to a young girl, and tell her lots of things about which Catholic prayers to say?
Who said anything about aliens? I explicitly said "not alien spaceships". And the 'U' in "UFO" means "not any specific thing that we know of". UFOs are almost certainly not alien spaceships, and are only mistaken for alien spaceships who've been watching too much mid-20th-century Sci Fi. UFOs, are just people seeing something they don't understand and trying to interpret it by an overweighted, culturally-transmitted prior. Which differs from culture to culture.
And that's something we know a lot about. Which you seem to have independently rediscovered, but I can't help thinking you'd have got there a lot faster if you'd had a proper map of the territory. A map which includes no aliens outside of the imaginary sort.
Does saying "UFO" communicate anything interesting without the alien angle?
I.e., if one means only, literally, "an unidentified object in the sky"—well, we got as much from the description of the event; using explicitly the initialism "U.F.O." seems merely a matter of taste, after that.
I really don't think it was aliens (among many, many other reasons, why did so many people see the flying object and so many others not?) - but the "why'd they do this?" would be pretty solid! They're playing nasty games! Same reason so many later abductees got anally probed, and same reason so many farmers' crops got knocked down in circles!
Ra appeared in order to display His glory to an errant local population. He revealed Himself that he might turn them away from the false gods (three in number) that they had been worshipping. If it was a test, they flunked. They could describe their experiences only in terms of the stories they had learned as children. In sadness, Ra paddled his barque back to Heliopolis, there to recover from the whole exhausting (and deflating) experience. He will try again when He again believes that humanity has evolved sufficiently to apprehend His glory, but he's beginning to be concerned that this belief might be merely a delusion rooted in his own mishegas. The Fatima experience was a tough one for Him and He'll likely give it a rest for a while.
For a long time scientists dismissed ancient accounts of rocks falling from the sky as fanciful myths.
"The celestial origin of meteoric iron had been recognized at an early date, although it was disregarded subsequently. A fall of meteorites in 644 B.C. is noted in Chinese records. Another famous meteorite is the one that fell in 466 B.C. at Aegospotamos in Thrace, as recorded on the Parian marble. It is mentioned by Pliny and Plutarch. ... In 1794 the German philosopher Chladni drew attention to the extra-terrestrial source of such iron masses, but his explanation was rejected by scientific men. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century these wanderers from outer space were regarded as mere eccentricities, the French Academy of Science going so far as to vote that there was no such thing as celestial metal. Directors of museums were ashamed to exhibit specimens reported as having fallen from the sky. Not until the great shower of meteorites fell on April 26, 1803, at L’Aigle, in Normandy, was the question definitely settled. That strange spectacle was witnessed by thousands of persons, and focused the attention of scientific men, so as to prompt serious inquiry. The Minister of the Interior sent the scientist Biot to the spot to make a careful investigation, the result of which was a report, to the National Institute of France, confirming the extra-terrestrial origin of the stones. These facts must have escaped the notice of the American public, for in 1807 when President Jefferson was told that Professors Silliman and Kingsley had described a fall of stones from the sky at Weston, in Connecticut, he remarked: “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors will lie than to believe that stones will fall from heaven.” At L’Aigle more than two thousand meteoric fragments fell over an area of twenty square miles. They were stony in substance, but they contained 10 per cent of nickel-iron."
T. A. Rickard, Man and Metals, volume 2, p. 847-848
Fantastic
I'm sure the answer you were looking for was hiding in that fifth reddit link you didn't click.
What about that African elementary school where like a hundred kids all saw a UFO land and reported it and the aliens very consistently? This kind of thing happens to big groups all the time. A couple of hundred eyewitness accounts is nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident
I think that's a good bit weaker due to (a) a smaller number of people, (b) those people being only rural school-children, and (c) no distant eyewitnesses outside the crowd. Are there many other events that share the "hundreds or thousands of witnesses, including many well-educated sorts, and including witnesses not in the main crowd" trifecta?
(Note that this is meant to explain the *allure* of Fatima, in particular—i.e., whether or not it is *actually the case,* it's at least *commonly reported* that some people in other towns & in the countryside also witnessed the phenomenon: hence why it might seem more unusual than the African Schoolchildren Claim UFO Sighting case... although that one is *also* interesting, heh; I'd not, heretofore, ever heard of it.)
a) 65 is still a lot, same OOM in terms of actual number of *accounts* if not attendees - I'm very skeptical of the number of attendees reported - why wouldn't everyone have an incentive to vastly exaggerate the number of attendees at Fatima?
b) rural Portuguese semi-peasants would have made up the vast majority of attendees, titles at the time like doctor, lawyer, mathematician were vastly less gatekept than today, not sure how much better that is than kids -- deeply susceptible to mass bias
c) distant eyewitnesses thoroughly debunked/explained in this particular case (Fatima) by Scott's thoughts, imo, while of course alien abduction/visitation witnesses are probably the only thing more common than sun miracle witnesses across the world
UFOs and greys need more explanation than sun miracles, from my perspective
> he has only a few potshots about crowd psychology and “optical phenomena”.
Should have gone with "phytoplankton".
Here’s my theory for what explains the two different light sources seen in the sky:
> The 42° source corresponds to the elevation we would expect the sun to be at in southern Portugal on October 13 around solar noon. It’s diffuse because it’s hidden behind clouds, just as it was all morning.
> So what is the 30° light source? Dalleur suggests it’s whatever object the witnesses are describing as spinning, moving, and changing color. They’re mistaking it for the sun because the real sun is hidden behind clouds. For a bright round sun-sized object in the sky during the day not to be the sun, isn’t really in most people’s hypothesis space.
> The paper stops here, but I’m not sure why. Given a distance, an angle, an apparent size (the size of the sun disc), and basic trigonometry, you should be able to calculate the object’s elevation and true size. Do this, and you find that the light source is two miles high and about 200 feet in diameter. That’s about the size of a 747, at about half the 747’s usual cruising altitude.
Ok I have a theory here that, combined with the psychological priming, uncommon weather phenomenon, and somewhat inconsistent testimony, that might explain why this looked the way it did.
The object that was about 2 miles high, and possibly rotating was a World War 1 observation balloon covered in either cellulose dope, or linseed oil. When freshly applied (and these were both used to make the fabric observation balloons hydrogen-tight) they can give a glossy look (or possibly some sort of rubber). Now the balloons we have pictures of are all painted in drab colors to be less visually distinct, but it’s completely possible a balloon could be painted in a shiny/reflective color, or a balloon covered in a rubberized covering of some sort that gathered a lot of condensation and thus became reflective.
Combine this with both the sun and this balloon passing behind the clouds, and you might see the sun jump from one place to another, between the reflecting balloon and the sun itself. If the balloon was of the round sort it could be rotating by the wind to slightly alter the angle of reflection, making it look like it was shimmering in a way no one had seen before. It would also explain why some people would claim to see the clouds pass behind this “sun.”
This might also explain it coming down to earth. The balloon landed somewhere nearby.
The reason this balloon was there could be anything from some military men wanting to get a good look at the miracle that was about to happen, (ChatGPT says Portugal did have weather balloons during WW1), to a nefarious actor attempting to pull of some sort of con to make you Catholic, to someone just wanting to make a prank and it being way more effective than they thought.
Most people would never have seen a balloon at this time, and if it was up in the clouds and a different color than normal, then those few who knew what a balloon normally looks like might not know what they were seeing.
Anyway that is my theory to fill in the gaps for the stranger claims you see with this. I honestly think that the claims made are very weak, as it’s totally legitimate to say that “Just because I can’t explain exactly what happened, doesn’t mean your explanation of a miracle happening is correct.” If our ignorance of an explanation of a thing (either due to lack of information or lack of current understanding) equates to the claim of a miracle happening, then in this very big world there are going to be unlikely events that for one reason or another lack explanation, and thus miracles are almost certainly to happen with or without divine intervention.
Very interesting analysis, only read about 1/3 so far - beginning and the end, but pleased with the level of rigor here, thanks for putting the work in
Great work.
I will say that I find it interesting that so many of the testimonies seem to focus on the collective nature of the event (ie. what the people around the viewer were seeing and experiencing) as much as what the viewer themselves is experiencing. By default, I might assume that if I were to view such an impressive and miraculous event, I would have a much stronger recollection of the event itself, and my own reactions, than the reactions of those around me. To me, this provides some amount of evidence for the power of suggestion being a major piece in this puzzle. You can think of a domino effect, where the experiencing of being surrounded by people in awe only serves to intensity your own mental imagery.
Is there any accounting for the kids knowing this was something that happened there? Otherwise that needs explaining. (I basically believe in non miraculous miracles)
The fundamental issue I have with this seems to be an assumption that is never addressed. How valuable is a bunch of eyewitness testimony? You model seems to be presuming validity which can be properly lowered by psychological factors and not properly lowered by the idea of "mass hallucination" because the evidence for such a phenomenon is very low.
The problem is this isn't an accurate model, eyewitness testimony is actually baseline awful. If you went out and got a hundred testimonies of an event and asked how many people could give you a roughly accurate description of the event without any false data you'd be moderately lucky to get one and there's no chance you'll get more than five.
Let's take for example this chart of witness statements about the killing of Michael Brown that happened in 2014.
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/newshour/app/uploads/2014/11/table-finalfinalup4.png
If you have this chart and try to estimate how many shots were fired, if you're like me you'll probably center around eight, and then you may read news reports, as many of the people did, saying two shots were fired in the car and Brown was shot six times and conclude this makes sense.
Except we know the actual answer and the actual answer is twelve. An answer that literally does not appear on the chart (except for the 'at least' answers which range from 3-7 who get technically correct awards).
Now you can still tease out some information from these accounts, though unlike our Fatima accounts these have already been selected for not getting basic details wrong or contradicting themselves, but you must treat this data with an extreme amount of suspicion. Now, I picked a relatively fraught example because it had the media attention to do things like make nice charts, but this effect reproduces everywhere.
This doesn't feel like the way our brains work, it doesn't feel like if you're looking at people in a police lineup your error rate will go up if you look at all the options at once instead of sequentially, but that's the case. It doesn't feel like a bunch of people's memories will change just because they read a news report the next day but that's the case.
Taken in this light the evidence for a miracle is much, much weaker
I think there's a large difference between "multiple people *forgetting or misremembering some details within the framework of a real, well-agreed-upon event"* (e.g.: witnesses seemed to agree that shots were fired & merely disagreed on the number), and "multiple people *confabulating an entire event from start to finish."*
I.e., taking the Brown shooting example as our guide, we'd say that we expect that (a) the eyewitnesses did see something and reported the basic skeleton of the event correctly, and (b) the individual details draped upon that skeleton are likely to be mixed up or incorrect in particulars. This pattern, applied to Fatima, still leaves us with quite a mystery (& even sort of explains away some of the skeptical objections as to "why do people report different colors in different orders, if it was real?" & the like)!
Hey! Don't you dare knock Lubbock, amigo...
No, for real, it's great! I have lived an unusually large number of places (when I was a kid, the longest my parents stayed in a single location was three years; as an adult, my longest-held job involved moving wherever they told me; and I also briefly lived in South America & Europe for love, or "love", respectively–)...
...and my favorite place of all—the city I'd probably live in could I live anywhere—is Lubbock, TX. If it didn't have motherfcuking tornadoes, it'd be perfect.
Granted, I'm a bit of a weirdo, in many respects (after ND & WA, I never want to live somewhere that isn't hot, dry, and sunny, *ever again*); but still—I've just never lived anywhere...
...*easier,* if you know what I mean. Friendly people, who stay out of your business if you don't want 'em to be in it & are always ready to help if you do; flat & open country, with good roads, mild traffic, lots of space, lots of parking; "shorts & T-shirt" weather most of the year; great (Tex-)Mexican food (& great Norteño & cumbia music on the radio!)—plus lots of pretty college Latinas; good service, good variety, everything's open when you want it to be¹...
Love it, man. It's the best. Wish I hadn't moved away!
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¹(after Germany, I'll never take that for granted again—same reason I mention parking, heh; wouldn't have been on my wish-list, before... I'm traumatized forever by Wiesbaden–)
Thinking about my prior on miracles and the divine, it would be weird if God were real and manifested Himself to 100,000 people a year in such an arbitrary way. We also have a suspiciously low number of miracles that aren't purely experiential. So my prior is "trapped" in the sense that I'm not going to start updating on God if we keep hearing that small numbers of believers directly experienced something; if He starts conjuring monolithic crosses of depleted uranium or Christian countries start winning every war I'm open to the possibility.
In the "one good video", it does seem to me like the brightness of the sun seems correlated with the orientation of the camera: when the camera is pointing closer toward the ground the sun gets brighter, and when the camera goes up (pointing toward the sky) the sun gets dimmer. This makes it look like it might be an artifact of the camera somehow (although it still seems weird, since the changes seem too dramatic to just be a brightness adjustment)
This is my first comment - I'm planning on making a couple more. In this comment, I am going to focus on responding to Scott's rebutting defeaters to Dalleur's reconstruction in Section 4.
re Objection #1: "Why don't we have more testimony from distant witnesses?"
--(Sampling bias) Whereas there were systematic efforts to elicit and record the testimony of witnesses at the Cova, the same can't be said for witnesses in surrounding villages.
--(Cloud cover) A source at 1.5km could be obstructed by cloud decks with bases in the same range. Meteorological data and eyewitness testimony agree that the region was under a stratocumulus deck during the Miracle of the Sun. You agknowledge this point later.
--(Line-of-sight) If LSa was only 1–2 km above the terrain, then its apparent elevation drops sharply with distance. Most towns around Fátima sit in hilly terrain. Local ridges rise 2–4° above the horizon as seen from many village centers. At 20km away, the source would be at a 4° apparent elevation which could easily be obstructed by ridges, trees, and buildings.
You write "Against this, the child 6 miles from Fatima and the schoolboy 8 miles from Fatima both described huddling in terror, thinking the world was coming to an end. This doesn’t sound like something only slightly visible as an odd flickering on the horizon. If Dalleur’s location hypothesis is correct, then the child is only 3 miles from the event source - the same distance as Fatima - but the schoolboy is still about 10 miles. Dalleur must believe that the event seemed cataclysmic up to at least a 10 mile radius. So where are all the other distant witnesses?"
The Lourenço brothers were not alone. They were part of a larger company that included their schoolteacher, her daughter, other teachers, and several inhabitants of Alburitel. They claim that there were alarmed by cries in the street, implying that it was a communal event, not something that only they saw. That demonstrates that there is a reportage bias - we only have recorded testimony from a small fraction of the distant witnesses that we know of.
re Objection #2: "What about the negative testimony from Leonor?"
First, Alburitel would have seen the source about ~1–1.5° higher than Torres Novas - which is a big deal when you are dealing with low angles. Alburitel sits on higher ground with gentler relief on the azimuth toward the Fatima plateau. Torres Novas is in a basin ringed by the ridges of the Serra de Aire. Leonor’s car was stuck in a ditch on uneven terrain. The nearby bank itself could have completely obscured a low-horizon object like LSa. Leonor mentions that there was persistent rain at her location while she was stuck in the ditch - her slice of sky never opened. These factors could easily explain why it was visible from Alburitel but not from Torres Novas.
Second, inattentional blindness is real and powerful. Leonor wasn't expecting a sky miracle, she didn't know in advance the time the event was supposed to occur, she was on the move, and she clearly would have been distracted by the fact that she was delayed/her car had broken down. It is totally possible there was something visible in the sky from her vantage point and she didn't notice. We have examples of a driver that was within a hundred meters of the crowd at the Cova and was oblivious to the fact that a massive crowd had worked itself up into a frenzy.
You say "Believers argue that Torres Novas’ view of the event was blocked by the hills. But as we saw above, if we believe Dalleur’s location, we can use trigonometry to estimate the light source’s elevation at >1 mile. This could not have been blocked by the small hills near Torres Novas, and so the explicit negative evidence from Constancio - not to mention the implicit negative evidence from the other 40,000 residents of Torres Novas - becomes damning."
This is misleading. What matters is not the absolute altitude of the source, but its apparent angular elevation from Torres Novas. From ~18 km away, a source 1–1.5 km above the Fátima plateau appears at only 3–5° above the horizon. That’s extremely low. The sightline to a 1.5 km-high source crosses ~335–420m asl at 3 km. Those are exactly the elevations of the nearby ridges north of Torres Novas. So it is expected that from many vantage points in town, a 4° object would be hidden by surrounding relief. Leonor's eye level would have been several meters lower than the general terrain. Her viewing position was as unfavorable as possible.
re Objection #3: "Why didn't LSa heat the area directly beneath it?"
This objection assumes uniform, isotropic IR emission. Dalleur's analysis indicates that the IR flux from LSa was directional. If it were diffuse, it wouldn't have produced the IR shadows that are depicted in the certified photographs - that suggests a collimated beam aimed at the Cova.
re Objection #4 "Given the cloud cover, how could distant witnesses have seen anything at all?"
Each location’s line of sight to the luminous source pierced the cloud deck at a different distance and angle, so each town required its own local gap. Stratiform rain clouds naturally form such patchy, kilometer-scale breaks, so it is not unrealistic that some places (Cova, Minde, Alburitel) had clear corridors while others (Torres Novas) remained under rain. The cloud breaks needed at each town would not have to have been exotic or improbably coordinated (but it wouldn't be too much of a problem for the miracle hypothesis if they were).
re Objection #5 "Dalleur claims the light source was not the sun at all, but some sort of artificial miraculous object. But if this were true, how did the miracle end? No witness describes seeing the pale sun disappear. They only say it went back to its usual place in the sky. Later in the day, the clouds cleared and it became a normal sunny day. But nobody reports seeing two suns. At some point, either the first light source must have vanished (which would have been noticed), or there must be two suns in the same sky (which would also have been noticed). Therefore, it seems like the miraculous light source must have been the sun after all, which throws Dalleur’s calculations into disarray."
The witness accounts describe an abrupt transition where the light source went from being 'pale and moonlike' to regaining its former brilliance. There are also reports of vertical motion throughout the event. Those observations support the 'optical blending' theory of how the miracle ended: as LSa shifted in brightness and apparent position, it was choreographed to 'merge' with the true solar disk hidden behind a thin cloud. From the perspective of observers, the distinct pale 'sun' did not vanish in midair or split into two bodies, but instead seemed to 'return back to normal' when the two images merged. Rival theories have a hard time accommodating an abrupt transition 'back to normal.'
re Objection #6 "Mark Grant disagrees with Dalleur's analysis of the photographs."
Mark Grant is very smart - he is the skeptic that I respect the most - but I think that his analysis of the photographic evidence is flawed (especially his analysis of the IR shadows). I plan to respond to him at length, but that will require me to write an entire article.
This is nice, but I'm lazy and I want correct answers quickly. Many people dismissed the miracle on much less work than this - correctly, I think you'd say - but you also (correctly, IMO) criticise their reasoning. So what gives?
I think there are really obvious errors in Ethan's analysis of the testimonies. He says - well it could be one of 5-odd very specific kinds of event that causes people not to tell the truth, and we have evidence against them all, so they must have been telling the truth. But we know that reliable lie detection is very hard, and that regular people are super bad at it, so we've extremely strong reasons to think the efforts of the few amateurs who interviewed them can't be very informative on this and the details of how they were interviewed are relatively unimportant*, and so the records aren't sufficient to rule out the possibility that the girls were, for one reason or another, saying things that weren't true. So how did he err? Well I think centrally the problem was what I described above: he decided that the only way to say something that isn't true is to be exhibiting one of 5-ish very specific psychological conditions and so finding inconsistencies with any of these conditions was sufficient to establish truthfulness.
This seems to be a robust general crankish tactic: make your preferred argument flexible and your opposition brittle. I fell for it with LK-99: I thought well, there's strong measured diagmagnetism (ruling out ferromagnetism, I thought), and it floats (ruling out known non-superconducting forms of diamagnetism, I still think) so it must be something novel and exotic or a superconductor. But actually diagmagnetism and ferromagnetism often co-occur. I thought I'd laid out the whole opposition, but I'd inadvertently strawmanned it. At the same time I did allow flexibility on the "LK-99 is superconducting" side. No-one had measured 0 resistance after all, so already any naive theory of it being a superconductor was ruled out. I think it's generally best to be flexible on both sides: yes, God can grant specific people visions, but yes also kids can fool adults, or be confused in ways that aren't specifically described in published psychology papers, or be a bit confused and embellish a bit as well.
So what then about the harder to explain weird sun stuff? Well Ethan at least employs the same tactic as for the kids truthfulness: consider a few specific explanations, dismiss them. But for exactly the same reason, this isn't compelling. This much I'd thought already.
On further reflection: I think you could in principle make a compelling argument that this was a very extraordinary event: to start with, it was a "called shot" so it would be surprising if it were even a particularly uncommon natural event (unless it's the sort of thing that can be expectation-induced), and there was a lot of attestation so it can't be something that depends on some individual person being weird. So all you'd need, in some sense, is a compelling case that the attested phenomena–or anything that could be mistaken for them with a bit of priming–were very unusual among cases of Sun-inspection. This hypothesis really does cover "all natural explanations", or at least does a much better job of it than the grab bag of ad-hoc alternatives. But this is hard to show precisely because Sun-inspection is rare, and we might suspect that this difficulty is not independent of the miracle's having come to our attention in the first place.
So the general rule I'm advocating is: if someone's advocating an unexpected claim on the grounds that all of the alternatives fail, expect them to start with a compelling argument that they've actually caught *all* of the alternatives, at least to a certain level of probability, and surveys, brainstorms, convenient samples and lists of alternatives do not rise to that standard.
*save that they involved no surprising concordances in testimony on facts which the girls could not have coordinated on in advance
And here I thought Chesterton invented the idea of medicinal sungazing. (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/204/pg204-images.html#chap10)
Fantastic article, but I think there's not enough discussion of the fact that this is their best miracle. If there were 75 better miracles we'd be talking about those instead. So we shouldn't be asking how this miracle updates our priors. Instead we should be asking how does finding out this is what people think is the most compelling miracle update our priors. Personally, I think conditional on religion being true I would expect much more compelling miracles. Conditional on religion being false I think this is about what I would expect for most compelling miracle (quite compelling if it was the only thing to have ever happened, but history is long and our knowledge very incomplete, so I'd expect some strange, unexplained phenomena). From this perspective, I think it's more reasonable than you argue for a skeptic to dismiss it without having a plausible alternative explanation.
Here are some rough numbers for how I think about it. Say we're the first human on Earth. What should our estimated odds on Christianity be. Extremely low. I'll make up something like 10^-100. There are many, many totally crazy claims and it is also just extremely specific, so if no one had every conceived of it, it would have extremely, extremely low odds. On the other hand there are probably like 10^90 equivalently strange religions possible. So the odds one of them is true is like 10^-10 (If you think this is too low, consider that this is before there was any evidence for any religion at all except the existence of the planet. Under these conditions I think the idea that there is a religion as strange as Christianity is extremely low). Now consider that we're given information on the strength of the evidence for the most convincing miracle for the most common religion in the world.
In this case Fatima. I'll call it a 60/100 (if you think this is low consider that we could have the entire sky filled with CHRISTIAN GOD IS TRUE. I WILL NOW MY SON JESUS CHRIST TO EVERY MAN ALIVE. The sun dancing seems to be much less obvious than what you expect for the best miracle 3 millions years ago if Christianity was true, even if you think it is extremely convincing.)
So what are the prior distributions on best miracle for our two scenarios. For me something like:
Christianity True: 70% 100 (why wouldn't god make it obvious) 30% uniform from 50-100
Christianity False: uniform from 30-70
So basically there was like a 25% chance that we'd see a best miracle this good if Christianity is false and only like a 6% chance we'd get a best miracle so poor if Christianity is true. This is all overwhelmed by my 10^-10 prior against, but if anything I consider it evidence against Christianity.
More convincing for our guy from 3 million years ago is actually that billions of people believe it. I would have put low priors on that. That should be a solid update (though it is also mixed up with the miracles as well. People are more likely to believe if the miracles are good, so you don't want to double count). But we know it can't be too big because Christianity and Islam can't both be true, so clearly billions can believe without truth. Still I'll randomly update to like 10^-6 split between Christianity, Islam, other religions, and the nameless 10^90 relatively equally.
> at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused.
I would be grateful if you would say more on this. I feel I have a sufficiently strong prior (maybe a "trapped prior") that I can't see myself tilting towards the belief of "God being real" such that I'll alter my behaviour.
May only apply to Fatima and not an independent explanation, but there was significant hunger and food shortage at the time. This might have created a population more likely to experience this phenomenon or for it to have greater intensity.
Well, I may have been nerd-sniped, but I don't actually have the leisure time to be nerd-sniped all in one go. So having read only the first few paragraphs, I'm going to register a prediction on my future mindset when I finish (which may be several days, or possibly weeks).
Conditional on this article convincing me that The Miracle doesn't have any remotely-plausible non-supernatural explanation, I still won't update my belief that it was caused by YHWH[1] to any higher than third place, after "aliens" or "glitch/test/Easter Egg in the matrix," not necessarily in that order.
The reasons being twofold. First, both of the former two require smaller updates away from my belief in a lawful, reductionist-materialist universe. Admittedly it's not *a lot* smaller for "reality is a simulation" type hypotheses, but as broad and fuzzy as a category as "simulation" is, it implies SOME degree of consistent rules and limits. I've programmed simulations and even with full freedom to tinker with the source code, you cannot *trivially* make them do arbitrary things. Aliens, meanwhile, require a pretty small update: mostly just updating my probabilities around whether an interstellar species would choose to leave a visible footprint in the cosmos. Meanwhile YHWH is claimed to be all-knowning and all-powerful, which means that the universe as a whole can fundamentally *have no limits*. It only has whatever structure YHWH decides He wants for today, which He is definitionally isn't consistent about (or he wouldn't be an agent at all, he'd be another name for the laws of physics).
Second, motives. Aliens could have any motive or no motive at all (in that the alien(s) perpetrating the hoax could be insane in some fashion that precludes anything we'd regard as a motive). Likewise, many, many motives for simulating a universe could exist, and so too for messing with the simulation in an apparently unprecedented way. Meanwhile YHWH is allowed exactly one fundamental motive: to the extent that the lore about Him is consistent at all, his most fundamental, agreed-upon attribute is Love for His Creation, which is supposed to inform all things He Does. Taken in isolation an incident like this could be in keeping with that motive, but taken in the context of a world where things like this are puzzling, bizarre exceptions to the often much more grim and horrifying realities, this still make no bloody sense. If He's speaking to me through this incident, He's knowingly chosen to speak not only in a language I can't understand, but in one that comes across as the intellectual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
I'll add that having the miracle heralded by (apparently) human children *does* cause a relative update in favor of YHWH, compared to a universe where the Event had occurred unheralded, or heralded in some less human fashion. But it can't be a large update because...well...you can fit SO much "sufficiently advanced technology" in the gap between "understanding exactly how it happened" and conceding "I guess it was literal magic."[2]
[1] I'll usually write "The God of Abraham," but YHWH sports the twin advantages that it's shorter to type repeatedly and (thanks to Unsong), I can choose to pronounce it in my head as "YEEHAW!"
[2] This isn't a Fully General Counterargument, though I'll understand if religious folks react to it like one. Yes, there is *some* threshold of evidence at which I'd have to start rapidly updating towards "YHWH did it." But that threshold doesn't look like scattered reports of miracles (even well-attested ones). It looks like Unsong.
I'm not very impressed with the meteorological explanation but this was a great article, good job. I'm probably 80 percent sure right now that these mass visions are a supernatural phenomenon. Maybe I'm an easy "mark," since I think dualism is plausible and it has merit, although I'm far from totally convinced on that.
Do I think these visions have something to do with religiosity? Yes. How much do I think they have anything to do with the Christian God or the Devil? God: 20 percent. Devil: zero percent. It's hard for me to imagine that the Christian God, as I conceive of him in potential existence, would ask people to hurt their eyes in order to see a vision. (The Christian God, as I conceive of him in potential existence, did not tell Abraham to sacrifice his son, did not tell Israel to genocide Amalekites, and generally did not do the horrible things he is reported to have done in the Bible). The devil is a literary device and does not have the power to cause visions.
If upon further knowledge and reflection, I were to become 100% sure that this was a vision sent by the Christian God, I would not consider this an endorsement of the truthfulness of the Catholic sect over any other sect of Christianity. I would just update to think that Catholics are especially pious for some reason, whether or not the specific doctrines of the Vatican are true. I believe and hope that the Christian God, if he exists, would reward people strictly according to their personal piety/ethics, regardless of their theological beliefs.
I have to ask -- if you believe Yahweh exists, but you don't believe he did various things he's recorded doing in the Old Testament why not?
Interesting synchronicity: just yesterday I was watching Part 2 of an interview with Michael Talbot about the 'Holographic Universe', and he discusses his theory that paranormal phenomena may actually be a projection of individual and collective psyches, so essentially as I interpret it, this experience described in 1917 may have been both created by, and simultaneously experienced by, members of the crowd gathered there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGeGHLIpgvU is the link to the interview, which I found truly fascinating and his theories well worth contemplating
> Our best source for witness testimonies is the Documentacao Critica de Fatima [...] The rest is available only as physical books, $15 + shipping each. Somebody should buy the books, scan them, machine translate the testimonies, and put the translations online. The most important is Volume III
I've ordered Volume III - though shipping anywhere outside Portugal cost $48 (not surprising for a 639 page book, I guess). They promise delivery by Oct 12th.
> There are a few articles about solar retinopathy in the context of Marian shrines that I couldn’t access, including at least Nix and Apple (1987) and Campo et al (1988)
Emailed you both.
P.S. Small plug: check out `pdf-to-markdown-cli` (available via `pip install`) for converting large PDFs with complex formatting (no monetary affiliation, I just wrote a CLI wrapper).