I mean, I'm an atheist, and I'd love to attend a scheduled miracle (camera in hand). But it seems like they only ever get scheduled once in a blue moon, down in South America somewhere, so what am I gonna do ?
You're an atheist in an atheist world with nothing to prove. If you're an atheist in the throes of an enormously superstitious power apparatus where religious authorities micromanage people's lives, but have recently lost their ability to enforce that with violence, well, you might be more motivated.
"Why were so many atheists in attendance? I, an atheist, have never in my life shown up for a predicted miracle."
As shown in the piece, this wasn't just a religious event, it was a hot-button political topic in the struggle between secular progressivism and the power and influence of the Church. If you're a New Atheist of the Four Horseman era type in early 20th century Portugal, what better way to prove that religion is a bunch of hooey than to turn up at the site and date of an announced miracle, then when it doesn't happen, document that fact, publicise it, and use it as evidence for religion being all hooey and this particular apparition being faked up by the Jesuits (it's always the Jesuits, isn't it?) to tighten their grasp on the ignorant peasantry?
Why did the sceptics turn up with their telescopes for a different sun viewing? See Josh's comment about the Georgia Skeptics:
"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."
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.
Might be good to point out: as people have said regarding the other Filipino video, the apparent fluctuations in brightness here are probably the recording device automatically adjusting exposure levels (they are synchronized with camera movements). It's not clear to me what the people themselves would have seen.
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.
Maybe people today imagine mathematicians speak like this because the modern layman's concept of mathematician-speak crystallised around the 1920s, and this is how mathematicians of that period did often tend to speak?
(Of course I've no evidence for this either way, 'tis just an idea..)
n=1, but I'm a mathematician and I often write like this when clarifying my own thoughts. (I strike out the numbers before the final draft, but they help to get things in the right order and to separate ideas until there's only one per sentence.)
As a mathematician he might have been trying to give individual statements each of which could be verified or argued independently (like Euclid's postulates). Or he might have been influenced by his understanding of legal documents or other formal declarations in that time and place.
n=2, I'm not a mathematician but a mathematically-minded student, and I rarely write like this on first pass, but when I'm trying to think about some topic systematically and organize my thoughts, a refined text often ends up looking something like that (although I tend to organize it in paragraphs and bulletpoints rather than an ordered list).
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.
I think you overestimate the difficulty here. The phenomena described in the miracle are relatively low end, before the most significant plateau stages. For shamatha practices like these, long term momentum is a big factor, as are faith, expectations, emotional energy etc. But I would also just suggest trying kasina practices for a little bit, I think the phenomena described in the post wouldn't be too difficult to attain for many people within a week or two of diligently practicing good instructions for an hour or so a day.
What are the criteria for / where does one find "good instructions"?
Shamatha-related practices are a minor obsession of mine, so I'm always eager to learn more. (Been meaning to write a blog-post about the Chad Shamatha Meditator vs. the Virgin Vipashyana Dry-Insight Practitioner, actually–)
Also, Ingram's instructions in MCTB seemed good (also available for free online), but I haven't tried more than two or three sessions with only minor results.
I'm fairly sure firekasina.org (linked earlier also) is the most comprehensive plain English source and the visuddhimagga and vimuttimagga are the best classical sources I'm aware of.
Agree with this, I saw a spinning disk probably on the first or second try after staring at my cell phone in flashlight mode for ~30s, along with it changing colors
I did fire Kassina for a while cycling through the VS jhanas and also immediately had to think of it when reading the descriptions. However, it only feels like a soso fit to me.
People could do a test following the instructions https://firekasina.org/fire-kasina-book/ and see whether you get to the stage with the stable clearly contured point or the circle (recommend using LED instead of candle or sun).
Pro:
* MCTB style 2nd jhana in fire kassina classically has a circle turning around the dot (changing directions with the breath). People could instead interpret it as the sun moving. There is variants where the whole field turns or some part of the plane against each other but it's way rarer from my experience
* When you try to follow the after image with your eyes it will jump around (but it seems unlikely that that would coincide with 2nd jhana)
* Because the light of the sun is so intense I would expect the afterimages to be much more intense. Probably overlayering with open eyes reality. You can then get several of those over each other as well. Try staring at one point intensely enough and the whole room can glow. Weird color things can happen for sure. I would expect it to be more about that then something "meditative"
* There is also a strong beginner/not trying effect with meditation. E.g. my first fire kassina meditation the afterimage turned into a pink lotusflower which took me a long while to replicate.
* Religious stuff can increase priors for weird things or concentration which for this is something like lowering the impact of the bottom up part on processing and thus allowing weaker believes to shape reality and/or increasing the strength of some top down believes. It was months of prep. though I don't think that's true for all the cases.
* I wouldn't expect it to be anything like what Daniel is talking about in the text above which "only" happens on very high concentration or psychedelics. The other stage a beginner with meditation/prayer background can possibly reach in their first sit (more likely if they have Streamentry).
* It's cute that some of the phenomenology fits but to my brain it feels like overfitting
I really want to tag on to this thread and give you a further twist to consider on this hypothesis, Scott ...
There is a lot of focus on the sun -- the stimulus -- which makes sense, but I have a hunch that says the sun probably only tangentially plays a role. I experienced something in seated meditation, with no stimulus, that bears remarkable resemblance to the Fatima Sun miracle in some of the descriptions - but obviously there was no connected stimulus, unlike the mentioned kasina meditation (which is totally related, regardless).
I've since learned that this phenomenon, although named different things in different traditions, is most well documented as a "nimitta" - a sign without substance. Buddhaghosa gives the original account where he describes it, and says it is basically just a mental construct that arises in deep concentration. He says it's not really worth thinking about beyond its role in meditation. One Western-born modern Buddhist monk, Ajahn Brahm, has also discussed the phenomenon vis-a-vis optics and neurology - he describes it from a practical perspective here:
In any event - for your purposes Scott, here was what the nimitta I saw looked like - compare again to the Sun descriptions:
1. Field of vision is dark and hazy
2. Brightness suddenly appears from the middle of my field of vision
3. Focusing on the brightness concentrates it into a ball / disc
4. The disc is pale blue, and occupies roughly 1/3 of my total visual plane
5. After further focus on the disc, it appears to "move", gyrating in a spiraling motion until it appears to fly towards me
6. The disc flies towards me, engulfs me in a bright blue light
7. The light begins to spin with alarming intensity
8. I recoil with a sense of vertigo, breaking out of meditation
Again, this happened to me and I had to go looking for explanations that fit the experience - that being said, I have been reading Buddhist scripture and meditating - so that may as well be a primer, who knows.
Regardless, I just wanted to provide that evidence to potentially update you on this one hypothesis. The suggestion of this evidence would be that such a hallucination (which honestly might be the best word for this) can result from internal mental processes without an external focus (sun, candle, etc).
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 think few intellectually serious people believe that mystics who start religions are *necessarily* madmen or liars; that's the kind of assertion I mostly expect to hear from teenagers on Reddit who have only a very cursory understanding of their own side's arguments.
A quick search also turns up several "Madman or Messiah?" titles about cult founders and religious leaders.
That is not necessarily all mystics, but it seems a common enough framing of religious revelation and mystical experience. And I think many people who would use that framing would categorize weird experiences from staring at the sun, for example, as hallucinations that fall under "madman/lunatic."
This gets a little more complicated. Back then they copied books by hand, no printing press. This led to an incredible number of falsifications, like some dude copied Plato, didn't like an idea, replaced it with an idea of his own. So the same book existed in many versions.
They understood this problem, and developed a long and complicated and of course error-prone process of filtering out falsifications. This was called "canon", meaning: measurement or measuring rod. So Aristotle, Cicero etc. all had to be canonized this way. And no one says the results are perfect.
Now the canonization of the Bible (the whole thing, not just Gospels) lasted 1500 years, the final Catholic version presented at Trent.
So there is simply no such thing as a date when the Gospels were written. Perhaps there were contemporaneous versions. But then centuries and centuries were spent rewriting them to filter out falsifications. And no one says the results are perfect (well Protestants do, but they are ignorant).
One thing is very clear. Catholic philosophy absolutely rests on the Jesus = Logos idea. And that is from John. And John is not synoptic, which really weakens the case. The entire idea of canonization was to filter out versions that were not very compatible with other versions, perhaps John should have been filtered out.
But if John is filtered out, it would have been much harder to sell Christianity to philosophers, to educated people of that age, who were generally much in love with the Neo-Platonic idea of the Logos. Minus John, the educated people of the time would have considered it a stupid religion.
>This gets a little more complicated. Back then they copied books by hand, no printing press. This led to an incredible number of falsifications, like some dude copied Plato, didn't like an idea, replaced it with an idea of his own. So the same book existed in many versions.
That's a huge exaggeration. Almost all "falsifications" consisted of a scribe letting his attention wander and accidentally writing out the wrong word or missing a line or two.
>Now the canonization of the Bible (the whole thing, not just Gospels) lasted 1500 years, the final Catholic version presented at Trent.
The canonisation of the Bible refers to deciding which books should be included, not to establishing the most accurate version of the text. Incidentally, the textual history of the NT is better established than for virtually any other ancient text.
Hmmm... I think the weakness of this argument is that "lunatic" is a very negative word, it sounds like someone who is wrong about everything. As opposed to some kind of sage who is supposed to be right about everything. Isn't that too binary? How about "somewhat unhinged genius" ?
How about someone with a very sensitive brain, who can see things others cannot, but sometimes going into an overdrive and seeing something that is not real? I think such cases exist. And such people tend to be prophetic mystics.
I mean, something like taking LSD can do this, too. You either get some powerful insights into philosophical stuff. Or you see little green men. The brain gets over-sensitive, noticing details that are usually not noticed, but also sometimes hallucinating.
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.
I don't think that shifting sunlight a bit toward the infrared would significantly increase how much heat is absorbed by the clothes (and the water in them)
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.
I am confused too. For example, if someone keeps winning at roulette, they might be lucky, they might be cheating, or they might be helped miraculously by supernatural entities. If one can hypothesize that something like cheating might be behind the wins, then philosophically speaking, why can’t we imagine miraculous wins?
The fact that experientially, there is just one damn thing after another doesn’t mean people don’t cheat at games.
>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.
Yes, but if we were convinced God exists then we would believe in miracles all the more: everything God does is a miracle. It is only by taking on a weird and unnatural definition of miracle (something that violates the laws of nature) that you can argue that God existing is evidence against miracles.
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.
Would this be a way of translating something at least adjacent to Hume's view into something a little more Bayesian:
If we have a prior for how likely something is on naturalism, that prior comes from the frequency which with we've observed that event in the past.
When we observe a deviation from this--when we something that our prior probability indicated to be negligibly probable--the correct response is to update your prior for the event under naturalism, never to reject naturalism.
So if you think, based on a bazillion coin flips, that you'll never see a coin land on its edge, and then on the next flip you do see that, you should always prefer to just modify the prior rather than argue that your old prior was correct and now you have evidence for a phenomenon beyond the laws of coin-flipping.
?
If your idea of natural law is just, the observed regularities of the universe so far, then I can see how you can more or less replace "natural law" with "prior under naturalism" as I do above.
If my gloss is reasonable, is Hume just combining radical empiricism about natural law with methodological naturalism?
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
TBQH, I don't think the idea of "violation of natural laws" actually has any meaning. The whole point of natural laws is that they're descriptions, not prescriptions. They don't *command* things to happen, they simply describe the way we see them happen.
And the idea that the laws of nature we see are *actually* the underlying regularities of the universe itself is an assumption I've never been too comfortable with...in part due to my religious belief.
So I'd say that, for me, the idea isn't that God breaks the natural laws. Any more than a bird flying "breaks" the law of gravity. He simply operates by the deeper, more true laws that describe His existence, which is of a higher order than ours--very similar to how Flatland (the book) describes a 3d object interacting with a 2d world, it *appears* to break the laws of nature...but only reveals that the actual laws weren't what we thought they were.
The true, eternal laws of nature are fixed and eternal. What we see is nothing more than a projection of those laws from a (metaphorically) higher-dimensional space onto our non-Euclidean, non-time-invariant (metaphorically) metric space. This also accounts for the differences in God's commandments--the projection of F(... but not t) onto G(..., t) is time-variant, despite the thing being projected not changing in time. The underlying principles are the same, but the nature of the people being projected onto changed.
As for this particular "miracle"--I'm skeptical...but for religious reasons. I firmly believe that miracles are for the faithful, to help people. They're *not* given as signs to convince the unbelievers...in part because seeing is *not* believing. The *worst* way to convince someone of something is via this kind of sensory thing. Because it's way too easy to explain away sensory input, as we see here *for better or worse*. And I also believe that the Adversary (yes, the good ol' devil's real) has the power to *mimic* miracles, and this smells like something he'd do to get the people all riled up.
to put it another way, we cannot have evidence for exceptionless laws, laws that apply across all tme, .as opposed to.laws that apply 99.9..9% of the time, because we only see a limited subset of data available.
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.
>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.
The thing that makes a miracle a miracle is that the agent doing the disturbing is God. Lets say someone claims that their eyesight was miraculously healed by God. Does it make sense to say "That healing is no more miraculous than any other case where a system that usually operates undisturbed sometimes gets disturbed by God." Do you think the person whose eyesight was healed would then agree with you that it wasn't a miracle at all, it was just God disturbing the natural operations of the world? Of course not! God disturbing the natural operations of the world is what the man means when he says his eyesight was miraculously healed!
As for figuring out "the laws explaining when it does occur" that's as difficult as figuring out the laws explaining when I decide to throw a rock into a pond. There is no natural law that allows you to calculate "FLWAB will throw a rock into a pond on October 17th at 6:22 AM exactly." Whether I throw a rock in a pond depends on what kind of person I am, what I'm thinking about, and what I like to do. Similarly, whether God takes action in the world depends on what kind of agent God is, what his goals are, etc. The study of which we call Theology.
Well that just becomes a circular argument where all miracles are either false or trivial by definition. If your argument allows you to discard a hypothesis regardless of what input data you feed it then something is very wrong with your argument.
Hume's thesis is precisely that the concept of miracles is circular. You either have laws or miracles (no laws), you can't empirically have both. It's not Hume who nefariously defined miracles this way, it's a classic, scholastic idea that miracles are something in direct relation to laws. Hume is just trying to argue it's contradictory.
I'm sorry, but that's just silly. You can argue about precise definitions, but "miracles" clearly describes a real (in the metaphysical sense) cluster in thingspace, with things like the resurrection and the blind seeing as central examples. You can debate the veracity of such events, but to claim that coming back from the death is the same category of event as a dropped object falling should immediately trigger epistemic alarm bells in anyone who takes a second to make that comparison.
That might be so. However, this has nothing to do with whether they can be epistemically established based on appeals such as being "against nature, beyond nature, or above nature" to quote Aquinas. Without any coherent definition, it is of course not "clear[ly]" what they describe. The Catechism's criterion of indubitable sign of divinity is also similarly empty in formal content. Hume's thesis is that they do not describe a real cluster, based on some lines of evidence like this (surely, you cannot establish a category apophatically?), and therefore, it is senseless to speculate on their origin, because they cannot share a common origin. I.e. there can never be a science of miracles as such, and there is no matter of fact which miracle is real, fake, divine, demonic, ... because the term is either contradictory or empty. This is of course, highly relevant, since the dogma of the Catholic Church on miracles is at least highly dependent on this supposed possibility, since they discern fake miracles from real miracles. The thrust of the argument is that either everything is a miracle, so they are all legitimate, or there are no miracles- based, again, on the preceding concept. Whether resurrection is different from gravity is a matter altogether different.
Honestly can't tell if you're trolling me or not. Congratulations. If ever you happen to speak to the Blessed Virgin in the flesh, don't forget to inform her that her apparition isn't actually a miracle.
This is one of those cases where critical rationalism per Deutsch/Popper is a better tool than Bayesianism. It’s more flexibility and allows qualitative judgements about whether something is a *good explanation*, rather than how likely it is to be *true*.
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.
That general problem is large, but a common response is that God tells people stuff on a need-to-know basis for the greater good.
It seems unlikely that God would decide those children and whichever few people wrote down their testimony needed to know about future geopolitical events but larger groups of people did not need to know until it was too late. Nor would it seem to serve the greater good for this prophecy, if real, to look suspiciously ex eventu.
A pro-miracle response to that could be that God wanted the prophecy shared more widely, but the Church deviated from God's plan and decided to hide it instead. Cf. Jonah not delivering God's message to Nineveh the first time around.
Attributing everything good to God and everything bad to human failings (or occasionally demonic forces) is a common cop-out in Christianity. I don't have a strong rejoinder to that except to point out my broad conclusion that "yeah, official Church people and decisions get stuff wrong all the time even though they constantly ask God for direction" does not exactly inspire me to accept their authority over me.
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
And through sufficiently motivated reason, no amount of evidence can prove God exists, as Scott says in this post. I believe there are plenty of atheists who would not believe in God if he came down from heaven in a chariot of glory, and landed in their back yard. If one is sufficiently committed to atheism, one might decide this visitation was merely proof that they had gone mad, or that they were strapped to a hospital bed somewhere, in a coma.
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
According to merriam-webster.com, „square“ can mean „any of the quadrilateral spaces marked out on a board for playing games“, though, and „quadrilateral“ apparently includes parallelograms.
I feel quite confused by now, but I think I agree. A certain inconsistency in the caption is hard to deny.
But my previous comment also has a point (I think). Rob Miles writes that the caption „accept[s] the premise of the image in terms of 3d geometry, but reject[s] it in terms of lighting, which is an arbitrary and very unnatural way to think about an image“. Given the sentence before that, „They’re parallelograms or whatever [rather than squares]“, I took 3D geometry to refer to the transformation between square shape and parallelogram shape in some way: in which case this is not, as per my previous comment, actually what the caption accepts (or needs to accept), right? Rather, it accepts the premise of the image in terms of the object depicted, a checkerboard.
(While rejecting it in terms of lighting of said object —- is this „arbitrary and very unnatural“, in addition to „inconsistent“?)
I too found the caption wrong. The squares are obviously different colors because color is subjective. I can not be wrong about the color I perceive. What I perceive I perceive
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).
If you take the view that what the people at Fatima saw has all the hallmarks of a Weird Natural Optical Phenomenon, then the purportedly supernatural thing is now not the Miracle of the Sun but the Miracle of the Prediction of a Weird Natural Optical Phenomenon.
In which case, how impressive it is doesn't particularly depend on how weird the optical phenomenon is, it depends on how _rare_ it is, and how _unpredictable_ it is, and how well the prediction matches what actually happened.
So far as I can make out, the prediction was just "a miracle will happen in October". You could argue (fairly plausibly, I admit) that it was implied to be on the 13th at the same time as the earlier alleged apparitions. There was no prediction of _what_ the miracle would be.
So, if we accept FeepingCreature's claim that what the people at Fatima observed shows ever sign (if we ignore the predictions) of being a weird but natural optical phenomenon, what needs explaining is: there was a prediction of a miracle at about a particular time, and at that time a particular (somewhat unusual and very striking) weird natural phenomenon took place.
How much evidence that is for (say) the existence of God then depends on two things. The first is how rare that natural phenomenon is, conditional on its being _non-supernaturally_ predicted (which might be the same as how rare it is simplciter, but might not if there's a psychological perceptual element). Scott's sections 3 and 5 suggest that the answer is: not, actually, all that rare.
The second is how likely it is, given the existence of God and everything else we can infer about him from the rest of the world, that if he existed he would choose to show himself (or, permit the Virgin Mary to demonstrate her power) in this particular way, rather than not at all or in some other way.
That second probability looks really small to me.
In fairness, if we're really specific about the particular weird optical phenomenon in question, _both_ probabilities are really small, and then we have the problem that when you're comparing two tiny probabilities it's not so easy to tell whether your odds ratio is 10^-18 : 10^-12 or 10^-12 : 10^-18. The usual fix for this is "marginalization"; instead of asking very specifically about this particular Weird But Plausibly Natural Phenomenon, you ask (1) how likely is it, in the absence of gods and the like, that if a big crowd gathers in the middle of the day and expects a miracle, that _some_ WBPNP will happen that makes them think a miracle has happened, and (2) how likely is it, if the god of Roman Catholic Christianity is real, that he will coordinate things so that someone makes a super-vague prediction of A Miracle on a particular occasion and then a(n unspecified) WBPNP happens on that occasion. Those are still pretty small probabilities. My feeling is that they are fairly comparable in size.
>Scott's sections 3 and 5 suggest that the answer is: not, actually, all that rare.
I disagree. It shows that this kind of thing has happened in other times and other places, almost always in the context of a miracle occurring. It is certainly not something that happens often enough that we would have any way to predict it happening in the future on a particular date.
>The second is how likely it is, given the existence of God and everything else we can infer about him from the rest of the world, that if he existed he would choose to show himself (or, permit the Virgin Mary to demonstrate her power) in this particular way, rather than not at all or in some other way.
How confident are you that you can judge what is or is not likely for an immortal omnipotent and omniscient deity to do? It would be like an ant predicting what a human would do. How much weight would you put on an ant's predictions of human behavior?
If they can't predict it because they are human and limited, neither can you nor any prophet. And if you claim the prophet can predict it, because they are a prophet, then you have to answer to failed predictions too, and why it seems you are suspiciously post hoc about every prediction.
I agree that Fatima-type phenomena, whatever they actually are, aren't common or regular enough for us to predict. It sounds as if you think I was saying that they are, in which case I've clearly been unclear. I wasn't intending to say anything like that.
I am not particularly confident of my ability to judge what a god would do. Nor of anyone else's. Note that this cuts both ways: if you want to forbid me to say "It's very unlikely that a god would do X", in the context of someone claiming that X is evidence of a god, then you must also forbid believers to say "It's rather likely that our god would do X" in the same context. And also to say (or assume) things like "If God tells a prophet something, it's probably true" or "If God inspires someone to write something that becomes part of our scriptures, then it probably tells us something important".
In any case, even though I don't expect myself to be all that good at predicting what gods will do, that doesn't exempt me from having to try to, if I want to (for instance) assess the credibility of a claimed miracle. And it doesn't mean that I know which direction any given prediction is likely to be wrong in. If my best estimate is that the Christian god, if real, would do X with probability 1/1000000, it _could_ be that someone with more expertise would assign a much higher probability, say 1/1000; but it could also be that they'd assign a much lower probability, say 1/1000000000. All I can do is to make the best estimates I can and work with them.
(Perhaps your actual opinion is that _my_ ability to predict what gods will do is poor and _yours_ is much better. That might be true. But so far as I can see, I have no reason to believe it, and hence no reason to think I would do better by moving my estimates in the direction of yours.)
>I disagree. It shows that this kind of thing has happened in other times and other places, almost always in the context of a miracle occurring.
Doesn't it seem really counterproductive for god to choose to perform miracles which correspond to things people occasionally see in non miraculous contexts? Those accounts from people on reddit seem rather hard to explain within a model where various sun miracles like Fatima are supernatural.
>How confident are you that you can judge what is or is not likely for an immortal omnipotent and omniscient deity to do? It would be like an ant predicting what a human would do. How much weight would you put on an ant's predictions of human behavior?
This seems to undercut the miracle case pretty bad. If we have no way of judging what God is or isn't likely to do, then we have no way of knowing how likely he is to perform a miracle at all. Maybe the probability of God performing this miracle is 0
It should definitely update you some! Only you can judge how much, but if you ask and do not receive that is an update towards either there not being a God, or there is a God but you experiencing a miracle right now would not be good.
"but you experiencing a miracle right now would not be good"
This seems like a somewhat suspect explanation because atheists asking for supernatural entities to show themselves does not seem to be particularly rare, yet it seems like people in that situation actually getting a response is the exception. I've certainly asked for such signs myself at various points in my life and never observed anything interesting.
What seems more egregious however is the frequency of accounts of people who lose their faith precisely because they desperately prayed for signs from god and never received them. In fact this seems to be a common element of every deconversion story I've heard.
So if one looks at how many more people are leaving religion than converting to it from being irreligious, that raises some problems.
Since you don't just have to explain a few anecdotes of atheists not getting any miracles when they ask for them: You need to explain *most* atheists and those struggling with their faith not getting evidence when they ask for it.
Based on the actual content of what occurred, I think the most likely within-frame explanation here is that God/the Virgin didn't really care about them either, He cared *specifically* about Lucia, this girl with apparently beatific devotion to Him, and *she* is the one who wanted there to be a miracle to convince the others, and God (or the Virgin) chose to oblige her.
Now to be clear, I believe Scott's more naturalistic interpretation of these events. But one of the things that a lot of these Catholic stories (this one, Joan of Arc, etc.) have in common is that there is a specific individual who God seems to care about, and God's consideration for all the other people attached to the story comes secondary to that person's concern for those other people.
What does that say about God? Seemingly that he's a distant and unmoving figure who doesn't care that much about regular people. While I doubt a Catholic would agree with this characterization, it kind of does match up with their pre-existing notion of why praying to Saints works in the first place (the Saint will care about you, and God cares about the Saint). Theologically though it seems problematic for a personal being of infinite love.
I tend to think of the denominators in Bayesian calculations as the universes across the multiverse, so you can’t really apply them to the existence of God. It’s not like there are some universes where God is real and others where he is not!
Well, depends on your conception of god, but if it involves god being above all, then that would include the multiverse. If god only existed in some universes, he would be bounded in a way that not even humans are. More generally, I think events can have probabilities, but explanatory propositions can’t.
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 didn’t find the sungazing stuff that convincing because a. The responses were much less shocking and b. They had to stare for a while to experience that, it didn’t happen instantly like it did for some people at Fatima.
One of my favorite things about your blogs, Scott, has always been the way you lead people through a thought process. You give us the experience of thinking, including counterpoints, the discovery of new information, and having new questions. It's like you've written an RPG campaign for us that we get to play. Your readers enjoy thinking, and it's a pleasure to have your essays assist us by laying out clear breadcrumbs so we don't get lost, making it possible to incorporate more threads than if we were doing it on our own without writing our own research notes. And your style normalizes thinking and writing with complexity, clarity, and charity - characteristics your readership is capable of but does not often get to see modeled together. Thank you.
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.
If there's an intelligence simulating our universe, I don't think we should call it AI, because philosophically speaking it would be significantly less "artificial" than a human's!
A fourth possibility is that Christianity is true, *and* the Fatima apparitions/sun miracle are caused by fae folk or the like. Perhaps these beings aren't actively trying to lead people toward or away from God, but rather they just enjoy messing with people from time to time for unclear reasons, or they dont pay attention to us at all and our perceptions of them are side effects of activities that have some other unfathomable purpose....
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.
As a Theravada who presumably believes the Buddha was just some dude who figured out some stuff, why _would_ you believe it possible for the teachings to be transmitted uncorrupted?
"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."
And unlike Protestantism, which is a network of local parishes, the Roman church is a top-down media machine. The Catholic church affirmed the Fatima miracle decades later, even stating that the pope saw it in the Vatican gardens. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think it's odd that the Pope wouldn't a disclose miracle like that right away but should wait decades for church officials to decide that it's good PR.
I read the Stevenson book years ago and have not thought about it since. Two facts are important. 1. Almost all his cases of reincarnation are reported by people whose religion takes reincarnation for granted. The main exception is the British cases recorded in an archive called, I think, the Bloxham tapes. 2. The British paperback second edition of Stevenson included a new appendix demonstrating that many of the British cases were submerged memories of ephemeral historical fiction novels.
Which book are you referring to? There are quite a few. The cases that I found most interesting were American ones (James Leininger and Marty Martyn), which I think were actually Tucker cases, not Stevenson ones. There are a few others that I think were pretty interesting (Antonia by Tarazi is one of them, which I trust somewhat less because it was via past-life regression, but there are some features that make it pretty bizarre), but I can't remember the names of most them. I haven't done that much research on rebirth, but the cases I've come across have been compelling enough that if we're going to accept miracles, I think we should accept rebirth as well. I discussed this with Ethan, and he agrees they are supernatural, but he puts it down to demons (I don't think they have the features one would expect of demonic oppression, which makes that a very ad-hoc hypothesis).
As for point 1, I don't find that particularly problematic — cultures that already believe in rebirth are more likely to take claims seriously enough to bring them to investigators, whereas it's a lot less likely for Westerners to do the same. It's a reason to be careful, but it's not inherently a problem.
Re: point 2: based on a quick ChatGPT query, it looks like Stevenson just floated this as a possible explanation, while saying that he doesn't accept it as an explanation. ChatGPT is saying that his thought was that the children read some historical fiction, so it's possible that could have played a role, but that there weren't any clear connections drawn, and that their reading in itself wouldn't account for the level of detail they provided. I'm planning to read through his books though, so I plan to verify this and not just take ChatGPT at its word.
I misremembered. I was referring to Reincarnation?: The Claims Investigated, by Ian Wilson, a popularisation of Ian Stevenson, though I also read Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Wilson was an English Catholic and professional author who also wrote on the Turin Shroud. He was willing to entertain, though not endorse, marginally possible stories of the supernatural. The second edition of Wilson's book definitively showed that some seemingly plausible British cases were dredged up memories of historical fiction.
I was just reading up on the Leininger Case. It's really trippy. Michael Sudduth put together a decent critique, but I don't think he really touched what I take to be the two biggest indicators of something weird going on: James' apparent identification of the Natoma Bay aircraft carrier, and the naming of James Huston's wingman Jack Larsen, before he or his parents had any of that information available to them.
And I guess fraud is POSSIBLE, but in the Leininger case at least, there's timestamped evidence of his parents' unfolding investigation over the years, as they discovered more and more details that corroborated James' memories until the supposed past personality was finally identified. Moreover, once Huston WAS identified, his sister apparently confirmed that James was aware of further details of their lives that were never public info.
With cases like this, there's simply no room for wishful thinking or coincidence. Either something weird (whether it be past life, ESP, or as Ethan might like it, demonic shenanigans) is going on, or there's brazen, elaborate fraud. If fx James Leininger's parents perpetrated a fraud, it was a very meticulous, thorough, impressively well-thought out one. And to what end? I guess they DID get their fifteen minutes and they wrote a book, but it seems like a LOT of patient hoaxing for the opportunity to maybe write a semi-successful book in a decade. Only seems more likely than Something Weird if you have VERY strong naturalist priors. Which...maybe I do? idk
Fwiw, as a Christian myself, I'm willing to consider the possibility that genuine past life memories could be transmitted in ways other than rebirth, although I'm far from certain about this
That raises the same issues as the demon explanation — the standard Christian response is that these are genuine memories, but they are implanted by demons. The problem is that there's no reason to believe that. Rebirth is a belief that predates the Judeo-Christian conception of a single life followed by judgment. Christian philosophers often argue that the fact that people seek God shows that God exists, so I think there's a similar argument that since rebirth has been one of the most common afterlife views, that points to it as a serious possibility given established Christian argumentation, at the very least.
The issue is that the rebirth cases don't align with cases of demonic oppression unless you take a stance that everything that makes people doubt Christianity is demonic, in which case you can end up saying science is demonic. So I don't think that's a reasonable approach. The other possibilities are (1) some type of psychic recall or (2) a conspiracy of non-demonic psychics who have been implanting memories for some unknown reason for thousands of years. For (1), it's entirely unclear how this would actually be different (or even differentiable in principle) from genuine rebirth and for (2) this is just demons by another name, and there is no clear reason why these psychics would be engaging in this conspiracy since before Christianity. Both of these also don't explain why some of these rebirth cases are paired with physical marks that correspond to the way the supposed reborn being died.
I think that it's entirely possible that Christianity is broadly true, but that certain doctrines, like the view of the afterlife, are incorrect. The issue is just that apostolic Christianity and mainline Protestantism won't accept that, in which case I think the most reasonable stance is that the rebirth cases raise a huge issue for Christianity. In one of my conversations with a Catholic, they agreed that if rebirth were proven, Christianity would be falsified. However, it's not clear we could ever prove rebirth beyond the types of cases we have now, as there's no soul that transmigrates that can be tracked — it all just comes down to memories. So there will always be the ability to say "maybe it's demons" or something of that sort. But that's highly motivated reasoning and can (and has) been applied to many things that have turned out not to be demons. After all, we could say the same thing about anything that goes against the Christian narrative — maybe everyone who doesn't remember the miracles of Christ's resurrection had their memories swapped out by demons. Or maybe it's the reverse — who knows? The most reasonable approach, I think, is that if people are reporting memories, we treat them as genuine memories. Memories can be false or fabricated, but that doesn't contradict their mnemicity. If a reported internal experience has both mnemicity and is shown to be authentic, we should then approach it as a genuine, accurate memory per Occam's Razor, not try to find a way around the simplest and clearest conclusion by positing a vast conspiracy of demonic agents that don't act like demons just to save a given doctrine.
That said, the rebirth cases could all be fake/wrong. What I'm saying is just assuming they are valid for the sake of argument.
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.
But was the color of her clothing consistent with the clothing of a Trades-class married woman in 1st C Roman Judea(Palestine? Not certain what the Romans called it) or with consistent with how Renaissance-era painters depicted her, which usually depicted her as more Italian than Jewish, along with the expensive blue pigment?
You could indeed say the same about the miraculous appearances of faces: how do you know that the bearded face that appeared on your toasted bread is indeed the face of Jesus, and not that of Pythagoras or Mengzi?
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.
Could be something like the metaphysics in some fantasy settings where belief itself has a supernatural power to affect reality. Or there are lots of supernatural entities which include but are not limited to the Christian ones. The possibility space of ways the universe could be if it wasn't materialist is large and varied
Actually, in a supernatural-but-not-Christian universe, I expect the supernatural entities to appropriate the beliefs of people, if they want faith. Especially in Xianxia-esque worlds.
Seems like building a cult to a false god would be by far the easiest way of damning a massive amount of souls, both in the physical and metaphysical sense...
If Jack Chick-style evangelicism is right, it could have been Satan, pretending to be Mary to drag people to hell by persuading them of the heresy of Mariolatry.
Where do you get "converted thousands of people to Catholicism" from? The most the accounts you listed show is that there was at least one alleged witness who wasn't Catholic. There doesn't seem to be anything in the reports indicating that there were mass conversions afterwards.
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.
> Because the combinatorics of possible phenomenon becomes really endless.
Which is also why it's completely insane that people so readily believe that these random dudes have perfect knowledge of how the supernatural functions. But I guess that insanity is what's keeping society intact, so I can't really complain.
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.
>The fireball question is just "what if I showed you strong evidence of a supernatural claim"
I think Scott's point is that "mass hallucination", specifically, is not—realistically—going to be a plausible explanation for anyone reading were they to see something such as "fireball from hands" or "sun spinning & dancing", and so to foist it upon *other* people is a bit of a double standard.
In the wizard case, you weren't told *what* you going to see, but went somewhere expecting "something weird"; if fireballs specifically seem too plausibly wizard-y, substitute "made the walls bend & glow" or something—then you have approximately the same situation as the Fatima event... but who would accept "ah, probably we all just hallucinated" after that?
If I saw the walls bend and glow, I would probably suspect someone slipped me a hallucinogen, because that's a known thing hallucinogens can do.
This is kind of my point: from the start of hearing about the Fatima event, it seemed likely to me that it was *some* combination of weather event + trick of perception + effect of expectations + social influence at the time + social influence on memories or records afterwards. It's interesting to explain exactly how all of those played out, but from the beginning, it sounds like the kind of thing that should be explained by them! A wizard trying to show his powers ought to be able to show you something that you'd clearly never experience otherwise, and *an all-powerful God* much more so! So why is Scott treating this like "it was a miracle" was the null hypothesis?
Also, I think that one thing smuggled in by the wizard example is the assumption that it's a single event of claim -> evidence. How many would-be seers were there in the period 1900-1925? How many times did even a prediction of "something will happen at this time" come true? If you claim to have telekinetic powers and then get a fair coin to come up heads 20 times in a row in front of me, I'll be pretty impressed; if you tell me that someone made that claim and got that result sometime in the last century, rather less so.
"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." FYI, this is also what Pascal thought.
Yeah lol Ethan didn't come up with this, I've heard it from religious people my whole life.
Of course, they all have to admit that on their view, some people actually get to see the miracles, some people see the parting of the waters or Jesus fly into the sky while everyone else is asked to take their word for it.
But would you really jump to believing in wizards just like that? A mass hallucination may not be right but wizardry isn't right either. I've seen enough stage magic to know it's pretty easy to perform a trick that would confound my ability to explain it on the spot. I'd need to see quite a few fireballs before I started believing in wizards rather than writing off your truck as a clever illusion. One fireball and I'd think sure we saw something, but it wasn't what it appeared to be.
>as I mentioned in the mass hallucination section, we really don't have any other examples of a true mass hallucination
...but then you mention dozens of other similar cases of tens of thousands of people seeing the dancing sun or whatever, why didn't all of them make the Wikipedia's cut? Doesn't seem particularly unlikely that entire separate classes of comparable events are overlooked by such lists.
Magicians can do magic tricks! After seeing a magician do 6 magic tricks that I cannot possibly guess how they did them, I do not conclude that there is at least a 6% chance of him being a magician, but that I'm not very good at explaining magic tricks. "There's a lot we don't understand about staring at the sun, but we do know mob psychology, perception, and memory are all tricky." is frankly already enough. "We don't have a scientific explanation for this" should never update "there is no possible scientific explanation for this, therefore it must be supernatural"
So when would I ever update and start to believe David Blaine at least might be doing real magic? It's a fair question! I realistically expect be could fool me (my eyes and ears) for any test I could come up with.
Well, let's say instead of a wizard, there's a wild magic sorcerer. 0.01% of the time they sneeze, it causes some meteorological event in the next 1-3 months. This could be the ground truth, but what should cause a Bayesian update to this possibility? Nothing. We simply don't have the precision of measurement at this point in history for this claim to be anything more than a shrug of the shoulders.
I was raised a Catholic and actually taught in a Catholic school for two years. But in examining Catholicism more closely, I realized it is just a cult. I don’t believe that the pope is anyone special as Catholics proclaim . There have been some very bad popes!
There is a great deal of corruption in the church and has been since the beginning. The rules are man made.
I found going to Mass over and over again did not lead me to a closer relationship to God or Jesus, but I do have a belief in a power greater than man.
Mankind has proven to be filled with evil people, since the beginning of time. Why?
Are there truly devils?
Are there angels?
Why does this planet never seem to get any better, so many wars, so many people who are insanely cruel to others?
When we die, does our “soul” live on in “heaven” or suffer in “hell”, or do we simply disintegrate and become part of the soil….ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
I find near death stories from people very fascinating and hope that they have truly experienced what happens when our “life force” leaves our body.
Did the story of Fatima in Portugal really happen? Yes, something happened. Those children were not capable of making up stories and telling people that “the lady they saw said she was the Immaculate Conception.” They didn’t even know what that meant.
The same with Lourdes. Hard to explain that as well. Why would Mary just randomly show up in odd places and perform miracles??
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.
Not actually that hard: Just predict that in the future more people will continue to report accounts on that subreddit like those which have been reported in the past.
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.
I'm gonna be honest, it's not fun to debate people who completely refuse to interact with your reasoning. I don't have anything against religion, but its believers are too stubborn to have interesting conversations with in any topic that involves their faith.
I find the classic case of "transitional fossils" illustrative. If someone says the gap in the fossil record between two species with no known intermediate is a miracle and evidence of God, and when presented with such a fossil, respond "Ah, now there are two gaps, and twice as many miracles!" I DO think that's a reason not to take them, or this entire class of argument, seriously.
You could argue that what Scott did here is "atheism of the gaps": he doesn't know whether this optical illusion exists or whether it caused the dancing sun at Fatima, but he puts it forward in the hope that someday we will know. A gap in our knowledge to be explained later, and until then assumed to be not caused by God.
I think that would be an uncharitable argument, but I don't care for the "God of the gaps" rebuttal in any case.
> A gap in our knowledge to be explained later, and until then assumed to be not caused by God.
That's not uncharitable: that's exactly what he's doing.
To be analogous, your position would have to be that more normal, reasonably well-understood phenomena like, say, rainbows (or even lightning), are just as caused by God as this "dancing sun."
Did anybody have a prophetic vision predicting that God would cause a rainbow to appear on a certain time and day, or that God would cause a particular tree to be struck by lightning? If they did, and then the events happened, I would believe it is likely that God caused that thing to happen, in that God took action to ensure it would happen as prophesied.
In other words, as I said, what makes a miracle a miracle is that God is part of the explanation: that it would not have happened but for God's action. Here we have children claiming to have received a prophecy that a miracle (that is to say, and act caused by God) will occur on a certain day. The day came, and thousands of people experienced something they have never experienced before, something they considered remarkable and unusual. It is not "God of the gaps" to argue that God caused that to happen! This isn't an unexplained phenomenon, this is an accurate prediction that gives evidence of the existence of God. It is "atheism of the gaps" to say "Even though it appears that God caused this to happen, and even though we don't know for sure how this could have happened without God, I am going to assume that God was not involved."
This is exactly right. The symmetry between "I don't know exactly what's happening here, but I'm sure there's a naturalistic explanation" and "I don't know what's happening here but I'm sure there's no naturalistic explanation" is broken by methodological considerations: it's really hard to build an accurate model of how the world works if parts of the world that aren't well-captured by your theories are assumed out-of-hand to be uncapturable, even in principle.
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...
If I close my eyes and just relax into the image I get a continuous stream of psychedelic imagery, it's been that way since I was a child. It starts as vague lights and shapes, often resolves into geometric patterns (often involving moving through a tunnel) and then often proceeds to full imagery. The 'deep dream' zoom videos that came out a few years ago aren't quite it, but are the closest I've seen outside of my own head.
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?
Hmm is that really a necessary condition for scientific analysis/modeling? And it seems to strongly depend on the reference class. You can study/model... wars (but WW2 is unique), planet formation (but the formation of the Earth is unique), abiogenesis, the Big Bang... I feel like you actually can study and model phenomena that are unrepeatable (strictly or broadly).
My background is in psychological research. You can do a case study on an individual person, even collect a time series of measurements on some behavior. The problem is, there is no way to know whether any of that will generalize to other people, and the purpose of science is to empower the general public with meaningful and robust theories, not individual persons. Psychotherapy isn't a science, it's an application. It's based on science, but the science behind it used defined categories of people as the focus of analysis, not individuals taken alone.
This is true for all the sciences. You can't subject "the Earth", taken as one whole, to scientific analysis, unless you are comparing it to other planets. Of course, the Earth is host to many systems, both physical and biological, so you can break the "Earth" down into those system and look at defined categories of phenomena.
The same is true of WWII (or any other historical event). Assessing that war, as a homogenous whole, is meaningless unless you are comparing it to other events. Of course, that war consisted of a complex series of interactive events, so you could break those down and look at defined categories of those events.
Science can say nothing about the unique. Fortunately, nothing appears to be entirely unique.
I'm not sure I agree science depends solely on replication. Here are some steps I can imagine which counters this claim:
1. You make an axiomatic model of the world by observing repeated phenomena
2. You then make formal logical inferences from those axioms that cannot be tested repeatedly
3. The extended model is still logical / the inferences are useful
Although the logic of repetition (frequentism, empiricism) and the logic of the mind (formal logic) are both valid ways to make conclusions, they offer completely different information and pathways to information. Repetition gives you statistical knowledge, formal logic gives systematic knowledge. Repetition can tell you whether X is related to Y by repeatedly observing X, but formal logic can shave the bounds of X to a subset of X, create new Y's which give information about Y, or even introduce a Z, which greatly improves the usefulness of a scientific model without needing any repetition of X.
I did not mean to claim that science depends solely on replication, merely that replication is a necessary condition to make any other analysis meaningful. Knowing that the sun has always risen in the east tells us one fact, and very little else. Combining that series of observations with a theory regarding the mechanism by which this occurs (the Earth is rotating on it's axis every 24 hours) gives us the basis for testing hypotheses: if an airplane were to fly west at a significant speed it would encounter the sunrise early. The proposed mechanism is the theory, the observations are the way to test that theory. Without replication, you can't test hypotheses or theories.
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.
Yes, it seems curious that God never goes for miracles that make everyone go ”right, there’s *clearly* no natural explanation here”. He could have manifested a full-scale cathedral permanently on an empty spot, but instead it’s always visual phenomena, receding cancers, and similar stuff.
Why is the method he chose to reveal himself to the world to have his followers write a book which is so similar in content and form to the 100s of other religious books that come down to us from the same timeframe?
Just about all ancient cultures have a roughly similar set of stories, and a being that could presumably automatically telepathically communicate its presence to every human on the planet chose to hide itself in the same format that is abundant in other culture’s tales about beings such as Krishna, Thor, and Tlaloc.
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?
I find cases 1 and 2 in Nix and Apple particularly striking. In case 1, the man reports first seeing the miracle when he was in Medjugorje and then sees it again when he comes back to New Orleans, explicitly identifying it as the "same phenomenon". In case 2, the woman sees the miracle in New Orleans despite no history of visiting Medjugorje (I presume the authors would report if she had visited, since they do so in the other three cases). Louisianian Catholics who came back from Medjugorje are reported to have encouraged others to sungaze (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1987/07/11/la-catholics-warned-against-staring-at-sun/f1521e7a-2db5-4b80-8025-cdcecf63de1a/). So although Nix and Apple never spell this out explicitly, I think we can infer the woman's sungazing was likely to have been primed by tales of Medjugorje miracles.
So that partially answers question 6: people can indeed see the miracle again even after leaving supposed apparition sites, and they can even see it without visiting a site at all, likely when primed appropriately.
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?)
You know, there probably are reported miracles out there where the true explanation is something ridiculous like hoaxters hiding in the wings and putting on an elaborate puppet show. The way all stage magic works is that an apparently simple effect actually involves much more complexity and effort than seems intuitively plausible, so that we tend to dismiss the true explanations out of hand.
Granted, that doesn't make elaborate hoaxes a particularly strong explanation for anything- conspiracies are a bit too universally explanatory to be very useful. It does make me wonder how we should treat possibilities like that from a Bayesian perspective. I guess we can have a prior on the likelihood that something we're experiencing is a manufactured illusion based on how often similar illusions have been exposed in the past. But should that prior increase only when seeing direct evidence of fraud, or should it also increase when ruling out alternate explanations?
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 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.)
How does this differ from a migraine flare? My gf has been getting these weird zigzaggy colorful shapes on one side of her vision, usually after taking ADHD pills.
Migraine aura is neurological, and always temporary. (And as you say, it's colorful and has complex shapes, and tends to shimmer or move.) AMN is physiological, it happens inside the retina. I _think_ migraine aura would tend to be in both eyes, and being in one eye is a sign that something is in the eye vs the brain. And AMN is not colorful or moving -- it's just a small blindspot. For me it was very subtle -- since it's never right at the center of vision, but always out slightly from there, it can be tricky to even perceive it, beyond "huh, my vision is doing something weird." And AMN can be permanent although mine was temporary. (But it resolved over days, whereas I would expect migraine aura to resolve much faster.)
Same! It's happened to me a handful of times, maybe 5 max, usually after prolonged periods of stress and sleep deprivation. Now that I know the pattern is just an ocular migraine and not a sign of an imminent stroke, I think the visuals are kinda cool.
Is it harmful at all? Dangerous? My gf has started getting these recently, we think due to either stress or ADHD meds, and are a bit concerned about it!
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, too, wasn’t impressed by the Mercy Hills video. I took a close look at what happens between 3:30 and 3:33. At 3:30, there is a solid white blob, which corresponds to an area around the sun where all three color channels are maxed out. There are two internal lens reflections which converge to a point near the bottom of the white blob; that is presumably where the sun is. There is some yellow around the white blob; that is where the red and green channels are maxed out, but the blue channel is not. Beyond the yellow, we start to see something only closer to the actual color, with only the red channel maxed out. Portions of the sky where we have actual color (no color channels maxed out) can actually appear to be a little bit blue, but that’s only due to the contrast with the more reddish areas; red is still the strongest primary.
The image becomes brighter between 3:30 and 3:33 by about a factor of 3.5x in the darker areas. I think that the video is processed to make dark areas lighter, meaning that the actual increase in exposure was more than 3.5x. In any case, the change in the appearance of the sky is what you would expect from brightening the image. The white area, where all the color channels are maxed out, increases in size (and changes shape), as does the yellow area. The internal lens reflections get brighter like everything else, but they don’t move relative to the rest of the image or get wider, suggesting that the sun has not changed position or changed size.
I came up with three possibilities, all equally consistent with the footage: (1) the sun got brighter, (2) the camara operator adjusted the brightness, or (3) the brightness was increased during post-processing. But EngineOfCreation spotted what is almost certainly the answer: The camera is configured to set exposure automatically and weights what is at the center of the frame quite heavily. So at 3:30, when the center of the frame is above the horizon it sets an exposure that makes everything below the horizon so dark that it is hard to make anything out. At 3:30, when the center of the frame is just slightly below the horizon, it sets exposure so that we can more or less see the people but completely blows out a large portion of the sky.
This is unauthenticated video. For all we know, the person who made the video would tell us, “I was expecting the sun to do something, so I videoed it, but nothing happened. Only when I got home, I looked at the video, and decided that maybe something did happen and I didn’t see it.” I viewed the video only because Scott, for what whatever reason, seemed to take it seriously. Also, it’s a safe bet that the video footage was shot on location because it would be easier to travel to Mercy Hills than to fake it.
But the sound track? It’s clearly edited (the music wasn’t recorded live), and making the oohs and aahs of the crowd match up with the images is basic video editing. Arguing that the crowd was seeing that the video was showing is like arguing that a television show must have been filmed before a live audience because the laughs match up with the jokes.
If we had testimony from the video editor that the oohs and aahs were from the original video and he hadn’t moved them around, then I could understand treating them seriously. But, honestly, I didn’t notice whether the oohs and aahs matched up with anything and I’m not going to check now because without any testimony to authenticate the soundtrack, what’s the point?
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.)
But in pre-modern time, penniless shepherds would basically have been as low-class and mundane as McDonalds workers. It's only from our warped modern point-of-view that "shepherds" are this slightly romantic, fairy-tale thing that naturally goes together with magical boons.
But the association of shepherds with magical boons goes all the way back to Jesus' birth. It wasn't McDonalds workers who first heard about Jesus' birth from angels and then went to see him!
Well, no, but my point is that in a Second Coming designed to come across to 21st century humans as the original narrative did in its own era, they might very well be.
I shall never forgive you, Scott Alexander. Forever will you be my enemy for this dire insult to my homeland, the noble and storied Lubbock, Texas, home of Buddy Holly, whose mighty statue towers above our central plaza.
This is an awesome story, and reminded me of a profound, terrifying childhood experience of seeing a white cross superimposed over the moon. Every test I could think to perform showed this phenomenon was real, but inexplicable.
Eventually I realized I was seeing a reflection from each strand of the metal window screen in my bedroom.
Lubbock is only 300 miles from Marfa, another Texas town with a silly name; the famous Marfa Lights have only recently been explained to high confidence. Strange things are always happening in West Texas!
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 don't have a strong opinion on if this is quantum or not. I came to complain about the "few" in " Solar Coronae are one of the few quantum color effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye.
Rainbow effects due to different wavelengths having different diffractions are not rare.
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.
>either the Intervention Budget has been dialed back a good bit, or something else is going on...
It's clearly the OG replication crisis. One time, a large effect is observed, and all attempts to replicate run into regression to the mean or outright fraud. There is truly nothing new under the sun.
Zeus may personally not be subtle, but he comes from one of many vast pantheons of gods and spirits, many of whom do subtle things - indeed, there's a whole archetype of trickster gods! A world full of supernatural entities, who need not be aligned with one another (ala God and his angels) vastly increases the possibility that one of them plays a weird trick on some people or tries to guide them in some odd way, no?
Then again, it's typical for one (or maybe a couple, like Apollo and Helios, when you have enough divergent traditions to integrate) of them to control the sun.
I mean subtle as in "motives are unclear" not subtle as in "I'm engaging in a complex long-term plan", the latter of which I feel more clearly describes most mythological occurrences of trickster gods. Subtlety of motivation is NOT common in Anansi stories. It's very clear to the reader what he wants and often becomes very clear to all other characters by the end. Also the "complex plans" of trickster gods in various mythological accounts are not all that complex by any sort of modern planning standard. It's usually on the order of "tell one lie".
According to the accounts, many of the witnesses were moved to repent and resolve to be better Catholics, and I assume at least some of them actually followed through. "Leading people to repent and be better Catholics" isn't an unclear or particularly surprising motive for God to have.
I feel like that kind of post-facto analysis is sort of dangerous. Like we could similarly conclude that god's goal was to increase tourism to South America. A faithful Christian might say "tourism doesn't sound like God but leading to repentance does", sure, but a worshipper of Ra would almost certainly say "well getting more people to look at and think about the sun sure sounds like Ra so I'm pretty sure this was my guy not your guy".
Whereas when you look at biblical accounts the miracles are not really so easily open to interpretation. The effects are far more dramatic: resurrection of the dead, parting of oceans, pillars of fire. Further, the purpose of such events is often pre-committed or very obvious: let my people go or I'm going to send plagues, this town has some defensive walls so I'm gonna break them, hey we need food lemme dupe some loaves and fishes.
There are some exceptions (I don't think Job ever figures it out) but they are very unusual. Whereas nowadays all the miracles are weird and require heavy interpretation? Sus at best.
>I feel like that kind of post-facto analysis is sort of dangerous.
This isn't a post-facto analysis, though? The visionaries said in advance that the Virgin Mary was going to perform a big miracle on October 13 so that people would believe. That's why there was such a big crowd in the first place: people came along either to witness the miracle, or to laugh at everyone else when no miracle occurred.
>Like we could similarly conclude that god's goal was to increase tourism to South America.
Why would an apparition in Portugal increase tourism to South America?
>A faithful Christian might say "tourism doesn't sound like God but leading to repentance does", sure, but a worshipper of Ra would almost certainly say "well getting more people to look at and think about the sun sure sounds like Ra so I'm pretty sure this was my guy not your guy".
Said Ra-worshipper would have to ignore the previous five months of apparitions in which a specifically Catholic religious figure appeared and commanded people to do specifically Catholic things like praying the Rosary.
>The effects are far more dramatic: resurrection of the dead, parting of oceans, pillars of fire.
The miracle caused a big panic because people thought the sun was falling down and was going to destroy the earth. Sounds pretty dramatic to me.
> Why would an apparition in Portugal increase tourism to South America?
I know a lot of Brazilians so sometimes when I see "Portugal" it maps Portugal -> Portuguese -> Brazil
I think your arguments re: whether this is post-factor analysis are sensible and you're probably right that my categories need to be better adjusted or formalized. But that sounds like a lot of work so I'm not gonna, particularly because my instinct is that it wouldn't result in a change to the ultimate conclusion, i.e., that this miracle is unlike the typical biblical/mythological miracle. I'm not sure if that's very Bayesian of me or not.
Oh, I see. A journey of a day taking 1,000 years. So, interpreting literally, the angels have a time dilation factor (gamma) of 365,250. From this, we can estimate that the angles travel at a speed of about c(1 - 4e-12), which is really quite impressive! If we assume the angel Gabriel has about the same mass as a human, he’d hit the earth with the kinetic energy about 10^24 J, or about five times the energy of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
You are correct, this in no way implies a particular speed in SI units or any other. I suppose, if you’re being really, really, really charitable, you could read this as anticipating special relativity.
Indeed. Though probably the theologians would argue that angels probably don't have human mass given the "how many on the head of a pin" debate. Or something.
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.
The project was an indulgence. I even followed up on most of them years later to see if the recollections changed. Partway through, I decided I couldn't assess the stories without researching about all major categories of the paranormal in general, which added a "General Discussion" section to the end. If you do decide to peruse this, and you just want to pick out the worthwhile parts, I would offer the following:
- The introduction contains a couple charts on the data.
- Page 20 contains the amusing result of the first "investigation."
- Case 13 was the best one. Gives me a bit of a chill thinking about it.
- Cases 4 & 5 ("ghost" phenomena) involves more than one person seeing an acute thing--even if some mental phenomenon explains one or both of them, I didn't believe in that particular kind of mental phenomenon before the book.
- In Case 14, I found out that my now-wife saw a "ghost" and still occasionally thinks about it. Similarly, if it was somehow a mental phenomenon, the continuity of it is surprising.
- In Case 20, I found out that my maternal grandparents had a UFO sighting in their later years that convinced both of them that aliens were visiting earth. They hadn't even told anyone. This was the most jarring clash between the type of person and the type of observation (which was a major point of the exercise for me). Hearing my grandfather say "aliens" in a serious voice was nuts.
Some skepticism is elided throughout because the people who cautiously agreed to tell me the stories were likely to be the only readers.
I got rather deep into UFOs during this. This comment is not particular to UFOs, but I was shocked at how these meaningful distortions creep in at every information bottleneck--you'd hunt down a key detail and it would be wrong in every documentary, missing from Wikipedia (with justification from Source, where Source is wrong), and almost every person spending real time researching the claim would be biased. And then Bob from a UFO Facebook group got his hands on a piece of the record that was never published in any retellings.
I’m a materialist and rationalist type person. On a few occasions I saw a phenomenon of stars moving in the sky, which obviously could be satellites traversing the night sky.
However, they made perfect right angle turns, and in some cases reversed direction fully 180 degrees, while moving at what looked to be immense speeds and not slowing down.
I saw it about twice. Then I went camping with my family. And I saw it and pointed it out and my mom saw it as well.
Just another anecdote to say that I have seen this once too. I described it to people in similar words, at night-time a star-like point of light moving in unusual ways including hard right angle turns. I can't remember if the other movement was linear or involved curves. But I was certain it wasn't possible that it was a plane or a drone. Otherwise I was generally extremely skeptically inclined.
Once when I was young I was watching three satellites move around in the sky. They would stop, change direction, change speed, and leave my field of view before coming back into view. They travelled at a steady pace always in a straight line, and then would periodically change direction and speed to a new uniform pace.
It was a year or so later when I found out satellites don’t do that. This is kind of neat because I was not emotional when watching it happen because I assumed it was normal. So the experience was somewhat uncontaminated.
I don’t think they were aliens, but it’s fun that I saw one thing that I can’t understand or explain. It’s also fun that there’s a Discovery Channel documentary about aliens where I told this story and they apparently made me look like a proper ass. (I’ve never seen it).
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.
If the divine Author's motive is to say "I'm God", the Miracle of the Sun is ineffective, for me. The Miracle shows that the Author can mess with the sun [or our perception of it] for a bit, do some big weird fireworks. I would respect this Author as I would any great Wizard, or great Hacker - I'd be wary of it.
But you're right, we should be epistemically humble re God's ways. If we meet God some day, we can ask what was up with the Sun stuff. God might say: "Wasn't me, was my crazy-ass nephew." Or, might say: "Judging by your popular entertainment, people just can't get enough of car chases, gun play, & explosions. And 16-bar snare-roll buildups in EDM leading to big bass drops. I have to play to the crowd sometimes, be Michael Bay for a day."
According to the accounts, lots of witnesses were moved to repent and resolve to be better Catholics in future, and I assume at least some of them actually followed through. Seems like a pretty plausible motive to me.
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.
Again, *there is no alien angle*, and never was. At least none that I ever proposed. I'm obviously not expressing myself clearly here, and I'm not sure why. But one more try, at least.
Saying "UFO" communicates that there is a huge body of prior work in trying to understand how and why people perceive wondrous and/or terrifying things in the sky, with the well-justified conclusion that it's basically never anything truly wondrous or terrifying and basically always what Scott proposes in section 6. I thought it would have been perhaps useful to be aware of that body of prior work while doing a deep dive into one more example of the same thing.
We need a term to describe to perceptions of flying objects that are unidentified or misidentified, particularly if we want to properly identify such objects. We have that term; it's "unidentified flying object". I have elsewhere suggested we'd have been better off with "unidentified aerial image", to avoid prejudicing the discussion, but the language is what it is.
So why is it that when I say "UFO", even when I immediately and explicitly and now thrice-repeatedly say "...and that *doesn't* mean alien spaceships", people assume I mean to talk about alien spaceships? Does the word "UFO" somehow short-circuit people's brains? What word or phrase *should* I be using to refer to our collective understanding of unidentified aerial images which are almost certainly not alien spaceships?
I meant to propose that *given that* there is no alien angle (i.e., in the case that one *doesn't* wish to prompt thoughts of aliens & flying saucers & the like), using the term "UFO" may not communicate anything especially enlightening—perhaps even, given your complaints here, offering only some counter-productive & unwanted (mis)communication about aliens, instead—and so *it seemed to me* that Scott's neglecting to use the term was a minor sin, if any.
In other words, I'm skeptical about the term's ability to communicate that "there is a huge body of prior work" with any particular bearing upon the Fatima event—or to communicate anything beyond the usual alien & conspiracy associations—but if you think that Scott himself would have been better-served consult such work... well, I could buy that.
(But, even so, I feel like probably *the reader* is just as well-served by the current "UFO-less" formulation as otherwise—given that Scott hasn't thereby failed to make some enlightening connection / missed some general explanation that clearly fits the Fatima case / vel sim.)
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!
Crop circles and physical gifts delivered by "Santa Claus" have something in common: They are both completely achievable by human beings, and people really LOVE pretending they aren't.
Assuming for the sake of argument that aliens are real, it doesn't seem to require too many further assumptions to suppose that they have their own society and laws and so on, including (given that we don't see more evidence of their industrial activities) restrictions against excessive disruption of the natural environment. Perhaps some petty logistical screwup resulted in needing to do emergency repairs and/or resupply within the oxygen-rich atmosphere of an inhabited planet, and bureaucratic procedures (originally intended to discourage that sort of incompetence) mandate notifying any potentially affected locals in advance. Then, a cheap, sketchy automatic translator failed to convey more than the bare minimum, leaving thus-notified Terran peasants to garble up the attempted warning within their existing belief framework.
Alien: "Hello? Is this thing on? Testing, testing."
Shepherd: "I hear you, O Mary!"
A: "Alright, you are hereby notified that there's going to be an induced atmospheric disruption coming up in... wait. What time units are you using down there? Just tell me what the hyperfine transition frequency of Cesium-133 looks like, in your system, and I'll do the rest of the math."
S: "..."
A: "Fifty-five protons, seventy-eight neutrons? You've never even heard of... okay, forget about cesium. Even from here I can tell your planet has a huge natural satellite, and lots of surface water, and your language has words for the relevant orbital period and tidal effects, so that's how I'm going to explain the timing of this upcoming event for official notification purposes."
S: "Why are you dressed that way?"
A: "It's a mechanical counterpressure... y'know what, they're not paying me enough for this, and it's barely even relevant. I'll just forward you the standard briefing."
*one horrifying telepathic outer-space workplace safety training video later*
S: "You're saying if we leave too much skin uncovered, or don't properly attach tethers to ourselves, we might end up lost, burning and freezing in the void forever?!?"
A: "What? No! You're inside a stable biosphere, most of that stuff can't /possibly/ happen to you personally. Probably couldn't get to space even if you wanted to."
My stereotype of a UFO encounter (and indeed, the UFO encounter you link) is something that occurs at night, but these happen during the daytime and involve the sun.
There may be things to learn from UFOlogy and the skepticism thereof, but these and sun miracles seem to be discrete phenomena, if both weird and culture-bound ones.
Your stereotype notwithstanding, a great many UFO "encounters" occurred in broad daylight and clear weather. Notably including the very first UFO encounter of the "flying saucer" era, the one in which that term was coined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting
If there's a discretization, I'm not seeing it, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't occur at the day/night border. The people who studied this half a century ago, learned a great deal about how people respond to apparent aerial oddities by day and by night, and the same principles apply. Different triggers - you probably can't see Venus in the daylight, nor high-altitude balloons at night. And different misidentifications - airships, flying saucers, or biblical miracles depending on the cultural background of the observers. But the same general principles regardless of the level of illumination.
I've actually seen Venus in the daytime, when high in the mountains on the French-Italian border. It took me a while to realize what I was seeing.
But I agree, it isn't likely to lead to UFO reports. I saw it by luck, a slightly brighter speck some distance from the sun, and found it very difficult to get others in our party to be able to discern it.
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
> 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?
Remember that Portugal was in the middle of a politically fraught battle between atheists/secularists and Catholics; there were quite a lot of powerful people reporting on it who had no such incentive.
But according to the article like 99% of Portuguese were Catholic, and it was primarily the church that did all the investigations. Huge opportunity for bias.
Sure, but there were plenty of secular journalists with quite different incentives. And it's also clear that Catholic investigators are not quite so eager as all that to certify new miracles; note the other miracles of the sun that they rejected and excommunicated people for.
This might be our crux. What secular sources? It seems to me like there were basically none that reported both the size of the crowd *and* reported many eyewitness accounts of the miracle. "Secular" people reporting to/via the Catholic Church authorities, after the fact, that they now believe in God and of course he's the architect of the world etc. etc. obviously wouldn't count in my mind.
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.
Interesting idea, but the obvious drawback is that weather balloons generally don't disappear after flying just one time, so we should be able to identify the exact one. I find it unlikely that at the time, one could just pass over the place, especially nefariously, and noone ever notices it- but I could be wrong.
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 agreeing that shots were fired & merely disagreeing upon the number), and "multiple people *confabulating an entire event from start to finish."*
Taking the Brown shooting example as our guide, we might say that we expect that (a) the eyewitnesses did see something, and reported the basic skeleton of the event correctly (perhaps, at minimum, something like "there was a shooting, involving a police officer & this other individual, with multiple shots fired" / "there was a celestial phenomenon involving a sun-like apparition, movement thereof or therein, color changes, and an unusual lack of discomfort when gazing upon it"); 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)!
If you look at the chart you'll see that eyewitnesses do not report the basic skeleton of the event correctly. For anything but the very basic "The officer shot him" you have multiple witnesses offering mutually contradictory information.
When it comes to Fatima, all of this eyewitness testimony is consistent with a brief break in the clouds and people staring at the sun for ten minutes. Because eyewitness testimony is terrible.
And this is before you get into the susceptibility of people to peer pressure right after the event, the way people will incorporate newspaper accounts into their memories and the way something as simple as the questioner asking things like "Many people reported a spinning effect? Did you encounter that?" (This will massively increase the number of people who report such an effect)
Ok, but after how many witnesses do we start to agree that there was at least something? More than just the original Fatima is discussed in the article, even if we discounted the idea that it would be enough.
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)
A brightness adjustment from an exposure time appropriate for the literal sun, to an exposure time appropriate for the ground at sunrise, can easily be orders of magnitude.
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 higher than Torres Novas - which is a big deal when you are dealing with low angles. **EDIT: Mark has acknowledged that near-field obstructions could have occluded the source from many vantages in Torres.** 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 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 the clouds. 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 my second comment. In this comment, I am going to focus on responding to Scott's undercutting defeaters to the opthamological arguments.
First, you propose that comfortable fixation can be explained by the Sun being veiled by clouds. That is inconsistent with the testimony of educated witnesses.
--Jose Garret said "Nor could it be confused with the sun seen through fog (which, by the way, didn't exist at that time), because it wasn't opaque, diffuse, or veiled. The celestial vault was hazy with light cirrus clouds, with gaps of blue here and there, but the sun sometimes stood out in patches of clear sky. The clouds that scurried lightly from west to east didn't obscure the light (which didn't hurt), giving the easily understandable and explainable impression of passing behind it." This witness explicitly denies veiling.
--Dr. Gonçalo Garrett was a **professor of astronomy.** He said "The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon, and could be easily seen." An astronomer would not have described cloud dimming that way.
--Avelino de Almeida said "The star resembles a plate of dull silver, and one can gaze at its disc without the slightest effort. It does not burn, it does not blind. One would think that an eclipse was taking place.” That does not correspond to your photo.
Cloud veiling is also disfavored by the Sun being at its zenith. There is a double-bind: If the clouds are optically thin, then they can't reduce the luminosity enough to avoid discomfort glare. If the clouds are optically thick, then they could possibly attenuate sunlight by the factor that you need, but only if you blur the source beyond recognition.
Second, you argue that it is plausible that the incidence of retinopathy was low enough to evade detention.
--Eclipses:
**The eclipse retinopathy study that you cite is only reporting exposures for people that developed injuries - it is not telling us that there were people with 45 minute exposures that didn't develop injuries. And it included people that were wearing protective gear (who presumably were the ones that had the longest exposures).
**The vast majority of people only take brief peeks—fractions of a second to a few seconds—before looking away. So the effective pool with prolonged, unprotected exposures is much, much lower than the total number of people that viewed the eclipse.
**During eclipses, much of the solar disc is occluded. The retinal exposure will be reduced in direct proportion to the occlusion (90% occlusion = 10% of full exposure)
**Most eclipses are viewed when the Sun is not at zenith but at lower altitudes. That gives you another significant reduction in exposure compared to Fatima.
--Medjugorge:
**Once again, your statistic is not exposure-matched. Some glance for a second or two, some wear sunglasses or veils, some don’t look at all. The average exposure is tiny compared to the Fatima event.
**At Medjugorje, 'sun miracles' are typically observed in the late afternoon, with the Sun lower in the sky. You are probably getting 2x-3x reduction in exposure from that alone.
**Unlike with eclipses, with Medjugorje, we have are anecdotal reports from opthamologists, but not a systematic effort to detect, report, and quantify incidence. So it doesn't seem like the numerator of your statistic is all that informative.
--Attenuation:
**Supposing that there was cloud attenuation (which I disputed above), it is worth noting that veiling does causes pupils to dilate which increases the dose. If the pupils dilate from 3mm to 6mm that can increase the exposure by as much as 4x - that claws back much of the reduction in exposure that you get from the attenuation itself.
As for a positive case that there would have been non-trivial incidence: Fatima involved prolonged, unprotected fixation by tens of thousands. 5-10 minute gaze would have been an excess dose that was 50-200x the threshold. Injury risk is a steep sigmoid - assuming no attenuation, the probability for *each individual* should have exceeded 50%. Allowing for substantial attenuation, the doses remain large enough that you would have expected a mass epidemic of retinal injury in the aftermath of the event. https://www.icnirp.org/cms/upload/publications/ICNIRPVisible_Infrared2013.pdf
Third, I think this is a very important point that has been neglected: transient photophobia should have been ubiquitous in the immediate aftermath of the event. Witnesses should have mentioned that light hurt their eyes after the event - photophobia is an immediate, consistent, conspicuous symptom of prolonged fixation on the Sun. There is no evidence of anyone complaining about light sensitivity after the Miracle of the Sun.
VEILED BY CLOUDS: No, see my section 1.5, where I specifically discuss all of these testimonies and how they support, rather than oppose, being veiled by clouds. I'm glad you mentioned this, because I said in that section that I am confused how people can think these are arguments against cloud cover. Have you seen the sorts of clouds I am talking about? Would you have voted no on the Discord poll?
RETINOPATHY: I agree there is no formal study, I am using these as a pointer to the fact that there seem to be a large number of people gazing at the sun in some distribution, but the distribution of people who present to ophthalmologists is much smaller and spans a very wide variety of exposures. If you want people who claim they stared at the sun for 45 minutes without incident, go to r/sungazing, where you will find many.
I read your section 1.5 - it doesn't "specifically discuss" the testimony that I cite. It references the description of "pale and moonlike" - but Jose Garrett explicitly comments on veiling and says there were times when the sun stood out in clear patches of sky and was still comfortable to fixate upon. Almeida Garrett, as an astronomer, would have commented on mundane cloud veiling and would not have used the visual metaphor that he did without commenting on that. I have seen the photo that you are talking about, but I dont think it would be possible for that to be the explanation and for highly educated people to think it was mysterious/anomalous - especially not an astronomer - I think that contextualizes/interprets the testimony in a way that rules out what might otherwise be a superficially plausible explanation for the phenomenology. I also dont think it matches the ‘metallic’ phenomenology of witnesses.
Also, I want to note that I made an optics argument that veiling couldn't have explained comfortable fixation - I'm not sure if you saw or you missed.
Retinopathy - I understood your point - but I tried to point out the limitations of using this data to object to the theoretical dose-response curve - and I tried to point out ambiguities and symmetry breakers that could reconcile the observation with the theoretical expectation for retinopathy.
There seems to be a contradiction in your model: If the sunlight was attenuated enough to avoid discomfort glare throughout the event, then you wouldnt get the sungazing effects, since those are physiologically-contingent on glare-level input. You cant have your cake and eat it too on the luminance of the source.
Also, I’ve looked more into the physics of attenuation by clouds and it seems like what you are saying you see ‘regularly’ is not possible (and especially not possible for the Sun at its zenith). You may be misremembering - the sun appeared ‘pale’ but you had to squint/felt minor discomfort/only glanced briefly/it was low on the horizon. I’ll elaborate on this more in my response post.
SAMPLING BIAS: I don't think this is true. Our main sources for witnesses are the parish investigation, the diocese investigation, Haffert, De Marchi, and various people who wrote pamphlets and letters to the editor. The parish investigation selection criteria are unknown and might have oversampled the Cova. But the diocese investigation participants came from a letter addressed to everyone in the diocese asking them to come forward if they had seen anything. Haffert and De Marchi were both scouring Portugal looking for people, and if anything would have been *more* interested in distant witnesses, since at least Haffert includes a section in his book specifically trying to argue for the existence of distant witnesses. The pamphlets and letters could, of course, have come from anyone. One reason to doubt a sampling explanation is that we successfully sample three testimonies from one small crowd of ~50-100 people (the Alburitel schoolchildren), then only another three from the entire rest of the area. Even if the two Lourenco brothers' testimony counts as correlated and we only have two from the schoolchildren, this suggests samplers had no problem picking up the schoolchildren (who definitely saw it), and makes their failure to get the rest of the region more surprising.
CLOUD COVER: I guess this depends on our explanation for why there were perfect line-of-sight tunnels leading to Minde, Alburitel, and the poet's house 20 miles away, but nowhere else. I don't have a good enough sense of the meteorology/geography to know how likely this is, or how many other such line-of-sight tunnels we should expect in such a situation. I do think it's hard to say that the event felt like the end of the world at distance of 10 miles, but also stopped being noticeable if there was cloud cover.
LINE OF SIGHT: I took this argument from Mark, who calculated the hill elevations in more detail, and will let him defend it in his future discussion with you.
LOURENCO BROTHERS: Obviously we only have testimony from some fraction of witnesses - this is true everywhere, including the Cova. At Cova, we have, let's say, 150 / 70,000 = 1/500. So it's not surprising that we don't have more witnesses from the schoolchildren (I'm imagining this as a crowd size of 50-100) at Alburitel. In fact, it is surprising that we have three testimonies from them! I'm guessing this is a combination of the two brothers being correlated, plus there being more interest in this because of all the people searching for distant testimonies.
LSA HEAT: Fine, I grant that if this was a heat ray pointed directly at Cova, then it works out.
LIGHT SOURCE TRANSITION: If I understand correctly, the normal sun would have been behind the clouds at this point. So LSa couldn't have (visibly) merged with the normal sun, it could only have disappeared behind the clouds. But nobody mentions the sun disappearing behind clouds. What people have to say about the end of the miracle is:
- Alves: "The sun returned to its normal position and one could no longer stare at it."
- Garrett Sr: "Finally, the sun regained its brightness and splendor."
- Lopes: "Then the sun returned to its normal state."
- Reis: "The sun went back to its right place."
- Menitra: "The sun ceased to spin and went back into its place."
- Lourenco: "The sun, now dull and pallid, returned to its place."
SAMPLING BIAS: For the parish inquiry, my understanding is that the focus was overwhelmingly on the on-site witnesses at the Cova - investigators weren't canvassing the surrounding areas. For the diocesan inquiry, it is true that they circulated a letter, but (a) this was already 5-10 years after the event, (b) it would be hard to get testimony from the uneducated (the preponderance of potential witnesses in surrounding villages) by publishing/soliciting written materials, (c) there is an interpretive filter - since people that saw odd flashes/pale light might not interpret that as 'the miracle of the sun' - meanwhile, everyone at the Cova interpreted their experience as related to the solar miracle. It is true that Haffert would have sought out distant witnesses, but his investigation would have been during the '40s-'50s when the task would have been much harder. It seems that the testimony from distant witnesses that we have is from these secondary investigations - suggesting that they were overlooked by prior investigations that would have had an easier time finding them if they had been searching for them.
I also think that the sampling bias is a better explanation when you consider it in the context of the other points for why you wouldn't have had nearly as much of a density of distant witnesses. Investigators would have gotten the impression that there wasn't much of a return to surrounding areas, so they would concentrate their efforts on networks of witnesses with high density of useful testimony (which would have been Cova-centric - discouraging them from investing the energy to find the outliers).
LIGHT SOURCE TRANSITION: Here is a scenario (there are several others that could be proposed): During the event, the cloud deck veiled the Sun, so people saw only the pale disk. At the end of the event, LSa ascends to match the solar azimuth 'returning to its place.' The cloud coverage breaks behind it, so the glare of the real Sun 'broke through,' overwhelming the pale disk. To the eye, there was no moment of “vanishing.” Instead, the two images collapsed into one: the bright Sun in its normal place. This is actually most consistent with Jose Garrett's description of the cloud phenomena: "The clouds that scurried lightly from west to east didn't obscure the light (which didn't hurt), giving the easily understandable and explainable impression of ***passing behind it.***" -
I'll just throw in that (as a skeptic) I found Objection #5 to be somewhat weak. It is easy to imagine all sorts of ways a separate object might disappear & thence be described as the witnesses described this—"and then the sun went back to its usual place" fits with everything from "the object moved to the sun's apparent position & slowly faded" to "the object suddenly disappeared somewhere apart from the sun & now the cloud-hidden actual sun became noticeable again". (I think. I don't know, perhaps the latter requires that no one come up with the thought "wait... was the sun there behind the clouds all along?", but it's at least *somewhat* plausible.)
Good analysis of the LoS objection; I didn't notice/realize this—I guess my intuition was that "an object at 1 mi. altitude must be high in the sky for miles & miles around", but if 4° is accurate, that is indeed quite low!
>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.
Dalleur estimates LSa to roughly be hovering 6.1km south of the Chapel of Apparitions, placing it around (39.57951247372401, -8.672957642460675) - though I only lazily eyeballed this on Google Maps. Thus, given his LSa angular elevation estimate of 28˚ at Cova da Iria, this implies LSa’s altitude relative to Cova da Iria was about 3.2km; as Cova da Iria is itself about 350m ASL, we conclude[1] LSa’s altitude is about 3.55km ASL.
Torres Novas is about 48 meters ASL, and it’s about 15.83km away from the aforementioned geo-coordinates as the crow flies - closer in some places, obviously, and further away in others. This yields apparent LSa elevation of 12.47˚ from that town. The local hills’ apparent elevation will be much smaller, maybe 2.4-4˚.
[1] This and other things would need to be fiddled with a bit to reflect the Earth's curvature, but it will have a minor effect given the small distances involved.
I dont think that Dalleur constrains the horizontal displacement to 6km, that is an arbitrary value that he plots on the map (all he argues for is 'a few kilometers to the south'). If distance was 3km rather than 6km, then you get 1.5km altitude and the 3-5 degree elevation from Torres Novas.
Worth noting is that it's still ~6.14˚ in that case, well above the most visually obstructive hill. You need it to be a bit closer. But I agree he doesn't precisely estimate where it's supposed to be. Nevertheless, if the sky itself was turning bizarre colors, as one of the Garretts clearly insisted, this would show up regardless of LSa's direct visibility.
Not that this matters, but I think you are slightly off in your calculations - how are you estimating the vertical difference between Torres observers and the Fatima plateau?
3km south of the Chapel of Apparitions is this[1] location. Google Maps says it's about 17.62 km from Torres Novas. If the light source is hovering above those coordinates with visible angle 28˚ from Cova da Iria, then its height ASL is approximately[2] 3,000m*tan(28˚) + 350m = 1945m, where the +350m comes from Cova da Iria's own altitude. Torres Novas is again about 48m ASL, so the apparent angular elevation in degrees there is arctan((1945 - 48)/17,620)*180/π degrees = 6.14489479˚.
For the range of 22-29 at Cova, you get between 1500m ASL and 2000m ASL for the altitude of the source. I was explicitly assuming the bottom of the range 1500 - you’re right that you’d need to move the closer to accommodate 2000 ASL if you assume a higher angular elevation at Cova. But I’m assuming that for the purposes of this argument that I get the benefit of the favorable end of the uncertainty (1.5km ASL). This doesnt really matter because there is nothing stopping us from moving the source slightly closer to Cova.
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.
You cannot _possibly_ have any useful intuition of the sizes 10^-100 and 10^90 that would allow you to conclude that the resulting number 10^-10 has any validity. What if that 10^-100 is really 10^-80? How could you tell the difference? You're just making up numbers and saying you're doing Bayes.
Yes, they’re just vague made up numbers. I’m not claiming otherwise. I don’t expect people to necessarily agree with the 10^-10. That’s just a random personal guess. I do think it’s hard to justify anything except a quite a low number. If you accept that I think the rest is relatively solid, though certainly not definitive.
There are, or were, 67 Church-recognized healings at Lourdes. The best documented ones, that is. There were plenty more healed but most of them not fully documented.
> 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 hope this doesn't sound dismissive but "Why WOULDN'T I do that?" I grew up in a heterodox home that was devoutly Christian in a sense, but we amused ourselves by coming up with alternate, quirky theories about God. and by the time I was a young adult, I felt absolutely free to mix and match bits and pieces of different religious traditions, just like Indians love to do.
Abrahamic faiths REALLY, REALLY spent a lot of effort saying "you can't do that." A third of the Old Testament is about how much God hates that! That's why it feels so strange to you, but it doesn't feel like something that needs a special explanation on my part. Although I provided one anyway!
One can read the Bible and the Koran like theological newspapers, full of truths and falsehoods.
PS. I'm actually a Deist and lapsed Christian who maintains some ties to Christianity, just in case.
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).
Scott, you continue to be unable to write more than I want to know about any topic, though this was a valiant effort!
The crisis of faith section rings a bit hollow for me. I sincerely love that Scott has the perspective he does and the personality that leads to it - it's noble, cooperative, and useful in the role of ‘front line researcher pushing forward the frontier of knowledge,’ which Scott remarkably often is. From my baser perspective, while I do think Ethan et al make interesting points, and felt someone really ought to step up and do an Evan-level treatment of the miracle itself, I wasn't actually that impressed by the overall strength of the theistic argument. So while I was excited to see that Scott had tackled this, and read it immediately, I also felt even before Scott's EPIC TAKEDOWN (jk!) that it was pretty fair, if lazy and unvirtuous, to simply shrug and figure that a bunch of people primed to expect a miracle might see weird things when looking at the sun, and that probably it would look less surprising with further investigation.
Scott reminds me of Thomas Nagel (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/325845-in-speaking-of-the-fear-of-religion-i-don-t-mean) who, in his book arguing against eliminative materialism, admits he is uncomfortable that so many theists agree with his critique, since he doesn't want to embrace theism. He doesn't, since he has a third way in mind that avoids both, but his honesty was quite refreshing and I like that Scott showed the same here.
"Manuel Perreiro da Silva, local priest:" - Wait, a local priest in catholic Portugal talks about his w i f e?
Isn't that a translation error? "o pastor" means "the shepherd" and could easily have been confused with "priest", but it's an error I would rather attribute to a human than a machine.
"The Shrine of Fátima is another indelible link in Father Manuel's life. He would be the first to preside over an open-air Mass at Cova da Iria, on October 13, 1921. In fact, he was one of the few priests present among the crowds at the apparitions of September 13 and October 13, 1917, as can be seen on his tombstone in the Fátima Cemetery. He moved to the Shrine in 1939, where he celebrated his golden anniversary as a priest in 1949, and where he died of cerebral congestion on February 15, 1951."
Hang on, I think I've found out what's wrong. EWTN has the same accounts from eyewitnesses, and if you read all the way to the end, the names are *after* the accounts but look like they are *before* them.
So it's not Fr. da Silva talking about his wife, but instead Senhor Alfredo da Silva Santos.
"The sun appeared with its circumference well defined. It came down as if to the height of the clouds and began to whirl giddily upon itself like a captive ball of fire. With some interruptions, this lasted about eight minutes. The atmosphere darkened and the features of each became yellow. Everyone knelt even in the mud....
Fr. Manuel Pereira da Silva (in a letter to a friend)"
And then:
"We made our arrangements, and went in three motor cars on the early morning of the 13th. There was a thick mist, and the car which went in front mistook the way so that we were all lost for a time and only arrived at the Cova da Iria at midday by the sun. It was absolutely full of people, but for my part I felt devoid of any religious feeling. When Lúcia called out: "Look at the sun!" the whole multitude repeated: "Attention to the sun!" It was a day of incessant drizzle but a few moments before the miracle it stopped raining. I can hardly find words to describe what followed. The sun began to move, and at a certain moment appeared to be detached from the sky and about to hurtle upon us like a wheel of flame. My wife---we had been married only a short time- -- fainted, and I was too upset to attend to her, and my brother-in- law, Joao Vassalo, supported her on his arm. I fell on my knees, oblivious of everything, and when I got up I don't know what I said. I think I began to cry out like the others. An old man with a white beard began to attack the atheists aloud and challenged them to say whether or not something supernatural had occurred.
Senhor Alfredo da Silva Santos (Lisbon)"
Confusing way to lay it out, and no wonder everyone got it sideways!
Looks like this has been figured out but for the record, it is possible to be a married Catholic priest these days. According to the LA Times there are about 120 married priests in the US. Most of them were Anglican/Episcopal priests that converted and were already married. In addition there are Eastern Rite Catholic Churches that allow their priests to marry. Those can now serve in the US.
None of this was allowed back then so it still should have raised some questions.
(Note that OCIC itself, as a site, is quite towards the rigorist side of Orthodoxy and shouldn't be taken as a be-all-end-all resource on Orthodox views)
Haven’t read yet, but FWIW most evangelical Protestants (who certainly believe in God and miracles) would be happy to chalk Marian apparitions up to demons and call it a day. Certainly, if I was a Protestant I wouldn’t lose any sleep. I thought the section of Ethan’s post attempting to rebut the “demons” objection was the weakest part.
This is excellent. One additional strand that I'd like to see someone tug on – maybe I will. The Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats has a poem about the 1891 funeral of Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem describes how clouds covered the sky on the day of the funeral, the sun could be seen through a gap in the clouds, and then a star "shoots down". Most people who write about this poem take this to be pure symbolism (the next stanza describes a scene of pagan sacrifice that definitely is pure symbolism), but a while ago I came across an essay where Yeats insists that no, this actually happened.
He wasn't at the funeral himself, but he knew lots of people who were. He cites his unrequited love Maud Gonne telling him afterwards about "the star that fell broad daylight as Parnell’s body was lowered into the grave", and quotes the writer Standish O'Grady:
‘I state a fact - it was witnessed by thousands. While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly, and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements, and that storm, and other elemental disturbances have too often succeeded or accompanied great battles to be regarded as only fortuitous...’
Now, Yeats was exceptionally credulous and prone to exaggeration. And he wrote the poem years after the funeral: while I think it's very unlikely, it's not impossible that he was 'contaminated' by subsequent knowledge of the reports from Fatima, and this coloured the way he stitched together the testimony he'd heard. The two sources he cites are less obviously Fatima-esque than his poem (though they don't contradict each other, and altogether they add up to something exceptionally Fatima-esque with the lights and the falling object etc.; and, again, my knowledge of Yeats' biography makes contamination seem unlikely). Even accounting for all this, the similarities between Yeats' poem and the Fatima sun miracle are really striking to me.
I think this is a potentially very important datapoint, because it's an almost entirely non-religious example. To be sure, you can define 'religion' so that Irish nationalism can be a religion, but it's very different from a bunch of people huddling on a hill because someone told them the Virgin Mary might appear. And indeed Parnell was in the unique position of being the Protestant leader of a mostly-Catholic political movement, cutting across Ireland's religious divide. If there really was a Fatima-esque sun miracle at Parnell's funeral, it strongly suggests that the correct explanation is (a) non-religious/materialist but also (b) 'objective' (or at least as intersubjective as optical illusions) rather than a matter of pure mass hysteria or hallucination. Which is exactly what this post suggests. And Parnell's funeral came several decades before Fatima, so genuine primary sources would rule out 'social contagion' completely.
This has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, but if enough people are interested I may try to track down the sources. The main published collection of Yeats' letters to and from Gonne starts in 1893, two years after the funeral, so the main source he cites might be tricky to verify. But there might be independent diaries or newspaper reports from people at the funeral who weren't in Yeats' social circle, and at very least I can check the quote from Standish O'Grady.
(The poem is entitled 'Parnell's Funeral'; the essay where Yeats says all this really happened is in his book King of the Great Clock Tower.)
Yes, I'd seen the Herald-Tribune reporting. I'd imagine that, if this was indeed a thing, it was only seen by a small proportion of the mourners (which could still be an absolutely large number of people, though maybe not the 'thousands' O'Grady claims). Which would give credence to optical illusion–esque explanations? as opposed to celestial/supernatural explanations that everyone would see. But then again, maybe it just didn't happen at all, nobody saw anything strange in the sky, and this was a legend that grew up later.
I wonder if Alfonso Lopes Vieria might have genuinely described seeing *a* Miracle of the Sun, but not the original one — just one of the follow-ups in later years. That would account for him not mentioning it in contemporary letters, and it's easy to see how the timing might blur in his (and his widow's) mind decades later.
This is my perspective as an Orthodox Christian, and a possible framework for interpreting Fatima as a real miracle without becoming a fire-and-brimstone Catholic.
It's possible that Fatima et al. are partially or entirely from God. It's also possible they are partially or entirely demonic phenomena, though often repurposed by God to good ends. Either way, if I have good reason to believe the Catholic Church is not fully in accord with Divine Truth, these miracles on their own shouldn't make me change my mind.
Christ Himself tells us to believe for His own sake, not for the sake of miracles. I believe in the supernatural because of numerous miracle stories that are impossible to explain otherwise. But my non-materialism is specifically Orthodox Christian because I can't explain Jesus unless He's the Christ, and I find Him most clearly in the practice and teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has plenty of miracles too, but that's not why I'm here.
I.E. Christ Himself gives you permission to decouple the reality of a supernatural occurrence from an associated claim to Divine Truth. You can use Fatima to update the chance of P(supernatural) without an equal update to P(Catholicism).
--
Anyway, if you do want to keep going down the miracle rabbit-hole, the Orthodox equivalent of Fatima is the annual miracle of the Holy Fire. The main miracle - that a candle is miraculously lit while the Patriarch of Jerusalem is alone in the Holy Sepulchre - has supposedly been debunked since the Middle Ages. Even many Orthodox doubt it. But pilgrims regularly report a secondary miracle: For the first few minutes, candles lit from the Holy Fire don't burn things, at least not how they should.
They don't leave their flesh in the flame for too long, but my brain tells me that putting the bundle of candles directly under your chin like the man does at 0:07 should also result in serious burns:
I pray before a single small candle every night. If I put my hand two inches above the visible flame, I can only hold it for ~2 seconds until it hurts too much. I find the videos and first-hand testimony (see Rod Dreher's blog for one example) pretty convincing.
Ah, I'm not pushed about Marian apparitions. The miracle of the sun is along the lines of the Shroud of Turin - you don't have to believe the shroud is really the shroud of Jesus Christ, nobody is making you, it's not doctrine. At the same time, if you want to venerate it (as you would a crucifix) that's okay. Keep away from making extravagant claims, don't contradict received doctrine, and it's fine.
Did a miracle happen at Fatima? I have no idea. I believe in God and the supernatural and all that jazz, but I'm not living and dying on "did this one event at this one apparition site really happen? if you prove it didn't, oh no my faith is destroyed!"
During the moving statue craze in Ireland, we had our own little local apparition. At the height of it, tour buses used to come with people to pray at the site. That has long died down, and I don't recall that there were any earth-shattering revelations claimed by the visionaries, what remains is a quiet revival in people going to pray the rosary at the grotto.
There are a *lot* of alleged apparitions and private revelations that are never officially accepted by the Church, and a lot more which are condemned as fakes and frauds.
So at which point does Rome start taking note and say "check your spelling, you're supposed to worship the Son, not the Sun"? This whole "Dancing Sun" thing seems to have traction, or is that still small fry, yet undeserving of the Spanish Inquisition?
I think it's accepted as "people weren't hoaxing". The apparitions themselves are considered "worthy of belief", but does that include the Miracle of the Sun? Seems a little grey, so far as I can find out:
"October 1930 - Announcement of Dom Jose Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of the Diocese of Leiria-Fatima on the Results of the Investigative Commission
In virtue of considerations made known, and others which for reason of brevity we omit; humbly invoking the Divine Spirit and placing ourselves under the protection of the most Holy Virgin, and after hearing the opinions of our Rev. Advisors in this diocese, we hereby: –
1. Declare worthy of belief, the visions of the shepherd children in the Cova da Iria, parish of Fatima, in this diocese, from the 13th May to 13th October, 1917.
2. Permit officially the cult of Our Lady of Fatima."
Pope Pius XII claimed to have seen the miracle himself:
But because all this comes under the heading of private revelation, nobody is *bound* to believe it as a matter of faith. You can legitimately have doubts about the apparitions or the miracle claims and still be a Catholic in good standing.
I don't see any mention here of different layers of clouds. It is possible to have both cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds at the same time, so what we think of as "clouds" part and behind them is another layer of clouds blocking the sun. It seems to me, especially from watching the videos and videos in the comments, that there is some rare kind of clouds, perhaps caused by high ice crystals, that can produce a variety of optical effects: motion, changing color, and changing size. That this should happen at a time when a lot of people are looking at the sun expecting something to happen is a big coincidence, but in the end only a coincidence.
Suppose as the cloud layer changes, you get something shifting in a striking way between solar halos and cloud coronae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(optical_phenomenon) . It is a localized weather phenomenon. Wouldn't this explain most of what needed to be explained?
I don't think it makes sense for this to happen at Fatima, Ghiaie, Lubbock, and every time people go to Medjugorje, but practically never be seen anywhere else.
Why can’t God create a miracle that only some can see? If it’s a miracle than localization is entirely possible, if natural then probably not. But that’s entirely what is at issue.
I know it would have interfered with the nerding, but it seems like some liar constant needs to be introduced here. An odd omission from a psychiatrist!
In terms of persuading those who disagree, pointing out that about half of them are lying is a problem. But in terms of pursuit of the truth, it has to be a big factor in our quest.
And the more we investigate and quantify that factor, the more we’ll know! For example, there’s an actual number attached to the lizardman constant, right? Those kinds of numbers, should we be able to obtain them, would be powerful.
Someone could read court records, for example, and calculate what percentage of statements made under oath are later contradicted by court rulings. That would give a baseline for how much lying happens under our most truth-intensive social contexts, and provide a minimum expected level of lying elsewhere.
I don't understand - you think all 150 witnesses were lying, including the unbelievers? And no truth-tellers stepped up to say "no, I didn't see it?" (except for the tiny handful I cited)
Not all, but I’d guess that there’s a proportion. And I’m thinking that it might be more like 40% than 4%.
I’m also very unsure how to handle issues like P and not-P. The claim “a miracle happened” doesn’t seem symmetrical with “a miracle didn’t happen”; but I don’t know how to weight these contradictory statements. I guess the naive approach would be to treat them the same, and apply the liar discount to both.
If you have well-paired P and not-P claims, applying the discount like this wouldn’t make a direct difference on the question. But if you have fairly small numbers (e.g. dozens) of claims, then knowing a priori that X% of them are likely to be lies could usefully reduce the amount of mystery that we feel like we have to solve.
I've spent considerably more time than the average person pointing my face continuously at the sun with my eyes open (trying, of course, to somehow not look at the sun whilst doing this..)
No miracles to report - just one very-unusual-but-totally-explicable phenomenon - but first: I think there might be a class of people alive today who look at the sun more than the typical amount, and who aren't being selected for weirdness (like the Redditors) or religious fervour (like the Medjugorje pilgrims).
Some nation's navies (for all I know, possibly all nation's navies) still teach navigation by sextant. This is partly because navies tend to be quite reactionary in general, but also because in the navy you're much more likely than most sailors to find yourself navigating under conditions of GPS failure (or GPS denial, which is surprisingly easy even for a low-tech adversary).
Solar observations by sextant are often taken at solar noon, sunrise, and sunset, but such observations can be taken at any time of the day when at least one limb of the sun is clearly visible (ie. not a blurred outline seen through cloud). If you suck at using a sextant (through some combination of being completely new to using one; not really caring as much as you ought to because it's a minor part of your training syllabus and you know you're soon going to be tested against much more demanding things; having been taught by somebody who hasn't used the technique themself in maybe twenty years; and just being generally hopeless and clumsy..) you can potentially spend ten minutes pointing sextant + face at the sun whilst fiddling with the scope, micrometer, shades, etc. and end up accidentally looking at the sun unshaded (or painfully under-shaded) a fair bit.
I just mention it in case there's some way of canvassing 'hopeless beginner sextant users' as a sort of control group for pilgrims and 'I-stare-at-the-sun-to-replenish-my-aura' Redditors.
(The unusual-but-totally-explicable phenomenon I saw was an eclipse; I couldn't say exactly where or when (after enough time at sea it all sort of blends together..) but I think it was in the Eastern Mediterranean sometime during the Russo-Ukranian War. I'd read nothing in the news about it, and being a partial rather than a total eclipse it wasn't visible to the naked eye: teaching a cadet some basic navigation techniques, I just pointed my sextant at the sun and found that a sizeable chunk of it wasn't there. I was so taken aback I think I'd have been prepared at that point to believe in any miracle that was suggested to me.)
Separately: I was hoping to find a treatment by Scott of the argument that the Fatima Event was a miracle *regardless of the mechanism-of-action*: If God chooses to work though perfectly-coordinated combinations of timely shepherdess predictions, specific meteorological phenomena, hitherto-undocumented optical illusions, and optimal sociocultural priming, who are we to argue?
Two ways I can think of to approach this are:
1) Statistically: if we can assign frequencies to shepherdess predictions, meteorological conditions, etc., can we determine the chance-occurrence rate and derive a p-value for any given observed occurrence?
2) Theologically: it seems as though at least twenty-six people, many of them faithful, well-intentioned Catholics, have been blinded through trying to replicate aspects of the Fatima Event; possibly many more if you factor-in Medjugorje, the possibility of undocumented blindings, etc. "Free Will" doesn't seem to be a good enough justification since these victims only ended-up staring at the sun because of the nature of the specific miracle that God chose to perform (presumably God could have predicted this in advance and chosen another sort of miracle, had He wished to). Can this be reconciled with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God? Do Fatima-inspired blindings thus provide evidence against an omnibenevolent God? Or, does this reduce to the standard theodicy problem we already knew about, not providing any extra evidence either way?
I just want to say I have seen sundogs IRL and they were very colorful, like a rainbow. They were however limited to relatively small spots near the sun, they did not appear to move and the rest of the sky looked normal.
After reading all of that, it seems to come down to some kind of optical illusion + social priming:
- staring at the sun (which as was repeatedly emphasised, can cause eye damage, so people don’t usually do it), plus maybe cloud cover
- *and* expecting to see some kind of miraculous vision
With the hypothesis being that either on their own isn’t enough to do it
It’s normally rare because people (a) aren’t staring at the sun and (b) aren’t expecting miracles. But when the right factors are present (including, maybe, cloud) then lots of people see it.
I agree - also note how many witness reports are not stating that they saw something weird in the sun but that others pointed out that something weird was happening in the sun, causing them to take a glance and noticing it, too. In my opinion that is very strong evidence that whatever was going on needed concentration to be observed and was not something immediately obvious. And that in such a large crowd expecting an unusual sign from the heavens someone was starring a little bit too intensely into the sun, especially after the appointed time for the miracle had already passed, and therefore was able to see the phenomenon and point it out to others seems not too farfetched.
"At some point the created image will begin to get clearer, brighter, more refined, and more stable. If you are using a candle flame and its subsequent red dot as image, it will tend to gain green, blue, and purple rings around it with intricate yellow rapidly moving fine complex lines in the middle that shift and spin at high speed. Paying attention to that high-speed spinning and movement will develop good attention-tuning skills that translate extremely well to other meditation styles.
The more refined dot (it might be some other shape, depending on what object you start with) is called the nimitta in the Pali commentaries. The nimitta will eventually start to do strange things, such as oscillate between a black dot and some greenish-yellow dot, or other variants on this theme. It may acquire all sorts of fine details, change color many times, develop into other images, and even begin to seem alive, like you are watching an animation. The larger the nimitta, the more remarkable the show that it can produce, particularly in terms of exquisite little nuances, images, colors, and shimmering variability. As practice grows stronger, you will notice that your internal intentions and inclinations have more and more control of what shapes and colors the nimitta becomes, as well as where it is in the visual field and how it moves."
The first source especially includes a lot of reports. This isn't particularly hard to verify experientially either fwiw.
A large number of people pulling a fire kasina off the sun and reporting phenomena as reported in the miracle is impressive but not implausible to me esp. in a primed religious context.
Hey, guys. I need to read this more (it's a long post and regrettably I'm very busy) but I was anxious to get a thought out there. Is there a chance that the autokinetic effect plays into this?
For clarity.
1) The autokinetic effect is a well-known psychological effect where a small, stationary pinpoint of light in a dark room appears to the viewer to move around.
2) This happens because the eye’s natural motions (saccades) have no reference point in a featureless darkness, so it appears like the light is moving, rather than the eyes.
It’s not tough to imagine that a featureless grey haze obscuring the sun, leading to it hanging like a silver disc, might produce an autokinetic effect if the haze removes all visual anchors that a person would normally need in order to interpret the sun as static. In the absence of those visual anchors viewers might experience their own eye saccades as the disc of the sun moving.
3) The effect could be something like the combination of the eye saccades moving (causing the sun to appear to move in the featureless fog) along with the retinal effects of having the sun shining in one’s eyes too long. Staring at the sun seems sufficient to create the “disc on the outside of the sun” effect and also some of the colors/motion. What if you combine that with the autokinetic effect?
4) It might also explain the sun appearing to plunge toward the ground. Imagine staring at the white disc of the sun against a featureless gray haze with no landscape references, so the autokinetic effect starts to happen. The sun appears to be moving. Suddenly there is a break in the fog for a moment—just enough that your eyes can see the true distance of the sun above the horizon. Would this coincide with a sudden “plummet” effect, visually, as your eyes moved from the wild fulminations of the autokinetic effect to a more anchored understanding of the actual location of the sun?
5) Hypothetically if this were the case, variations in the Fatima miracle could be explained by how much of a person’s field of vision was taken up by a featureless background like diffuse, cloudy haze.
6) This would also explain the noon timing of the Fatima effect. At that time, the sun is high in the sky. So, imagine, looking up, and in doing so you remove most of the landscape from your vision and are just looking at a featureless swatch of sky. A haze obscures the sun a bit, such that it appears to be a silver disc, but there's not much by way of visual features that can anchor your vision. That would probably fulfill the conditions for the autokinetic effect; saccades would be interpreted as motion.
7) If I recall, in the lab, people were completely credulous about the autokinetic effect. They thought the light was moving in the dark room, not that their eyes were moving.
8) Question RE: this, not so much for you guys as for me, but how smoggy or smoky were the conditions in some of these sightings? I’ve walked through a hazy-but translucent fog bank before and can vouch that if the atmosphere has enough particle density you can look directly at the sun and it looks like a bright white plate with clearly defined edges. That happened to me once in middle school. I never forgot it. If I imagine similar conditions in Fatima, with the sun high in the sky against a featureless background, I could see this happening. But for it to happen consistently week after week there would need to be a sort of constant haze. Smog or smoke from a factory is a good possibility.
9) I know this doesn't square with all the facts described even in the opening of Scott's article (where people said that the sun appeared to bounce around the landscape, which would imply that the landscape was in their visual field) but all of those talks of wild motion and I can't help but think of saccades and the autokinetic effect. It's the most reach-for-able phenomenon, and in combination with retinal effects of sun exposure it might explain some of the basics.
I agree; autokinesis seems like a very strong candidate for the 'dancing sun' effect (especially when combined with the sort of color changes and effects mentioned by sungazers, plus the power of suggestion, which I think is underemphasized by Scott here). The piece spends a fair amount of time considering phenomena of the eyes and brain that could account for these effects, and it's unfortunate that it misses this one.
The one point you make which I question is the attribution to saccades; the causes of autokinetic effects seem to be up in the air (see eg https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10965040/) and may be outside the eyes.
A couple of additional notes, mostly just adding to your good overview:
1. As you say, early observers of the effect were convinced that the movement was real, and it was originally named 'Sternschwanken': 'swinging stars'.
2. As you say, events having occurred close to solar noon makes autokinetic effects especially plausible.
3. Although autokinesis seems to be typically studied in very (subjectively) small sources like stars, at least one study (https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0055867) looked at patterns of dots as large as 60° and autokinesis was observed in all subjects.
4. The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autokinetic_effect) quotes a passage from HG Wells's *The War of the Worlds*, which I'll close with, both because it's charming and because it describes a disc growing and shrinking, not just moving (of course it's fiction, but it at least seems plausible that Wells is describing something he himself has observed:
'Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view. As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty million miles it was from us—more than forty million miles of void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.'
(1) you can totally stare directly at the sun during a total eclipse, without any damage. The eclipse I stared at had about 2 minutes of totality. Highly recommended even if it would produce minor eye damage. Those are probably the top 2 minutes of my life in terms of sheer, visceral joy.
(2) related to sungazing, I have heard claims that direct sun exposure (including UV B, i.e., you shouldn't be behind glass!) does good things for your mitochondria. I think it causes the muscles to build more of them. I have an n=1 data point that this raises energy levels and relieves fatigue. Very weak evidence with dozens of confounding factors of course.
(3) Part of the recommendation I got along with (2) was to gaze at the sun with eyes closed. I hypothesize that this has benefits like getting your homeostasis into a more natural balance. The theory being that never being exposed to strong sunlight tricks our body into thinking it's winter, leaving it perpetually in energy saving mode, which is highly maladaptive in the modern environment. AFAIK, gazing at the sun with eyes closed for a few minutes at a time is entirely unproblematic. Please correct me if this isn't the case! I am very eager to learn more about this, also please share related experiences and theories.
(4) Why did Scott not click on the link about poop and cum? We simply MUST know where the sun's energy goes, FOR SCIENCE! Is it really the best disinfectant? Any applications to UTIs?
Direct exposure to UVB has all sorts of benefits, but as far as I know, none of these benefits depends on exposing your *eyes* (don't stare at the sun)
I am wondering how often after visions of Jesus and Mary someone asks the miracle-viewer to describe Jesus and Mary. If they describe a Middle Eastern Jew, that would seem like the historical figure. If Jesus or Mary looks like the standard depiction in their culture's religious iconography, that strongly suggests a brain inserting an already known religious image rather than actually seeing anything.
Insert here "coming to you in a form you will understand."
In near death experiences, people always see whatever is culturally relevant to them (whatever their local religion is / religious iconography is), whereas children are more likely to see…their peers. Other kids. The relevant stuff in their kid life.
Of course, if everyone sees their localized version at this miracle site, it could just be said that that’s how the entities choose to reveal themselves rather than their historical look.
Kind of like ghosts from the 1700s showing up in low-rise jeans and a bomber jacket. Why not I guess?
Scott sayeth: "The straightforward Bayesian way to do this is to start with some prior probability that there is a God who causes miracles (let’s say 1%), notice that the evidence for Fatima being a miracle naively seems very high (let’s say 90%), multiply out, and end up with a higher (8.3%) probability of God’s existence and a lower (8.3%) chance that Fatima in particular was miraculous."
This is not the standard way Bayesianism works. The proper way is this: start with priors, P(God) and P(noGod). Observe Fatima. Then ask: in the world where these it God, how likely are we to observe Fatima? And in the world where there is no God, how likely are we to observe it? Both of these probabilities are small. Even in the world with a God, surely he doesn't feel obligated to do every thing you can think of, even though he could. Even in that world, most miraculous things don't happen. Also, in the world with no God likelihood that we would observe Fatima depends on how big the world is: if you had 100 Earths, you would get 100 times more rare events.
Worth noticing: this calculation doesn't introduce the concept of a miracle at all and is indifferent to whether Fatima is such.
Obviously, however you slice it, we are more likely to observe Fatima in a God-world than in the noGod-world.
(At this point it would be nice of me to put some toy numbers on it and say approximately what kind of update *I* think is warranted, but these numbers are so tiny and hard to estimate, that I will refuse to do that in a cowardly fashion.)
What if we do want to use the concept of a miracle the way Scott did? Let's say miracle is a type of thing that only God can do, and natural law doesn't explain at all.
First: funny enough, if Fatima is 90% likely to be a miracle, then situation is even nicer for the God's side than Scott's calculation would suggest, because there are 3 possibilities: 1) no God and Fatima is not a miracle 2) Yes God, but Fatima is just some random illusion unrelated to him and 3) Yes God, and Fatima is a miracle.
P3/(P1+P2+P3) should be 90% then, and you might end up P1 = 5%, P2 = 5% and P3 = 90%, yielding an even larger update towards God, 95:5, not 90:10.
Second: must we buy into the 90% number though? Where did it come from? I think the most reasonable way to actually estimate P(Fatima_Is_Miracle) would be to run the first calculation I talked about, start with prior for God/NoGod, figure out P(Fatima|God) and P(Fatima|NoGod), whatever those are, then do the arithmetic on them (exercise for the reader). But that defeats to point of ever bringing up P(Fatima_Is_Miracle), because if we could agree on P(Fatima|God) and P(Fatima|NoGod) we wouldn't need to talk about miracles, we would immediately calculate a Bayesian update from that.
I am not sure I can think of another good was to estimate P(Fatima_Is_Miracle), honestly. There's a danger of naively noticing that something really, really has a shape of a miracle (glowing signs in the sky! Prophecies!) and becoming sure something is miraculous. But as a bare minimum any calculation of P(something_is_miraculous) would have to take into account: is this something you stumbled on today or is this the most miracle-seeming even selected from all the events in the world, and how big is a world, anyway? These things must be accounted for.
Imagine a story: "a very holy child told be God has blessed me with luck. And I rolled 5 dice, an lo: they formed a shape of a cross when they fell, and all were 3 in honor of the Trinity, how miraculous!" Imagine for a second it is completely true beyond doubt. The story is very miracle-shaped, but what is the probability this is a real miracle though? It absolutely matters whether: 1) this has just happened to you and this is the strangest thing that has happened in the span of your life or 2) this is an ancient tale, and this is the most miraculous thing that has happened in recorded history or something in between. And whatever thought process says that P(Fatima_Is_Miracle) = 90% has to take these considerations into account.
(So if you're wondering what the conclusion of this Bayesian analysis is, the conclusion is that I don't think I can use Bayesian analysis for this, even with made-up numbers.)
Having seen the videos, I'd say your explanation of the "miracle" is essentially correct, and is easily explained by boring old meteorology. No need for fancy new illusions, and the cameras aren't having a stroke either.
A quick reminder: clouds can either block sunlight, or *reflect* it - which is why they appear either black or white, depending on their position relative to the sun from us. We all know this, but it's gonna be important.
So, what's happening in the videos, and - presumably - what had happened in Fatima.
There is diffuse, low-level, multi-layer cloud cover, with high-altitude winds moving the clouds about. That's it! That's all you need to explain pretty much everything.
Let's go over the "consensus testimony" point by point:
1. At the hour predicted by the child-seers, the rain stopped and a “window” of clear sky opened in the clouds, revealing the sun. It looked surprisingly pale, cool, and painless to gaze at, like the full moon.
You already explained that one, with a photographic example, to boot. The sun is obscured by a diffuse cloud which blocks out enough of its light to make it possible to look at it directly, but not enough to hide it completely.
2. It began to dance in a zig-zag pattern.
The clouds are moving, moreover, the different layers of clouds are moving at different speeds relative to one another. The amount of sunlight reaching the observer changes with time, as does the amount of light reflected from nearby clouds. Both of these are clearly observable in the 2010 video, and can cause the sun to appear to move, when its actual disc is obscured, but its rays fall onto a nearby cloud causing it to light up against the otherwise dark background with reflected light, giving the illusion that the sun has changed position.
3. It spun and shot off sparks like a firework wheel.
Given that the clouds will be moving across the sun's disc, they can create an illusion of motion in the sun itself. As for shooting off sparks, occasional breaks in cloud cover will result in the manifestation of short-lived "god rays". The 2009 video demonstrates this, with the "god ray" being directed at the camera, which causes it pulse when the amount of light hitting it suddenly overloads the sensor.
4. It changed colors, and everyone in the area was bathed in different-colored light, as if it were shining through stained glass.
Everyone has been staring at the sun for a while, with the amount of light hitting their eyes varying over time, as the clouds move across it, obscuring and revealing (again, see the 2009 video). They're getting the usual after-images, but in a random fashion, given that they're looking at a randomly variable light source that is, at its maximum, as bright as the sun.
5. It seemed to fall down to Earth three times, terrifying the onlookers and making them think the world was about to end.
This is the really neat one, and again well shown in the 2010 video: a combination of obscuring and reflection from surrounding clouds that causes the sun to appear to change its size, up to the point of washing out all across the sky. Probably even neater to see in person, but not particularly miraculous. Since we are dealing with fast moving clouds, these changes appear to be like the sun dashing forward and retreating.
6. Then it returned to its normal position, and the previously drenched crowd noticed they were miraculously dry.
Eventually, the clounds blocking the sun cleared up enough that direct sunlight became the brightest light source, and everything went back to normal. The drying most likely happened at its own pace - aided by the wind that we know was present - but by that time everyone was so miracle-minded, it was the juniper bushes all over again.
This doesn't purport to explain *everything*. For example, there's the matter of it happening at the predicted hour.
This gets into a trickier psychological issue: the people at Fatima came expecting to see a miracle, and the conditions happened to be right for this one. Likely, the phenomena outlined would have already been visible prior to the appointed time, but nobody was paying attention, because it was not yet time. In any case, I don't think anyone was keeping detailed time records.
What *did* happen is that somebody who was looking around for signs of the miracle looked up to the heavens, saw that the sun looked a bit off, and kick-started the whole thing by pointing to it as the sign of the miracle. Social contagion on fertile ground did for the rest.
So, yes, the "miracle of the sun" - as described - can be observed by anyone, anywhere the conditions are right. Indeed, most of us already might have. Had you shown me the 2010 video with no context, I'd simply have said "Neat video of sun shining through the clouds." and thought nothing more of it. Which is why you have so many examples, both in the records, and on video.
What if the meteorological conditions weren't right in Fatima on 13 October 1917? Well... we'd have a different miracle, most likely. When thousands of people descend to see a miracle, then, by Jingo!, they will have one! Any miracle will do.
Which is why it's so important to pre-register one's miracles.
The whole thing is also a great illustration of the limits of oral testimony. As a fun exercise, I invite everyone to try to describe what they see the sun doing in the videos here, importantly: without including anything about what is causing it to appear so (so, nothing about clouds, camera sensors, or anything of that sort). Now, ask your friends to do the same, and compare notes afterwards. I have a sneaky suspicion that the descriptions will seem a lot more strange and exciting than what is actually on record.
This only works if you assume that everyone is exaggerating far beyond the reality, and that it was actually very mundane. Why would a group of people feel so confident about it even years after the fact? It's possible, people can be goaded, but it seems implausible given the variety of kinds of witnesses. What you fail to not omit in your final challenge is that most would, even if they were wanting for words, clarify that it's nothing very unusual. These people were saying they never saw anything like it in their life, or only on special occasions.
I would describe it as either the Sun flashing, or its aura of light expanding and contracting. Nothing even remotely close to the descriptions of the witnesses. For example, saying everything is bathed in a certain kind of light is not just a normal afterimage. I also do not get any instinctual fear of terror that the Earth is about to be eaten. The videos don't show anything like an actual firework wheel in action. Etc.
- Do all religions have a concept of "miracles" such as that in Fatima?
- If not, have there been events that other religions would call a miracle for religions that don't?
- Has there ever been a miracle giving the people who witnessed it visions of a different religion than their own? Like Christians seeing visions not of Mary but of Vishnu or Thor?
Yes, actually. I’ve read several times over the years that visions of Christ and Mary are one of the two biggest reasons Muslims in the Middle East convert to Christianity
I know only of one story off the top of my head, I’ll see if I can find a source. There was a group of missionaries deep in a rural area of Africa trying to reach this remote village. After several days traveling by elephant, they finally make it. When they get there, the whole village gets super excited, and after the missionaries explain who they are and what they’re doing, the village elders inform them that their holy man had a dream from an unknown god that a white monkey would come in riding an elephant to tell them about his son.
I may have blurred the details there but you get the gist.
I don’t know if this counts but I have personally met someone who was raised Protestant and converted to Catholicism after having a vision of Joan of Arc while on holiday during a study abroad in college. She was studying in Germany, but had gone on a cycling trip to France. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she stopped for lunch in Joan of Arc’s home village, and had the vision while out in a meadow eating. She didn’t know who the saint was or anything about Catholicism at the time. I’ve heard of other Marian apparitions along those lines, where the person might theoretically know about Catholicism but have no idea who this woman appearing to them is.
I mean if it's a miracle, it doesn't have to be consistent right? Isn't (one of) the general idea(s) that the naughty rationalists don't get to see it or analyse it.
You might thing they’re dumb but that’s the official stance. That’s why they allowed samples of the Shroud of Turin to be examined by non-sympathetic scientists. They didn’t have to do that lol.
From the literal Catechism of the Catholic Church:
159 Faith and Reason: “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”“Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.”
There's a long history of faked relics, faked miracles, and con artists using the credulity of the masses to make money, as well as honest but mistaken people claiming they saw things which were apparitions or miracles. Add in the tendency of some people to claim to be seers and who go completely off the reservation and end up forming their own little cults, and that is why the Church is cagey about "so some guy/gal in Nowheresville claims Jesus is appearing every Thursday in their living room and giving them special divine revelations? And there are starting to be crowds turning up to witness this? Uh-huh, let's look into it".
What the Reformers in England liked to do was go around to monasteries and shrines and destroy alleged miraculous items or statues etc. that had been venerated and were the centre of pilgrimages, in order to prove the deception, deceit, and falsity of the Roman Catholic Church (and by contrast, how right, pure and faithful the new Anglican Church was) e.g. the Holy Blood of Hailes and so forth:
"Cromwell’s men were also instructed to hunt down any evidence of superstitious practices among the monks and nuns, notably the keeping of relics. They soon returned stories of a host of fake relics being used to impress or intimidate the occupants of the houses. A phial of liquid believed to be the blood of Christ was proven to contain only the blood of a duck, while a bottle containing ‘Our Ladies milke’ was ‘broken and founde but a peece of chalke’. Cromwell made sure that stories such as these were well publicised in order to pour scorn on the monasteries, and thus help to justify their dissolution."
(Borman, Tracy. Thomas Cromwell: The untold story of Henry VIII's most faithful servant). Hodder & Stoughton.)
Of course, the reformers had their own agenda in proving such to be fakes, so I do wonder about how much 'proof' was actually "well we couldn't find anything so we just said we did". But that's a different question.
Another weakness of the theory is that it means the children just got very lucky that A) the weather cooperated and B) the posited psychology mechanism exists. It also seems like the Italian Marian apparition apparently independently verified as happening on the same day as the original Fatima apparition should count for something, too.
The children getting "lucky" is basically just the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. They didn't say what manner of miracle would be performed, merely that one would. If we didn't have this miracle, we'd get a different one, because you had a whole crowd of religious people waiting for a miracle to happen (and, therefore, anything seeming sufficiently miraculous would be taken as such).
We can take it a step further, and note the anthropic aspect: the only reason we're discussing the Fatima miracle is that something *did* happen, and enough people agreed it was miraculous. Had nothing like that happened, the children would have been in trouble, and the whole event long forgotten.
I take your point, but I think you’re mistaken here.
It seems very implausible that people would just make up a miracle if nothing had happened. It’s tantamount to saying that when a big crowd gets together expecting supernatural intervention, they (always? usually? sometimes?) get a positive result. But that is an empirical claim that I am not inclined to accept, though would be open to evidence.
But even if I granted that, remember that not everyone was expecting the miracle. The proposal at the end relies on objective, external conditions obtaining. The skeptics (and many of the religious people, too—we aren’t simpletons lol) would not have accepted that sort of “miracle.” The children would have to have gotten very lucky that they wound up with JUST the right conditions to end up with something observable by atheists and Catholics alike.
The assumption of the anthropic principle as you use it would seem to be that actually, tens of thousands of people gather expecting Marian apparitions quite regularly, and usually they’re disappointed. This is just the weird fluke where everyone actually saw something by chance. Since this relies on an empirical premise it’s hard to evaluate, and also hard to know what it even implies. Is that a reason to think these people DIDN’T witness something?
This is not the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. This was a called shot on a target that wasn't the minimum possible size.
Imagine it wasn't two young children who predicted the right time and place six months in advance. Imagine it was a psychologist and an eye doctor who said, six months in advance: Hey, I bet if we get a bunch of people to stare at the sun, they will collectively decide they saw something unusual. Then what happened happens.
Would we dismiss these two for not preregistering the exact results? They would probably be celebrated. Not as much as if they predicted exactly the sun falling and color changing, but you would still here about them today.
The actual children said come here and the laws of the universe will be suspended. People came, and witnessed something so inexplicable that its requiring rewriting our understanding of laws of the universe (brand new optical illusions interacting with brand psychology)
They would be celebrated, but not their non-existent explanation. It would be legitimate to say it's a lucky, maybe educated guess. Same as with the discovery of penicilin.
Alexander Scott, it's always a delight to read your crystal-clear thinking and intellectually honest, deep analysis. This blog post is truly epic and fascinating. But one point surprised me to a stronger degree. You consider the Philippines video as plausibly showing real variations in brightness (while aknowledging that you're unsure). I disagree on this specific point and, on the contrary, I think it constitutes evidence in favor of collective enthusiasm or suggestion bordering on hallucination.
I'm not a professional, but I enjoy playing with cameras as much as anyone, and to me it's blatantly obvious that the variations in brightness of the setting sun in this video are simply caused by the camera's automatic brightness correction reacting to the movement of the person holding it. Because yes, the guy (or woman) is definitely not standing still, but moving slightly up and down. The brightness variations are clearly correlated with that motion (with perhaps a tiny delay).
It's true that the variations in brightness coincide with the "oooh" and "aaah" reactions from the crowd, but that's because the movement of the person holding the camera is also correlated with the general level of excitement or collective trance.
The camera is pointing at a transition zone, a threshold where the bottom of the image is dark and the top is bright. At such a threshold, even a tiny downward movement is enough to make the auto-correction blow out the upper part (overexposure). This is especially true with ordinary cameras from a few years ago, before true HDR, multiple sensors, AI chips, etc.
It's possible the person was perfectly aware that they were playing with that threshold to create the desired effect, but it could also have been something its brain noticed without full conscious awareness.
Why am I so confident about this? Because I've often played with that kind of effect using devices that struggle to adjust brightness under similar conditions. Want a more dramatic sky? Just lower the camera a bit. Even with more modern devices, my experience is that taking pictures (or even more so, filming) at sunset often results in odd brightness corrections and even strange color shifts. I filmed a video this summer during unusual twilight weather, and the result was totally weird, despite being shot with a Pixel 8 Pro using the best settings.
My feeling is that it's almost surprising we don't see many more videos showing miraculous colors and brightness in the sky at this kind of gathering, given how easy it is to obtain odd results with a standard camera (without even mentioning editing and post-production)
PS: I'm not a stargazer, but I'm pretty sure I've witnessed some of the effects described here when looking at the sun on various occasions in my life, notably during sunsets. The usual afterimage, changing colors, blinking, possibly motion or spinning (though I'm less confident about those). Overall, strange things. But honestly, scotomas and ophthalmic migraines are even more impressive. The source is clearly the visual system, not the sun or God.
I’ve seen a few comments arguing the video was caused by camera movements, but you are the first person I’ve seen to argue that the guy was moving the camera in order to sync up with the crowd (because cameraman himself was part of the crowd!)
It’s a nice contribution to this discussion. I hope your comment gets featured when Scott does the inevitable “Comments on X” post that he usually does when a post generates a lot of discussion.
Here an email (1. April 2020) of me writing my computational vision professor which is an expert in neurology and vision. This event was very impactful at the time and I'm really glad I wasn't alone in witnessing it, it was the most supernatural phenomenon that I have experienced in my life. It felt like falling out of this world, falling out of the matrix or similar. If I wouldn't have experienced it first hand, I would have laughed at it, but having experienced it, well it was extremely special and I can imagine how if something of that significance happens to a religious person, it would make them a strong believer. Anways here the mail:
"""
I am a former student from <my_univserity> and I have a question for you.
Excuse the long email, but I could not explain the situation shorter.
I had an interesting event happen to me in summer in the US, Los Angeles last year. Which kinda seems very odd to me and I can not really explain it. My girlfriend and me were walking down a wide road in the suburbs of LA. It was 3.45pm and a sunny, blue sky day. There was no single cloud anywhere around us. The road was in usual US style broad and the houses on both sides of the road where 1-2stories high. Now we were both walking home and watching the boardwalk in front of us looking 5-10 meters in front of us, when suddenly it got dark, it felt like a very fast solar eclipse, it only lasted around 0.8-1.0s. The weird thing was, that it was not a single spot in front of us, that got darker, but the whole visual field/the whole area in front of us. Also it was not a hard shadow of an object, but kind of a soft shadow, like really very similar to a solar eclipse. We both immediately looked up but saw nothing and then looked at each other and asked ourselves what that was, but we both had no clue. I have never in my life experienced something like that and if there were not another person present who also experienced it, it would have made me question my sanity. There were some thoughts I had while it happened. My first thought was: 1. Who turned of the sun? Followed by, what unlogical thoughts are you thinking, nobody can turn of the sun. The only other feeling I had, was as if something big flew over us very fast.
Now I have searched for this phenomena online and was surprised to find some very similar sounding descriptions of this phenomena. The site is just a forum and sounds very unreliable and conspiracy theory like, but I just wanted to mention it: http://test.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread380219/pg1
Now I came up and read various theories what could have caused this, but the fact that both me and her saw it at the same time made me abandon all subjective theories, like it was just a glitch in my brain or my visual cortex. Which leads me to believe it was something external which affected both her and me.
Sunburn: We were at the beach the whole day and this could have been, if the event weren't so short and at the same time for both of us.
Sun rays not being everywhere continuously: I read the theory, that the sun does not emit always continuously light everywhere and that there are small gaps sometimes in between the light. I have never heard of this and it sounds improbable to me.
Magnetic field messing with both our brains: This is the theory which seems the most likely to me. At 10am that day there was a small earthquake at the beach and also at 2pm another small earthquake. I read that earthquakes can cause small changes in earths magnetic field.
I am reaching out to you in the hope that you could help me shed a bit light on this phenomena which happened to us. I would consider myself a quite scientific person and because it is concerning the visual field, I thought you might have an idea or might have heard about this before and know an explanation. How likely do you consider the earthquake magnetic influence theory? Have you heard of studies or more scientific avenues than a random forum, looking into this phenomena? In any case thank you for reading and thank you in case you find time to respond to this and I am curious to hear your thoughts.
Best wishes
"""
He did respond really quickly, but was at a loss for an explanation as well.
I tried to form a world model including that experience for a few months, but had to give up and just accept, that I can't explain everything, which for me is a very odd thought, because I would say I can explain nearly everything in the world, not in a detailed way, but in a "I know what books I would have to read or what the relevant keywords are or experts to ask", in a bounded error for the mental box of phenomena way. But this experience truly defied any explanation. After a while I simply stopped thinking about it, nothing much to be done since it never happened again.
Wouldn't that be a plane, or a bigger object even more distant, like ISS/satellite or an even farther celestial body like a meteor passing between the sun and the earth ? I had the experience with a plane (glider), however it was easy to spot the cause of the brief darkening. But the farther the object, the bigger and smoother the shadow.
Edit :Afterthougth. My guess is wrong, sorry. It would need the object to have an apparent diameter similar to that of the sun (like the moon). It could still be the good explanation. In my case, I saw the glider but not as easily as you could have think, because It was close to the sun.
> There are many statements in the diocesan inquiry which I was unable to get, because they were in Portuguese (and on paper, and therefore not machine-translatable).
Confused by this; can't you just take a picture or scan and upload it to ChatGPT? It will hallucinate some details, but you can use a few different trials across different AIs to see what details remain consistent.
I'm not going to chime in on whether I think this miracle is real or not. I've never been particularly interested in Marian apparitions, despite the soaking you get in them (or used to, at least) growing up Catholic in Ireland.
I would just like to note that one of the alternate explanations for "this wasn't a miracle" is that it was aliens. Yep. Since *clearly* miracles don't happen, and the sun doesn't behave like that, what was it people were seeing? Obviously it had to be a UFO! That explains the small circular object coming close and then retreating, rotating, etc.
Don't take this as proof of God, take it as proof of UFOs! 😁
"Sungazing is an ancient spiritual practice which, like most ancient spiritual practices, was invented by a 1900s quack doctor. According to its practitioners, staring at the sun for long periods heals your eyesight, improves your health, and confers spiritual benefits."
Thank you for this, now I know where Chesterton got his inspiration for the story "The Eye of Apollo":
"The building was American in its sky-scraping altitude, and American also in the oiled elaboration of its machinery of telephones and lifts. But it was barely finished and still understaffed; only three tenants had moved in; the office just above Flambeau was occupied, as also was the office just below him; the two floors above that and the three floors below were entirely bare. But the first glance at the new tower of flats caught something much more arresting. Save for a few relics of scaffolding, the one glaring object was erected outside the office just above Flambeau’s. It was an enormous gilt effigy of the human eye, surrounded with rays of gold, and taking up as much room as two or three of the office windows.
“What on earth is that?” asked Father Brown, and stood still. “Oh, a new religion,” said Flambeau, laughing; “one of those new religions that forgive your sins by saying you never had any. Rather like Christian Science, I should think. The fact is that a fellow calling himself Kalon (I don’t know what his name is, except that it can’t be that) has taken the flat just above me. I have two lady typewriters underneath me, and this enthusiastic old humbug on top. He calls himself the New Priest of Apollo, and he worships the sun.”
“Let him look out,” said Father Brown. “The sun was the cruellest of all the gods. But what does that monstrous eye mean?”
“As I understand it, it is a theory of theirs,” answered Flambeau, “that a man can endure anything if his mind is quite steady. Their two great symbols are the sun and the open eye; for they say that if a man were really healthy he could stare at the sun.”
“If a man were really healthy,” said Father Brown, “he would not bother to stare at it.”
“Well, that’s all I can tell you about the new religion,” went on Flambeau carelessly. “It claims, of course, that it can cure all physical diseases.”
...Once Flambeau entered her office on some typewriting business, and found she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids of an ethical tirade about the “sickly medical notions” and the morbid admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.
Flambeau, quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from asking Miss Pauline (with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles was a more morbid sign of weakness than a lift, and why, if science might help us in the one effort, it might not help us in the other.
“That is so different,” said Pauline Stacey, loftily. “Batteries and motors and all those things are marks of the force of man—yes, Mr. Flambeau, and the force of woman, too! We shall take our turn at these great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and splendid—that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the doctors sell—why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But I was free-born, Mr. Flambeau! People only think they need these things because they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power and courage, just as the silly nurses tell children not to stare at the sun, and so they can’t do it without blinking. But why among the stars should there be one star I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I will open my eyes and stare at him whenever I choose.”
“Your eyes,” said Flambeau, with a foreign bow, “will dazzle the sun.” He took pleasure in complimenting this strange stiff beauty, partly because it threw her a little off her balance. But as he went upstairs to his floor he drew a deep breath and whistled, saying to himself: “So she has got into the hands of that conjurer upstairs with his golden eye.” For, little as he knew or cared about the new religion of Kalon, he had heard of his special notion about sun-gazing."
This couldn't be the effect of hallucinogens, potentially via smoke or similar in the local area? You can apparently smoke shrooms, but the effect is lessened and inconsistent. Could something like this not produce a similar localized-but-inconsistent effect, that hits everyone at about the same time?
I'll note that I sometimes hallucinate the approach of things I know are stationary. Usually the ground or walls, but sometimes the ceiling. I recall one occasion where the clouds gave the impression that they were falling to earth and would become fog in minutes. As far as I know that's not a thing that happens, but my eyes were convinced I was seeing it. Of course, when I mentioned it to my friend, she just gave me an odd look and called me crazy.
This is one of your best posts yet! As it happens, I have phone footage that looks remarkably similar to the last video you shared, which should be helpful. I’ll try to get it to you soon!
The dancing sun videos remind me of crown flash [1], which is (to me at least) one of the weirdest and most supernatural-looking weather phenomena I've come across. Here's an example I found randomly on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGKC1hZQSog though there are others too
Amazingly written and very thorough. My only question is why the conclusion is phrased so tentatively, given all of the videos of people witnessing other sun miracles? Of course something like that is going to be the right answer. A bunch of people conditioned themselves to see a miracle and then stared at the sun, causing them to see things that the sun obviously didn't really do, and their reports are pretty inconsistent because of course they are.
Still an amazing write-up but you could have just led with the videos. What happened at Fatima? Something just like these.
I’m reading “Meeting the Witnesses” - on p. 54 a witness called Higino Faria aims to have been “completely cured” by the miracle. The sickness in question was minor (“a severe cold and hoarseness”), so I take it that a psychosomatic explanation works here. But off the top of your head, were there other reported healings at Fatima, or is this report a one off?
"The Halifax Slasher was a typical supercriminal story."
If we're doing stories "ripped from the pages of The Fortean Times", I think my favourite has to be The Mad Gasser of Mattoon. Just the name alone is wonderful!
"The Mad Gasser of Mattoon (also known as the "Anesthetic Prowler", the "Phantom Anesthetist", or simply the "Mad Gasser") was the name given to an event of alleged mass hysteria in which a person or people allegedly committed a series of apparent gas attacks in Mattoon, Illinois, during the mid-1940s. More than two dozen separate cases of gassings were reported to police over the span of two weeks, in addition to many more reported sightings of the suspected assailant. The gasser's supposed victims reported smelling strange odors in their homes which were soon followed by symptoms such as paralysis of the legs, coughing, nausea and vomiting. No one died or had serious medical consequences as a result of the gas attacks."
I used to read a Catholic blog that thought the original Medjugorje miracles were fake, but that when the place started getting wider notice the Virgin Mary took advantage of the increased attention to do some real miracles. Opportunistic divine miracles.
I have some experience with programming camera's to react to light levels. In short: optic sensors have an 'integration time' over which charge accumulates, when the sensor is read, the charge is dissipated. This can be programmatically varied typically between a few microseconds to tens of seconds. The value read by the sensor mostly varies linearly with the exposure time, but must be compressed into an 8-bit value, typically using a non-linear function such as logarithm which roughly matches how humans perceive light levels. Typically, the exposure time is adjusted to fit the majority of sensor values in the 8-bit range, attempting to minimize the number of over/under exposed pixels. For a given scene, increasing the exposure time will brighten everything, at the extreme end everything will be white. Decreasing exposure time will have the opposite effect, making everything darker until it's all black. Because of the logarithmic function, this will not happen evenly across the image, but it will affect everything including shadows and other surfaces not in direct exposure that are primarily ambient light. While watching these videos, it's worth remembering that most of our ambient light comes from scattering in the upper atmosphere, so for dimming of the sun to affect ambient light significantly, the interference would either have to be exo-atmospheric or large enough to affect a wide region (think massive obvious storm-cloud taking up most of the sky), while a change of exposure will automatically affect everything, including apparent ambient light levels (shadowed regions of the image will get brighter so long as they are not under-exposed).
When adjusting these values, you are typically relying on the values read from the sensor itself, to predict what exposure you need to use on your next readout, thus changing conditions can cause a mis-prediction, or a large adjustment that will cause the entire scene to change apparent brightness. This is what appears to me to be happening in the linked videos.
For example, in "miracolo del sole medjugorje" we see the sun is clearly overexposed while the majority of the scene is visible. At about 11 seconds, there is some sort of glitch in the system and we see a frame with an odd hatch pattern that is clearly some sort of failure in the image processing pipeline that appears to coincide with a slight zooming in of the scene. After this we start to get frames where everything is much darker, but typically only a frame at a time. At ~13 seconds, there is a 4 box grid superimposed over the sun, which looks like the digital overlay a camera puts on an object it's trying to focus on, though usually on the camera display and not the video itself. This suggests to me the person holding the camera is attempting to get the camera to focus on the sun specifically (which makes sense given the context), and the predictive algorithm isn't sure where to set its exposure and ends up flipping between two. Notice that when the frame is dark the sun appears smaller because fewer pixels are oversaturated, and other bright regions like the silver linings of clouds are still quite visible while dimmer objects have become pure black. I also note that there is a tree branch almost directly in line with the sun, such that sometimes the leaves are partially occluding the sun itself, which may be contributing to the predictive algorithm freaking out (remember, the algorithm is predictive, so the branch being in front of the sun influences future frames, not the frame it just took).
In "PRIEST IN MEDJUGORJE POSTS...", the sun appears normal, then appears to expand to fill the sky with overexposed white pixels, then shrinks back down to normal. However, notice the brightness of everything else in the scene while this happens: it also changes (in non-linear relation to what's going on with the sun), indicating a change in the exposure times. Furthermore, if you pause the video at say 0:23 (just as the sun begins to expand), take a screenshot, paste that screenshot into GIMP (or other photo editing software), and then use the exposure adjustment tool, it pretty much perfectly emulates the brightness changes seen in-video, including the apparent expansion of the sun in the sky.
In "Witness the ‘Dancing Sun’" we see a similar phenomena of the sun appearing to expand and contract in the sky. However, these also show the same effect of the rest of the scene getting brighter/darker matching a change in exposure and coincident increase of overexposed pixels surrounding the sun. These changes frequently match the camera motion: when the camera is pointed further down such that more of the scene captures the crowd while the sun is more isolated to the top of the photo, the sun expands and the scene brightens showing the crowd more clearly. When the sun is more centered, it darkens and shrinks and the crowd becomes darker and more obscured, again matching a pattern of exposure changes. Again, changing the exposure setting in GIMP largely reproduces this effect module some changes in color balance. As for why the crowd appears to clap in sync with this, my best guess is the sun being low on the horizon is legitimately affecting its brightness over time due to clouds or other atmospheric interference, and that is affecting the exposure predictions along with the motions of the camera. Regardless, it's clearly an exposure response since the entire scene is modulated (eg: the trees, of which we primarily see shadowed due to the low sun angle, get brighter/dark, as do the underside of the bleachers.
Since even in the darkest frames, the sun is still over-exposed (yea, the sun is very bright), we can never really see the sun itself and therefor can only speculate what people are witnessing personally. However, I think we can confidently say the phenomena the camera itself is witnessing is just an artifact of either changing or mis-predicted frame exposure times butting up against the small one-byte dynamic range brightness information is necessarily crammed into to make a digital photograph. Fun fact, software derived HDR imagery is just the process of taking multiple photographs at different exposure levels, using that to reconstruct a larger chunk of brightness information than 8-bits, then re-compressing it back into 8-bits but with a different scaling value so fewer pixels are over/under exposed.
I think I slightly but permanently damaged my eyes by looking briefly at a partial solar eclipse, in a way that has not entered any medical records.
I didn't have eclipse glasses, and I figured that I accidentally get sun in my eyes sometimes, so I decided to chance a quick glance. I was indeed able to see that the sun was partially eclipsed, and I looked away immediately. But right away I had the sense that looking straight at it had been worse than the accidental exposures I had used to justify the risk. I had a really strong afterimage right at the center of my field of vision that was still pretty strong after a few minutes and never actually fully went away. It doesn't prevent me from seeing anything, and I can successfully ignore it most of the time, but it's there.
(It's possible it was already there and I just started paying attention to it after the eclipse incident. Subjectively, I don't think it was)
I think this is waaaaay more common than people believe. Also it is really hard to tell subjectively the difference between temporary even for a few months spots of blindness which heal after a while or actual permanently dead blind spots, which get filtered out by saccades and neural processing. I once was curious and looked at the sun, when it was very low on the horizon with a similar logic as you, luckily never directly looking at it, but keeping it in the periphery. It was a beautiful experience, just an amazing sunset, but I think I got some temporary blind spots after that. Imo they went away, but I never really tested if the spots were temporary or not.
About the fire and brimstone hell described by the children:
The whole "getting tortured for eternity" thing never made sense to me because of the way my body copes with pain. When I get hurt, I dissociate. My lizard brain takes over while my conscious mind takes a backseat and only does enough work to figure out how to prevent long term damage from whatever is going on. If long term damage happens anyways, I find a way to cope and life goes on. Eternal torture would likely result in me losing my mind completely and becoming some kind of cenobite. Is it not like that for everyone?
I imagine real hell would be more akin to having severe depression and panic attacks for all eternity but there's living people who experience that daily. It's hard to imagine how hell could be worse.
I have never had the pleasure of disassociating or passing out.
Before I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, my iron levels got so low that I came near to passing out on two separate occasions: once after lifting a 40-pound bag of water softener salt onto a shopping cart, and once after getting a needle stuck into my tricep while volunteering for the medical assistant students at my community college (I don't like needles any more than the next guy, but volunteers got free snacks and the students were mostly Latinas around my age). On both occasions, I became lightheaded, my vision went black, I couldn't hear anything but blood rushing in my ears, and a mixture of nausea and general unpleasantness came on so strong that I--I mean, frankly I was ready to just die, but I would've accepted passing out as a substitute. No dice: I got to be awake through the whole slow recovery process.
I ended up getting my intestine cut out. About two years later, I woke up with intense pain in my lower abdomen and in my shoulders. In short and in layman's terms, my intestines were coming apart and leaking digestive gases into my abdomen (medically, my ileal j-pouch--installed three years prior during my proctocolectomy due to treatment-resistant ulcerative colitis--had a microperforation as a result of chronic pouchitis).
The pain is difficult to quantify. I'd had plenty of needles stuck in me, including more than a few medication autoinjectors (the old formula Humira, which burned as it went in), and in general I was a healthy young man--intestinal stuff notwithstanding. I'm not bothered by pain most of the time, although, funny enough, little static shocks make me genuinely angry in a way almost nothing else does.
In any case, it will have to suffice to say that I could not lift my arms to knock on my father's door that morning; I had to headbutt the door instead, and eventually managed to drop my hand onto the door handle to open it. He drove me to the nearest emergency room--
Where I waited for sixteen hours before going in for surgery ("exploratory laparotomy with j-pouch resection" is such a delightful phrase).
During that time, I received two doses of morphine and one fresh bag of IV fluids, so I was not only in searing pain but also severely dehydrated (my condition means I don't absorb water well, and on a typical day will drink 4-6 L electrolyte-fortified water). Having worked as a patient transporter, I'd never understood the patients who just sat there moaning until that day. I was a quiet guy at the time--I hate making unnecessary noise, though as I get older I've gotten better at taking up space--but I could not stop myself simply moaning for a good portion of that time.
As a side note, this problem has come up three times since, although none as severe as the first; I have to remember when I go in and am asked to rate my pain that my "10" is somewhat higher than normal (xkcd 883). Whether it were better or worse than the pain of childbirth I cannot (and do not care to) know, but I think I can at least claim to understand something of the magnitude.
To your second point: hell could incorporate forms of suffering other than simple pain. When I woke up from this surgery, I discovered I'd been given an NG tube--naso gastric, running through the nose, down the throat, and into the stomach. While my pain tolerance is pretty high, my gag reflex is sensitive; any motion of the tube relative to my head would cause spasms which threatened to cause vomiting. To solve this, I'd keep the free end tucked into the pocket of my hospital gown, and I'd reach up and hold the tube when I needed to turn my head. This worked well enough while I was awake, so long as I didn't cough, sneeze, laugh, or hiccup. Of course, the moment I'd start to fall asleep, my head would move slightly, and I'd wake up gagging.
They removed the tube on my third and final day in the hospital, once my bowels had resumed their usual function, and I slept off-and-on for 12 hours. For about a week afterwards, every time I turned my head, I'd instinctively panic and reach up to grab a phantom NG tube. If I wanted to torture somebody for eternity, I'd just stick one of those into them, removing it periodically for a day or so to prevent death from sleep deprivation.
Also worth noting that many of the people who suffer from the conditions you list choose to deliberately stop living rather than continue, but the condemned would have no such escape.
Minor typographical correction: some of the text above the Dalleur map refers to figures in miles but it is in km on the map. For example, “Afonso Vieria, famous writer, 30 miles away” seems to refer to map item 1 that is 34 km from Fatima.
I wonder if there’s something involved with (1) which wavelengths of light trigger your pupil to contract, (2) which wavelengths are filtered by clouds, (3) which wavelengths cause retinal damage, (4), variation in items 1 and maybe 3 across the population, (5) variation in item 2 depending on where you are standing.
There could end up being a statistical distribution of how much eye damage occurred among people in a position to see something. This might help with the minority who saw more specific imagery that seems like hallucinations.
It's pretty obvious to me that the child-seers all ignored the advice given earlier to them not to look into the sun, found out you get awesome hallucinations if you do (especially if on a cloudy day), and confabulated their story into a a prophecy to convince other people to look into the sun, and because of the religious implications, the natural reaction wasn't 'wow these kids figured out something about looking at the sun', but 'wow these kids are prophets'.
This seems like something that would happen at a reasonable frequency.
When it comes to the testimony of Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio (who said that educated people didn't see something while uneducated people did) I think the best way to interpret what she said was that everyone saw the sun dance and turn silver etc. (which is why she says everyone saw that at the beginning) but that only uneducated people saw Jesus, Joseph, and Mary (aka the celestial court or the celestial apparition) and that was the proof of the apparitions she was looking for that was found lacking. I don't think her testimony provides good evidence of some people not seeing the sun miracle. When she says the educated people didn't see the celestial apparition she is talking about the appearance of Joseph, Jesus, and Mary not the sun miracle itself.
A relatively minor point, but: Pope Pius XII claimed to have witnessed the Miracle of the Sun from the Vatican Gardens on 30 and 31 October, as well as 1 and 8 November 8 1950. Apparently, he was planning at the time to confirm the Assumption of Mary as a dogma, and took this as a sign from God that he was on the right track. Obviously -- if we assume the Pope or somebody else isn't just flat out lying -- Dalleur's explanation doesn't work at all here. As much as in Benin, someone would DEFINITELY have noticed a giant luminous UFO hovering over Rome or its suburbs on an October afternoon in 1950.
Unfortunately, a quick google search did not turn up any records on the weather in Rome that week, but I would be very interested to know whether it was rainy or not. Maybe someone more diligent than I am can hunt up some yellowing Roman newspaper archives or meteorological observations.
FWIW, I see visual hallucinations all the time. Usually it's a sign that I didn't quite read, so the missing part is filled in with...some word. I probably only notice this when the word is especially inappropriate. To me this seems similar to the way the blind spot gets filled in, and people just don't notice. So I EXPECT visual noise to lead to images that echo frequently seen things...echo, but not duplicate. So the elves and leprechauns that you mention are reasonable, but so are religious symbols that are frequently gazed upon. This is *my* explanation for "bigfoot" sightings, and it works just as well for things like this, where that is intentional strain placed on the visual system. Also people talk to each other, and like to agree on what they've seen, except when they intentionally want to stand out. So they tend to use the same words to describe the same thing even when it's inappropriate. (Just yesterday I did a search and found a bunch of different reports that described a galaxy as "sparkling", when what appears to have been meant by the original source is that there were a lot of bright blue stars at the periphery. But most reports said it was sparkling.)
>others from setting up a pipeline of PDF splitters, OCR software, and machine translation
What tools did you use for this? I have a Russian mathematical paper I've been meaning to read, but the length of it seems to make most PDF translation tools choke.
As I implied in my previous comment, I really don't see what the big deal is here (admittedly, I only skimmed the middle parts of the article). If you stare at the sun just a little bit, you'll start seeing all kinds of visual aberrations, usually manifesting as colorful spots in your field of view, as your retinas overload. Stare a bit longer, and you'll start getting semi-permanent retinal damage and thus much stronger aberrations. Staring at the sun is less damaging when it's dimmed, either due to the time of day, or due to being behind a cloud, or both.
Normally people have enough common sense not to stare at the sun, even when it's behind a cloud. But when they're caught up in mass religious fervor, common sense takes a back seat, and the placebo effect makes it harder to even notice the pain -- especially if the prophesied event starts off with the sun being dimmed, making it easier for the few early adopters to stare at it and get everyone else caught up in the feeling.
This scenario is consistent with most (arguably all) of the evidence. Lots of positive testimonies, check. Weird visual phenomena, check. A few negative testimonies (from observers who were not swept up in the wave of fervor and thus did not stare directly at the sun), check. Failure to record video evidence, check (digital cameras have different failure modes from human eyes). Repeat sightings, check (all you need are the sun, some clouds, and a bunch of hyped-up true believers). Sure, some kind of a sundog or a nimbus or a double rainbow or whatever would be helpful as well, but not strictly necessary.
I fully agree. However, the case was impressive and strong, testimony-wise, and deserved the meticulous discussion that Scott offered to us. After this work has been done, reaching a reasonable conclusion, it is tempting to think that it was simple and blatant from the beginning. But to me it is the sign that Scott did a great job.
First, SA's explanation is plausible but still rather unlikely. The prophecies could create the priming, but not the weather event. Even if this is a relatively common weather event, it's still somewhat remarkable timing - my local metereologists cannot reliably predict rain even a few days out. And that's before you factor in everything else that isn't explained: the distant witnesses, the other visions, etc.
Second, I make very little of the fact that many people subsequently claimed to see similar miracles. Of course they did, Fatima is one of the most well-known miracles in the 20th century, and a huge number of people will fabricate or hallucinate something similar. The Church itself admits that fakery of miracles is common, even among genuine believers, that's why they are offiically investigated and treated with a great deal of skpeticism. Notably, the Church to this day refuses to give the official label of approval to Medjugorje. So I'd be more persuaded by similar phenomena reported *prior* to Fatima.
Third, fighting over miracles seems to me a bit beside the point, even if I were more engaged in whatever's left of the internet atheism wars. Individual Catholics are not obliged to buy into any particular miracle or saint. The Church's teaching on faith and morals is considered infallible and obligatory on all Catholics; that rule has never been extended to specific saints or miracles. So in the extremely unlikely event that Fatima could be conclusively disproved, the Church's dicastery for these things would take a big credibility hit, and many individual Catholics might feel their faith was shaken, but I personally would not change any of my theological views. I suppose this only works to my advantage if I'm arguing with atheists: if Fatima is a miracle their belief system is conclusively disproven, if it isn't, nothing changes for me (other than perhaps an increased skepticism of other Church-approved miracles). But I'm not sure all secularists are aware of this aspect of Catholic theology, and they probably should be.
> Even if this is a relatively common weather event, it's still somewhat remarkable timing - my local metereologists cannot reliably predict rain even a few days out.
Some selection effects are at work. If the crowd had gathered and nothing had happened, no one but perhaps enthusiasts of Portuguese history and visionary experiences would have ever heard of Fatima, and Scott wouldn't have written this substack post. I suspect there are plenty more instances where someone predicted a miracle, people showed up, and nothing happened, though I admit I don't know any of the top of my head (and, precisely because nothing happened, they've probably left a smaller documentary footprint).
Would it be a coincidence? Sure. Is such a coincidence -- granted this is a relatively common phenomenon -- less likely than the hypothesis that this really was a visitation of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God? On my view, taking the rest of the evidence for and against Christianity into account, no.
>Second, I make very little of the fact that many people subsequently claimed to see similar miracles. Of course they did, Fatima is one of the most well-known miracles in the 20th century, and a huge number of people will fabricate or hallucinate something similar.
I'm not sure this really matters. All that matters is that -- if Scott's readings of these other "sun miracles" at Lubbock, Benin, Medjugorje, etc. are correct -- then the phenomenon reported by the crowd at Fatima is reproducible, and probably natural, since we know there was nothing objectively unnatural going on with the sun at those places and times.
> then the phenomenon reported by the crowd at Fatima is reproducible, and probably natural
That’s exactly my point - if the criteria for reproduction is “people say they saw the same thing under natural conditions” then of course you’re going to be flooded with false claims of having seen the same thing over the last 100 years. These are not “reproductions” of the Fatima event.
The much more persuasive evidence of this being a relatively common phenomenon would be someone having reported the same thing (as an alleged miracle or otherwise) prior to 1910, or a similar account from someone who is not at all acquainted with or sympathetic to Catholic beliefs (hence, the redditor accounts carry more weight with me, since I assume they are overwhelmingly hostile to and ignorant about organized Christianity).
>then of course you’re going to be flooded with false claims of having seen the same thing over the last 100 years. These are not “reproductions” of the Fatima event.
If dozens or hundreds of people look into the sky and see the same thing the people at Fatima saw, that's a reproduction. Unless you want to claim that later witnesses -- of which there are apparently at least dozens, if not hundreds -- are lying, which I think would be hard to demonstrate. The fact that they were primed to see this phenomenon by prior knowledge of Fatima doesn't matter. Because if what the Fatima crowd saw was truly a unique miracle, then crowds of people shouldn't be able to see the same thing at various later (non-miraculous) times, no matter how hard they want to or expect to.
So two options:
1. This is a fairly common phenomenon, the witnesses at Lubbock, Benin, etc. saw the same thing the crowds at Fatima did.
2. The Fatima witnesses were privy to a miracle. The other witnesses were not. Ergo, since the other witnessess claim to have seen the same "Miracle of the Sun" seen at Fatima, they were either mistaken or lying about what they saw.
I think 1 is more likely, since there seems to be no evidence to suggest that the other witnesses were mistaken or lying.
>The much more persuasive evidence of this being a relatively common phenomenon would be someone having reported the same thing (as an alleged miracle or otherwise) prior to 1910, or a similar account from someone who is not at all acquainted with or sympathetic to Catholic beliefs
I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect this. It's very possible this phenomenon IS only remarkable in this particular context, and therefore we wouldn't expect records of it in a non-Catholic, non-miraculous context. If I was out in the street on a cloudy day, and I decided to stare at the sun for a little while for some reason and it started behaving really weird, I would almost certainly chalk it up to my decision to...stare at the sun. I probably wouldn't tell anybody about it, except maybe offhandedly in conversation with a friend or a family member, and there wouldn't be any record of it. I certainly wouldn't shout "Look at the sun!" and try to get a bunch of people to join me.
Likely the only instances where you would get this kind of group experience is when a great mass of people is gathered, fired up with religious expectation, and fully expecting or at least hoping to see something miraculous. Granting that this is a natural and fairly common but not THAT common phenomenon, it seems totally plausible that Fatima was the first time all of these factors came together, or at least the first time reasonably well recorded.
(e.g, if a bunch of peasants in 1750s Germany ALSO saw the "miracle of the sun" it would be unsurprising if there was no record of it)
> The fact that they were primed to see this phenomenon by prior knowledge of Fatima doesn't matter
I think it matters a lot, because at a minimum it’s not a truly “independent” reproduction, and there’s a much greater risk of motivated reasoning (whereas the actual Fatima miracle involved at least some witnesses who were motivated to believe the opposite).
> or at least the first time reasonably well recorded.
This argument veers into motivated reasoning. Fatima did not happen in the Middle Ages, by the 1910s astronomy was hundreds of years old. Also, the ancients spent thousands of years looking at the sky, often with religious ideas in mind, and many of them did so in a systematic way and/or kept pretty good records. You’re telling me this very scary, unusual solar phenomenon was going on for thousands of years on a regular basis - so regular it happened at bunch of times in the 20th century - and yet nobody wrote it down? Even in the 18th and 19th century? The ancient Greeks, Byzantines, Ottomans, etc all noticed and recorded other phenomena that look supernatural but aren’t - St Elmo’s Fire being an obvious one. It seems extremely unlikely that nobody noticed such a common solar phenomenon until 1910.
>I think it matters a lot, because at a minimum it’s not a truly “independent” reproduction, and there’s a much greater risk of motivated reasoning
If you agree motivated reasoning and staring at the sun can produce miracle reports indistinguishable from those at Fatima, that’s all there is to it. We’ve established no miracle is required to make people say, apparently honestly, “I saw the Miracle of the Sun.”
The argument would have to be that while this can happen with people already aware of Fatima, it’s much less likely to happen to people not expecting the MotS SPECIFICALLY (which would include the original Fatima crowd). I would simply disagreed. I think it’s only a little less plausible that a large group of people gathered in expectation — or at least hope — of A miracle, under favorable atmospheric conditions, would see MotS, even if they were not expecting that in PARTICULAR.
>You’re telling me this very scary, unusual solar phenomenon was going on for thousands of years on a regular basis - so regular it happened at bunch of times in the 20th century - and yet nobody wrote it down? Even in the 18th and 19th century?
thats the thing, MotS might not be all that scary or remarkable outside this very specific context. If Scott is right, sometimes on cloudy days, when you stare at the sun for a little while, it appears to spin, change colors, and move around.
In what circumstances would we expect records of MotS? Most people don’t stare at the sun, ever. I don’t think I’ve ever stared at the sun for more than a second in my life. It’s painful and pointless. And not only do you have to stare at the sun, you have to do it under particular conditions, which while not exceedingly rare, aren’t every day.
Still, we would expect a number of people to have done out of the billions that have lived through human history. But why would we expect records? If a friend told me “hey man I was staring at the sun for a while earlier and then it started spinning and changing colors and moving around” I would say “yeah no shit, why would you stare at the sun?” Like to me, not knowing anything about ophthalmology or meteorology but having experienced weird lights and flashing colors after staring at something bright, that sounds like a totally plausible thing that might happen when you stare at the sun and not really worthy of further consideration.
I really don’t think this would warrant much comment from astronomers or astrologers through history, most of whom were presumably smart enough not to stare at the sun for too long.
Like if you look at the sun and see MotS, on just an ordinary day with no religious significance, the vast majority of people are just going to chalk it up to the effects of staring at the sun for too long and probably won’t ever make any record of it. If they do tell other people, then those OTHER people would chalk it up to “stared at the sun too long.”
The only circumstances where I think it’s reasonable to expect records of this (granting that there aren’t any others — as you note, Scott seems to have found some on reddit) are ones meeting the following conditions:
1. Atmospheric conditions are right
2. A large group of people is gathered in an outdoor space with a good view of the sun
3. That group of people is specifically expecting/hoping to see something otherworldly
4. Mass media, communications, and literacy are developed enough not only to produce a number of witness statements, but to draw onlookers and reporters from well beyond the immediate area
Seems totally plausible to me Fatima is the first time all of those conditions were met.
> The argument would have to be that while this can happen with people already aware of Fatima, it’s much less likely to happen to people not expecting the MotS SPECIFICALLY (which would include the original Fatima crowd).
That’s exactly my argument, and I think it’s pretty well supported by basic human psychology. It’s a lot easier to knowingly fabricate something recognizable or pattern match to what you already know or have heard about - right down to how you describe that experience later to someone else. Realistically, most of it is probably fabrication, since none of it is anywhere near as well documented as Fatima. But the mere fact that after Fatima people faked or hallucinated Fatima-like events says little about whether Fatima was an actual miracle.
As for your point about the ancients not writing things down… I mean, we’ve got example in Scott’s own thread of individuals and small groups writing down solar phenomena that are a lot less remarkable. And we know the ancients recorded plenty of other similarly rare and spooky phenomena like SEF (I encourage you to look into how well this phenomena is historically documented despite being pretty damn rare). The idea that this solar phenomenon is easily observed under the right conditions but never once recorded in thousands of years of human history - including the first several hundred years after the start of astronomy as a formal science and 1900 years after Catholics started writing down miraculous events - is extremely implausible given what gets written down today and know about what was written down in the past.
But if you follow Scott's conclusions, there was nothing truly exceptional with the weather nor the sun. The main element is that people stared at the sun with a strong collective expectation to see something. And at least some had to see something because if anyone stares at the sun, it is inevitable to see visual aberrations, moderate for some and stronger for others. With the eyes of faith and collective enthousiasm, we can expect that a collective hallucination could easily build up on this basis.
The weather is exhaustively discussed in the post, but what I mean is that in the end Scott's cautious conclusion doesn't point at the weather being the central explanation. It's a part of the puzzle, but The other Miracles of the Sun examples and the stargazer's posts on Reddit favor the role of sungazing and psychology. I think you read the post differently because you dismiss the other Miracles of the Sun examples and the stargazers comments. You stay focused on the Fatima case, that is puzzling for sure, while Scott zooms out to find an answer.
> people stared at the sun with a strong collective expectation to see something
My point is that this is neither a description of what Fatima was (at least some people there were committed to *not* seeing anything) nor the phenomenon Scott describes (which requires at least some kind of specific weather, at least cloud cover).
Also, as Scott says in the original post, none of the witnesses mention staring at the sun. Instead, they heard someone say "Hey, look at the sun!", looked up, and saw it already behaving strangely.
I don't think the straightforward Bayesian approach to this fails in the way that you suggest it might.
Here's my understanding of how you do Bayesian updates: take your two possibilities for how the world might work (God exists, or God doesn't), and the evidence, and then ask how likely it is that you would see this evidence under either hypothesis. The ratio of these likelihoods gives you the factor that you should multiply your prior odds by in order to get your posterior odds.
Here's how I would apply this approach to the Fatima miracle. We are considering this miracle because it is the "final boss" of miracles. This is the event, out of all recorded history, that it is hardest to find a materialist explanation for. So the question we need to ask is: In a world without a God, what is the chance that the hardest event to explain would be about this hard to explain? Similarly, in a world with a God, what is the chance that the hardest miracle to explain in materialist terms would be about this hard to explain? Thought of this way, it seems that the update becomes fairly minor, and it probably won't change much if we also learn about the 2nd hardest example, and 3rd hardest, etc. In fact, phrased this way, the update may even go in the other direction (this is only because we're sneaking in the lack of still more impressive miracles into the one update, but I think that's the right way to approach the problem).
The problem with your framing, where we learn about each potential miracle individually, make an independent Bayesian update, and repeat, until we end up with a high probability of God's existence, is that it misses all the updates we should be making for occasions where miracles could have occurred but didn't. It is the equivalent of doing an independent Bayesian update on every scientific paper in a field that suffers from publication bias.
A lot of people do perform the incredibly naive calculation you describe, estimate a base probability, estimate the evidence under that theory, update. But that is not a grounded or principled approach. In my opinion, it is the core arrogance and stupidity of the rationalist community - that they apply these statistical concepts with great confidence and smugness while actually having little understanding of them.
The standard framework of a statistical tests is that you start with a hypothesis, observe the data, and then, observing the data, you can reject a hypothesis if the observed data had a vanishing chance of occurring under the hypothesis.
The Baysian approach is just this process intuitively extended to having a distribution placed over all possible hypotheses, and then you can update your probability distribution on the hypotheses. It fundamentally isn't coherent if you have an incorrectly specified hypothesis space. In your example, you posit two cases: case i) god exists and case ii) god does not exist. These two cases split the world in half and so seem fair.
But tacitly, the comparison is far more distorted: case i) our current understanding of reality is correct and complete and case ii) our current understanding of reality is incomplete. You are making a false equivalence between our understanding being incorrect / incomplete and god existing.
In short, you conflate rejecting the null hypothesis with accepting the alternate hypothesis.
To make the abstract discussion concrete, if we agree that the miracle seems outside the scope of our current understanding (e.g., of crowd psychology, political reasons to lie about events, eye bio-dynamics, atmospheric dynamics, astronomical events, etc...) then that is only evidence that our current understanding is incomplete (and it could just be that we have an erroneous understanding of any one of those factors).
A more proper Baysian analysis would start with a probability associated with all of those hypotheses (e.g., 10% chance we are wrong about eyes, 10% chance we are wrong about crowd psychology, 10% chance we are wrong about atmospheric dynamics, 0.001% chance the Judeo-Christian God Exists, 0.0001% chance Odin exists, etc...) and really the change in the belief of god from an any number of identical miracles appearing likely is just updating towards us being wrong about something (not specifically that God exists).
But honestly, attempting to correctly apply Baysian analysis to as complex a question does not seems possible, as the hypothesis space is too complex. This issue applies to much of the whole "Bayes for everything" approach so-called self identified rationalist like to uncritically tout.
I apologize, I don't have the discipline to come up with a thought in the first section of the post, hold onto it while reading the entire rest of a post of this length, then post the original thought at the end. So if these two points are addressed later, ignore me and i apologize.
1.I wonder if the sense that the sun was falling could be caused by a perceptual shift between perceiving the sun as a distant part of the heavens to perceiving it as a near object in the local sky?
Switching between the two interpretations of a Necker cube, I do get some sense that a corner is 'moving' towards/away from me as I reinterpret it as the 'near' or 'far' corner of the cube.
There is a fundamental ambiguity between size and distance in the visual field, where you can interpret the same image as something large and far or near and small. I do wonder if people could 'switch' that perception the way you do with a Necker cube, and get a sense of 'approach' as you go from thinking something is far to thinking it is near.
Obviously, the particular religious context and reactions of others around, plus the perception of the sun doing things that celestial bodies never do but near objects often do, could influence this flip in perception. (eg - the sun, moon, etc. are generally fixed and inanimate. Something that spins and moves is more like an animal or other animate phenomenon, and these are always nearby, never celestial).
As a modern scientist, I'm aware that if the sun got closer, it should also get bigger. Would this be obvious to rural peasants in 1917? In the moment of an extreme event causing religious hysteria? Maybe the sun just feels 'as big as The Sun' whether it is light-minutes away or light-seconds away, to someone in that context, and the understanding of size and distance is vague enough to not notice a discrepancy.
(experimental question - if someone sees lights in the sky and believes them to be distant stars, then realizes they are actually a nearby plane, is there any sense at all of 'approach' or 'falling', however minor or fleeting? Has anyone studied/experienced anything like this?)
2. Regarding the claim that the people involved would obviously know what afterimages from a bright light were, and recognized if that were part of the phenomenon. Would they?
I don't think I've ever seen an afterimage from bright light that didn't come from an electrified source. I don't think rural parts of Portugal would be very/at all electrified at this point (based on 30 seconds of Google, correct me if wrong).
Would peasants at this time/place have powerful gas lamps that would cause afterimages? Does any gas lamp cause an afterimage, or does it need it need to have focusing mirrors or etc. to do so? What is the *magnitude* of the afterimage from a gas lamp vs. the sun, would it be obviously recognizable as the same phenomenon to someone with no scientific/philosophical literacy, in the middle of a religious hysteria?
I don't remember ever seeing an afterimage from staring at a fireplace or campfire, which I've done a bit of in my days. Am I wrong about that? Would everyone with a fireplace know about afterimages?
Would the people here actually all be familiar with afterimages? Outside of staring at the sun, how would they encounter them?
There's a difference between understanding it when you see it in relation to normal nearby objects, and understanding it in a technical sense that you can put into words and know to apply to celestial bodies (if you even know what celestial bodies actually physically are, rather than seeing them as mystical objects)
>There's a difference between understanding it when you see it in relation to normal nearby objects, and understanding it in a technical sense that you can put into words and know to apply to celestial bodies
I don't know what you mean by "understanding it in a technical sense", but if you're familiar with the idea that closer things look bigger, there's no real reason not to apply that to the sun as well.
>(if you even know what celestial bodies actually physically are, rather than seeing them as mystical objects)
We're talking about twentieth-century Portugal here, not Ancient Egypt.
I filled out the form; no idea if my experience was the same illusion or what. I was watching a total eclipse through eclipse glasses, and long before totality the sun started to move, grow, and shrink. I never thought it was anything other than an optical illusion; I remember saying aloud that my brain must be trying to auto-adjust brightness and getting confused by the novel experience of using eclipse glasses. I hadn't heard of these miracles before, but I still kind of like my "explanation."
No miraculous experience, but I have seen the [thin clouds make the sun easy to look at with a crisp edge] phenomenon many times (midwest US, usually early in the morning, but occasionally nearer midday).
Also, I have on two occasions gotten visual hallucinations while staring at the full moon (the moon looked like a TV screen with random cartoon faces).
Maybe not useful, but better here than in the survey. I was surprised that green flash sunsets didn't get a mention, neither in your article nor in the comments. They're pretty common, stunning to see, and far from ormal expectations of the sun. They even photograph well, the wiki has some nice examples. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash
The last video, the supposedly "good" one, seems to exhibit the exact same sort of auto-brightness adjustments based on camera motion up and down as the previous one where you pointed this out. Not sure what makes it better other than the crowd going along with the camera motions, which could easily be caused by the photographer reacting to the same thing the crowd is reacting at.
As a Portuguese Catholic, I was pleasantly surprised to see this. Always nice being noticed!
More to the point, I appreciate the intellectually honest deep dive and the care not to overstate your case. The only significant thing I'm left wondering (apart from the "loose threads" mentioned in the post) is whether similar events are known to have taken place _before_ 1917. The materialistic picture you're hinting at seems to suggest we should expect that to be the case. If that weren't the case, it would probably be evidence in favour of the "original" Fátima miracle being real/unusual - with possibly successive ones being strongly influenced by the expectations it set.
Sorry for the weird and personal question, but why do so many of the Portuguese eyewitnesses - and you - have the name Vieria? Same question about "da Silva" actually.
There was one previous Marian apparition (Tilly-Sur-Seulles, 1900) that had some weird lights coming out of the sun, although this wasn't similar to Fatima other than "sun involved in some way". My impression, discussed briefly in Section 3, is that people gradually started building the "signs in the sun" narrative over the first five apparitions, and this constrained expectations for the great miracle in the sixth.
Sorry for my internal sigh, but it's Vieira (not Vieria). I only half kid, but that's a very common misspelling.
"da Silva" is by far the most common Portuguese surname. If you told me you'd found a random Portuguese person that would be my guess for their surname.
"Vieira" is slightly less common but still among the most common. Speculatively, there's a town called Vieira not far from Fátima, which might have increased the prevalence of this surname locally. ("Vieira" means scallop, the symbol of St James the Greater, probably the most popular saint in the Iberian Peninsula; which probably contributed to its popularity.)
PS: Unrelated, but I must say I also really appreciated the Beatles lyrics!
I was also left wondering about the existence of similar events before 1917, but it's kind of funny that my thinking was the opposite of yours.
You seem to suggest that the absence of prior events gives weight to the real miracle theory, because people would be seeing illusions throughout history, whereas my immediate thought was that the absence of such events in the past would give weight to the materialistic theory because after Fátima, people around the world would start to expect similar miracles to occur, thus creating a sort of contagion effect. And the reason illusions in the past weren't interpreted as miracles was simply because there was no expectation of a big miracle occurring, kind of like the people from the subreddit.
I basically agree with your thinking for everything post-Fátima, but it looks like for Fátima in particular people wouldn't know what to expect to see so all explanations based on that expectation fail to explain this one in particular.
I find the Phillipines video fishy. At 3.11 the sun appears as a disk with the bottom of the disk just "touching" the top of some hills on the horizon. Three minutes later the sun is in the same position.
The earth rotates 360 degrees, 21600 minutes of arc every 24 hrs 86400 seconds. That is one minute of arc every 4 seconds. The sun is about 30 minutes wide, so it should move one diameter below or above the hills in around two minutes. Back in 1988 when I was vacationing in Jamacia I watched a sunset and timed it and yeah it goes down fast in a little over two minutes. And yes I could watch the sun go down as it was quite dim enough.
Well this sun did not move at all over 3 minutes. The direction is east so the sun should have moved 1.5 diameters above the hills, but it didn't.
The sun doesn't move straight up or down. It moves diagonally, and the relative amount of vertical vs. horizontal motion depends on the latitude and the time of year. At the north pole, for example, there's essentially no vertical motion and the sun just circles the sky endlessly until the season changes.
Also, what you're seeing in the video is not the solar disk. It's an extremely oversaturated part of the detector corresponding to the bright area of the sky around the sun. Point any camera at the sun with an exposure time that isn't ultra-short and you'll see the same thing.
I know the sun does not move vertically everywhere. But its the Philippines, 9 degrees N lattitude in March, so not much off of vertical. I also mentioned I watched the sun go down in Jamacia 18 degrees N lattitude, also in March, and it took a little more than two minutes to go down, I timed it (I was watching the sunset and wonders how long should a sunset take, did the mental calculation and came up with 2 minutes, which I found hard to believe. So I timed it and yeah the calculation was right (this was 1988, long before the internet and phones).
Based on what I was seeing I concluded it was some sort of optical effect, but I doubt it was just the phone, because the crowd was reacting so they were seeing this as well.
> Do mathematicians really number everything they say like this?
I know many mathematicians, and while none of them talk like this, if you told me you knew a mathematician who talked like this, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised, lmao. I'd say it's within three sigmas of average for mathematician quirkiness.
Not sure how relevant this is, or if someone as mentioned already, but the names of the Portuguese witnesses are very frequently misspelled. If someone tries searching the documents for the names with typos they might fail to find them.
Some are fine and text finders should successfully detect the text (eg missing accents, or using 'c' instead of 'ç')
For instante:
1. Goncalo should be Gonçalo (the cedilha, means the 'c' is pronounced like an s)
2. For pretty much for any combination of 'ao' 'ae' or 'oe' the first letter should have a tilde eg João instead of Joao.
3. Other examples of missing accents are names like Lúcio, Queirós, José
But some names have swapped or extra letters. For instance, it should be:
1. Manuel Perreiro da Silva -> Pereira instead of Perreiro
1. Maria Jose de Leimos Quieros -> Lemos Queirós instead of Leimos Quieros
2. Goncalo de Almedia Garrett -> Almeida instead of Almedia
3. Joao Martia Lucio Serra -> Maria instead of Martia
In some cases I couldn't find the name in the large Fátima documents, but I'm pretty sure they're misspelled. For instance, it probably should be:
1. Afonso Vieria -> Vieira instead of Vieria
2. Augusto Pereiro dos Reis -> Pereira instead of Pereiro
3. Izabel Brandao de Mela -> Isabel Brandão de Melo instead of Izabel Brandao de Mela
I wonder if these typos are just the result of typing manually of if it has something to do with the machine learning translation.
I'm unable to tell if there's anything wrong with the Italian names, but I'm kind of curious if the issue is also present there.
Also, for what it's worth, I visited Fátima multiple times throughout my youth. The sun always seemed to successfully follow the laws of physics.
I was tempted to point that out. I thought _Perreiro_ (besides looking like it comes from the Spanish noun _perro_ ‘dog’) was a misreading of _Ferreiro_ or _Ferreira_. However, Escot Aleksandre is known to spice his posts with deliberate typos.
My take on this is weirdly almost exactly the opposite of Scott's. I think I have a much higher prior on miracles being plausible than most people here; I would say I believe with high confidence that God exists with high confidence, with moderate confidence that at least some claims of miracles and divine revelation are real, and while I don't think it's probable that Christianity, specifically, is true, I don't have high confidence on the topic one way or the other. But the miracle at Fatima strikes me as one of the few points on which the "smugly-dismissive skeptic" take is not only correct, but clearly, obviously so.
The basic problem that I see with Scott's analysis is that, in attempting to be as charitable as he can to the opponents, he ends up holding his own side to a bizarre double standard. He devotes great effort to showing how various naturalist explanations fail to perfectly account for every detail of the recorded events, but he never thinks to ask whether the *religious* explanations fit the recorded details any better.
Even if we grant the assumption that the Christian God exists, what explanation is this supposed to allow for that's any less strained than the naturalistic ones Scott rejects? As Scott notes, it obviously can't be that God *actually* made the Sun depart from its usual path in the sky; if that were what happened, it would have been visible all across the planet, not just in Fatima and possibly a few surrounding areas. But if that's ruled out, then, as far as I can see, all that we're left with is:
1. The Virgin Mary appeared to tell people that something miraculous would happen at a particular time
2. When the time came, God chose to do... *something*... that would cause most (but not all) of the people there to start seeing similar (but not identical) sequences of weird things, because... reasons. IDK, God's ways are mysterious I guess.
How is this any better than saying "most (but not all) of the people there started seeing similar (but not identical) sequences of weird things, because of some unknown natural phenomenon. IDK, nature is mysterious I guess"?
I have to give credit to Scott, as always, for not going the smug sceptic route but honestly doing the work, even if he doesn't think this was a real miracle.
He treated the topic with respect, so God bless him! It's a lot fairer shake than these type of things get elsewhere, even from other believers, and believers can be just as smugly dismissive of the world views of non-believers, so we don't get to pat ourselves on the back there.
One trap most people fall into with religion generally is thinking everything about it has to be 100% true to be useful or valid. I believe something miraculous happened at Fatima. I don’t necessarily buy everything everyone said about it in 1910, including the seers themselves.
A lot of Catholicism recognizes that truth can exist in degrees while also being objective. For example, if you are baptized in a Protestant church and then become Catholic, the church will not baptize you again.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I was responding to your conditional alternatives:
> But if that's ruled out, then, as far as I can see, all that we're left with is: 1. The Virgin Mary appeared to tell people that something miraculous would happen at a particular time …
I don’t think these are the only alternatives. For example, if you were a Protestant, you might claim Fatima was a miracle but Mary had nothing to do with it. Or you could say that Fatima is evidence of God’s existence because God made the world full of such incredible natural wonders, but deny that it was a miracle. I would say those positions are less true than my own, but more true than an atheists.
With respect to your second point, there’s any number of possible ways God could have altered the standard law of physics and/or human perception during Fatima itself. The definition of “miracle” in Catholicism is a deviation from the standard physical laws. At that point all bets about “how God did it” are off.
>I don’t think these are the only alternatives. For example, if you were a Protestant, you might claim Fatima was a miracle but Mary had nothing to do with it
I agree that, if you wanted, you could come up with a supernatural "explanation" for Fatima that's even vaguer and less useful than the one I proposed.
>With respect to your second point, there’s any number of possible ways God could have altered the standard law of physics and/or human perception during Fatima itself. The definition of “miracle” in Catholicism is a deviation from the standard physical laws. At that point all bets about “how God did it” are off.
I really wish there were a catchier name for this rhetorical move, where someone says "With respect to your point...", then proceeds to ignore your point and address an entirely different one.
In this case, my actual point was that, if Catholics are allowed to hand-wave the specific details of what happened with "God could have done something mysterious for mysterious reasons", then it should be equally legitimate for atheists to hand-wave away the details with "an unknown natural phenomenon could have happened mysteriously for mysterious reasons". Your response was to just repeat that you are hand-waving away the details with "God could have done something mysterious for mysterious reasons", which doesn't address the point at all.
My point was that you can’t simply laugh something off by nitpicking details about Catholic doctrine or the most specific accounts of what was seen and heard at Fatima. This would seem to be even more obvious if (as your original comment states) you believe in a God. God is by definition all-powerful, so the range of possibilities about what He is getting up to and how He goes about it is by definition very large. So it you believe in a God of some kind, especially a sort of nonspecific deist God, I don’t see how you could so easily dismiss Fatima on the basis of specific things that allegedly happened there, as opposed to being a likely supernatural event of some kind that was misinterpreted by people who practice a more specific religion. I guess that’s vague, but the vagueness is inherent both in God’s nature and in the generic deism you claim.
When I was a child I did have a weird, probably-OCD tendency to stare at the sun, particularly on long car trips. I would slowly work up to looking directly at it as my eyes adjusted.
All I can usefully report from this (thankfully-discontinued) practice is:
1. So far there's no evidence my vision was damaged in any way. (I wear pretty weak glasses that haven't changed much in two decades.)
2. I cannot report almost anything remotely related to these accounts. The closest I can say is that looking at the sun unsurprisingly gives you a sun-shaped afterimage; slight eye movements make this mismatch the real sun a little bit, resulting in the sense that there is a crescent of brighter light around part of it. My recollection is that sometimes this does seem like it's "spinning" around the sun, just because your eyes keep moving a little.
It frustrates me when skeptics don't take religious arguments more seriously.
(For example, the Bible was just accepted as four JEPD documents without ever explaining how exactly it was accepted. Or the Kuzari argument dismissed without proposing a serious alternative. Or the various miracle stories of Rabbi Schneerson. None of these are airtight arguments, but they are dismissed in a way that makes one wonder if the skeptic also has his trapped prior...)
I wonder if this can explain Ezekiel spinning wheels as well?
This whole article reminds me of St Elmo's fire which was also dismissed by skeptics until it was proven to be a real phenomenon.
I'm an atheist, but I am not familiar with the arguments you listed, so I can't exactly accept or reject them. That said, all of the religious arguments I've encountered so far (admittedly mostly from Christians) have been exceedingly poor. They tend to either be entirely circular ("the Bible is true because it says so in the Bible"); born of incredulity due to ignorance ("I don't understand how X happens therefore the only answer is God"); philosophical confusion ("let's assume that something exactly like God exists, 20 logical steps rooted in medieval understanding of the world later we can prove that thing is actually God"); or emotion ("God's nonexistence would lead to some outcome that would make me very sad, therefore God exists"). These arguments rarely tend to reach even the "trapped prior" stage; they're just fallacious.
The one type of argument I find reasonable is personal revelation -- but God, if he does exist, had chosen not to reveal himself to me (yet).
This is not to say that your specific arguments (or any other) are necessarily poor -- who knows, they could be the ones that finally convince me to embrace some kind of religion -- I'm just relating my lived experience, as it were.
Well, do you have a link or something ? I'd be curious to check it out, but as I'd said, my expectations are somewhat low. It's no slight against you personally; it's just that after you encounter 99 apologists, each of them saying "oh yeah that previous guy's arguments were weak, but I personally have ironclad proof", the 100th guy fails to generate breathless anticipation...
Basically the claim about how the revelation of Torah is unique because millions of people received it and orally transmitted it and they all said it's legit
Well, the main problem is that the patriarchal history got demolished by modern, academic history...
I have not read anything by Feser, and I cannot claim to have any kind of formal in-depth training about Aquinas, either. However, I think (given my limited understanding) that Aquinas actually did a fantastic job in laying out his theology in a systematic manner. In fact, that's the problem: he did such a good job that modern theologians appear to be stuck in the Middle Ages -- even today, when we know that most of Aquinas's premises are untrue and his reasoning is occasionally flawed.
Do you have some links to his salient posts and/or books ? I checked out his blog, but there's a lot of stuff there, mostly unrelated to the topic at hand.
Yeah, his blog is a lot of fighting with people over the death penalty.
I suggest “Aquinas: a Beginner’s Guide” especially if you’re already familiar with Aristotle’s metaphysics and skeptical of them. The other one on Aquinas is “Five Proofs of the Existence of God.”
I’ve also heard “Scholastic Metaphysics” and “The Last Superstition” are good.
"let's assume that something exactly like God exists, 20 logical steps rooted in medieval understanding of the world later we can prove that thing is actually God"
Please point out which “medieval understanding of the world” was disproven in such a way that Aquinas’ logic has been falsified. I find that most of this tends to be snarky nonsense about causes, when in fact they are perfectly fine if properly understood.
Aristotelian physics has been determined as useless for understanding physics empirically ages ago. Sure, the logic technically isn't falsified, but that's because it can't be in the way you demand. How am I supposed to do it when Aristotelian physics claims to start with unassailable, self-evident principles of movement, and that you can't start from particulars? It's a stonewalled system which is definitionally not amenable to any fundamental critique.
For our purposes, it is enough that it will simply keep giving you wrong (unsound) conclusions. It is at best some kind of folkway theoretical overlay. Only that part can be defended.
I’m sensing a lot of r/atheism. Nobody thinks you can use Aristotelian metaphysics to launch a space shuttle. But that’s not the point, as you’d know you’d read anyone other than Dawkins on this subject.
I don't know if this is terribly relevant, but the thought occurred to me, so I'll plop it out here just in case. You mentioned some discordance between the sun gazing testimonies at Fatima, and those of scholarly, weird folk who intentionally risked eye damage in the past. This might be due to selection effects. Fatima seemed fairly unique in the breadth of people who decided to stare at the sun for ten minutes, but weird scholarly folk are definitely a unique, self-selected crowd of observers. It seems quite likely that they would approach the process in a way that deviates significantly from the norm.
This sort of flips the ending hypothesis on its head. Fatima isn't an unusual account of sun gazing, it's the normal result. But since normal people don't generally stare directly at the sun for ten minutes straight, we only have unusual accounts of sun gazing to work with.
I have a soft spot for Eucharistic miracles, though I think if you don't accept the foundational belief you won't be convinced by them no matter what (it's entirely possible and not unreasonable to think that if the alleged Host does indeed turn out to be cardiac tissue, that just means a bunch of unscrupulous clerics back in the 8th, 13th or 15th century faked it up by cutting up the heart of a corpse and then pretending this 'miracle' happened during Mass somewhere sometime vague. If that's anyone's view, I can't criticise them for holding it).
And there's always something new to learn; an Aztec featherwork image of the subject, done either by or on behalf of the nephew and son-in-law of Moctezuma:
"Don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin (or Panitzin) was a 16th-century Nahua noble. A grandson of Axayacatl, nephew of tlatoani Moctezuma II. He was initially the tlatoani (ruler) of Ecatepec before becoming tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, as well as its first governor under the colonial Spanish system of government."
This took me longer than any Scott post before. So, late to the party but here the 407th comment:
A) As a very minor theologian, I do not get what the fuss is about. If the (appearance of the) sun turned into a disco-ball right now for all to see, WTF would it made me update about except the possibility of the sun to appear as a disco-ball?!? Would it proof the existence of God, Buddha, Reincarnation, Matrix or Gilgamesh? Should we now follow the commandments or rape and rob and kill kittens?
A2) The funniest part of the whole topic are those people in the videos who stand among those miracles and could not care less. Because: wtf, indeed.
B) I fully agree with Sun-ism (not sun-gazingism), as St. Francis said:
"especially Sir Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendour! Of you, The Highest, he bears the likeness."
As a bushman said when asked if there is a God, he shrugged: "Sure, look: the SUN" (and sure as the sun shines, it does not care what we believe or do.) If sun-worshipping gives you good vibes, go for it (I do.), and to me the sun+clouds already are the most amazing show on earth, no need for further embellishments. Not sure there is a better God than the sun is; see Peanuts https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fb/6d/3f/fb6d3f6a2673c864a82f3d9ab5db29a7.jpg
D) This post took a looong time to become interesting; till the other miracles came up, I slugged through out of a sense of duty. Who wants to read a dozen testimonies like that? Not me. It was rewarding in the end. - Now was that a Yom-Kippur thing? I shall atone now, with Leonard Cohen "Repent!" and "There's a crack, a crack in every thing; that's how the light gets in" ("The Future" resp. "Anthem")
It's uncanny for this sun to act like a disco ball, because that's an unexplained phenomenon. It's uncanny for a child who claims contact with a supernatural being to be able to accurately predict when the sun will act like a disco ball. Despite those Reddit posts Scott found, there doesn't seem to be any strong evidence that simply staring into the sun causes the sun to act like a disco ball. So yes, this topic really is as interesting as Scott thinks it is.
Takes a rather un-canny god to do such pointless "miracles". And repeats them a bunch of times, sometimes even as a new tourist-attraction. But true: P is as interesting to Y as P is to Y. And more interesting to X resp. less to Z. Shrug.
Those reddits seem close enough to the 'miracle'-experiences, imho. What I found much more fascinating than effects of strong lights on our retina (esp. in combination with priming for sth supernatural + in a crowd of other primed primates): the complete absence of any "awe" by many/most of the bystanders during the "miracle" in Africa/Croatia.
Scott made the authorial choice to frame this topic inasmuch as it relates to our views of Catholicism and the stereotypical Christian God. He's following a long tradition here, and it's fine. But I am adamant there's so much more going on here. The Miracle of Fatima story really is huge in many different ways, or so it seems to me. There's an enormous amount of meat here clinging to these bones.
2. If (ever) not; I'll change my mind to be fine with Scott's choices.
I do like the post. I an a way it reminds of his Top-Post about deworming medication against Covid.
Where's the meat? It is God's way to tell us what? To be Catholic? To look into the sun? To praise village boys and girls with visions? If the sun looks kinda strange - but beat them if it does not?? (must have happened sometimes; miracles that did not work out, do not get recorded) For what? To repent? How, why and: afaih, Jesus et al told people at length to repent plus how - and with rather more impressive miracles. Did those witnesses repent - except kneeling / the guys taking their hat off? Or shall we all take of one sandal and follow the water bottle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS42gDNvMAQ
What's the Catholic church's official position on these? My understanding is that they do at times decide that a miracle was a real official miracle such as when deciding on sainthood. Is the Fatima miracle official? Are these other on-going places also considered official miracles?
Certain miracles and saints are declared “official” by the Vatican. However those determinations are not binding on individual Catholics. So unlike church teaching on abortion (for example), you aren’t obligated to accept any particular miracle as true.
Interesting. Is there a way to look up these specific miracles? I’m very interested in whether there is just a an officially determined miracle that occurs yearly on schedule with greater than 10% chance apparently. That seems so far removed from my mental image of a miracle (namely, that you never get them on demand).
The Church hasn’t recognized a recurring phenomenon as a miracle as far as I know.
Rather, the event at Fatima specifically was designated as a miracle.
The official responsibility for investigating miracles is with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith. Unfortunately their website is still from the 1990s so I can’t sort their publications easily, but their opinions on various phenomena are listed here along with other DDF publications:
Note that DDF no longer officially labels events as supernatural, but rather simply disapproves or approves the promotion and veneration of certain apparitions and the like. The new guidelines are explained here:
I would disregard all “visions of cross, marry and etc”. We know that heavy religious people regularly insist on seeing things either because they actually see them or because they want to show strength of their faith. Event had people coming from other cities so no wonder there would be a bias towards such people. You don’t need any new effect to cause multiple reports of visions there it’s not like hundreds of people had them
Agreed. Imho, the very high inconsistency of the stories lends credence to the skeptical theory, and makes it likely that the simpler ones are real reports of an effect such as the later sungazer reports, whilst the more complex ones are a mix of priming & intentional fabrication. Maybe even sub-clinical psychosis for some.Not even just a religious people thing, even without it, most cultures kind of expect you to exaggerate it a little.
Is idea “staring at sun makes your vision weird” so unbelievable? People normally would stop staring at sun once they see afterimages since we don’t want vision to be impaired even temporary. Everyone knows you couldn’t trust your eyes for some small time if you stare at bright object too long. So I am not surprised there could be effect that would go unnoticed until something forces big mass of people to stare at sun and put too much effort into interpreting their sensations instead of immediately going to conclusions that you shouldn’t do it
Also I have seen my friend going into absolute ave when she first seen clearly visible double rainbow at the age of 18. It was indeed amazing but it’s not that rare. She wasn’t religious to my knowledge but I can imagine group of religious people seeing it as a miracle
I saw a phenomenon like the photo of the sun behind the clouds. Approximately September 15, 2025, St. Paul, MN, 7:30-8:00 am driving east. It also appeared that the visible disk was offset from where the sun really was. Weather was very foggy earlier, but fog was starting to clear.
I used to stare into the sun as a little kid, before I knew better. In the age of like 4 maybe - and it is actually one of my most early memories.
Well the disc really sort of turned grayish yellow and started to kind of rotate and wobble a bit. If I were primed into expecting a miracle, I would surely had seen one.
I was debating this with a Catholic friend and was reminded of this from Scott years ago, some things like the lattiude of the pyramids matching the speed of light do seem miraculous.
The pyramid case is one I've heard before that's actually really funny if you think about it, even if you just accept as a given that the pyramids were constructed via aliens or the supernatural.
Since it would imply that the aliens in question somehow knew that in the distant future humans would specifically develop the latitude longitude system along with the metric system and not any of a million other alternative measurement systems we could have invented.
Either that or the well documented development of the metric system secretly involved aliens which is a very funny conspiracy to hold! Because it implies that previous measurement systems like Fahrenheit were probably developed by humans, but somehow metric wasn't.
It also implies that the aliens either couldn't come up with a system better than metric, or that they deliberately arrogantly taught us their measurement system in secret even knowing it wasn't that good. Since if starting at first principle in the modern day you could do much better than the metric system, especially if you aren't wed to also using a suboptimal base ten number system.
Though time travel (if you don't dismiss that a-priori) would explain things more parsimoniously.
Scott mostly focuses on the nitty gritty details of how reliable the evidence looks, and I'm happy he did that because it's painstaking work and it's good that someone does it.
The cooler question obviously being: if (assume) this is true, THEN WHAT? Throw in a bunch of miraculous healings too, East and West, South and North. What does this tell us about reality?
People will jump to the "God" conclusion: a loving but inscrutable being with complete control over the universe, who freely chooses to do these things every once in a while. That will certainly work as an explanation, but (remember Ockham!), it's unnecessarily complicated. Why bring freedom and control into it? Why the ontological commitment of a separate being?
If praying hard can bring a Sun miracle or a miraculous healing, most kinds of physicalism/materialism are out. What is then the simplest update we can possibly land on?
I think it's basically a kind of Idealist or consciousness-centric view. You did something unusual and intense with your consciousness, and some tangible result came out in the world. What you just learned, then, is that consciousness has some direct causal power over the world, but this power only activates under some narrow conditions (given that many people pray and most don't seem to get miracles).
Yeah I'm surprised he didn't bring up that for this to support a specifically catholic worldview you'd also need to explain all other miracle claims. And using demons as an explanation isn't just unfalsifiable, it puts you in a situation where you can't be justified believing that your own religion's miracles weren't also demon produced.
I (a practicing Catholic) love the intellectual honesty of this post.
I am not a fan of the Fatima secrets and their meanings (they seem to lack a bit of the spiritual elevation that makes me think my religion goes beyond mere superstition), but I must admit that, as my prior is that God's existence is more than 1% likely (it's more like 80-90% I guess, for a few reasons), the evidence is quite convincing.
Curious what you think about the similar reports from people on reddit. Since it would seem very strange to me for God to perform miracles that coincide with things that people sometimes see in non-miraculous contexts.
What is surprising about Fatima possible miracle is that people saw right away that the sun was behaving strangely. It's not like they had to stare at it for a few seconds or minutes to see it strange, plus nearly all of them said that the sun began hurting again at the end of the phenomenon, implying that it didn't before.
Reddit sun gazers, if I understand correctly:
1. Don't always see fatima-like things (it's quite uncommon, even for them)
2. Do so only after staring at the sun for a while.
On the other hand, a miracle is something so dubious that, by default and however unlikely it sounds, I tend to prefer the rational explanation if there is one. So, not sure about the real odds of Fatima being a genuine miracle. I'd say 60% (out of nowhere)?
Plus, I'm not exactly sure what counts as a miracle: if God breaks the laws of physics, then we have to update the laws of physics to account for their occasional breakage. If He operates without breaking them, then we can always go for the "rational" explanation. Looks like we have limited knowledge of our world, because we live in it. It's hard to be sure what a real outlier event is, without outside knowledge of the whole system.
This is why I don't buy the proofs (or disproofs) of God's existence. And despite being quite scientific in my approach to things, I tend to think that our ability to "feel there must be something above who's really beautiful and who's very good" is the clearest (if not rigorous) indication of there being something or someone above.
Another indication is that scaling up systems with a lot of interactions (like atoms -> molecules -> bacteria -> humans -> humanity -> ??) seems to bring a greater consciousness (impossible to define without using an equivalent synonym, which is an indication it might be a standalone feature of our world) AND greater awareness of the elements of the system (there's no sign a molecule is aware of the atoms it is made of, but we are aware of our limbs, and you could argue that our intellectual knowledge of cells, organs and so on amounts to some kind of awareness). It's possible to envision the limit of this scaling-up as a being that is perfectly aware of itself and of what it is "made of" (maybe us, like the Bible might mean by "you are the body of Christ"?).
Not sure I stuck to answering your original question.... 😂
> It's not like they had to stare at it for a few seconds or minutes to see it strange, plus nearly all of them said that the sun began hurting again at the end of the phenomenon, implying that it didn't before.
There didn't seem to be some specific amount of time that people had to look at the sun to see weird stuff. Plus even if there was (say 30 seconds) that wouldn't actually be incompatible with the reports. Since the people didn't claim to immediately see the sun change colors, they all said they saw it merely looking unusually dim at first (which is can be explained with clouds).
People's eyes not hurting is also unremarkable: Since first there wasn't some clear relationship between how much one's eyes hurt and how much weird stuff you see. Secondly pain in subjective and very easily missed if you're distracted like people were here.
I also think the lack of consistency between reports is a much bigger problem than Scott thinks it is: Since if 100 people saw a car crash you'd expect plenty of misremembering and differences between reports yes. However, you'd still expect that if 100 people were staring transfixed at this car crash when it happened, that at least a handful would have accounts of what happened which shared the same details (as well as including all the details seen in most reports).
Whereas the lack of even a handful of witnesses who: like that mathematician had very detailed records of their observations, but which also agreed with multiple other independent observations is suspect.
I mean come on, out of 70k people people couldn't even find 10 that had the same detailed account of events! Sure the unreliability of human memory may explain *most* accounts differing from each other, but to imagine not even %0.001 of accounts are consistent seems implausible.
To buy that level of disagreement was plausible I'd need to be shown other examples where an event has thousands of witnesses, yet nobody can find 2 that agree with each other on specifics.
>I tend to think that our ability to "feel there must be something above who's really beautiful and who's very good" is the clearest (if not rigorous) indication of there being something or someone above.
The issue I see with this line of reasoning is that you don't exactly seem to be looking for data points which *don't* fit the hypothesis. For instance if beauty and goodness are evidence for god, then logically ugliness and evil must be evidence against god, or alternatively evidence for an evil god. Since every argument one can provide for why some evil in the world isn't evidence against a good god, can be turned on its head to also serve as an argument for why the existence of good isn't evidence against an evil god: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_God_challenge
There's also another issue with this line of reasoning; which is that there's no good way of squaring it with an evolutionary explanation of our morality and sense of beauty: For instance we evolved for our morality to be extremely socially malleable and subject to self deception and various biases. Whereas there wasn't much impetus for our moral instincts to evolve to be logically consistent, as opposed to just "good enough" for how we evolved. Similarly our morality is extremely *specific*, for example any more r-type species than us which evolves intelligence and morality will almost certainly seem utterly morally repugnant to us. Since such a species would have evolved to treat their offspring as far more expendable, and so behavior we would consider extremely manipulative or abusive may be seen as perfectly acceptable.
So if a god with anything like a concern for human morality and beauty exists then it's utterly inexplicable that they just so happened to have a sense of beauty and morality that so perfectly coincided with one particular species of ape out of the near infinite space of possibilities. Well presumably minus the part where our morality is hardwired towards peer pressure and hypocrisy.
Also if once you appeal to intuition like this then you end up with the issue that monotheism empirically doesn't correspond most closely to our intuitions out of the various options: Since you can look cross culturally and see that the most "intuitive" religions would clearly have to be animism and/or polytheism. Whereas I don't know of any examples of monotheism not evolving from polytheism, with Judaism being a good example of this transitions happening (as biblical scholars point out a lot of stuff early on in the old testamate only makes sense if you realize Judaism evolved out of a pastoralist sect of the polytheistic Canaanite religion).
>Another indication is that scaling up systems with a lot of interactions (like atoms -> molecules -> bacteria -> humans -> humanity ->
This seems arbitrary, you can easily swap things out a lot there and it still works. For instance when people believed in the 4 humors they could have slotted them in before humans. Similarly you could easily just put "society" after humanity.
This argument also has similar problems to the ontological argument because you can use it to seemingly argue into existence an infinite number of hypothetical beings. For instance legos->lego people-> lego cities: Therefor continuing the trend there must exist a god of specifically lego to complete the pattern. Or you could also argue that there must exist somewhere a lego Dyson swarm, since that also fits the pattern.
I feel like Scott's gotta be right that there's something to do with weather conditions and clouds here. But I feel like this does not explain everything we know about the OG Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. In particular, it doesn't explain the photograph that appears to imply two point light sources in the sky, and it doesn't explain the consistent position of a "sun-like object" in the sky over Portugal.
To me, the clear-ish explanation seems to be that as Scott says, under the right weather conditions involving clouds and maybe rain, looking at the Sun can cause you to see trippy rainbow spiral stuff, especially if you are suggestible. Those conditions were met in the sky over Fatima. But separately and simultaneously, there was also a meteor that was falling to Earth south of Fatima. This meteor is what caused people to look up at the sky in the first place and notice the trippy rainbow spiral stuff when prior to 1910 nobody had noticed this was a thing, Hindu-milk-style. This meteor also explains the dual point light sources, the consistent position of a sun-like object in the sky over Portugal, and maybe even also the miraculous heat drying people's clothes (which wasn't present in the other Miracles of the Sun AFAICT) and maybe also the sun "falling to earth" (which wasn't present in the other Miracles of the Sun). (Although the fact that everyone agrees that it fell to Earth "3 times" is hard to explain. Maybe the first was the actual meteor falling and the rest was people noticing the rainbowy-sun-cloud-phenomenon, having been primed? But why exactly 3? This is a flaw in my theory. But at least it's also a flaw in Scott's theory without the meteor.)
By my theory, the miracle at Fatima is the only Miracle of the Sun that had both the cloud-sun phenomenon and the meteor; all other Miracles of the Sun, including the one in Italy, are lesser miracles that are only the cloud-sun phenomenon without any meteors, but after Fatima people were looking for them. This explains why Scott's attempt to locate a point light source for the Italian miracle, Fatima-style, failed; there was only a meteor at Fatima, not at Ghiaie. This also helps explain why the relatively skeptical crowd at Fatima were nevertheless convinced of the existence of God; it needed the additional detail of the meteor to be especially impressive. I'm speculating that later Miracles of the Sun, after the success at Fatima, involved less skeptical crowds in general.
I feel like there's more than enough evidence for the meteor that I feel it deserves to be added to the story at Fatima. That said, it does require the child-seers' prediction to have been much more impressive; they had to have called the meteor strike. That's a Bayes price I feel is worth paying, though. The child-seers successfully calling a meteor strike that coincides with a sun-cloud weather phenomenon is very impressive, but without doing any math I think the most impressive modern miracle of all time, the final boss of miracles, is allowed to be that impressive of a coincidence. It sounds like there were a lot of child-seers 100 years ago; the luckiest among them are probably allowed to as lucky as Fatima's. But who knows, it'd probably be better to do some math to back that up.
"In particular, it doesn't explain the photograph that appears to imply two point light sources in the sky, and it doesn't explain the consistent position of a "sun-like object" in the sky over Portugal."
The evidence for a meteor rests almost entirely on this (everything else doesn't require it, and there's evidence you'd have expected if it were a meteor that wasn't observed). Importantly though I should note that some other people did independent analysis of that photograph and very much didn't agree with the assessment of there being two light sources. It's just that the photograph is bad enough that it's not too hard to convince yourself you're seeing what you expect to see. Try looking at the oldest comments and ctrl-f photo that should find it.
This seems like a just-so explanation--a meteor came right at the exact moment that the children predicted, everyone looked up simultaneously at that moment, and the meteor (or parts of it) fell 3 times. I think it is more reasonable to say we just don't know.
"The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened."
Perhaps I missed it, but exactly how many of these people who were inclined towards skepticism were there and later reported seeing something, as far as we know? There is Avelino de Almeida, the newspaper writer, but which others? And Evan's article casts some doubt on the idea that his status as a skeptic was well established.
I’m not sure if there’s an exact number, but notable sceptics such as António Sérgio witnessed it. Most of Portugal’s elite at the time was not just atheistic but anticlerical.
Avelino de Almeida and José Maria de Almeida Garrett were mentioned in this piece, however you may be interested to know that the person who took the most famous photographs for O Século newspaper was in fact Jewish: Judah Bento Ruah (certainly related to the acress Daniela).
"Although the sun isn’t vastly clearer than any of the other videos, it’s obvious in this one that the oohs and aahs of the crowd match up with the pulses recorded on video - so it doesn’t seem like it can just be a camera failure. "
The only changes I see in the sun in that video are due to the camera moving. At 3:10, the camera zooms in, and the sun changes appearance. At 3:41, the camera pans up, and the sun becomes fainter. At 3:57, the crowd claps, but there's no obvious change in the sun. At 4:08 the camera pans right, and the sun brightens. To the extent that the oohs and aahs match up with the pulses--and I don't think they match up that well--it makes sense that the cameraman would move the camera when the crowd oohs and aahs.
Most phone cameras continuously adjust the exposure time according to some center-weighted average of how bright the frame appears. That works well if the whole scene is somewhat even in brightness, but fails catastrophically when you're filming the sun, especially if the sun is near the center of the frame, and especially especially if the horizon dividing a bright sky and a dark ground is also near the center of the frame. In such cases, small camera movements result in huge changes in exposure time. If the camera is panned toward the ground, the average pixel in the frame gets darker, and exposure time increases to compensate. If it's centered on the sun, the exposure time decreases. Whether the center of the frame is on the sun, on the sky, or on the ground, and how the phone's algorithm decides to weight the relative contributions of these regions of very disparate brightness, will either make the detector somewhat saturated by the sun or very saturated (because starting at 3:11, it's always saturated).
Even if the variations in the sun's brightness are real, they wouldn't be that surprising. The sun is rising over a mountain, and there are clouds in the sky. It doesn't take much for the sun to rise into a thin band of cloud and dim, or rise past one and brighten.
One thing not considered in this post is the prophecy fullfilled. Not the WWII and Russia one, the prophecy of "Virgin Mary will do cool shit on such and such time at such and such place".
There are crowds gathering to watch the prophesied miracles every now and then, and miracles mostly fail to materialize. Do we have a base rate for that? In a heavily religious country I'd expect there to be such an event at least every couple years.
We could get estimates of Fatima-tier miracle probability by multiplying this base rate by base rate of cool meteorological phenomena (plus maybe rates of meteors, volcanic explosions, etc.). If statistics predict about one Fatima per couple centuries, then prophecy doesn't need further explanation, this kind of event should've happened once or twice in the Age of Reason. If statistics suggest one such match in, say, ten millenia, then any materialistic explanation has one more issue to deal with.
Reading this post took so long, by the end my phone screen had started dancing, spinning, changing colors, and hurling towards me.
More seriously, I wonder about possible refutations of the hypothesis here - are there examples of groups of people staring at the sun through clouds for a long time (either expecting a miracle or for any other reason) and *failing* to see anything remarkable? Everybody going home disappointed? If such examples exist, I would count this as a refutation of Scott’s hypothesis; if they don’t exist, as a confirmation (maybe collective disappointment is not a very exciting thing to record, but it seems that people gathering to stare at the sun expecting a miracle have not been all that rare in history; a potential negative result might well have been recorded). Apologies if I missed a discussion of this in this long post (between the dancing and the spinning).
I am afraid that there aren't many cases of groups intentionally going out and staring at the Sun through clouds for at least 5 minutes at a time, just for the heck of it lol
I am Italian from the south of Italy. I was talking to my mom about your analysis of the Fatima mystery (which is very famous here). My mom told me she had exactly the same experience when she was doing a "religious trekking" trip in a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone). She was around 18 at the time (she is 70 now). She saw a pulsating sun, like it would get closer and closer and then the go back again. This effect repeated several times (3/4) and she got really scared.
Importantly, at the time she didn't know about this effect of the pulsating sun (she learnt about it later).
Also importantly she claimed they were not staring particularly at the sun nor they were expecting any miracle. They were actually sitting down on a bench nearby a cliff eating a sandwich.
She doesn't remember whether if was cloudy or not but she says she was able to stare in the sun, so maybe it was. As she was coming down the trip, her group met a local lady that confirmed those types of visions would occur there.
This place is famous cause a young little girl and her grandma had a vision in a cave ( little Jesus, no more details provided) few years back. When my mom visited the little girl was still alive, not sure about now. As I am writing this , she just told me the story so didn't have the time to research it independently .
I want to address something. The Fatima mystery was already famous BUT not everyone knows about the pulsating sun effect. Indeed before reading this post I didn't know or didn't remember about this effect - although I surely knew about the Fatima story.
So it's possible that my mom knew about the Fatima story and still never heard of the pulsating sun effect when she had her experience.
I am happy to ask her more questions if you have them.
I could also plan a trip over there to take a look myself. If I do, I will surely try to record it
Apart from the one sun "miracle" I've personally seen (which I will input into your form when I have some time), there are two other rare weather phenomena my extended family has allegedly encountered.
One is ball lightning. It was seen by my grandmother who was extremely grounded and truthful, so I am pretty much certain that it exists.
The other was a phenomenon similar to the Fatima one with rotating (2 axes), moving sideways, downward, upward and color changes (though there were no purple color, only green and orange). It was allegedly seen by my other grandmother who is less trustworthy, but I would still be surprised to learn that she lied about something like this. She is still alive, so if anyone has some specific questions I can ask her.
EDIT: The circumstances: She was on a religous trip with other old Catholic people at Szilágynagyfalu (or Nusfalau in Romanian, diacritics omitted), Transylvania. She used to go to a lot of religous places, she didn't know at the time that there sometimes were sun miracles at this specific one. When it happened, one of her group members noticed (allegedly) and alerted the others who all saw it (allegedly).
Btw, my personally favoured hypothesis for my grandmother's vision is that the priest or the tour guide subtly made the old people there consume psychoactive drugs in some way. This probably sounds outrageous at first blush, but there are some arguments for it:
1. There is great money to be made if a place becomes known as a site where miracles happen.
2. The fraud is easy and cheap to execute, because you don't have to drug every tour group for the place to acquire rumors of miracles. It's enough if you choose the most vulnerable groups (eg. ones with only old people) and distribute the contaminated food item on the bus/inside the church under the guise of it being some holy/healing water/food. The amortized cost of drug is probably small.
3. It explains why the specific account of miracles differ slightly (as was the case with my grandmother's group): It's probably not hard to suggest the rough form of the miracle to people who you previously drugged, but you can't control the specifics.
4. My grandmother herself seemed a bit puzzled when I asked her about some specifics of the vision (eg. how can you see that a sphere is rotating if it has a completely uniform color?). (And she did not look like she was trapped in my masterful line of questioning.)
5. A few fraudsters existing globally is enough, because the places where miracles happen will quickly attract victims from far away. There is a large global demand for miracles. Therefore, the low prior on a priest or tour guide being a fraud is not as much of a problem.
The main counterarguments, as I see it:
1. This is very unlikely to be responsible for alleged miracles where there are a lot of people as it's probably pretty hard to drug so many people.
2. Why did I not hear about even just one case where a fraudster used some drug to fake miracles? If it's a viable method, surely some fraudster should have been caught somehwere in the world using this method of crime.
On the whole, I'm still unconvinced, but I also do not accept the other explanations for my grandmother's vision:
I don't remember her saying it was cloudy or it wasn't, but I'll ask next time we talk.
One person in her group noticed it and alerted her and she saw it instantly.
This week I talked with her and asked about this again, because last time she said she would ask Magdika (another person there). She now says that she thought about it some more and she misremembered, it was not rotating, and the specific path of sun was slightly different than the one she initially reported. However, it also came closer to them apparently.
I think I would remember the details of a miracle better if I saw one, so this is somewhat weird.
I asked her. Here are the answers: There were no clouds. It was during a sunset. First, she noticed that she can look at the sun without pain, then that it is orange, then that it became green, then that it moves. She said that the whole phenomenon seemed realtively simple to her.
This seems like it's demanding a follow-up post. Since even if one didn't have compelling counterevidence of this being a miracle in the form of those reddit comments, there's still a deeper issue here:
Miracles with large numbers of witnesses like this aren't unique to any one religion. Which means you have to explain the observation of miracles outside of one's own religion. However if you say invoke demons, then you're left in the uncomfortable situation of not being able to be confident any of your own religions purported miracles *weren't* demons. Which is especially absurd if you're forced to believe that demon caused miracles must be more common than those caused by god.
It’s simple. God is showing us miracles all the time, and we only occasionally pay attention and make a big thing out of it. Why this is preferable to experiencing a miracle every day is beyond me, but it seems to be the case.
If the people seeing miracles were all one religion, or the miracles otherwise seemed to favor a particular religion then you'd have a point.
But how are you supposed to square the observations of miracles within different wildly theologically incompatible religions?
Like what model would allow for miracles to be observed in both polytheistic and monotheistic religions? At least without having the aforementioned issue where you can't attribute other religion's miracles to demons without logic dictating that probably applies to one's own religion as well.
>But how are you supposed to square the observations of miracles within different wildly theologically incompatible religions?
I think it’s because people crave miracles, and God manifests itself in numerous ways to lots of different kinds of people. In my view, miracles happen all the time and what is rare is forming a consensus.
Ok so now I'm very curious, what exactly is your theology?
Since at the very least I can't imagine you believe God cares too much about what people's specific beliefs are, if he's sending people with wildly different beliefs miracles they will each perceive as confirmation of their existing religious beliefs.
First question: is there more than one omniscient God?
A: that wouldn’t make sense to me, but it would explain different miracles for different believers; but now we have a situation where more than one God is making more than one variety of people. I cannot wrap my head around that.
So one God responsible for the whole thing and completely embedded in its creation. (we can leave out the pantheon of gods for now- i.e. Greek and Roman.)
So if we are left with one God and multitudes of people who have different theologies, then surely we are introducing the complication and not God.
If you envision a God that stands apart from its creation, then to me, you have a God that is treating the universe like a video game and giving everyone a chance to win or lose (except we know that isn’t true.) That notion seems reductively anthropomorphic to me. We seek to make God more like ourselves.
I'm still not sure what exactly your theology here is supposed to be. Since it sounds deist adjacent, but obviously if God's sending miracles then they have to be at least a *somewhat* personal deity right?
Do you have some works based theology that lends itself to God not caring about people theology necessarily?
How closely does you theology match Spinoza? Since his wiki page says "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law" however I don't know how such a God can be squared with the view on miracles you previously endorsed.
As an aside, I was raised in the Anglican tradition so that atmosphere of a church and style and customs of a church is definitely something I am closer to, but that’s a cultural thing more than a theological thing
Sam Harris brings up Sathya Sai Baba quite a lot as an example of someone with thousands of still living followers who claim to have seen miracles performed by him. Though idk if there's any purported miracles which get into the 5 digits.
This seems to be a topic which chatgpt is frustratingly bad at helping me research, but I'd start by looking into Sathya Sai Baba and some of the UFO accounts with a decent number of witnesses that can't easily be dismissed as a secret military aircraft or well understand phenomenon.
Not exactly a miracle in the same sense as Fatima, but Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker's reincarnation research can be pretty interesting. I'd actually be interested in seeing you tackle that. Some of their cases leave me stumped, but maybe you can come up with an at-least relatively convincing naturalistic explanation, like you did here.
Predicting the date of something rare when 70k people take the bet seems damn most interesting here even if the phenomenon is not a miracle. I think the logical conclusion is that this just happens almost every day in this place. Then the questions are:
What's so special about this place? Could it be lake/see/river reflecting sun onto clouds causing interference of reflection with sun passing through the cloud?
And why not just visit this place and check what happens on rainy days in Autumn?
> I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience.
> So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained?
Most people derive the vast majority of their knowledge of the sun and moon from mythology, what other people tell them, rather than from personal observation.
For example, it drives astronomers nuts that people keep telling them the moon can't be seen during the day. This is easy to explain from a mythological perspective: the sun is what lights the sky during the day, and the moon is its nighttime counterpart. If the moon were present during the day, it would be the sun.
In fact, though, the moon appears in the sky during the day all the time. All you have to do to know this is occasionally look up, which isn't something people do.
If all evidence contradicts God's existence except for a solitary piece that actually seems pretty good, one must ask, "is there a reason for God to use this one piece of evidence and this alone?"
And if the answer is no, you conclude it's a trick. When a magician performs on stage, you don't have to know in detail how each trick is performed, and if one seems impossible there's no need to go "holy shit magic was real all along??"
Of course if you do want to spend thousands upon thousands of words on that, there's Umineko.
I think for a lot of us, it's not about "evidence contradicting God's existence." In fact the very concept of "evidence contradicting God's existence" is leaves me cold. Does such a thing really exist? Maybe you could find evidence contradicting one conception of God or another, but how could you find evidence contradicting all possible versions of God that may exist?
It seems to me that for most atheists these days, at least the ones I have really talked to about this, their atheism is fueled by a LACK of evidence for any type of God existing.
One more issue I have with your argument here. According to this rubric, even if God came down in a chariot from heaven and gave you a personal theological lecture, that wouldn't be enough to convince you. Because that's just one data point.
As far as I know, there is only one dogmatically accepted variant of God taught by the Catholic Church.
Yes, there are logical issues with the CC's dogma that no shock and awe could fix. It would maybe convince me of some Olympian demigod at best. If you want to believe, all miracles are superfluous, and if you don't want to believe, you still have no reason to believe 100 % exactly what the theologian wants from you.
I'm not sure why you made this clarification when I was speaking more broadly about the ramifications of the miracle of Fatima for non-Catholics, if genuinely seen as a miracle. Surely it is absurdly limiting to stick to the binary of “Fatima miracle real, Catholicism vindicated” and “Fatima miracle not a true miracle, Catholicism false.” There must be many entirely separate ways of analyzing the incident.
We had a long drive home from Northern Scotland on Saturday. My wife drove on the A9 heading south from Inverness. It was the the middle of the day, with lots of scattered cloud, and a pale sun visible to varying extents behind cloud covers of varying shades and thicknesses.
So I did a little sungazing. I should estimate for around a second a couple of times when the sun was behind light cloud; maybe for three seconds when it was behind darker cloud.
I did not perceive any non-yellow colouring. But I did get impressions (a) of far brighter yellow than was perceptible with a casual glance (b) an expanded sun and (c) separate - two or three - yellow balls in the sky. These perceptions lasted briefly after I had looked away.
I am pretty sure that had I been hoping to see "miraculous" solar effects as evidence for an important belief, particularly if I had been surrounded by like-minded people looking for the same thing, I would have been pretty excited.
In fairness, though, as someone highly sceptical about this "miracle", I was surely expecting perceptions like the ones I had yesterday.
The "three suns" perception put me in mind of the parhelion effect, most notably observed at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross during the first phase of the War of the Roses, when the future Edward IV is said to have persuaded his troops that the seeming appearance of three suns showed that the Trinity looked favourably on the Yorkist cause.
One basic problem I have is that this feels more like a conjuring trick than a miracle. You can believe or disbelieve that at Cana Christ turned water into wine, but the proposition is clear enough. The liquid was water, but then instantly became not-water. There was no deflected attention, substitution of alternative vessels, hypnosis, auto-suggestion, etc.
For the Fatima miracles, it is not true that the sun made strange movements, or that our planet did so altering our views of the sun. So we either have some mass hypnosis trick, or the misdirection that what people honestly thought was the sun was instead a temporary object introduced into the picture without being noticed, so that people thought they were looking at the sun, but were in fact looking at this rig up. I guess either if carried off are quite impressive, but all the same both seems different in kind from the straight up-and-down miracles attributed to Christ in the gospels.
Relevant is Newton's description of gazing at the sun indirectly using a mirror, and how suggestions could bring back the hallucinations, or thinking of other things could take them away. He did this at 22 and describes his experience to Locke many years later thus:
"The observation you mention … I once made upon my self with ye hazzard of my eyes. The manner was this. I looked a very little while upon ye sun in a looking-glass wth my right eye & then turned my eyes into a dark corner of my chamber & winked to observe the impression made & the circles of colours wch encompassed it & how they decayed by degrees & at last vanished. This I repeated a second & a third time. At the third time when the phantasm of light & colours about it were almost vanished, intending my phansy upon them to see their last appearance I found to my amazemt that they began to return & by little & little to become as lively & vivid as when I had newly looked upon ye sun. But when I ceased to intende my phansy upon them they vanished again. After this I found that as often as I went into ye dark & intended my mind upon them as when a man looks earnestly to see any thing wch is difficult to be seen, I could make ye phantasm return wthout looking any more upon the sun. And the oftener I made it return, the more easily I could make it return again. And at length by repeating this wthout looking any more upon the sun I made such an impression on my eye that if I looked upon ye clouds or a book or any bright object I saw upon it a round bright spot of light like ye sun. And, which is still stranger, though I looked upon ye sun wth my right eye only & not with my left, yet my phansy began to make ye impression upon my left eye as well as upon my right. For if I shut my right eye & looked upon a book or the clouds with my left eye I could see ye spectrum of the sun almost as plain as with my right eye, if I did but intend my phansy a little while upon it. For at first if I shut my right eye & looked wth my left, ye spectrum of ye Sun did not appear till I intended my phansy upon it; but by repeating this, appeared every time more easily. And now in a few hours time I had brought my eys to such a pass that I could look upon no bright object with either eye but I saw ye sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover ye use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together & used all means to divert my imagination from ye Sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in ye dark. But by keeping in ye dark & imploying my mind about other things I began in three or four days to have some use of my eyes again & by forbearing a few days longer to look upon bright objects recovered them pretty well, thô not so well but that for some months after the spectrum of the sun began to return as often as I began to meditate upon ye phænomenon, even tho I lay in bed at midnight wth my curtains drawn. But now I have been very well for many years, tho I am apt to think that if I durst venture my eyes I could still make ye phantasm return by the power of my fansy."
I reproduced the effect in the video by just moving the exposure slider (which appears as an on-screen control on an Android phone) while videoing the setting sun. The most plausible explanation is that even if the crowd were witnessing something, the specific person taking the video is most likely to be doing this on purpose to create the effect. People want to go viral.
The problem with the "anyone who stares at the sun for 10 minutes will seeing something like this on a cloudy day" hypothesis is that surely not every person began their gaze at the exact same time, yet they all freaked out at the time the children predicted. Some people probably came a few minutes early and started looking, some right on time, some maybe distracted by their family or someone in the crowd. So, I don't really think that is a good explanation.
Also, none of the witnesses mention staring at the sun *before* the strange phenomena started. Instead, it sounds like they looked up, and the sun was already acting weirdly.
Not directly mentioned in this article, but it can at least be inferred. How else would they be talking about disappointment from trying to see the miracle beforehand, and not finding any?
For the rotating aspect, I think this can also be considered as not especially unusual: when the sun can be watched painlessly (yeah, don't do it ;-) ) and is clearly defined - usually it happens very close to the horizon with a faint fog or very thin clouds - it gives the impression of a rotating gold-copper-orange disc - completely featureless and flat, not a sphere with shadows like the moon, but still giving the impression to rotate somehow. I suspect it's because it's appear to slightly move/deform because of some lightbending by the atmosphere, and the brain interpret it as a disc rotating slightly off-axis (which may be what the witness meant when saying the sun was doing circles. Anyway, I would not count it as exceptional: this rotating hot copper disc sun can be seen maybe once or two times a year, at least where I live (Belgium)
I don't think I see it special: my vision is quite normal, a slight myopia now (but at the time of observation, before university years I had 10/10) and moderate daltonism. But my brother agreed about the impression it kind of rotated... and he have normal color vision.
Could be more of a "mental" thing tough, I am very scientifically minded and like to observe a little bit everything. So it may just be that the effect is mild and people do not really care (really paying attention to the sun in those condition is probably not something a lot of people do, it's not painful nor dangerous*, but not spectacular either. ...My brother agreeing but only after I mentioned "it looks like it's kind of spinning" points to a real but modest, probably widely shared optical illusion, not me having rare vision (daltonism is a quite common defect for men, and I do not think it plays a role here).
Also, the rotation is nothing like catherine spiral firework. If I had to descibe more in details, it would be like a impression of a mild funnel (or inverted funnel) leading to a very flat small hot copper sun disc which rotate, with well defined interface between the mild funnel and the sun disc. You cant say which direction it rotate nor if it's a funnel or inverted funnel, so clearly an illusion similar to the hollow face illusion, but that how it looks. No sparkling or irregularity....
*When I say not dangerous, it's if you do not insist once it becomes unpleasant or have clear after image...Seems like the people who did observe the sun share the same crazy-let's do a "scientific" observation mindset as I do, but also seems to lack minimal self preservation. I sometimes am a little bit careless too, but clearly it could have been much worse ;-p.
This turns a century-old miracle into a testable class of phenomena (crowd priming, safe solar viewing, entoptic effects and contagion). Seems like a template for understanding UFO flaps, Marian apparitions at other sites, Havana-syndrome clusters, mass psychogenic illness, AI hallucinations, maybe even finance manias. Same mechanics: expectation, shared attention, ambiguous stimulus, narrative convergence.
When I see someone who is really good at close "magic," making cards or coins disappear or whatever, I don't think "maybe magic is real."
Obviously we all do that. But I think there are two reasons for it. The obvious one, that magic and miracles always turn out to be "tricks." And the maybe not so obvious ones that if magic and miracles were real, I would expect to in live a different reality than we do, and I wouldn't expect these astounding techniques for bending the laws of physics to be used solely on making cards disappear, or making the sun pulsate for some random people.
I've baysianed for zero to zero after reading this. What kind of god does this? Why? It's like believing hyper-technological aliens would traverse the galaxy to steal a cow.
Both links to the newspaper article scans in this sentence are broken for me:
> [...] there is a grainy mostly-unreadable scan of the original October 15th article here, and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here.
Hmm, the second one works now (in Firefox on laptop). But the first one can't even be resolved by DNS. I wonder if it's my ISP blocking it or something. I'm in Singapore, for what it's worth.
This is an astonishing piece of research and writing, and I am continually amazed that you find the time for this production. I'm inclined to write my reaction up to a greater extent, but for now I'll provide a very tiny contribution.
I am a receptive audience for this work: a cradle Catholic, orthodox in belief and practice without any period away from the Church, more intellectual than "spiritual" about my faith, generally putting a comfortable but respectful distance between myself and some of the more esoteric Catholic practices (bone churches, mortification, intense Marian devotions), and generally - most importantly here - skeptical of the value of purported miracles. Modern ones, at least; I'm going to continue to believe that the Shroud of Turin is authentic until someone makes one of equivalent quality and properties. Mostly that's because I don't think that events like the Fatima sun-miracle are the way that God operates to perform miracles.
The miracles that I believe in tend to be not so much demonstrative as personal and necessary. That's what I take from the Gospels. The miracles that Jesus performed were mostly not done for great crowds, and were usually done out of intense personal need: one sick/dead girl is revived in front of her family. One paralyzed man is told to get up and walk while inside a crowded house. Jesus calms a storm and walks on water to save his twelve homies. Jesus only appears to a couple of women, then ten of his boys, after the resurrection. The most visible miracle, recorded more times in the Gospels than any other, involved the feeding of five thousand men with five loaves of bread and two fish. He didn't conjure up a big pile of food or cause it to fall from the sky. The miracle occurred as the crowd passed bread and fish to each other, hand-to-hand. Needless to say, Jesus didn't make the sun dance. When asked by two of his apostles to call down fire from Heaven, Jesus declines.
So because there were no big explosive "take a look at what I can do" miracles in the Gospels, I don't expect any to occur 1,900 years later. If God is going to reveal himself in an impressive way, he's going to do it on a small scale, and it will accomplish something other than bolstering a belief. And while I do believe that God acts in history to accomplish great things, God's hand tends to remain hidden, shrouding itself in improbable coincidences and in the heroic actions of unlikely individuals. No fireworks, just inspiration.
This understanding leaves room for the possibility that the visions of the child-seers were, as the Church says, "worthy of belief," even as we are likely to close in on a material explanation for the sun miracle. God worked personally with those children, and they influenced the world. And they're essential to the story: without them, the dancing sun has no meaning. It exists only to verify that the children saw what they claimed, but it is not necessary.
So thanks again for this. I would give you so much Reddit Gold if were not completely cringe
According to the children, the sweet, kind, angelic mother of God apparently tormented the children with visions of hell and encouraged them to physically hurt themselves to atone for the sins of others. I’m honesty not sure I’d call that worthy of belief
I've briefly tried staring at the full moon today, just for half a minute or so. It's actually quite cool! The rim seemed significantly brighter, and the microsaccades made it jitter wildly - despite my trying to focus on a single point. I imagine its much more extreme if you stare at the featureless sun. I might have gotten some hint of rotation, hard to tell. I definitely didn't see any crazy colors or the moon shooting towards me. Again, I've been looking for a short time only.
Try it out for yourselves! :)
Update: I wear glasses (short-sighted, about -2.5 dioptres each eye), and I've tried staring without glasses. Guess what, it actually starts pulsating and has a blue rim most of the time! I can totally see how something similar but more crazy can occur when looking at the sun with a bit of weather trickery involved.
I think two explanations are possible: one is that these citizens ingested a massive dose of an LSD like hallucinogen. We should go to rural Portugal and try to extract it from moldy bread and grain and other known sources of curative medicines.... or that this experience was actually a UFO type phenomenon of alien life forms infecting the spectators and putting on a hell of a light show for the local rubes.. just like close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's clearly not evidence of any kind of God... Anyway the god of the portuguese has proven to be a false one... so this Catholic boy aint buying this bull...
The flashing in the videos seems like a thing multiple layers of clouds could cause. If there's a low, thin, even layer and a high layer of more opaque clouds with small holes, then when a hole passes in front of the sun, the lower clouds will be backlit and flash like that.
A comment on the 'good video' of the Filipino Sun incident.
I find that this is very clearly a cell phone doing auto-adjustment on the exposure levels. How an experienced nature photographer didn't know this shocks me, although they do state they don't video the sun.
Turn off the sound and watch the link between the camera motion, specifically the motion that causes changes in the light and dark areas of the video frame, and the sun's brightness.
Every time the camera points lower to include more darker regions (everything below the horizon and the larger tree to the left) the brightness of the sun over exposes. When the framing points to the sun and lighter sky the exposure drops and the sun resumes it's 'normal' size.
I didn't bother to think about the sound. I watched on silent. But possibly the verbal cues are linked to the camera operator pointing the camera down as the 'lose concentration' due to the crowd verbalisations.
Crowd noise>camera operator loses mental focus on filming>arm relaxes slightly>camera lowers slightly>more dark areas in frame>exposure goes higher>sun over exposes.
Amazing stuff. This miracle story was often at the forefront of debates I had as a young cringe reddit atheist with orthodox rabbis who claimed they could empirically prove that all of ortho Judaisms claims are true because of the ‘kuzari principle’ - namely that Judaism must be true because it has the only instance of ‘mass divine revelation’. (Eventually I lost interest in debating partially because I lost my virginity to one of the rabbis daughters)
I think you put too much stock in the Catholic Church excommunicating someone and how much that reduces the odds that Mary was involved or not. Pope St. Leo I and St. Joan of Arc have also been excommunicated. Many seers are given difficult treatment by the Catholic Church at first.
Taking a different potential angle to miracle or natural phenomenon: You have a group of kids who know well in advance that they will need to perform an impressive miracle on a certain date. Maybe a few adults could help them in strict confidence. You have a photo of the event showing potentially two light sources, the sun plus something else.
Can anyone think of a way that you might plausibly fake, with a relatively low-tech setup, the miracle as observed? I'm thinking something along the lines of a big mirror ball suspended on thin twisted wire across the surrounding terrrain, although obviously that example isn't enough to cover what was seen.
It didn't show up until the real sun came out, which is one reason I'm thinking mirror/prism/whatever ball rather than light source. An object suspended on wires also tends to spin. But for it to appear to a whole crowd as if it's far above them, maybe it would have to be something more like a large mirored balloon.
For the record I think it's unlikely that the miracle was faked rather than being some other phenomenon. But seems worth considering whether there's a relatively simple way it could be done.
Speculative hypothesis that might be worth exploring: could the perceptual mechanisms involved in the Fatima Sun Miracle be related to those underlying Tögal visions in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism?
In Tögal (an advanced, traditionally esoteric practice), meditators report experiences of multicolored, moving light displays in response to sky or light gazing. The parallels with the Fátima reports are striking: light as a trigger, dancing colors, and evolving visionary forms.
If so, Tögal might provide a reproducible framework for studying how visual and neurological processes, shaped by expectation and attention, can generate experiences of radiance that are interpreted as miraculous or sacred.
I'd like to contribute an experiment you can do at home to be convinced of a psychological aspect of the miracle, which supports the hypothesis in this post.
Set a timer for - at least five minutes, that's enough to get some effect for most people. Ten or even twenty if you're feeling ambitious.
Go somewhere with absolutely no light sources. For most of us, a bathroom will do if the lights both there and potentially shining under the door are off, although you're about to have to position things so you're not also seeing the next step in the mirror.
Light a tea candle. Start the timer. Look at the flame until the timer goes off. Do not look away.
Not everyone will experience anything strange, but distortions of the shape of the flame, and even pareidolia in the way it moves, are common. Hearing it seem to speak to you is rare, but not unheard-of.
It's nowhere near sufficient to support all aspects of the hypothesis, but it does support that staring at light sources can at least sometimes produce strange perceptual distortions. Using a candle in darkness (or rather, in a place illuminated only by said candle) is a much safer demonstration than using the sun.
Seems like the Ganzfeld effect might be relevant. Basically, if you tape halved ping pong balls over your eyes and sit under red lights, you begin to hallucinate after 10ish minutes. Perhaps with some additional social priming, this could lead people to see similar visions.
This probably doesn’t explain the Fatima miracle, but it might be interesting to see how much you can get people to converge on a common hallucination with the power of suggestion.
Great article! I am on and off listening to They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos M. N. Eire which also may be of interest to you, about levitating monks and nuns - miracles just as well-attested, but arguably much easier to fake than Fatima. And as with Fatima, the political climate is important - these are not (as I initially thought) medieval mysteries, but take place during and after the Counter-Reformation, when mysticism could do with a boost.
Anyway I disagree that Fatima is the final boss of paranormal experiences. it's clear Gef the Talking Mongoose. If Gef was correct when he said he could split the atom, and was the fifth dimension and the eighth wonder of the world, that definitely requires an in depth substack post.
I mean, I'm an atheist, and I'd love to attend a scheduled miracle (camera in hand). But it seems like they only ever get scheduled once in a blue moon, down in South America somewhere, so what am I gonna do ?
You're an atheist in an atheist world with nothing to prove. If you're an atheist in the throes of an enormously superstitious power apparatus where religious authorities micromanage people's lives, but have recently lost their ability to enforce that with violence, well, you might be more motivated.
"Why were so many atheists in attendance? I, an atheist, have never in my life shown up for a predicted miracle."
As shown in the piece, this wasn't just a religious event, it was a hot-button political topic in the struggle between secular progressivism and the power and influence of the Church. If you're a New Atheist of the Four Horseman era type in early 20th century Portugal, what better way to prove that religion is a bunch of hooey than to turn up at the site and date of an announced miracle, then when it doesn't happen, document that fact, publicise it, and use it as evidence for religion being all hooey and this particular apparition being faked up by the Jesuits (it's always the Jesuits, isn't it?) to tighten their grasp on the ignorant peasantry?
Why did the sceptics turn up with their telescopes for a different sun viewing? See Josh's comment about the Georgia Skeptics:
"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."
Oh hell yeah this is the most insane miracle I love this one
I know.....
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
Might be good to point out: as people have said regarding the other Filipino video, the apparent fluctuations in brightness here are probably the recording device automatically adjusting exposure levels (they are synchronized with camera movements). It's not clear to me what the people themselves would have seen.
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 could've read a whole Animorphs book instead of this.
Yeah, how does he do it
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.
Maybe people today imagine mathematicians speak like this because the modern layman's concept of mathematician-speak crystallised around the 1920s, and this is how mathematicians of that period did often tend to speak?
(Of course I've no evidence for this either way, 'tis just an idea..)
Or perhaps even just a few well-known mathematicians!
The "airline captain" voice is a vaguely West Virginian accent.
Chuck Yeager was from West Virginia.
n=1, but I'm a mathematician and I often write like this when clarifying my own thoughts. (I strike out the numbers before the final draft, but they help to get things in the right order and to separate ideas until there's only one per sentence.)
As a mathematician he might have been trying to give individual statements each of which could be verified or argued independently (like Euclid's postulates). Or he might have been influenced by his understanding of legal documents or other formal declarations in that time and place.
n=2, I'm not a mathematician but a mathematically-minded student, and I rarely write like this on first pass, but when I'm trying to think about some topic systematically and organize my thoughts, a refined text often ends up looking something like that (although I tend to organize it in paragraphs and bulletpoints rather than an ordered list).
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.
Jaki's asides on the great ones of physics, not excluding Einstein, tend to be devastating.
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.
I was able to get it on the first try! Also having intense expectations really helps with concentration
I think you overestimate the difficulty here. The phenomena described in the miracle are relatively low end, before the most significant plateau stages. For shamatha practices like these, long term momentum is a big factor, as are faith, expectations, emotional energy etc. But I would also just suggest trying kasina practices for a little bit, I think the phenomena described in the post wouldn't be too difficult to attain for many people within a week or two of diligently practicing good instructions for an hour or so a day.
What are the criteria for / where does one find "good instructions"?
Shamatha-related practices are a minor obsession of mine, so I'm always eager to learn more. (Been meaning to write a blog-post about the Chad Shamatha Meditator vs. the Virgin Vipashyana Dry-Insight Practitioner, actually–)
Sign me up for that post!
Also, Ingram's instructions in MCTB seemed good (also available for free online), but I haven't tried more than two or three sessions with only minor results.
I'm fairly sure firekasina.org (linked earlier also) is the most comprehensive plain English source and the visuddhimagga and vimuttimagga are the best classical sources I'm aware of.
Agree with this, I saw a spinning disk probably on the first or second try after staring at my cell phone in flashlight mode for ~30s, along with it changing colors
I did fire Kassina for a while cycling through the VS jhanas and also immediately had to think of it when reading the descriptions. However, it only feels like a soso fit to me.
People could do a test following the instructions https://firekasina.org/fire-kasina-book/ and see whether you get to the stage with the stable clearly contured point or the circle (recommend using LED instead of candle or sun).
Pro:
* MCTB style 2nd jhana in fire kassina classically has a circle turning around the dot (changing directions with the breath). People could instead interpret it as the sun moving. There is variants where the whole field turns or some part of the plane against each other but it's way rarer from my experience
* When you try to follow the after image with your eyes it will jump around (but it seems unlikely that that would coincide with 2nd jhana)
* Because the light of the sun is so intense I would expect the afterimages to be much more intense. Probably overlayering with open eyes reality. You can then get several of those over each other as well. Try staring at one point intensely enough and the whole room can glow. Weird color things can happen for sure. I would expect it to be more about that then something "meditative"
* There is also a strong beginner/not trying effect with meditation. E.g. my first fire kassina meditation the afterimage turned into a pink lotusflower which took me a long while to replicate.
* Religious stuff can increase priors for weird things or concentration which for this is something like lowering the impact of the bottom up part on processing and thus allowing weaker believes to shape reality and/or increasing the strength of some top down believes. It was months of prep. though I don't think that's true for all the cases.
* I wouldn't expect it to be anything like what Daniel is talking about in the text above which "only" happens on very high concentration or psychedelics. The other stage a beginner with meditation/prayer background can possibly reach in their first sit (more likely if they have Streamentry).
* It's cute that some of the phenomenology fits but to my brain it feels like overfitting
I really want to tag on to this thread and give you a further twist to consider on this hypothesis, Scott ...
There is a lot of focus on the sun -- the stimulus -- which makes sense, but I have a hunch that says the sun probably only tangentially plays a role. I experienced something in seated meditation, with no stimulus, that bears remarkable resemblance to the Fatima Sun miracle in some of the descriptions - but obviously there was no connected stimulus, unlike the mentioned kasina meditation (which is totally related, regardless).
I've since learned that this phenomenon, although named different things in different traditions, is most well documented as a "nimitta" - a sign without substance. Buddhaghosa gives the original account where he describes it, and says it is basically just a mental construct that arises in deep concentration. He says it's not really worth thinking about beyond its role in meditation. One Western-born modern Buddhist monk, Ajahn Brahm, has also discussed the phenomenon vis-a-vis optics and neurology - he describes it from a practical perspective here:
https://bswa.org/bswp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ajahn-brahm_the-basic-method-of-meditation.pdf
In any event - for your purposes Scott, here was what the nimitta I saw looked like - compare again to the Sun descriptions:
1. Field of vision is dark and hazy
2. Brightness suddenly appears from the middle of my field of vision
3. Focusing on the brightness concentrates it into a ball / disc
4. The disc is pale blue, and occupies roughly 1/3 of my total visual plane
5. After further focus on the disc, it appears to "move", gyrating in a spiraling motion until it appears to fly towards me
6. The disc flies towards me, engulfs me in a bright blue light
7. The light begins to spin with alarming intensity
8. I recoil with a sense of vertigo, breaking out of meditation
Again, this happened to me and I had to go looking for explanations that fit the experience - that being said, I have been reading Buddhist scripture and meditating - so that may as well be a primer, who knows.
Regardless, I just wanted to provide that evidence to potentially update you on this one hypothesis. The suggestion of this evidence would be that such a hallucination (which honestly might be the best word for this) can result from internal mental processes without an external focus (sun, candle, etc).
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
I think few intellectually serious people believe that mystics who start religions are *necessarily* madmen or liars; that's the kind of assertion I mostly expect to hear from teenagers on Reddit who have only a very cursory understanding of their own side's arguments.
I think a lot of otherwise serious people become unserious when the issue of religion comes up.
"Lunatic, Liar, or Lord" is C.S. Lewis's classic trilemma. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma
A quick search also turns up several "Madman or Messiah?" titles about cult founders and religious leaders.
That is not necessarily all mystics, but it seems a common enough framing of religious revelation and mystical experience. And I think many people who would use that framing would categorize weird experiences from staring at the sun, for example, as hallucinations that fall under "madman/lunatic."
Lewis omitted the fourth L: Libeled
The Gospels were not written contemporaneously. Ever play "Telephone"?
This gets a little more complicated. Back then they copied books by hand, no printing press. This led to an incredible number of falsifications, like some dude copied Plato, didn't like an idea, replaced it with an idea of his own. So the same book existed in many versions.
They understood this problem, and developed a long and complicated and of course error-prone process of filtering out falsifications. This was called "canon", meaning: measurement or measuring rod. So Aristotle, Cicero etc. all had to be canonized this way. And no one says the results are perfect.
Now the canonization of the Bible (the whole thing, not just Gospels) lasted 1500 years, the final Catholic version presented at Trent.
So there is simply no such thing as a date when the Gospels were written. Perhaps there were contemporaneous versions. But then centuries and centuries were spent rewriting them to filter out falsifications. And no one says the results are perfect (well Protestants do, but they are ignorant).
One thing is very clear. Catholic philosophy absolutely rests on the Jesus = Logos idea. And that is from John. And John is not synoptic, which really weakens the case. The entire idea of canonization was to filter out versions that were not very compatible with other versions, perhaps John should have been filtered out.
But if John is filtered out, it would have been much harder to sell Christianity to philosophers, to educated people of that age, who were generally much in love with the Neo-Platonic idea of the Logos. Minus John, the educated people of the time would have considered it a stupid religion.
And that looks a bit like a shenanigan.
>This gets a little more complicated. Back then they copied books by hand, no printing press. This led to an incredible number of falsifications, like some dude copied Plato, didn't like an idea, replaced it with an idea of his own. So the same book existed in many versions.
That's a huge exaggeration. Almost all "falsifications" consisted of a scribe letting his attention wander and accidentally writing out the wrong word or missing a line or two.
>Now the canonization of the Bible (the whole thing, not just Gospels) lasted 1500 years, the final Catholic version presented at Trent.
The canonisation of the Bible refers to deciding which books should be included, not to establishing the most accurate version of the text. Incidentally, the textual history of the NT is better established than for virtually any other ancient text.
The Gospels are more contemperaneous with Jesus' life than the great majority of classical histories are with their subject-matter.
Hmmm... I think the weakness of this argument is that "lunatic" is a very negative word, it sounds like someone who is wrong about everything. As opposed to some kind of sage who is supposed to be right about everything. Isn't that too binary? How about "somewhat unhinged genius" ?
How about someone with a very sensitive brain, who can see things others cannot, but sometimes going into an overdrive and seeing something that is not real? I think such cases exist. And such people tend to be prophetic mystics.
I mean, something like taking LSD can do this, too. You either get some powerful insights into philosophical stuff. Or you see little green men. The brain gets over-sensitive, noticing details that are usually not noticed, but also sometimes hallucinating.
The moon landings perhaps? Hard to explain those away.
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.
More specifically, this sort of refraction could shift the frequency spectrum of the light towards the infrared -- which might dry the clothes!
I don't think that shifting sunlight a bit toward the infrared would significantly increase how much heat is absorbed by the clothes (and the water in them)
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.
I am confused too. For example, if someone keeps winning at roulette, they might be lucky, they might be cheating, or they might be helped miraculously by supernatural entities. If one can hypothesize that something like cheating might be behind the wins, then philosophically speaking, why can’t we imagine miraculous wins?
The fact that experientially, there is just one damn thing after another doesn’t mean people don’t cheat at games.
>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.
Yes, but if we were convinced God exists then we would believe in miracles all the more: everything God does is a miracle. It is only by taking on a weird and unnatural definition of miracle (something that violates the laws of nature) that you can argue that God existing is evidence against miracles.
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.
Would this be a way of translating something at least adjacent to Hume's view into something a little more Bayesian:
If we have a prior for how likely something is on naturalism, that prior comes from the frequency which with we've observed that event in the past.
When we observe a deviation from this--when we something that our prior probability indicated to be negligibly probable--the correct response is to update your prior for the event under naturalism, never to reject naturalism.
So if you think, based on a bazillion coin flips, that you'll never see a coin land on its edge, and then on the next flip you do see that, you should always prefer to just modify the prior rather than argue that your old prior was correct and now you have evidence for a phenomenon beyond the laws of coin-flipping.
?
If your idea of natural law is just, the observed regularities of the universe so far, then I can see how you can more or less replace "natural law" with "prior under naturalism" as I do above.
If my gloss is reasonable, is Hume just combining radical empiricism about natural law with methodological naturalism?
Please define "miracle".
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
TBQH, I don't think the idea of "violation of natural laws" actually has any meaning. The whole point of natural laws is that they're descriptions, not prescriptions. They don't *command* things to happen, they simply describe the way we see them happen.
And the idea that the laws of nature we see are *actually* the underlying regularities of the universe itself is an assumption I've never been too comfortable with...in part due to my religious belief.
So I'd say that, for me, the idea isn't that God breaks the natural laws. Any more than a bird flying "breaks" the law of gravity. He simply operates by the deeper, more true laws that describe His existence, which is of a higher order than ours--very similar to how Flatland (the book) describes a 3d object interacting with a 2d world, it *appears* to break the laws of nature...but only reveals that the actual laws weren't what we thought they were.
The true, eternal laws of nature are fixed and eternal. What we see is nothing more than a projection of those laws from a (metaphorically) higher-dimensional space onto our non-Euclidean, non-time-invariant (metaphorically) metric space. This also accounts for the differences in God's commandments--the projection of F(... but not t) onto G(..., t) is time-variant, despite the thing being projected not changing in time. The underlying principles are the same, but the nature of the people being projected onto changed.
As for this particular "miracle"--I'm skeptical...but for religious reasons. I firmly believe that miracles are for the faithful, to help people. They're *not* given as signs to convince the unbelievers...in part because seeing is *not* believing. The *worst* way to convince someone of something is via this kind of sensory thing. Because it's way too easy to explain away sensory input, as we see here *for better or worse*. And I also believe that the Adversary (yes, the good ol' devil's real) has the power to *mimic* miracles, and this smells like something he'd do to get the people all riled up.
to put it another way, we cannot have evidence for exceptionless laws, laws that apply across all tme, .as opposed to.laws that apply 99.9..9% of the time, because we only see a limited subset of data available.
Even in secular terms, the universe could be strange and produce novelties, from time to time.
Our "laws" are merely observations, limited both in space and time.
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.
>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.
The thing that makes a miracle a miracle is that the agent doing the disturbing is God. Lets say someone claims that their eyesight was miraculously healed by God. Does it make sense to say "That healing is no more miraculous than any other case where a system that usually operates undisturbed sometimes gets disturbed by God." Do you think the person whose eyesight was healed would then agree with you that it wasn't a miracle at all, it was just God disturbing the natural operations of the world? Of course not! God disturbing the natural operations of the world is what the man means when he says his eyesight was miraculously healed!
As for figuring out "the laws explaining when it does occur" that's as difficult as figuring out the laws explaining when I decide to throw a rock into a pond. There is no natural law that allows you to calculate "FLWAB will throw a rock into a pond on October 17th at 6:22 AM exactly." Whether I throw a rock in a pond depends on what kind of person I am, what I'm thinking about, and what I like to do. Similarly, whether God takes action in the world depends on what kind of agent God is, what his goals are, etc. The study of which we call Theology.
Well that just becomes a circular argument where all miracles are either false or trivial by definition. If your argument allows you to discard a hypothesis regardless of what input data you feed it then something is very wrong with your argument.
Hume's thesis is precisely that the concept of miracles is circular. You either have laws or miracles (no laws), you can't empirically have both. It's not Hume who nefariously defined miracles this way, it's a classic, scholastic idea that miracles are something in direct relation to laws. Hume is just trying to argue it's contradictory.
I'm sorry, but that's just silly. You can argue about precise definitions, but "miracles" clearly describes a real (in the metaphysical sense) cluster in thingspace, with things like the resurrection and the blind seeing as central examples. You can debate the veracity of such events, but to claim that coming back from the death is the same category of event as a dropped object falling should immediately trigger epistemic alarm bells in anyone who takes a second to make that comparison.
That might be so. However, this has nothing to do with whether they can be epistemically established based on appeals such as being "against nature, beyond nature, or above nature" to quote Aquinas. Without any coherent definition, it is of course not "clear[ly]" what they describe. The Catechism's criterion of indubitable sign of divinity is also similarly empty in formal content. Hume's thesis is that they do not describe a real cluster, based on some lines of evidence like this (surely, you cannot establish a category apophatically?), and therefore, it is senseless to speculate on their origin, because they cannot share a common origin. I.e. there can never be a science of miracles as such, and there is no matter of fact which miracle is real, fake, divine, demonic, ... because the term is either contradictory or empty. This is of course, highly relevant, since the dogma of the Catholic Church on miracles is at least highly dependent on this supposed possibility, since they discern fake miracles from real miracles. The thrust of the argument is that either everything is a miracle, so they are all legitimate, or there are no miracles- based, again, on the preceding concept. Whether resurrection is different from gravity is a matter altogether different.
Honestly can't tell if you're trolling me or not. Congratulations. If ever you happen to speak to the Blessed Virgin in the flesh, don't forget to inform her that her apparition isn't actually a miracle.
Please explain Hume with reference to the miracle of virgin birth.
Law of nature: Virgins do not give birth.
Miracle: A virgin gave birth.
Law of nature still stands. Still virgins do not give births.
A miracle is an exception to the laws of nature. Hume maintained it could not be so.
Hume would say that the law of nature at that point is now "Virgins can give birth".
Hume would not say this. Law of nature is still-- virgins do not give birth. All people, Christians, atheists, Hindustan agree.
Just read the essay or the Wikipedia article or something you are wrong
This is one of those cases where critical rationalism per Deutsch/Popper is a better tool than Bayesianism. It’s more flexibility and allows qualitative judgements about whether something is a *good explanation*, rather than how likely it is to be *true*.
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.
That general problem is large, but a common response is that God tells people stuff on a need-to-know basis for the greater good.
It seems unlikely that God would decide those children and whichever few people wrote down their testimony needed to know about future geopolitical events but larger groups of people did not need to know until it was too late. Nor would it seem to serve the greater good for this prophecy, if real, to look suspiciously ex eventu.
A pro-miracle response to that could be that God wanted the prophecy shared more widely, but the Church deviated from God's plan and decided to hide it instead. Cf. Jonah not delivering God's message to Nineveh the first time around.
Attributing everything good to God and everything bad to human failings (or occasionally demonic forces) is a common cop-out in Christianity. I don't have a strong rejoinder to that except to point out my broad conclusion that "yeah, official Church people and decisions get stuff wrong all the time even though they constantly ask God for direction" does not exactly inspire me to accept their authority over me.
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
I saw what you wrote further on and I agree.
Through sufficient motivated reasoning, all things are possibly God.
And through sufficiently motivated reason, no amount of evidence can prove God exists, as Scott says in this post. I believe there are plenty of atheists who would not believe in God if he came down from heaven in a chariot of glory, and landed in their back yard. If one is sufficiently committed to atheism, one might decide this visitation was merely proof that they had gone mad, or that they were strapped to a hospital bed somewhere, in a coma.
Yeah. Miracles are a bad way of convincing anyone of anything. Seeing is not believing.
But that's just normal reasoning. Would you believe me if I told you I'm omnipotent after doing a magic trick? That doesn't make sense.
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
According to merriam-webster.com, „square“ can mean „any of the quadrilateral spaces marked out on a board for playing games“, though, and „quadrilateral“ apparently includes parallelograms.
But you're still engaging with the scene if you refer to the playing board.
I feel quite confused by now, but I think I agree. A certain inconsistency in the caption is hard to deny.
But my previous comment also has a point (I think). Rob Miles writes that the caption „accept[s] the premise of the image in terms of 3d geometry, but reject[s] it in terms of lighting, which is an arbitrary and very unnatural way to think about an image“. Given the sentence before that, „They’re parallelograms or whatever [rather than squares]“, I took 3D geometry to refer to the transformation between square shape and parallelogram shape in some way: in which case this is not, as per my previous comment, actually what the caption accepts (or needs to accept), right? Rather, it accepts the premise of the image in terms of the object depicted, a checkerboard.
(While rejecting it in terms of lighting of said object —- is this „arbitrary and very unnatural“, in addition to „inconsistent“?)
Thank you. I was not comfortable with the way the image was presented but I would never have been able to articulate reasons.
I too found the caption wrong. The squares are obviously different colors because color is subjective. I can not be wrong about the color I perceive. What I perceive I perceive
Disagree, atleast for me "color" means things about composition of light, with RGB values as objective information about them.
Color tells you about composition of light but color itself is a qualia.
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).
If you take the view that what the people at Fatima saw has all the hallmarks of a Weird Natural Optical Phenomenon, then the purportedly supernatural thing is now not the Miracle of the Sun but the Miracle of the Prediction of a Weird Natural Optical Phenomenon.
In which case, how impressive it is doesn't particularly depend on how weird the optical phenomenon is, it depends on how _rare_ it is, and how _unpredictable_ it is, and how well the prediction matches what actually happened.
So far as I can make out, the prediction was just "a miracle will happen in October". You could argue (fairly plausibly, I admit) that it was implied to be on the 13th at the same time as the earlier alleged apparitions. There was no prediction of _what_ the miracle would be.
So, if we accept FeepingCreature's claim that what the people at Fatima observed shows ever sign (if we ignore the predictions) of being a weird but natural optical phenomenon, what needs explaining is: there was a prediction of a miracle at about a particular time, and at that time a particular (somewhat unusual and very striking) weird natural phenomenon took place.
How much evidence that is for (say) the existence of God then depends on two things. The first is how rare that natural phenomenon is, conditional on its being _non-supernaturally_ predicted (which might be the same as how rare it is simplciter, but might not if there's a psychological perceptual element). Scott's sections 3 and 5 suggest that the answer is: not, actually, all that rare.
The second is how likely it is, given the existence of God and everything else we can infer about him from the rest of the world, that if he existed he would choose to show himself (or, permit the Virgin Mary to demonstrate her power) in this particular way, rather than not at all or in some other way.
That second probability looks really small to me.
In fairness, if we're really specific about the particular weird optical phenomenon in question, _both_ probabilities are really small, and then we have the problem that when you're comparing two tiny probabilities it's not so easy to tell whether your odds ratio is 10^-18 : 10^-12 or 10^-12 : 10^-18. The usual fix for this is "marginalization"; instead of asking very specifically about this particular Weird But Plausibly Natural Phenomenon, you ask (1) how likely is it, in the absence of gods and the like, that if a big crowd gathers in the middle of the day and expects a miracle, that _some_ WBPNP will happen that makes them think a miracle has happened, and (2) how likely is it, if the god of Roman Catholic Christianity is real, that he will coordinate things so that someone makes a super-vague prediction of A Miracle on a particular occasion and then a(n unspecified) WBPNP happens on that occasion. Those are still pretty small probabilities. My feeling is that they are fairly comparable in size.
>Scott's sections 3 and 5 suggest that the answer is: not, actually, all that rare.
I disagree. It shows that this kind of thing has happened in other times and other places, almost always in the context of a miracle occurring. It is certainly not something that happens often enough that we would have any way to predict it happening in the future on a particular date.
>The second is how likely it is, given the existence of God and everything else we can infer about him from the rest of the world, that if he existed he would choose to show himself (or, permit the Virgin Mary to demonstrate her power) in this particular way, rather than not at all or in some other way.
How confident are you that you can judge what is or is not likely for an immortal omnipotent and omniscient deity to do? It would be like an ant predicting what a human would do. How much weight would you put on an ant's predictions of human behavior?
If they can't predict it because they are human and limited, neither can you nor any prophet. And if you claim the prophet can predict it, because they are a prophet, then you have to answer to failed predictions too, and why it seems you are suspiciously post hoc about every prediction.
I agree that Fatima-type phenomena, whatever they actually are, aren't common or regular enough for us to predict. It sounds as if you think I was saying that they are, in which case I've clearly been unclear. I wasn't intending to say anything like that.
I am not particularly confident of my ability to judge what a god would do. Nor of anyone else's. Note that this cuts both ways: if you want to forbid me to say "It's very unlikely that a god would do X", in the context of someone claiming that X is evidence of a god, then you must also forbid believers to say "It's rather likely that our god would do X" in the same context. And also to say (or assume) things like "If God tells a prophet something, it's probably true" or "If God inspires someone to write something that becomes part of our scriptures, then it probably tells us something important".
In any case, even though I don't expect myself to be all that good at predicting what gods will do, that doesn't exempt me from having to try to, if I want to (for instance) assess the credibility of a claimed miracle. And it doesn't mean that I know which direction any given prediction is likely to be wrong in. If my best estimate is that the Christian god, if real, would do X with probability 1/1000000, it _could_ be that someone with more expertise would assign a much higher probability, say 1/1000; but it could also be that they'd assign a much lower probability, say 1/1000000000. All I can do is to make the best estimates I can and work with them.
(Perhaps your actual opinion is that _my_ ability to predict what gods will do is poor and _yours_ is much better. That might be true. But so far as I can see, I have no reason to believe it, and hence no reason to think I would do better by moving my estimates in the direction of yours.)
Mainstream Christianity is predicated on the ability to predict that god would not lie about various things e.g. the existence of heaven
>I disagree. It shows that this kind of thing has happened in other times and other places, almost always in the context of a miracle occurring.
Doesn't it seem really counterproductive for god to choose to perform miracles which correspond to things people occasionally see in non miraculous contexts? Those accounts from people on reddit seem rather hard to explain within a model where various sun miracles like Fatima are supernatural.
>How confident are you that you can judge what is or is not likely for an immortal omnipotent and omniscient deity to do? It would be like an ant predicting what a human would do. How much weight would you put on an ant's predictions of human behavior?
This seems to undercut the miracle case pretty bad. If we have no way of judging what God is or isn't likely to do, then we have no way of knowing how likely he is to perform a miracle at all. Maybe the probability of God performing this miracle is 0
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.
Easy way to find out: ask him for a miracle and see what happens.
If nothing interesting does, how much should this update me against (every) god's existence?
It should definitely update you some! Only you can judge how much, but if you ask and do not receive that is an update towards either there not being a God, or there is a God but you experiencing a miracle right now would not be good.
"but you experiencing a miracle right now would not be good"
This seems like a somewhat suspect explanation because atheists asking for supernatural entities to show themselves does not seem to be particularly rare, yet it seems like people in that situation actually getting a response is the exception. I've certainly asked for such signs myself at various points in my life and never observed anything interesting.
What seems more egregious however is the frequency of accounts of people who lose their faith precisely because they desperately prayed for signs from god and never received them. In fact this seems to be a common element of every deconversion story I've heard.
So if one looks at how many more people are leaving religion than converting to it from being irreligious, that raises some problems.
Since you don't just have to explain a few anecdotes of atheists not getting any miracles when they ask for them: You need to explain *most* atheists and those struggling with their faith not getting evidence when they ask for it.
Based on the actual content of what occurred, I think the most likely within-frame explanation here is that God/the Virgin didn't really care about them either, He cared *specifically* about Lucia, this girl with apparently beatific devotion to Him, and *she* is the one who wanted there to be a miracle to convince the others, and God (or the Virgin) chose to oblige her.
Now to be clear, I believe Scott's more naturalistic interpretation of these events. But one of the things that a lot of these Catholic stories (this one, Joan of Arc, etc.) have in common is that there is a specific individual who God seems to care about, and God's consideration for all the other people attached to the story comes secondary to that person's concern for those other people.
What does that say about God? Seemingly that he's a distant and unmoving figure who doesn't care that much about regular people. While I doubt a Catholic would agree with this characterization, it kind of does match up with their pre-existing notion of why praying to Saints works in the first place (the Saint will care about you, and God cares about the Saint). Theologically though it seems problematic for a personal being of infinite love.
I tend to think of the denominators in Bayesian calculations as the universes across the multiverse, so you can’t really apply them to the existence of God. It’s not like there are some universes where God is real and others where he is not!
Why couldn't there be?
Well, depends on your conception of god, but if it involves god being above all, then that would include the multiverse. If god only existed in some universes, he would be bounded in a way that not even humans are. More generally, I think events can have probabilities, but explanatory propositions can’t.
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.)
>"…the fallacy that 1% is the smallest number that isn't 0…"
Have you heard the gospel of our lord & savior, epsilon?
/s
you have trapped priors, I resist an adversarial persuasion attack.
And he has been brainwashed, just to complete the conjugation.
Hah, perfect!
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 didn’t find the sungazing stuff that convincing because a. The responses were much less shocking and b. They had to stare for a while to experience that, it didn’t happen instantly like it did for some people at Fatima.
One of my favorite things about your blogs, Scott, has always been the way you lead people through a thought process. You give us the experience of thinking, including counterpoints, the discovery of new information, and having new questions. It's like you've written an RPG campaign for us that we get to play. Your readers enjoy thinking, and it's a pleasure to have your essays assist us by laying out clear breadcrumbs so we don't get lost, making it possible to incorporate more threads than if we were doing it on our own without writing our own research notes. And your style normalizes thinking and writing with complexity, clarity, and charity - characteristics your readership is capable of but does not often get to see modeled together. Thank you.
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.
[This is just semantic nit picking]
If there's an intelligence simulating our universe, I don't think we should call it AI, because philosophically speaking it would be significantly less "artificial" than a human's!
Do you find that more likely than the theory that the simulators are performing religious experiments?
A fourth possibility is that Christianity is true, *and* the Fatima apparitions/sun miracle are caused by fae folk or the like. Perhaps these beings aren't actively trying to lead people toward or away from God, but rather they just enjoy messing with people from time to time for unclear reasons, or they dont pay attention to us at all and our perceptions of them are side effects of activities that have some other unfathomable purpose....
>"the Fae"
Lubbock was Coyote feeling left out and wanting to get in on the fun.
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.
As a Theravada who presumably believes the Buddha was just some dude who figured out some stuff, why _would_ you believe it possible for the teachings to be transmitted uncorrupted?
"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."
And unlike Protestantism, which is a network of local parishes, the Roman church is a top-down media machine. The Catholic church affirmed the Fatima miracle decades later, even stating that the pope saw it in the Vatican gardens. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think it's odd that the Pope wouldn't a disclose miracle like that right away but should wait decades for church officials to decide that it's good PR.
I read the Stevenson book years ago and have not thought about it since. Two facts are important. 1. Almost all his cases of reincarnation are reported by people whose religion takes reincarnation for granted. The main exception is the British cases recorded in an archive called, I think, the Bloxham tapes. 2. The British paperback second edition of Stevenson included a new appendix demonstrating that many of the British cases were submerged memories of ephemeral historical fiction novels.
Which book are you referring to? There are quite a few. The cases that I found most interesting were American ones (James Leininger and Marty Martyn), which I think were actually Tucker cases, not Stevenson ones. There are a few others that I think were pretty interesting (Antonia by Tarazi is one of them, which I trust somewhat less because it was via past-life regression, but there are some features that make it pretty bizarre), but I can't remember the names of most them. I haven't done that much research on rebirth, but the cases I've come across have been compelling enough that if we're going to accept miracles, I think we should accept rebirth as well. I discussed this with Ethan, and he agrees they are supernatural, but he puts it down to demons (I don't think they have the features one would expect of demonic oppression, which makes that a very ad-hoc hypothesis).
As for point 1, I don't find that particularly problematic — cultures that already believe in rebirth are more likely to take claims seriously enough to bring them to investigators, whereas it's a lot less likely for Westerners to do the same. It's a reason to be careful, but it's not inherently a problem.
Re: point 2: based on a quick ChatGPT query, it looks like Stevenson just floated this as a possible explanation, while saying that he doesn't accept it as an explanation. ChatGPT is saying that his thought was that the children read some historical fiction, so it's possible that could have played a role, but that there weren't any clear connections drawn, and that their reading in itself wouldn't account for the level of detail they provided. I'm planning to read through his books though, so I plan to verify this and not just take ChatGPT at its word.
I misremembered. I was referring to Reincarnation?: The Claims Investigated, by Ian Wilson, a popularisation of Ian Stevenson, though I also read Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Wilson was an English Catholic and professional author who also wrote on the Turin Shroud. He was willing to entertain, though not endorse, marginally possible stories of the supernatural. The second edition of Wilson's book definitively showed that some seemingly plausible British cases were dredged up memories of historical fiction.
I was just reading up on the Leininger Case. It's really trippy. Michael Sudduth put together a decent critique, but I don't think he really touched what I take to be the two biggest indicators of something weird going on: James' apparent identification of the Natoma Bay aircraft carrier, and the naming of James Huston's wingman Jack Larsen, before he or his parents had any of that information available to them.
Kemal Atasoy is another trippy one (https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2015/11/REI32-Tucker_keil-1.pdf).
And I guess fraud is POSSIBLE, but in the Leininger case at least, there's timestamped evidence of his parents' unfolding investigation over the years, as they discovered more and more details that corroborated James' memories until the supposed past personality was finally identified. Moreover, once Huston WAS identified, his sister apparently confirmed that James was aware of further details of their lives that were never public info.
With cases like this, there's simply no room for wishful thinking or coincidence. Either something weird (whether it be past life, ESP, or as Ethan might like it, demonic shenanigans) is going on, or there's brazen, elaborate fraud. If fx James Leininger's parents perpetrated a fraud, it was a very meticulous, thorough, impressively well-thought out one. And to what end? I guess they DID get their fifteen minutes and they wrote a book, but it seems like a LOT of patient hoaxing for the opportunity to maybe write a semi-successful book in a decade. Only seems more likely than Something Weird if you have VERY strong naturalist priors. Which...maybe I do? idk
Fwiw, as a Christian myself, I'm willing to consider the possibility that genuine past life memories could be transmitted in ways other than rebirth, although I'm far from certain about this
That raises the same issues as the demon explanation — the standard Christian response is that these are genuine memories, but they are implanted by demons. The problem is that there's no reason to believe that. Rebirth is a belief that predates the Judeo-Christian conception of a single life followed by judgment. Christian philosophers often argue that the fact that people seek God shows that God exists, so I think there's a similar argument that since rebirth has been one of the most common afterlife views, that points to it as a serious possibility given established Christian argumentation, at the very least.
The issue is that the rebirth cases don't align with cases of demonic oppression unless you take a stance that everything that makes people doubt Christianity is demonic, in which case you can end up saying science is demonic. So I don't think that's a reasonable approach. The other possibilities are (1) some type of psychic recall or (2) a conspiracy of non-demonic psychics who have been implanting memories for some unknown reason for thousands of years. For (1), it's entirely unclear how this would actually be different (or even differentiable in principle) from genuine rebirth and for (2) this is just demons by another name, and there is no clear reason why these psychics would be engaging in this conspiracy since before Christianity. Both of these also don't explain why some of these rebirth cases are paired with physical marks that correspond to the way the supposed reborn being died.
I think that it's entirely possible that Christianity is broadly true, but that certain doctrines, like the view of the afterlife, are incorrect. The issue is just that apostolic Christianity and mainline Protestantism won't accept that, in which case I think the most reasonable stance is that the rebirth cases raise a huge issue for Christianity. In one of my conversations with a Catholic, they agreed that if rebirth were proven, Christianity would be falsified. However, it's not clear we could ever prove rebirth beyond the types of cases we have now, as there's no soul that transmigrates that can be tracked — it all just comes down to memories. So there will always be the ability to say "maybe it's demons" or something of that sort. But that's highly motivated reasoning and can (and has) been applied to many things that have turned out not to be demons. After all, we could say the same thing about anything that goes against the Christian narrative — maybe everyone who doesn't remember the miracles of Christ's resurrection had their memories swapped out by demons. Or maybe it's the reverse — who knows? The most reasonable approach, I think, is that if people are reporting memories, we treat them as genuine memories. Memories can be false or fabricated, but that doesn't contradict their mnemicity. If a reported internal experience has both mnemicity and is shown to be authentic, we should then approach it as a genuine, accurate memory per Occam's Razor, not try to find a way around the simplest and clearest conclusion by positing a vast conspiracy of demonic agents that don't act like demons just to save a given doctrine.
That said, the rebirth cases could all be fake/wrong. What I'm saying is just assuming they are valid for the sake of argument.
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.
But was the color of her clothing consistent with the clothing of a Trades-class married woman in 1st C Roman Judea(Palestine? Not certain what the Romans called it) or with consistent with how Renaissance-era painters depicted her, which usually depicted her as more Italian than Jewish, along with the expensive blue pigment?
The renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred after the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 AD).
You could indeed say the same about the miraculous appearances of faces: how do you know that the bearded face that appeared on your toasted bread is indeed the face of Jesus, and not that of Pythagoras or Mengzi?
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.
Could be something like the metaphysics in some fantasy settings where belief itself has a supernatural power to affect reality. Or there are lots of supernatural entities which include but are not limited to the Christian ones. The possibility space of ways the universe could be if it wasn't materialist is large and varied
Actually, in a supernatural-but-not-Christian universe, I expect the supernatural entities to appropriate the beliefs of people, if they want faith. Especially in Xianxia-esque worlds.
Seems like building a cult to a false god would be by far the easiest way of damning a massive amount of souls, both in the physical and metaphysical sense...
If Jack Chick-style evangelicism is right, it could have been Satan, pretending to be Mary to drag people to hell by persuading them of the heresy of Mariolatry.
Where do you get "converted thousands of people to Catholicism" from? The most the accounts you listed show is that there was at least one alleged witness who wasn't Catholic. There doesn't seem to be anything in the reports indicating that there were mass conversions afterwards.
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.
> Because the combinatorics of possible phenomenon becomes really endless.
Which is also why it's completely insane that people so readily believe that these random dudes have perfect knowledge of how the supernatural functions. But I guess that insanity is what's keeping society intact, so I can't really complain.
I believe the first statement, not the second one, but also the third. So yeah. I agree.
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.
>The fireball question is just "what if I showed you strong evidence of a supernatural claim"
I think Scott's point is that "mass hallucination", specifically, is not—realistically—going to be a plausible explanation for anyone reading were they to see something such as "fireball from hands" or "sun spinning & dancing", and so to foist it upon *other* people is a bit of a double standard.
In the wizard case, you weren't told *what* you going to see, but went somewhere expecting "something weird"; if fireballs specifically seem too plausibly wizard-y, substitute "made the walls bend & glow" or something—then you have approximately the same situation as the Fatima event... but who would accept "ah, probably we all just hallucinated" after that?
If I saw the walls bend and glow, I would probably suspect someone slipped me a hallucinogen, because that's a known thing hallucinogens can do.
This is kind of my point: from the start of hearing about the Fatima event, it seemed likely to me that it was *some* combination of weather event + trick of perception + effect of expectations + social influence at the time + social influence on memories or records afterwards. It's interesting to explain exactly how all of those played out, but from the beginning, it sounds like the kind of thing that should be explained by them! A wizard trying to show his powers ought to be able to show you something that you'd clearly never experience otherwise, and *an all-powerful God* much more so! So why is Scott treating this like "it was a miracle" was the null hypothesis?
Also, I think that one thing smuggled in by the wizard example is the assumption that it's a single event of claim -> evidence. How many would-be seers were there in the period 1900-1925? How many times did even a prediction of "something will happen at this time" come true? If you claim to have telekinetic powers and then get a fair coin to come up heads 20 times in a row in front of me, I'll be pretty impressed; if you tell me that someone made that claim and got that result sometime in the last century, rather less so.
He pretty thoroughly addressed all of this -- if you want to stand so strong in your opinion at least work for it a little.
Read the post.
"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." FYI, this is also what Pascal thought.
Yeah lol Ethan didn't come up with this, I've heard it from religious people my whole life.
Of course, they all have to admit that on their view, some people actually get to see the miracles, some people see the parting of the waters or Jesus fly into the sky while everyone else is asked to take their word for it.
But would you really jump to believing in wizards just like that? A mass hallucination may not be right but wizardry isn't right either. I've seen enough stage magic to know it's pretty easy to perform a trick that would confound my ability to explain it on the spot. I'd need to see quite a few fireballs before I started believing in wizards rather than writing off your truck as a clever illusion. One fireball and I'd think sure we saw something, but it wasn't what it appeared to be.
>as I mentioned in the mass hallucination section, we really don't have any other examples of a true mass hallucination
...but then you mention dozens of other similar cases of tens of thousands of people seeing the dancing sun or whatever, why didn't all of them make the Wikipedia's cut? Doesn't seem particularly unlikely that entire separate classes of comparable events are overlooked by such lists.
There are many accounts of mass hallucination. Off the top of my head, the drones that shut down Gatwick 5-6 years ago, 200+ reports, did not exist.
Magicians can do magic tricks! After seeing a magician do 6 magic tricks that I cannot possibly guess how they did them, I do not conclude that there is at least a 6% chance of him being a magician, but that I'm not very good at explaining magic tricks. "There's a lot we don't understand about staring at the sun, but we do know mob psychology, perception, and memory are all tricky." is frankly already enough. "We don't have a scientific explanation for this" should never update "there is no possible scientific explanation for this, therefore it must be supernatural"
So when would I ever update and start to believe David Blaine at least might be doing real magic? It's a fair question! I realistically expect be could fool me (my eyes and ears) for any test I could come up with.
Well, let's say instead of a wizard, there's a wild magic sorcerer. 0.01% of the time they sneeze, it causes some meteorological event in the next 1-3 months. This could be the ground truth, but what should cause a Bayesian update to this possibility? Nothing. We simply don't have the precision of measurement at this point in history for this claim to be anything more than a shrug of the shoulders.
I was raised a Catholic and actually taught in a Catholic school for two years. But in examining Catholicism more closely, I realized it is just a cult. I don’t believe that the pope is anyone special as Catholics proclaim . There have been some very bad popes!
There is a great deal of corruption in the church and has been since the beginning. The rules are man made.
I found going to Mass over and over again did not lead me to a closer relationship to God or Jesus, but I do have a belief in a power greater than man.
Mankind has proven to be filled with evil people, since the beginning of time. Why?
Are there truly devils?
Are there angels?
Why does this planet never seem to get any better, so many wars, so many people who are insanely cruel to others?
When we die, does our “soul” live on in “heaven” or suffer in “hell”, or do we simply disintegrate and become part of the soil….ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
I find near death stories from people very fascinating and hope that they have truly experienced what happens when our “life force” leaves our body.
Did the story of Fatima in Portugal really happen? Yes, something happened. Those children were not capable of making up stories and telling people that “the lady they saw said she was the Immaculate Conception.” They didn’t even know what that meant.
The same with Lourdes. Hard to explain that as well. Why would Mary just randomly show up in odd places and perform miracles??
I don’t think we will ever know.
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.
>Because it happens every day and is easily replicated. Seems like a similar situation here though slightly less frequent.
I don't see how you justify that claim. How would you replicate it?
Not actually that hard: Just predict that in the future more people will continue to report accounts on that subreddit like those which have been reported in the past.
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.
I'm gonna be honest, it's not fun to debate people who completely refuse to interact with your reasoning. I don't have anything against religion, but its believers are too stubborn to have interesting conversations with in any topic that involves their faith.
I find the classic case of "transitional fossils" illustrative. If someone says the gap in the fossil record between two species with no known intermediate is a miracle and evidence of God, and when presented with such a fossil, respond "Ah, now there are two gaps, and twice as many miracles!" I DO think that's a reason not to take them, or this entire class of argument, seriously.
>"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?"
Yes
>"Shouldn't you still be willing to address specific arguments they raise, even if you know you can never "convince" them?"
No
You could argue that what Scott did here is "atheism of the gaps": he doesn't know whether this optical illusion exists or whether it caused the dancing sun at Fatima, but he puts it forward in the hope that someday we will know. A gap in our knowledge to be explained later, and until then assumed to be not caused by God.
I think that would be an uncharitable argument, but I don't care for the "God of the gaps" rebuttal in any case.
> A gap in our knowledge to be explained later, and until then assumed to be not caused by God.
That's not uncharitable: that's exactly what he's doing.
To be analogous, your position would have to be that more normal, reasonably well-understood phenomena like, say, rainbows (or even lightning), are just as caused by God as this "dancing sun."
Did anybody have a prophetic vision predicting that God would cause a rainbow to appear on a certain time and day, or that God would cause a particular tree to be struck by lightning? If they did, and then the events happened, I would believe it is likely that God caused that thing to happen, in that God took action to ensure it would happen as prophesied.
In other words, as I said, what makes a miracle a miracle is that God is part of the explanation: that it would not have happened but for God's action. Here we have children claiming to have received a prophecy that a miracle (that is to say, and act caused by God) will occur on a certain day. The day came, and thousands of people experienced something they have never experienced before, something they considered remarkable and unusual. It is not "God of the gaps" to argue that God caused that to happen! This isn't an unexplained phenomenon, this is an accurate prediction that gives evidence of the existence of God. It is "atheism of the gaps" to say "Even though it appears that God caused this to happen, and even though we don't know for sure how this could have happened without God, I am going to assume that God was not involved."
This is exactly right. The symmetry between "I don't know exactly what's happening here, but I'm sure there's a naturalistic explanation" and "I don't know what's happening here but I'm sure there's no naturalistic explanation" is broken by methodological considerations: it's really hard to build an accurate model of how the world works if parts of the world that aren't well-captured by your theories are assumed out-of-hand to be uncapturable, even in principle.
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.
"Supernatural miracle" as distinct from a "natural miracle"?
Or a non-miraculous supernatural event?
CS Lewis in his book Miracles argued that rational thought is a supernatural event in the brain. A tiny miracle, but not rare, common in fact.
The transubstantiation that turns bread and wine to flesh and blood of Jesus is also a miracle, that occurs all the time, all over.
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!
>"…maybe there's really a lot of atmospheric effects that we just haven't figured out!"
Seems likely so long as Navier-Stokes remains unsolved.
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...
If I close my eyes and just relax into the image I get a continuous stream of psychedelic imagery, it's been that way since I was a child. It starts as vague lights and shapes, often resolves into geometric patterns (often involving moving through a tunnel) and then often proceeds to full imagery. The 'deep dream' zoom videos that came out a few years ago aren't quite it, but are the closest I've seen outside of my own head.
These are closed eye hallucinations
Ditto
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?
According to Jesus, the good shephard spends most of his time looking for lost sheep.
Hmm is that really a necessary condition for scientific analysis/modeling? And it seems to strongly depend on the reference class. You can study/model... wars (but WW2 is unique), planet formation (but the formation of the Earth is unique), abiogenesis, the Big Bang... I feel like you actually can study and model phenomena that are unrepeatable (strictly or broadly).
My background is in psychological research. You can do a case study on an individual person, even collect a time series of measurements on some behavior. The problem is, there is no way to know whether any of that will generalize to other people, and the purpose of science is to empower the general public with meaningful and robust theories, not individual persons. Psychotherapy isn't a science, it's an application. It's based on science, but the science behind it used defined categories of people as the focus of analysis, not individuals taken alone.
This is true for all the sciences. You can't subject "the Earth", taken as one whole, to scientific analysis, unless you are comparing it to other planets. Of course, the Earth is host to many systems, both physical and biological, so you can break the "Earth" down into those system and look at defined categories of phenomena.
The same is true of WWII (or any other historical event). Assessing that war, as a homogenous whole, is meaningless unless you are comparing it to other events. Of course, that war consisted of a complex series of interactive events, so you could break those down and look at defined categories of those events.
Science can say nothing about the unique. Fortunately, nothing appears to be entirely unique.
I'm not sure I agree science depends solely on replication. Here are some steps I can imagine which counters this claim:
1. You make an axiomatic model of the world by observing repeated phenomena
2. You then make formal logical inferences from those axioms that cannot be tested repeatedly
3. The extended model is still logical / the inferences are useful
Although the logic of repetition (frequentism, empiricism) and the logic of the mind (formal logic) are both valid ways to make conclusions, they offer completely different information and pathways to information. Repetition gives you statistical knowledge, formal logic gives systematic knowledge. Repetition can tell you whether X is related to Y by repeatedly observing X, but formal logic can shave the bounds of X to a subset of X, create new Y's which give information about Y, or even introduce a Z, which greatly improves the usefulness of a scientific model without needing any repetition of X.
I did not mean to claim that science depends solely on replication, merely that replication is a necessary condition to make any other analysis meaningful. Knowing that the sun has always risen in the east tells us one fact, and very little else. Combining that series of observations with a theory regarding the mechanism by which this occurs (the Earth is rotating on it's axis every 24 hours) gives us the basis for testing hypotheses: if an airplane were to fly west at a significant speed it would encounter the sunrise early. The proposed mechanism is the theory, the observations are the way to test that theory. Without replication, you can't test hypotheses or theories.
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.
Yes, it seems curious that God never goes for miracles that make everyone go ”right, there’s *clearly* no natural explanation here”. He could have manifested a full-scale cathedral permanently on an empty spot, but instead it’s always visual phenomena, receding cancers, and similar stuff.
This is often of my main arguments.
Let’s say the Abrahamic God is real.
Why is the method he chose to reveal himself to the world to have his followers write a book which is so similar in content and form to the 100s of other religious books that come down to us from the same timeframe?
Just about all ancient cultures have a roughly similar set of stories, and a being that could presumably automatically telepathically communicate its presence to every human on the planet chose to hide itself in the same format that is abundant in other culture’s tales about beings such as Krishna, Thor, and Tlaloc.
He'd have managed better if he'd had it planned
Now why'd he choose such a backward time and such a strange land?
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)
I find cases 1 and 2 in Nix and Apple particularly striking. In case 1, the man reports first seeing the miracle when he was in Medjugorje and then sees it again when he comes back to New Orleans, explicitly identifying it as the "same phenomenon". In case 2, the woman sees the miracle in New Orleans despite no history of visiting Medjugorje (I presume the authors would report if she had visited, since they do so in the other three cases). Louisianian Catholics who came back from Medjugorje are reported to have encouraged others to sungaze (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1987/07/11/la-catholics-warned-against-staring-at-sun/f1521e7a-2db5-4b80-8025-cdcecf63de1a/). So although Nix and Apple never spell this out explicitly, I think we can infer the woman's sungazing was likely to have been primed by tales of Medjugorje miracles.
So that partially answers question 6: people can indeed see the miracle again even after leaving supposed apparition sites, and they can even see it without visiting a site at all, likely when primed appropriately.
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?)
You know, there probably are reported miracles out there where the true explanation is something ridiculous like hoaxters hiding in the wings and putting on an elaborate puppet show. The way all stage magic works is that an apparently simple effect actually involves much more complexity and effort than seems intuitively plausible, so that we tend to dismiss the true explanations out of hand.
Granted, that doesn't make elaborate hoaxes a particularly strong explanation for anything- conspiracies are a bit too universally explanatory to be very useful. It does make me wonder how we should treat possibilities like that from a Bayesian perspective. I guess we can have a prior on the likelihood that something we're experiencing is a manufactured illusion based on how often similar illusions have been exposed in the past. But should that prior increase only when seeing direct evidence of fraud, or should it also increase when ruling out alternate explanations?
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 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.)
How does this differ from a migraine flare? My gf has been getting these weird zigzaggy colorful shapes on one side of her vision, usually after taking ADHD pills.
Migraine aura is neurological, and always temporary. (And as you say, it's colorful and has complex shapes, and tends to shimmer or move.) AMN is physiological, it happens inside the retina. I _think_ migraine aura would tend to be in both eyes, and being in one eye is a sign that something is in the eye vs the brain. And AMN is not colorful or moving -- it's just a small blindspot. For me it was very subtle -- since it's never right at the center of vision, but always out slightly from there, it can be tricky to even perceive it, beyond "huh, my vision is doing something weird." And AMN can be permanent although mine was temporary. (But it resolved over days, whereas I would expect migraine aura to resolve much faster.)
I had this once. Was very vivid and intense! Very clear C shaped thing morphing with all different colors.
Same! It's happened to me a handful of times, maybe 5 max, usually after prolonged periods of stress and sleep deprivation. Now that I know the pattern is just an ocular migraine and not a sign of an imminent stroke, I think the visuals are kinda cool.
Is it harmful at all? Dangerous? My gf has started getting these recently, we think due to either stress or ADHD meds, and are a bit concerned about it!
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, too, wasn’t impressed by the Mercy Hills video. I took a close look at what happens between 3:30 and 3:33. At 3:30, there is a solid white blob, which corresponds to an area around the sun where all three color channels are maxed out. There are two internal lens reflections which converge to a point near the bottom of the white blob; that is presumably where the sun is. There is some yellow around the white blob; that is where the red and green channels are maxed out, but the blue channel is not. Beyond the yellow, we start to see something only closer to the actual color, with only the red channel maxed out. Portions of the sky where we have actual color (no color channels maxed out) can actually appear to be a little bit blue, but that’s only due to the contrast with the more reddish areas; red is still the strongest primary.
The image becomes brighter between 3:30 and 3:33 by about a factor of 3.5x in the darker areas. I think that the video is processed to make dark areas lighter, meaning that the actual increase in exposure was more than 3.5x. In any case, the change in the appearance of the sky is what you would expect from brightening the image. The white area, where all the color channels are maxed out, increases in size (and changes shape), as does the yellow area. The internal lens reflections get brighter like everything else, but they don’t move relative to the rest of the image or get wider, suggesting that the sun has not changed position or changed size.
I came up with three possibilities, all equally consistent with the footage: (1) the sun got brighter, (2) the camara operator adjusted the brightness, or (3) the brightness was increased during post-processing. But EngineOfCreation spotted what is almost certainly the answer: The camera is configured to set exposure automatically and weights what is at the center of the frame quite heavily. So at 3:30, when the center of the frame is above the horizon it sets an exposure that makes everything below the horizon so dark that it is hard to make anything out. At 3:30, when the center of the frame is just slightly below the horizon, it sets exposure so that we can more or less see the people but completely blows out a large portion of the sky.
This is unauthenticated video. For all we know, the person who made the video would tell us, “I was expecting the sun to do something, so I videoed it, but nothing happened. Only when I got home, I looked at the video, and decided that maybe something did happen and I didn’t see it.” I viewed the video only because Scott, for what whatever reason, seemed to take it seriously. Also, it’s a safe bet that the video footage was shot on location because it would be easier to travel to Mercy Hills than to fake it.
But the sound track? It’s clearly edited (the music wasn’t recorded live), and making the oohs and aahs of the crowd match up with the images is basic video editing. Arguing that the crowd was seeing that the video was showing is like arguing that a television show must have been filmed before a live audience because the laughs match up with the jokes.
If we had testimony from the video editor that the oohs and aahs were from the original video and he hadn’t moved them around, then I could understand treating them seriously. But, honestly, I didn’t notice whether the oohs and aahs matched up with anything and I’m not going to check now because without any testimony to authenticate the soundtrack, what’s the point?
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.)
But in pre-modern time, penniless shepherds would basically have been as low-class and mundane as McDonalds workers. It's only from our warped modern point-of-view that "shepherds" are this slightly romantic, fairy-tale thing that naturally goes together with magical boons.
But the association of shepherds with magical boons goes all the way back to Jesus' birth. It wasn't McDonalds workers who first heard about Jesus' birth from angels and then went to see him!
Well, no, but my point is that in a Second Coming designed to come across to 21st century humans as the original narrative did in its own era, they might very well be.
>It also has - sorry, no offense - a silly name.
I shall never forgive you, Scott Alexander. Forever will you be my enemy for this dire insult to my homeland, the noble and storied Lubbock, Texas, home of Buddy Holly, whose mighty statue towers above our central plaza.
This is an awesome story, and reminded me of a profound, terrifying childhood experience of seeing a white cross superimposed over the moon. Every test I could think to perform showed this phenomenon was real, but inexplicable.
Eventually I realized I was seeing a reflection from each strand of the metal window screen in my bedroom.
Lubbock is only 300 miles from Marfa, another Texas town with a silly name; the famous Marfa Lights have only recently been explained to high confidence. Strange things are always happening in West Texas!
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.
The different diffraction is because different colours move at different speed, which has to do with the interaction between photons and matter.
This video is a great explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTzGBJPuJwM
I don't have a strong opinion on if this is quantum or not. I came to complain about the "few" in " Solar Coronae are one of the few quantum color effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye.
Rainbow effects due to different wavelengths having different diffractions are not rare.
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.
>either the Intervention Budget has been dialed back a good bit, or something else is going on...
It's clearly the OG replication crisis. One time, a large effect is observed, and all attempts to replicate run into regression to the mean or outright fraud. There is truly nothing new under the sun.
...𝙙𝙖𝙢𝙣 𝘐 𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝙄 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴–
Zeus may personally not be subtle, but he comes from one of many vast pantheons of gods and spirits, many of whom do subtle things - indeed, there's a whole archetype of trickster gods! A world full of supernatural entities, who need not be aligned with one another (ala God and his angels) vastly increases the possibility that one of them plays a weird trick on some people or tries to guide them in some odd way, no?
Then again, it's typical for one (or maybe a couple, like Apollo and Helios, when you have enough divergent traditions to integrate) of them to control the sun.
I mean subtle as in "motives are unclear" not subtle as in "I'm engaging in a complex long-term plan", the latter of which I feel more clearly describes most mythological occurrences of trickster gods. Subtlety of motivation is NOT common in Anansi stories. It's very clear to the reader what he wants and often becomes very clear to all other characters by the end. Also the "complex plans" of trickster gods in various mythological accounts are not all that complex by any sort of modern planning standard. It's usually on the order of "tell one lie".
According to the accounts, many of the witnesses were moved to repent and resolve to be better Catholics, and I assume at least some of them actually followed through. "Leading people to repent and be better Catholics" isn't an unclear or particularly surprising motive for God to have.
I feel like that kind of post-facto analysis is sort of dangerous. Like we could similarly conclude that god's goal was to increase tourism to South America. A faithful Christian might say "tourism doesn't sound like God but leading to repentance does", sure, but a worshipper of Ra would almost certainly say "well getting more people to look at and think about the sun sure sounds like Ra so I'm pretty sure this was my guy not your guy".
Whereas when you look at biblical accounts the miracles are not really so easily open to interpretation. The effects are far more dramatic: resurrection of the dead, parting of oceans, pillars of fire. Further, the purpose of such events is often pre-committed or very obvious: let my people go or I'm going to send plagues, this town has some defensive walls so I'm gonna break them, hey we need food lemme dupe some loaves and fishes.
There are some exceptions (I don't think Job ever figures it out) but they are very unusual. Whereas nowadays all the miracles are weird and require heavy interpretation? Sus at best.
>I feel like that kind of post-facto analysis is sort of dangerous.
This isn't a post-facto analysis, though? The visionaries said in advance that the Virgin Mary was going to perform a big miracle on October 13 so that people would believe. That's why there was such a big crowd in the first place: people came along either to witness the miracle, or to laugh at everyone else when no miracle occurred.
>Like we could similarly conclude that god's goal was to increase tourism to South America.
Why would an apparition in Portugal increase tourism to South America?
>A faithful Christian might say "tourism doesn't sound like God but leading to repentance does", sure, but a worshipper of Ra would almost certainly say "well getting more people to look at and think about the sun sure sounds like Ra so I'm pretty sure this was my guy not your guy".
Said Ra-worshipper would have to ignore the previous five months of apparitions in which a specifically Catholic religious figure appeared and commanded people to do specifically Catholic things like praying the Rosary.
>The effects are far more dramatic: resurrection of the dead, parting of oceans, pillars of fire.
The miracle caused a big panic because people thought the sun was falling down and was going to destroy the earth. Sounds pretty dramatic to me.
> Why would an apparition in Portugal increase tourism to South America?
I know a lot of Brazilians so sometimes when I see "Portugal" it maps Portugal -> Portuguese -> Brazil
I think your arguments re: whether this is post-factor analysis are sensible and you're probably right that my categories need to be better adjusted or formalized. But that sounds like a lot of work so I'm not gonna, particularly because my instinct is that it wouldn't result in a change to the ultimate conclusion, i.e., that this miracle is unlike the typical biblical/mythological miracle. I'm not sure if that's very Bayesian of me or not.
There’s a passage in the Qur’an that approximates the speed of light? Can you elaborate?
Just google it, you'll find plenty.
Oh, I see. A journey of a day taking 1,000 years. So, interpreting literally, the angels have a time dilation factor (gamma) of 365,250. From this, we can estimate that the angles travel at a speed of about c(1 - 4e-12), which is really quite impressive! If we assume the angel Gabriel has about the same mass as a human, he’d hit the earth with the kinetic energy about 10^24 J, or about five times the energy of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
You are correct, this in no way implies a particular speed in SI units or any other. I suppose, if you’re being really, really, really charitable, you could read this as anticipating special relativity.
Indeed. Though probably the theologians would argue that angels probably don't have human mass given the "how many on the head of a pin" debate. Or something.
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?
I can tell you more than you want to know.
I self-published the book in 2018. You can buy it for a few dollars or I can send it for free.
https://www.amazon.com/Cropped-Circle-Investigation-First-Hand-Paranormal-ebook/dp/B07F2V1SXN/
The project was an indulgence. I even followed up on most of them years later to see if the recollections changed. Partway through, I decided I couldn't assess the stories without researching about all major categories of the paranormal in general, which added a "General Discussion" section to the end. If you do decide to peruse this, and you just want to pick out the worthwhile parts, I would offer the following:
- The introduction contains a couple charts on the data.
- Page 20 contains the amusing result of the first "investigation."
- Case 13 was the best one. Gives me a bit of a chill thinking about it.
- Cases 4 & 5 ("ghost" phenomena) involves more than one person seeing an acute thing--even if some mental phenomenon explains one or both of them, I didn't believe in that particular kind of mental phenomenon before the book.
- In Case 14, I found out that my now-wife saw a "ghost" and still occasionally thinks about it. Similarly, if it was somehow a mental phenomenon, the continuity of it is surprising.
- In Case 20, I found out that my maternal grandparents had a UFO sighting in their later years that convinced both of them that aliens were visiting earth. They hadn't even told anyone. This was the most jarring clash between the type of person and the type of observation (which was a major point of the exercise for me). Hearing my grandfather say "aliens" in a serious voice was nuts.
Some skepticism is elided throughout because the people who cautiously agreed to tell me the stories were likely to be the only readers.
I got rather deep into UFOs during this. This comment is not particular to UFOs, but I was shocked at how these meaningful distortions creep in at every information bottleneck--you'd hunt down a key detail and it would be wrong in every documentary, missing from Wikipedia (with justification from Source, where Source is wrong), and almost every person spending real time researching the claim would be biased. And then Bob from a UFO Facebook group got his hands on a piece of the record that was never published in any retellings.
Id love a PDF . Pmed you.
I’m a materialist and rationalist type person. On a few occasions I saw a phenomenon of stars moving in the sky, which obviously could be satellites traversing the night sky.
However, they made perfect right angle turns, and in some cases reversed direction fully 180 degrees, while moving at what looked to be immense speeds and not slowing down.
I saw it about twice. Then I went camping with my family. And I saw it and pointed it out and my mom saw it as well.
I still don’t know what to think about that.
Several of my cases were those point-source UFOs with inexplicable speeds and sharp turns. Whatever it is, it's not just you.
That’s fascinating … I had memory holed this and not thought about it much. Genuinely l have no idea what to think about this phenomenon.
Just another anecdote to say that I have seen this once too. I described it to people in similar words, at night-time a star-like point of light moving in unusual ways including hard right angle turns. I can't remember if the other movement was linear or involved curves. But I was certain it wasn't possible that it was a plane or a drone. Otherwise I was generally extremely skeptically inclined.
Once when I was young I was watching three satellites move around in the sky. They would stop, change direction, change speed, and leave my field of view before coming back into view. They travelled at a steady pace always in a straight line, and then would periodically change direction and speed to a new uniform pace.
It was a year or so later when I found out satellites don’t do that. This is kind of neat because I was not emotional when watching it happen because I assumed it was normal. So the experience was somewhat uncontaminated.
I don’t think they were aliens, but it’s fun that I saw one thing that I can’t understand or explain. It’s also fun that there’s a Discovery Channel documentary about aliens where I told this story and they apparently made me look like a proper ass. (I’ve never seen it).
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.
The Sun was not affected, though, only local people's perception of it.
If the divine Author's motive is to say "I'm God", the Miracle of the Sun is ineffective, for me. The Miracle shows that the Author can mess with the sun [or our perception of it] for a bit, do some big weird fireworks. I would respect this Author as I would any great Wizard, or great Hacker - I'd be wary of it.
But you're right, we should be epistemically humble re God's ways. If we meet God some day, we can ask what was up with the Sun stuff. God might say: "Wasn't me, was my crazy-ass nephew." Or, might say: "Judging by your popular entertainment, people just can't get enough of car chases, gun play, & explosions. And 16-bar snare-roll buildups in EDM leading to big bass drops. I have to play to the crowd sometimes, be Michael Bay for a day."
According to the accounts, lots of witnesses were moved to repent and resolve to be better Catholics in future, and I assume at least some of them actually followed through. Seems like a pretty plausible motive to me.
By analogy, you're saying the same thing if you say this is a legitimate miracle
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.
Again, *there is no alien angle*, and never was. At least none that I ever proposed. I'm obviously not expressing myself clearly here, and I'm not sure why. But one more try, at least.
Saying "UFO" communicates that there is a huge body of prior work in trying to understand how and why people perceive wondrous and/or terrifying things in the sky, with the well-justified conclusion that it's basically never anything truly wondrous or terrifying and basically always what Scott proposes in section 6. I thought it would have been perhaps useful to be aware of that body of prior work while doing a deep dive into one more example of the same thing.
We need a term to describe to perceptions of flying objects that are unidentified or misidentified, particularly if we want to properly identify such objects. We have that term; it's "unidentified flying object". I have elsewhere suggested we'd have been better off with "unidentified aerial image", to avoid prejudicing the discussion, but the language is what it is.
So why is it that when I say "UFO", even when I immediately and explicitly and now thrice-repeatedly say "...and that *doesn't* mean alien spaceships", people assume I mean to talk about alien spaceships? Does the word "UFO" somehow short-circuit people's brains? What word or phrase *should* I be using to refer to our collective understanding of unidentified aerial images which are almost certainly not alien spaceships?
I meant to propose that *given that* there is no alien angle (i.e., in the case that one *doesn't* wish to prompt thoughts of aliens & flying saucers & the like), using the term "UFO" may not communicate anything especially enlightening—perhaps even, given your complaints here, offering only some counter-productive & unwanted (mis)communication about aliens, instead—and so *it seemed to me* that Scott's neglecting to use the term was a minor sin, if any.
In other words, I'm skeptical about the term's ability to communicate that "there is a huge body of prior work" with any particular bearing upon the Fatima event—or to communicate anything beyond the usual alien & conspiracy associations—but if you think that Scott himself would have been better-served consult such work... well, I could buy that.
(But, even so, I feel like probably *the reader* is just as well-served by the current "UFO-less" formulation as otherwise—given that Scott hasn't thereby failed to make some enlightening connection / missed some general explanation that clearly fits the Fatima case / vel sim.)
They're calling them "UAP"s these days (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
They're trying, but it isn't catching on. And in any event, all the prior work is indexed under "UFO".
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!
Crop circles and physical gifts delivered by "Santa Claus" have something in common: They are both completely achievable by human beings, and people really LOVE pretending they aren't.
https://youtu.be/Qzvuqs9Bf7Q?si=3MrZvUrBseo2IF-W
Assuming for the sake of argument that aliens are real, it doesn't seem to require too many further assumptions to suppose that they have their own society and laws and so on, including (given that we don't see more evidence of their industrial activities) restrictions against excessive disruption of the natural environment. Perhaps some petty logistical screwup resulted in needing to do emergency repairs and/or resupply within the oxygen-rich atmosphere of an inhabited planet, and bureaucratic procedures (originally intended to discourage that sort of incompetence) mandate notifying any potentially affected locals in advance. Then, a cheap, sketchy automatic translator failed to convey more than the bare minimum, leaving thus-notified Terran peasants to garble up the attempted warning within their existing belief framework.
Alien: "Hello? Is this thing on? Testing, testing."
Shepherd: "I hear you, O Mary!"
A: "Alright, you are hereby notified that there's going to be an induced atmospheric disruption coming up in... wait. What time units are you using down there? Just tell me what the hyperfine transition frequency of Cesium-133 looks like, in your system, and I'll do the rest of the math."
S: "..."
A: "Fifty-five protons, seventy-eight neutrons? You've never even heard of... okay, forget about cesium. Even from here I can tell your planet has a huge natural satellite, and lots of surface water, and your language has words for the relevant orbital period and tidal effects, so that's how I'm going to explain the timing of this upcoming event for official notification purposes."
S: "Why are you dressed that way?"
A: "It's a mechanical counterpressure... y'know what, they're not paying me enough for this, and it's barely even relevant. I'll just forward you the standard briefing."
*one horrifying telepathic outer-space workplace safety training video later*
S: "You're saying if we leave too much skin uncovered, or don't properly attach tethers to ourselves, we might end up lost, burning and freezing in the void forever?!?"
A: "What? No! You're inside a stable biosphere, most of that stuff can't /possibly/ happen to you personally. Probably couldn't get to space even if you wanted to."
My stereotype of a UFO encounter (and indeed, the UFO encounter you link) is something that occurs at night, but these happen during the daytime and involve the sun.
There may be things to learn from UFOlogy and the skepticism thereof, but these and sun miracles seem to be discrete phenomena, if both weird and culture-bound ones.
Your stereotype notwithstanding, a great many UFO "encounters" occurred in broad daylight and clear weather. Notably including the very first UFO encounter of the "flying saucer" era, the one in which that term was coined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting
If there's a discretization, I'm not seeing it, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't occur at the day/night border. The people who studied this half a century ago, learned a great deal about how people respond to apparent aerial oddities by day and by night, and the same principles apply. Different triggers - you probably can't see Venus in the daylight, nor high-altitude balloons at night. And different misidentifications - airships, flying saucers, or biblical miracles depending on the cultural background of the observers. But the same general principles regardless of the level of illumination.
I've actually seen Venus in the daytime, when high in the mountains on the French-Italian border. It took me a while to realize what I was seeing.
But I agree, it isn't likely to lead to UFO reports. I saw it by luck, a slightly brighter speck some distance from the sun, and found it very difficult to get others in our party to be able to discern it.
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
> 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?
Remember that Portugal was in the middle of a politically fraught battle between atheists/secularists and Catholics; there were quite a lot of powerful people reporting on it who had no such incentive.
But according to the article like 99% of Portuguese were Catholic, and it was primarily the church that did all the investigations. Huge opportunity for bias.
Sure, but there were plenty of secular journalists with quite different incentives. And it's also clear that Catholic investigators are not quite so eager as all that to certify new miracles; note the other miracles of the sun that they rejected and excommunicated people for.
This might be our crux. What secular sources? It seems to me like there were basically none that reported both the size of the crowd *and* reported many eyewitness accounts of the miracle. "Secular" people reporting to/via the Catholic Church authorities, after the fact, that they now believe in God and of course he's the architect of the world etc. etc. obviously wouldn't count in my mind.
> 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.
Interesting idea, but the obvious drawback is that weather balloons generally don't disappear after flying just one time, so we should be able to identify the exact one. I find it unlikely that at the time, one could just pass over the place, especially nefariously, and noone ever notices it- but I could be wrong.
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 agreeing that shots were fired & merely disagreeing upon the number), and "multiple people *confabulating an entire event from start to finish."*
Taking the Brown shooting example as our guide, we might say that we expect that (a) the eyewitnesses did see something, and reported the basic skeleton of the event correctly (perhaps, at minimum, something like "there was a shooting, involving a police officer & this other individual, with multiple shots fired" / "there was a celestial phenomenon involving a sun-like apparition, movement thereof or therein, color changes, and an unusual lack of discomfort when gazing upon it"); 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)!
If you look at the chart you'll see that eyewitnesses do not report the basic skeleton of the event correctly. For anything but the very basic "The officer shot him" you have multiple witnesses offering mutually contradictory information.
When it comes to Fatima, all of this eyewitness testimony is consistent with a brief break in the clouds and people staring at the sun for ten minutes. Because eyewitness testimony is terrible.
And this is before you get into the susceptibility of people to peer pressure right after the event, the way people will incorporate newspaper accounts into their memories and the way something as simple as the questioner asking things like "Many people reported a spinning effect? Did you encounter that?" (This will massively increase the number of people who report such an effect)
Ok, but after how many witnesses do we start to agree that there was at least something? More than just the original Fatima is discussed in the article, even if we discounted the idea that it would be enough.
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!
.....................................................
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)
I entirely agree. I made the same observation in another comment.
A brightness adjustment from an exposure time appropriate for the literal sun, to an exposure time appropriate for the ground at sunrise, can easily be orders of magnitude.
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 higher than Torres Novas - which is a big deal when you are dealing with low angles. **EDIT: Mark has acknowledged that near-field obstructions could have occluded the source from many vantages in Torres.** 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 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 the clouds. 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 my second comment. In this comment, I am going to focus on responding to Scott's undercutting defeaters to the opthamological arguments.
First, you propose that comfortable fixation can be explained by the Sun being veiled by clouds. That is inconsistent with the testimony of educated witnesses.
--Jose Garret said "Nor could it be confused with the sun seen through fog (which, by the way, didn't exist at that time), because it wasn't opaque, diffuse, or veiled. The celestial vault was hazy with light cirrus clouds, with gaps of blue here and there, but the sun sometimes stood out in patches of clear sky. The clouds that scurried lightly from west to east didn't obscure the light (which didn't hurt), giving the easily understandable and explainable impression of passing behind it." This witness explicitly denies veiling.
--Dr. Gonçalo Garrett was a **professor of astronomy.** He said "The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon, and could be easily seen." An astronomer would not have described cloud dimming that way.
--Avelino de Almeida said "The star resembles a plate of dull silver, and one can gaze at its disc without the slightest effort. It does not burn, it does not blind. One would think that an eclipse was taking place.” That does not correspond to your photo.
Cloud veiling is also disfavored by the Sun being at its zenith. There is a double-bind: If the clouds are optically thin, then they can't reduce the luminosity enough to avoid discomfort glare. If the clouds are optically thick, then they could possibly attenuate sunlight by the factor that you need, but only if you blur the source beyond recognition.
Second, you argue that it is plausible that the incidence of retinopathy was low enough to evade detention.
--Eclipses:
**The eclipse retinopathy study that you cite is only reporting exposures for people that developed injuries - it is not telling us that there were people with 45 minute exposures that didn't develop injuries. And it included people that were wearing protective gear (who presumably were the ones that had the longest exposures).
**The vast majority of people only take brief peeks—fractions of a second to a few seconds—before looking away. So the effective pool with prolonged, unprotected exposures is much, much lower than the total number of people that viewed the eclipse.
**During eclipses, much of the solar disc is occluded. The retinal exposure will be reduced in direct proportion to the occlusion (90% occlusion = 10% of full exposure)
**Most eclipses are viewed when the Sun is not at zenith but at lower altitudes. That gives you another significant reduction in exposure compared to Fatima.
--Medjugorge:
**Once again, your statistic is not exposure-matched. Some glance for a second or two, some wear sunglasses or veils, some don’t look at all. The average exposure is tiny compared to the Fatima event.
**At Medjugorje, 'sun miracles' are typically observed in the late afternoon, with the Sun lower in the sky. You are probably getting 2x-3x reduction in exposure from that alone.
**Unlike with eclipses, with Medjugorje, we have are anecdotal reports from opthamologists, but not a systematic effort to detect, report, and quantify incidence. So it doesn't seem like the numerator of your statistic is all that informative.
--Attenuation:
**Supposing that there was cloud attenuation (which I disputed above), it is worth noting that veiling does causes pupils to dilate which increases the dose. If the pupils dilate from 3mm to 6mm that can increase the exposure by as much as 4x - that claws back much of the reduction in exposure that you get from the attenuation itself.
As for a positive case that there would have been non-trivial incidence: Fatima involved prolonged, unprotected fixation by tens of thousands. 5-10 minute gaze would have been an excess dose that was 50-200x the threshold. Injury risk is a steep sigmoid - assuming no attenuation, the probability for *each individual* should have exceeded 50%. Allowing for substantial attenuation, the doses remain large enough that you would have expected a mass epidemic of retinal injury in the aftermath of the event. https://www.icnirp.org/cms/upload/publications/ICNIRPVisible_Infrared2013.pdf
Third, I think this is a very important point that has been neglected: transient photophobia should have been ubiquitous in the immediate aftermath of the event. Witnesses should have mentioned that light hurt their eyes after the event - photophobia is an immediate, consistent, conspicuous symptom of prolonged fixation on the Sun. There is no evidence of anyone complaining about light sensitivity after the Miracle of the Sun.
VEILED BY CLOUDS: No, see my section 1.5, where I specifically discuss all of these testimonies and how they support, rather than oppose, being veiled by clouds. I'm glad you mentioned this, because I said in that section that I am confused how people can think these are arguments against cloud cover. Have you seen the sorts of clouds I am talking about? Would you have voted no on the Discord poll?
RETINOPATHY: I agree there is no formal study, I am using these as a pointer to the fact that there seem to be a large number of people gazing at the sun in some distribution, but the distribution of people who present to ophthalmologists is much smaller and spans a very wide variety of exposures. If you want people who claim they stared at the sun for 45 minutes without incident, go to r/sungazing, where you will find many.
I read your section 1.5 - it doesn't "specifically discuss" the testimony that I cite. It references the description of "pale and moonlike" - but Jose Garrett explicitly comments on veiling and says there were times when the sun stood out in clear patches of sky and was still comfortable to fixate upon. Almeida Garrett, as an astronomer, would have commented on mundane cloud veiling and would not have used the visual metaphor that he did without commenting on that. I have seen the photo that you are talking about, but I dont think it would be possible for that to be the explanation and for highly educated people to think it was mysterious/anomalous - especially not an astronomer - I think that contextualizes/interprets the testimony in a way that rules out what might otherwise be a superficially plausible explanation for the phenomenology. I also dont think it matches the ‘metallic’ phenomenology of witnesses.
Also, I want to note that I made an optics argument that veiling couldn't have explained comfortable fixation - I'm not sure if you saw or you missed.
Retinopathy - I understood your point - but I tried to point out the limitations of using this data to object to the theoretical dose-response curve - and I tried to point out ambiguities and symmetry breakers that could reconcile the observation with the theoretical expectation for retinopathy.
There seems to be a contradiction in your model: If the sunlight was attenuated enough to avoid discomfort glare throughout the event, then you wouldnt get the sungazing effects, since those are physiologically-contingent on glare-level input. You cant have your cake and eat it too on the luminance of the source.
Also, I’ve looked more into the physics of attenuation by clouds and it seems like what you are saying you see ‘regularly’ is not possible (and especially not possible for the Sun at its zenith). You may be misremembering - the sun appeared ‘pale’ but you had to squint/felt minor discomfort/only glanced briefly/it was low on the horizon. I’ll elaborate on this more in my response post.
SAMPLING BIAS: I don't think this is true. Our main sources for witnesses are the parish investigation, the diocese investigation, Haffert, De Marchi, and various people who wrote pamphlets and letters to the editor. The parish investigation selection criteria are unknown and might have oversampled the Cova. But the diocese investigation participants came from a letter addressed to everyone in the diocese asking them to come forward if they had seen anything. Haffert and De Marchi were both scouring Portugal looking for people, and if anything would have been *more* interested in distant witnesses, since at least Haffert includes a section in his book specifically trying to argue for the existence of distant witnesses. The pamphlets and letters could, of course, have come from anyone. One reason to doubt a sampling explanation is that we successfully sample three testimonies from one small crowd of ~50-100 people (the Alburitel schoolchildren), then only another three from the entire rest of the area. Even if the two Lourenco brothers' testimony counts as correlated and we only have two from the schoolchildren, this suggests samplers had no problem picking up the schoolchildren (who definitely saw it), and makes their failure to get the rest of the region more surprising.
CLOUD COVER: I guess this depends on our explanation for why there were perfect line-of-sight tunnels leading to Minde, Alburitel, and the poet's house 20 miles away, but nowhere else. I don't have a good enough sense of the meteorology/geography to know how likely this is, or how many other such line-of-sight tunnels we should expect in such a situation. I do think it's hard to say that the event felt like the end of the world at distance of 10 miles, but also stopped being noticeable if there was cloud cover.
LINE OF SIGHT: I took this argument from Mark, who calculated the hill elevations in more detail, and will let him defend it in his future discussion with you.
LOURENCO BROTHERS: Obviously we only have testimony from some fraction of witnesses - this is true everywhere, including the Cova. At Cova, we have, let's say, 150 / 70,000 = 1/500. So it's not surprising that we don't have more witnesses from the schoolchildren (I'm imagining this as a crowd size of 50-100) at Alburitel. In fact, it is surprising that we have three testimonies from them! I'm guessing this is a combination of the two brothers being correlated, plus there being more interest in this because of all the people searching for distant testimonies.
LSA HEAT: Fine, I grant that if this was a heat ray pointed directly at Cova, then it works out.
LIGHT SOURCE TRANSITION: If I understand correctly, the normal sun would have been behind the clouds at this point. So LSa couldn't have (visibly) merged with the normal sun, it could only have disappeared behind the clouds. But nobody mentions the sun disappearing behind clouds. What people have to say about the end of the miracle is:
- Alves: "The sun returned to its normal position and one could no longer stare at it."
- Garrett Sr: "Finally, the sun regained its brightness and splendor."
- Lopes: "Then the sun returned to its normal state."
- Reis: "The sun went back to its right place."
- Menitra: "The sun ceased to spin and went back into its place."
- Lourenco: "The sun, now dull and pallid, returned to its place."
SAMPLING BIAS: For the parish inquiry, my understanding is that the focus was overwhelmingly on the on-site witnesses at the Cova - investigators weren't canvassing the surrounding areas. For the diocesan inquiry, it is true that they circulated a letter, but (a) this was already 5-10 years after the event, (b) it would be hard to get testimony from the uneducated (the preponderance of potential witnesses in surrounding villages) by publishing/soliciting written materials, (c) there is an interpretive filter - since people that saw odd flashes/pale light might not interpret that as 'the miracle of the sun' - meanwhile, everyone at the Cova interpreted their experience as related to the solar miracle. It is true that Haffert would have sought out distant witnesses, but his investigation would have been during the '40s-'50s when the task would have been much harder. It seems that the testimony from distant witnesses that we have is from these secondary investigations - suggesting that they were overlooked by prior investigations that would have had an easier time finding them if they had been searching for them.
I also think that the sampling bias is a better explanation when you consider it in the context of the other points for why you wouldn't have had nearly as much of a density of distant witnesses. Investigators would have gotten the impression that there wasn't much of a return to surrounding areas, so they would concentrate their efforts on networks of witnesses with high density of useful testimony (which would have been Cova-centric - discouraging them from investing the energy to find the outliers).
LIGHT SOURCE TRANSITION: Here is a scenario (there are several others that could be proposed): During the event, the cloud deck veiled the Sun, so people saw only the pale disk. At the end of the event, LSa ascends to match the solar azimuth 'returning to its place.' The cloud coverage breaks behind it, so the glare of the real Sun 'broke through,' overwhelming the pale disk. To the eye, there was no moment of “vanishing.” Instead, the two images collapsed into one: the bright Sun in its normal place. This is actually most consistent with Jose Garrett's description of the cloud phenomena: "The clouds that scurried lightly from west to east didn't obscure the light (which didn't hurt), giving the easily understandable and explainable impression of ***passing behind it.***" -
I'll just throw in that (as a skeptic) I found Objection #5 to be somewhat weak. It is easy to imagine all sorts of ways a separate object might disappear & thence be described as the witnesses described this—"and then the sun went back to its usual place" fits with everything from "the object moved to the sun's apparent position & slowly faded" to "the object suddenly disappeared somewhere apart from the sun & now the cloud-hidden actual sun became noticeable again". (I think. I don't know, perhaps the latter requires that no one come up with the thought "wait... was the sun there behind the clouds all along?", but it's at least *somewhat* plausible.)
Good analysis of the LoS objection; I didn't notice/realize this—I guess my intuition was that "an object at 1 mi. altitude must be high in the sky for miles & miles around", but if 4° is accurate, that is indeed quite low!
>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.
Dalleur estimates LSa to roughly be hovering 6.1km south of the Chapel of Apparitions, placing it around (39.57951247372401, -8.672957642460675) - though I only lazily eyeballed this on Google Maps. Thus, given his LSa angular elevation estimate of 28˚ at Cova da Iria, this implies LSa’s altitude relative to Cova da Iria was about 3.2km; as Cova da Iria is itself about 350m ASL, we conclude[1] LSa’s altitude is about 3.55km ASL.
Torres Novas is about 48 meters ASL, and it’s about 15.83km away from the aforementioned geo-coordinates as the crow flies - closer in some places, obviously, and further away in others. This yields apparent LSa elevation of 12.47˚ from that town. The local hills’ apparent elevation will be much smaller, maybe 2.4-4˚.
[1] This and other things would need to be fiddled with a bit to reflect the Earth's curvature, but it will have a minor effect given the small distances involved.
I dont think that Dalleur constrains the horizontal displacement to 6km, that is an arbitrary value that he plots on the map (all he argues for is 'a few kilometers to the south'). If distance was 3km rather than 6km, then you get 1.5km altitude and the 3-5 degree elevation from Torres Novas.
Worth noting is that it's still ~6.14˚ in that case, well above the most visually obstructive hill. You need it to be a bit closer. But I agree he doesn't precisely estimate where it's supposed to be. Nevertheless, if the sky itself was turning bizarre colors, as one of the Garretts clearly insisted, this would show up regardless of LSa's direct visibility.
Not that this matters, but I think you are slightly off in your calculations - how are you estimating the vertical difference between Torres observers and the Fatima plateau?
Sorry, could you clarify?
3km south of the Chapel of Apparitions is this[1] location. Google Maps says it's about 17.62 km from Torres Novas. If the light source is hovering above those coordinates with visible angle 28˚ from Cova da Iria, then its height ASL is approximately[2] 3,000m*tan(28˚) + 350m = 1945m, where the +350m comes from Cova da Iria's own altitude. Torres Novas is again about 48m ASL, so the apparent angular elevation in degrees there is arctan((1945 - 48)/17,620)*180/π degrees = 6.14489479˚.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/search/39.6050972756283,+-8.672121805358584?sa=X&ved=1t:242&ictx=111
[2] As before, all of these numbers are a little off because the Earth is curved.
For the range of 22-29 at Cova, you get between 1500m ASL and 2000m ASL for the altitude of the source. I was explicitly assuming the bottom of the range 1500 - you’re right that you’d need to move the closer to accommodate 2000 ASL if you assume a higher angular elevation at Cova. But I’m assuming that for the purposes of this argument that I get the benefit of the favorable end of the uncertainty (1.5km ASL). This doesnt really matter because there is nothing stopping us from moving the source slightly closer to Cova.
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.
You cannot _possibly_ have any useful intuition of the sizes 10^-100 and 10^90 that would allow you to conclude that the resulting number 10^-10 has any validity. What if that 10^-100 is really 10^-80? How could you tell the difference? You're just making up numbers and saying you're doing Bayes.
Yes, they’re just vague made up numbers. I’m not claiming otherwise. I don’t expect people to necessarily agree with the 10^-10. That’s just a random personal guess. I do think it’s hard to justify anything except a quite a low number. If you accept that I think the rest is relatively solid, though certainly not definitive.
There are, or were, 67 Church-recognized healings at Lourdes. The best documented ones, that is. There were plenty more healed but most of them not fully documented.
> 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.
I think it's normal for people to experience ontological shock, and it's not fully predictable. The specific belief is besides the point.
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.
Any updates?
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?
I hope this doesn't sound dismissive but "Why WOULDN'T I do that?" I grew up in a heterodox home that was devoutly Christian in a sense, but we amused ourselves by coming up with alternate, quirky theories about God. and by the time I was a young adult, I felt absolutely free to mix and match bits and pieces of different religious traditions, just like Indians love to do.
Abrahamic faiths REALLY, REALLY spent a lot of effort saying "you can't do that." A third of the Old Testament is about how much God hates that! That's why it feels so strange to you, but it doesn't feel like something that needs a special explanation on my part. Although I provided one anyway!
One can read the Bible and the Koran like theological newspapers, full of truths and falsehoods.
PS. I'm actually a Deist and lapsed Christian who maintains some ties to Christianity, just in case.
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).
Scott, you continue to be unable to write more than I want to know about any topic, though this was a valiant effort!
The crisis of faith section rings a bit hollow for me. I sincerely love that Scott has the perspective he does and the personality that leads to it - it's noble, cooperative, and useful in the role of ‘front line researcher pushing forward the frontier of knowledge,’ which Scott remarkably often is. From my baser perspective, while I do think Ethan et al make interesting points, and felt someone really ought to step up and do an Evan-level treatment of the miracle itself, I wasn't actually that impressed by the overall strength of the theistic argument. So while I was excited to see that Scott had tackled this, and read it immediately, I also felt even before Scott's EPIC TAKEDOWN (jk!) that it was pretty fair, if lazy and unvirtuous, to simply shrug and figure that a bunch of people primed to expect a miracle might see weird things when looking at the sun, and that probably it would look less surprising with further investigation.
Scott reminds me of Thomas Nagel (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/325845-in-speaking-of-the-fear-of-religion-i-don-t-mean) who, in his book arguing against eliminative materialism, admits he is uncomfortable that so many theists agree with his critique, since he doesn't want to embrace theism. He doesn't, since he has a third way in mind that avoids both, but his honesty was quite refreshing and I like that Scott showed the same here.
Luckily for me, I read this in a thick fog, so was not at all tempted to stare at the sun.
"Manuel Perreiro da Silva, local priest:" - Wait, a local priest in catholic Portugal talks about his w i f e?
Isn't that a translation error? "o pastor" means "the shepherd" and could easily have been confused with "priest", but it's an error I would rather attribute to a human than a machine.
Thanks, I've removed the claim that he is a priest until I can recheck my source and figure out what went wrong.
Quick Google tells me that there was a priest named Fr. Manuel Pereira da Silva associated with Fatima:
https://www.leiria-fatima.pt/18-p-manuel-pereira-da-silva-1876-1951-o-procurador-da-diocese/
"The Shrine of Fátima is another indelible link in Father Manuel's life. He would be the first to preside over an open-air Mass at Cova da Iria, on October 13, 1921. In fact, he was one of the few priests present among the crowds at the apparitions of September 13 and October 13, 1917, as can be seen on his tombstone in the Fátima Cemetery. He moved to the Shrine in 1939, where he celebrated his golden anniversary as a priest in 1949, and where he died of cerebral congestion on February 15, 1951."
Hang on, I think I've found out what's wrong. EWTN has the same accounts from eyewitnesses, and if you read all the way to the end, the names are *after* the accounts but look like they are *before* them.
So it's not Fr. da Silva talking about his wife, but instead Senhor Alfredo da Silva Santos.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/sixth-apparition-of-our-lady-23368
So it should be:
"The sun appeared with its circumference well defined. It came down as if to the height of the clouds and began to whirl giddily upon itself like a captive ball of fire. With some interruptions, this lasted about eight minutes. The atmosphere darkened and the features of each became yellow. Everyone knelt even in the mud....
Fr. Manuel Pereira da Silva (in a letter to a friend)"
And then:
"We made our arrangements, and went in three motor cars on the early morning of the 13th. There was a thick mist, and the car which went in front mistook the way so that we were all lost for a time and only arrived at the Cova da Iria at midday by the sun. It was absolutely full of people, but for my part I felt devoid of any religious feeling. When Lúcia called out: "Look at the sun!" the whole multitude repeated: "Attention to the sun!" It was a day of incessant drizzle but a few moments before the miracle it stopped raining. I can hardly find words to describe what followed. The sun began to move, and at a certain moment appeared to be detached from the sky and about to hurtle upon us like a wheel of flame. My wife---we had been married only a short time- -- fainted, and I was too upset to attend to her, and my brother-in- law, Joao Vassalo, supported her on his arm. I fell on my knees, oblivious of everything, and when I got up I don't know what I said. I think I began to cry out like the others. An old man with a white beard began to attack the atheists aloud and challenged them to say whether or not something supernatural had occurred.
Senhor Alfredo da Silva Santos (Lisbon)"
Confusing way to lay it out, and no wonder everyone got it sideways!
Looks like this has been figured out but for the record, it is possible to be a married Catholic priest these days. According to the LA Times there are about 120 married priests in the US. Most of them were Anglican/Episcopal priests that converted and were already married. In addition there are Eastern Rite Catholic Churches that allow their priests to marry. Those can now serve in the US.
None of this was allowed back then so it still should have raised some questions.
How is "Manuel Perreiro da Silva, local priest" married? Was he mis-labeled?
If one's interested in a view that is predisposed towards believing in miracles but *not* this particular one, or other Catholic Marian apparitions: http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/marian_apparitions.aspx
(Note that OCIC itself, as a site, is quite towards the rigorist side of Orthodoxy and shouldn't be taken as a be-all-end-all resource on Orthodox views)
Haven’t read yet, but FWIW most evangelical Protestants (who certainly believe in God and miracles) would be happy to chalk Marian apparitions up to demons and call it a day. Certainly, if I was a Protestant I wouldn’t lose any sleep. I thought the section of Ethan’s post attempting to rebut the “demons” objection was the weakest part.
This is excellent. One additional strand that I'd like to see someone tug on – maybe I will. The Irish nationalist poet W. B. Yeats has a poem about the 1891 funeral of Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The poem describes how clouds covered the sky on the day of the funeral, the sun could be seen through a gap in the clouds, and then a star "shoots down". Most people who write about this poem take this to be pure symbolism (the next stanza describes a scene of pagan sacrifice that definitely is pure symbolism), but a while ago I came across an essay where Yeats insists that no, this actually happened.
He wasn't at the funeral himself, but he knew lots of people who were. He cites his unrequited love Maud Gonne telling him afterwards about "the star that fell broad daylight as Parnell’s body was lowered into the grave", and quotes the writer Standish O'Grady:
‘I state a fact - it was witnessed by thousands. While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly, and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements, and that storm, and other elemental disturbances have too often succeeded or accompanied great battles to be regarded as only fortuitous...’
Now, Yeats was exceptionally credulous and prone to exaggeration. And he wrote the poem years after the funeral: while I think it's very unlikely, it's not impossible that he was 'contaminated' by subsequent knowledge of the reports from Fatima, and this coloured the way he stitched together the testimony he'd heard. The two sources he cites are less obviously Fatima-esque than his poem (though they don't contradict each other, and altogether they add up to something exceptionally Fatima-esque with the lights and the falling object etc.; and, again, my knowledge of Yeats' biography makes contamination seem unlikely). Even accounting for all this, the similarities between Yeats' poem and the Fatima sun miracle are really striking to me.
I think this is a potentially very important datapoint, because it's an almost entirely non-religious example. To be sure, you can define 'religion' so that Irish nationalism can be a religion, but it's very different from a bunch of people huddling on a hill because someone told them the Virgin Mary might appear. And indeed Parnell was in the unique position of being the Protestant leader of a mostly-Catholic political movement, cutting across Ireland's religious divide. If there really was a Fatima-esque sun miracle at Parnell's funeral, it strongly suggests that the correct explanation is (a) non-religious/materialist but also (b) 'objective' (or at least as intersubjective as optical illusions) rather than a matter of pure mass hysteria or hallucination. Which is exactly what this post suggests. And Parnell's funeral came several decades before Fatima, so genuine primary sources would rule out 'social contagion' completely.
This has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while, but if enough people are interested I may try to track down the sources. The main published collection of Yeats' letters to and from Gonne starts in 1893, two years after the funeral, so the main source he cites might be tricky to verify. But there might be independent diaries or newspaper reports from people at the funeral who weren't in Yeats' social circle, and at very least I can check the quote from Standish O'Grady.
(The poem is entitled 'Parnell's Funeral'; the essay where Yeats says all this really happened is in his book King of the Great Clock Tower.)
Fascinating!
Interesting. For what it's worth, the New York Times write-up of the funeral doesn't mention any celestial events occurring.
https://archive.nytimes.com/iht-retrospective.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/1891-parnells-funeral-in-dublin/
Nor does this article.
https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=SPS18911017-01.2.12&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN%7CtxCO%7CtxTA--------0------
Yes, I'd seen the Herald-Tribune reporting. I'd imagine that, if this was indeed a thing, it was only seen by a small proportion of the mourners (which could still be an absolutely large number of people, though maybe not the 'thousands' O'Grady claims). Which would give credence to optical illusion–esque explanations? as opposed to celestial/supernatural explanations that everyone would see. But then again, maybe it just didn't happen at all, nobody saw anything strange in the sky, and this was a legend that grew up later.
I wonder if it's this illusion, applied to the sun on a cloudy day: https://dynomight.net/colors/
It requires looking at the disc for a while and the hallucinatory colors "spin" around the disc.
This was an impressive find. Looking at that image was quite trippy
It also hurt my eyes. There were a few moments when my eyes involuntarily jerked to look away, but I brought them back to the object.
I can see how people would describe this as spinning.
I wonder if Alfonso Lopes Vieria might have genuinely described seeing *a* Miracle of the Sun, but not the original one — just one of the follow-ups in later years. That would account for him not mentioning it in contemporary letters, and it's easy to see how the timing might blur in his (and his widow's) mind decades later.
This is my perspective as an Orthodox Christian, and a possible framework for interpreting Fatima as a real miracle without becoming a fire-and-brimstone Catholic.
It's possible that Fatima et al. are partially or entirely from God. It's also possible they are partially or entirely demonic phenomena, though often repurposed by God to good ends. Either way, if I have good reason to believe the Catholic Church is not fully in accord with Divine Truth, these miracles on their own shouldn't make me change my mind.
Christ Himself tells us to believe for His own sake, not for the sake of miracles. I believe in the supernatural because of numerous miracle stories that are impossible to explain otherwise. But my non-materialism is specifically Orthodox Christian because I can't explain Jesus unless He's the Christ, and I find Him most clearly in the practice and teachings of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has plenty of miracles too, but that's not why I'm here.
I.E. Christ Himself gives you permission to decouple the reality of a supernatural occurrence from an associated claim to Divine Truth. You can use Fatima to update the chance of P(supernatural) without an equal update to P(Catholicism).
--
Anyway, if you do want to keep going down the miracle rabbit-hole, the Orthodox equivalent of Fatima is the annual miracle of the Holy Fire. The main miracle - that a candle is miraculously lit while the Patriarch of Jerusalem is alone in the Holy Sepulchre - has supposedly been debunked since the Middle Ages. Even many Orthodox doubt it. But pilgrims regularly report a secondary miracle: For the first few minutes, candles lit from the Holy Fire don't burn things, at least not how they should.
Some videos:
Looks like this guy should have severe burns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kZu87tyqJ4
My brain tells me this might be possible with regular candles... but her sleeve gets plenty of time under intense flame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqJylLMRQYI
They don't leave their flesh in the flame for too long, but my brain tells me that putting the bundle of candles directly under your chin like the man does at 0:07 should also result in serious burns:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ipvp22o9khI
I pray before a single small candle every night. If I put my hand two inches above the visible flame, I can only hold it for ~2 seconds until it hurts too much. I find the videos and first-hand testimony (see Rod Dreher's blog for one example) pretty convincing.
So is @Deisaeach having a brain rapture over this post or why did our favourite fiery Catholic not weigh in yet?
Ah, I'm not pushed about Marian apparitions. The miracle of the sun is along the lines of the Shroud of Turin - you don't have to believe the shroud is really the shroud of Jesus Christ, nobody is making you, it's not doctrine. At the same time, if you want to venerate it (as you would a crucifix) that's okay. Keep away from making extravagant claims, don't contradict received doctrine, and it's fine.
Did a miracle happen at Fatima? I have no idea. I believe in God and the supernatural and all that jazz, but I'm not living and dying on "did this one event at this one apparition site really happen? if you prove it didn't, oh no my faith is destroyed!"
During the moving statue craze in Ireland, we had our own little local apparition. At the height of it, tour buses used to come with people to pray at the site. That has long died down, and I don't recall that there were any earth-shattering revelations claimed by the visionaries, what remains is a quiet revival in people going to pray the rosary at the grotto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues
There are a *lot* of alleged apparitions and private revelations that are never officially accepted by the Church, and a lot more which are condemned as fakes and frauds.
So at which point does Rome start taking note and say "check your spelling, you're supposed to worship the Son, not the Sun"? This whole "Dancing Sun" thing seems to have traction, or is that still small fry, yet undeserving of the Spanish Inquisition?
But isn't the Fatima miracle officially accepted by the Church as a miracle, unlike many others?
I think it's accepted as "people weren't hoaxing". The apparitions themselves are considered "worthy of belief", but does that include the Miracle of the Sun? Seems a little grey, so far as I can find out:
"October 1930 - Announcement of Dom Jose Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of the Diocese of Leiria-Fatima on the Results of the Investigative Commission
In virtue of considerations made known, and others which for reason of brevity we omit; humbly invoking the Divine Spirit and placing ourselves under the protection of the most Holy Virgin, and after hearing the opinions of our Rev. Advisors in this diocese, we hereby: –
1. Declare worthy of belief, the visions of the shepherd children in the Cova da Iria, parish of Fatima, in this diocese, from the 13th May to 13th October, 1917.
2. Permit officially the cult of Our Lady of Fatima."
Pope Pius XII claimed to have seen the miracle himself:
https://zenit.org/2008/11/04/pius-xii-saw-miracle-of-the-sun/
But because all this comes under the heading of private revelation, nobody is *bound* to believe it as a matter of faith. You can legitimately have doubts about the apparitions or the miracle claims and still be a Catholic in good standing.
Came here for this comment!
I don't see any mention here of different layers of clouds. It is possible to have both cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds at the same time, so what we think of as "clouds" part and behind them is another layer of clouds blocking the sun. It seems to me, especially from watching the videos and videos in the comments, that there is some rare kind of clouds, perhaps caused by high ice crystals, that can produce a variety of optical effects: motion, changing color, and changing size. That this should happen at a time when a lot of people are looking at the sun expecting something to happen is a big coincidence, but in the end only a coincidence.
Suppose as the cloud layer changes, you get something shifting in a striking way between solar halos and cloud coronae. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(optical_phenomenon) . It is a localized weather phenomenon. Wouldn't this explain most of what needed to be explained?
I don't think it makes sense for this to happen at Fatima, Ghiaie, Lubbock, and every time people go to Medjugorje, but practically never be seen anywhere else.
Why can’t God create a miracle that only some can see? If it’s a miracle than localization is entirely possible, if natural then probably not. But that’s entirely what is at issue.
damn that's crazy
I know it would have interfered with the nerding, but it seems like some liar constant needs to be introduced here. An odd omission from a psychiatrist!
In terms of persuading those who disagree, pointing out that about half of them are lying is a problem. But in terms of pursuit of the truth, it has to be a big factor in our quest.
And the more we investigate and quantify that factor, the more we’ll know! For example, there’s an actual number attached to the lizardman constant, right? Those kinds of numbers, should we be able to obtain them, would be powerful.
Someone could read court records, for example, and calculate what percentage of statements made under oath are later contradicted by court rulings. That would give a baseline for how much lying happens under our most truth-intensive social contexts, and provide a minimum expected level of lying elsewhere.
I don't understand - you think all 150 witnesses were lying, including the unbelievers? And no truth-tellers stepped up to say "no, I didn't see it?" (except for the tiny handful I cited)
Not all, but I’d guess that there’s a proportion. And I’m thinking that it might be more like 40% than 4%.
I’m also very unsure how to handle issues like P and not-P. The claim “a miracle happened” doesn’t seem symmetrical with “a miracle didn’t happen”; but I don’t know how to weight these contradictory statements. I guess the naive approach would be to treat them the same, and apply the liar discount to both.
If you have well-paired P and not-P claims, applying the discount like this wouldn’t make a direct difference on the question. But if you have fairly small numbers (e.g. dozens) of claims, then knowing a priori that X% of them are likely to be lies could usefully reduce the amount of mystery that we feel like we have to solve.
I've spent considerably more time than the average person pointing my face continuously at the sun with my eyes open (trying, of course, to somehow not look at the sun whilst doing this..)
No miracles to report - just one very-unusual-but-totally-explicable phenomenon - but first: I think there might be a class of people alive today who look at the sun more than the typical amount, and who aren't being selected for weirdness (like the Redditors) or religious fervour (like the Medjugorje pilgrims).
Some nation's navies (for all I know, possibly all nation's navies) still teach navigation by sextant. This is partly because navies tend to be quite reactionary in general, but also because in the navy you're much more likely than most sailors to find yourself navigating under conditions of GPS failure (or GPS denial, which is surprisingly easy even for a low-tech adversary).
Solar observations by sextant are often taken at solar noon, sunrise, and sunset, but such observations can be taken at any time of the day when at least one limb of the sun is clearly visible (ie. not a blurred outline seen through cloud). If you suck at using a sextant (through some combination of being completely new to using one; not really caring as much as you ought to because it's a minor part of your training syllabus and you know you're soon going to be tested against much more demanding things; having been taught by somebody who hasn't used the technique themself in maybe twenty years; and just being generally hopeless and clumsy..) you can potentially spend ten minutes pointing sextant + face at the sun whilst fiddling with the scope, micrometer, shades, etc. and end up accidentally looking at the sun unshaded (or painfully under-shaded) a fair bit.
I just mention it in case there's some way of canvassing 'hopeless beginner sextant users' as a sort of control group for pilgrims and 'I-stare-at-the-sun-to-replenish-my-aura' Redditors.
(The unusual-but-totally-explicable phenomenon I saw was an eclipse; I couldn't say exactly where or when (after enough time at sea it all sort of blends together..) but I think it was in the Eastern Mediterranean sometime during the Russo-Ukranian War. I'd read nothing in the news about it, and being a partial rather than a total eclipse it wasn't visible to the naked eye: teaching a cadet some basic navigation techniques, I just pointed my sextant at the sun and found that a sizeable chunk of it wasn't there. I was so taken aback I think I'd have been prepared at that point to believe in any miracle that was suggested to me.)
Separately: I was hoping to find a treatment by Scott of the argument that the Fatima Event was a miracle *regardless of the mechanism-of-action*: If God chooses to work though perfectly-coordinated combinations of timely shepherdess predictions, specific meteorological phenomena, hitherto-undocumented optical illusions, and optimal sociocultural priming, who are we to argue?
Two ways I can think of to approach this are:
1) Statistically: if we can assign frequencies to shepherdess predictions, meteorological conditions, etc., can we determine the chance-occurrence rate and derive a p-value for any given observed occurrence?
2) Theologically: it seems as though at least twenty-six people, many of them faithful, well-intentioned Catholics, have been blinded through trying to replicate aspects of the Fatima Event; possibly many more if you factor-in Medjugorje, the possibility of undocumented blindings, etc. "Free Will" doesn't seem to be a good enough justification since these victims only ended-up staring at the sun because of the nature of the specific miracle that God chose to perform (presumably God could have predicted this in advance and chosen another sort of miracle, had He wished to). Can this be reconciled with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God? Do Fatima-inspired blindings thus provide evidence against an omnibenevolent God? Or, does this reduce to the standard theodicy problem we already knew about, not providing any extra evidence either way?
I just want to say I have seen sundogs IRL and they were very colorful, like a rainbow. They were however limited to relatively small spots near the sun, they did not appear to move and the rest of the sky looked normal.
After reading all of that, it seems to come down to some kind of optical illusion + social priming:
- staring at the sun (which as was repeatedly emphasised, can cause eye damage, so people don’t usually do it), plus maybe cloud cover
- *and* expecting to see some kind of miraculous vision
With the hypothesis being that either on their own isn’t enough to do it
It’s normally rare because people (a) aren’t staring at the sun and (b) aren’t expecting miracles. But when the right factors are present (including, maybe, cloud) then lots of people see it.
I agree - also note how many witness reports are not stating that they saw something weird in the sun but that others pointed out that something weird was happening in the sun, causing them to take a glance and noticing it, too. In my opinion that is very strong evidence that whatever was going on needed concentration to be observed and was not something immediately obvious. And that in such a large crowd expecting an unusual sign from the heavens someone was starring a little bit too intensely into the sun, especially after the appointed time for the miracle had already passed, and therefore was able to see the phenomenon and point it out to others seems not too farfetched.
EDIT: I see someone beat me to this already
Please consider consulting https://firekasina.org/ (by blog acquaintance Daniel Ingram et al) or the kasina section of his book (https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iii-the-samatha-jhanas/29-kasina-practice/). The practice involves staring at a light and then closing the eyes and focusing on the afterimage. I quote (from the second source) :
"At some point the created image will begin to get clearer, brighter, more refined, and more stable. If you are using a candle flame and its subsequent red dot as image, it will tend to gain green, blue, and purple rings around it with intricate yellow rapidly moving fine complex lines in the middle that shift and spin at high speed. Paying attention to that high-speed spinning and movement will develop good attention-tuning skills that translate extremely well to other meditation styles.
The more refined dot (it might be some other shape, depending on what object you start with) is called the nimitta in the Pali commentaries. The nimitta will eventually start to do strange things, such as oscillate between a black dot and some greenish-yellow dot, or other variants on this theme. It may acquire all sorts of fine details, change color many times, develop into other images, and even begin to seem alive, like you are watching an animation. The larger the nimitta, the more remarkable the show that it can produce, particularly in terms of exquisite little nuances, images, colors, and shimmering variability. As practice grows stronger, you will notice that your internal intentions and inclinations have more and more control of what shapes and colors the nimitta becomes, as well as where it is in the visual field and how it moves."
The first source especially includes a lot of reports. This isn't particularly hard to verify experientially either fwiw.
A large number of people pulling a fire kasina off the sun and reporting phenomena as reported in the miracle is impressive but not implausible to me esp. in a primed religious context.
Are there any similar sun miracles in places that aren't Christian? China, India, Japan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, etc?
Hey, guys. I need to read this more (it's a long post and regrettably I'm very busy) but I was anxious to get a thought out there. Is there a chance that the autokinetic effect plays into this?
For clarity.
1) The autokinetic effect is a well-known psychological effect where a small, stationary pinpoint of light in a dark room appears to the viewer to move around.
2) This happens because the eye’s natural motions (saccades) have no reference point in a featureless darkness, so it appears like the light is moving, rather than the eyes.
It’s not tough to imagine that a featureless grey haze obscuring the sun, leading to it hanging like a silver disc, might produce an autokinetic effect if the haze removes all visual anchors that a person would normally need in order to interpret the sun as static. In the absence of those visual anchors viewers might experience their own eye saccades as the disc of the sun moving.
3) The effect could be something like the combination of the eye saccades moving (causing the sun to appear to move in the featureless fog) along with the retinal effects of having the sun shining in one’s eyes too long. Staring at the sun seems sufficient to create the “disc on the outside of the sun” effect and also some of the colors/motion. What if you combine that with the autokinetic effect?
4) It might also explain the sun appearing to plunge toward the ground. Imagine staring at the white disc of the sun against a featureless gray haze with no landscape references, so the autokinetic effect starts to happen. The sun appears to be moving. Suddenly there is a break in the fog for a moment—just enough that your eyes can see the true distance of the sun above the horizon. Would this coincide with a sudden “plummet” effect, visually, as your eyes moved from the wild fulminations of the autokinetic effect to a more anchored understanding of the actual location of the sun?
5) Hypothetically if this were the case, variations in the Fatima miracle could be explained by how much of a person’s field of vision was taken up by a featureless background like diffuse, cloudy haze.
6) This would also explain the noon timing of the Fatima effect. At that time, the sun is high in the sky. So, imagine, looking up, and in doing so you remove most of the landscape from your vision and are just looking at a featureless swatch of sky. A haze obscures the sun a bit, such that it appears to be a silver disc, but there's not much by way of visual features that can anchor your vision. That would probably fulfill the conditions for the autokinetic effect; saccades would be interpreted as motion.
7) If I recall, in the lab, people were completely credulous about the autokinetic effect. They thought the light was moving in the dark room, not that their eyes were moving.
8) Question RE: this, not so much for you guys as for me, but how smoggy or smoky were the conditions in some of these sightings? I’ve walked through a hazy-but translucent fog bank before and can vouch that if the atmosphere has enough particle density you can look directly at the sun and it looks like a bright white plate with clearly defined edges. That happened to me once in middle school. I never forgot it. If I imagine similar conditions in Fatima, with the sun high in the sky against a featureless background, I could see this happening. But for it to happen consistently week after week there would need to be a sort of constant haze. Smog or smoke from a factory is a good possibility.
9) I know this doesn't square with all the facts described even in the opening of Scott's article (where people said that the sun appeared to bounce around the landscape, which would imply that the landscape was in their visual field) but all of those talks of wild motion and I can't help but think of saccades and the autokinetic effect. It's the most reach-for-able phenomenon, and in combination with retinal effects of sun exposure it might explain some of the basics.
J
I agree; autokinesis seems like a very strong candidate for the 'dancing sun' effect (especially when combined with the sort of color changes and effects mentioned by sungazers, plus the power of suggestion, which I think is underemphasized by Scott here). The piece spends a fair amount of time considering phenomena of the eyes and brain that could account for these effects, and it's unfortunate that it misses this one.
The one point you make which I question is the attribution to saccades; the causes of autokinetic effects seem to be up in the air (see eg https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10965040/) and may be outside the eyes.
A couple of additional notes, mostly just adding to your good overview:
1. As you say, early observers of the effect were convinced that the movement was real, and it was originally named 'Sternschwanken': 'swinging stars'.
2. As you say, events having occurred close to solar noon makes autokinetic effects especially plausible.
3. Although autokinesis seems to be typically studied in very (subjectively) small sources like stars, at least one study (https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0055867) looked at patterns of dots as large as 60° and autokinesis was observed in all subjects.
4. The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autokinetic_effect) quotes a passage from HG Wells's *The War of the Worlds*, which I'll close with, both because it's charming and because it describes a disc growing and shrinking, not just moving (of course it's fiction, but it at least seems plausible that Wells is describing something he himself has observed:
'Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm—a pin's-head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view. As I watched, the planet seemed to grow larger and smaller and to advance and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty million miles it was from us—more than forty million miles of void. Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.'
fun sun facts (only vaguely related):
(1) you can totally stare directly at the sun during a total eclipse, without any damage. The eclipse I stared at had about 2 minutes of totality. Highly recommended even if it would produce minor eye damage. Those are probably the top 2 minutes of my life in terms of sheer, visceral joy.
(2) related to sungazing, I have heard claims that direct sun exposure (including UV B, i.e., you shouldn't be behind glass!) does good things for your mitochondria. I think it causes the muscles to build more of them. I have an n=1 data point that this raises energy levels and relieves fatigue. Very weak evidence with dozens of confounding factors of course.
(3) Part of the recommendation I got along with (2) was to gaze at the sun with eyes closed. I hypothesize that this has benefits like getting your homeostasis into a more natural balance. The theory being that never being exposed to strong sunlight tricks our body into thinking it's winter, leaving it perpetually in energy saving mode, which is highly maladaptive in the modern environment. AFAIK, gazing at the sun with eyes closed for a few minutes at a time is entirely unproblematic. Please correct me if this isn't the case! I am very eager to learn more about this, also please share related experiences and theories.
(4) Why did Scott not click on the link about poop and cum? We simply MUST know where the sun's energy goes, FOR SCIENCE! Is it really the best disinfectant? Any applications to UTIs?
Direct exposure to UVB has all sorts of benefits, but as far as I know, none of these benefits depends on exposing your *eyes* (don't stare at the sun)
I am wondering how often after visions of Jesus and Mary someone asks the miracle-viewer to describe Jesus and Mary. If they describe a Middle Eastern Jew, that would seem like the historical figure. If Jesus or Mary looks like the standard depiction in their culture's religious iconography, that strongly suggests a brain inserting an already known religious image rather than actually seeing anything.
Insert here "coming to you in a form you will understand."
In near death experiences, people always see whatever is culturally relevant to them (whatever their local religion is / religious iconography is), whereas children are more likely to see…their peers. Other kids. The relevant stuff in their kid life.
Of course, if everyone sees their localized version at this miracle site, it could just be said that that’s how the entities choose to reveal themselves rather than their historical look.
Kind of like ghosts from the 1700s showing up in low-rise jeans and a bomber jacket. Why not I guess?
Scott sayeth: "The straightforward Bayesian way to do this is to start with some prior probability that there is a God who causes miracles (let’s say 1%), notice that the evidence for Fatima being a miracle naively seems very high (let’s say 90%), multiply out, and end up with a higher (8.3%) probability of God’s existence and a lower (8.3%) chance that Fatima in particular was miraculous."
This is not the standard way Bayesianism works. The proper way is this: start with priors, P(God) and P(noGod). Observe Fatima. Then ask: in the world where these it God, how likely are we to observe Fatima? And in the world where there is no God, how likely are we to observe it? Both of these probabilities are small. Even in the world with a God, surely he doesn't feel obligated to do every thing you can think of, even though he could. Even in that world, most miraculous things don't happen. Also, in the world with no God likelihood that we would observe Fatima depends on how big the world is: if you had 100 Earths, you would get 100 times more rare events.
Worth noticing: this calculation doesn't introduce the concept of a miracle at all and is indifferent to whether Fatima is such.
Obviously, however you slice it, we are more likely to observe Fatima in a God-world than in the noGod-world.
(At this point it would be nice of me to put some toy numbers on it and say approximately what kind of update *I* think is warranted, but these numbers are so tiny and hard to estimate, that I will refuse to do that in a cowardly fashion.)
What if we do want to use the concept of a miracle the way Scott did? Let's say miracle is a type of thing that only God can do, and natural law doesn't explain at all.
First: funny enough, if Fatima is 90% likely to be a miracle, then situation is even nicer for the God's side than Scott's calculation would suggest, because there are 3 possibilities: 1) no God and Fatima is not a miracle 2) Yes God, but Fatima is just some random illusion unrelated to him and 3) Yes God, and Fatima is a miracle.
P3/(P1+P2+P3) should be 90% then, and you might end up P1 = 5%, P2 = 5% and P3 = 90%, yielding an even larger update towards God, 95:5, not 90:10.
Second: must we buy into the 90% number though? Where did it come from? I think the most reasonable way to actually estimate P(Fatima_Is_Miracle) would be to run the first calculation I talked about, start with prior for God/NoGod, figure out P(Fatima|God) and P(Fatima|NoGod), whatever those are, then do the arithmetic on them (exercise for the reader). But that defeats to point of ever bringing up P(Fatima_Is_Miracle), because if we could agree on P(Fatima|God) and P(Fatima|NoGod) we wouldn't need to talk about miracles, we would immediately calculate a Bayesian update from that.
I am not sure I can think of another good was to estimate P(Fatima_Is_Miracle), honestly. There's a danger of naively noticing that something really, really has a shape of a miracle (glowing signs in the sky! Prophecies!) and becoming sure something is miraculous. But as a bare minimum any calculation of P(something_is_miraculous) would have to take into account: is this something you stumbled on today or is this the most miracle-seeming even selected from all the events in the world, and how big is a world, anyway? These things must be accounted for.
Imagine a story: "a very holy child told be God has blessed me with luck. And I rolled 5 dice, an lo: they formed a shape of a cross when they fell, and all were 3 in honor of the Trinity, how miraculous!" Imagine for a second it is completely true beyond doubt. The story is very miracle-shaped, but what is the probability this is a real miracle though? It absolutely matters whether: 1) this has just happened to you and this is the strangest thing that has happened in the span of your life or 2) this is an ancient tale, and this is the most miraculous thing that has happened in recorded history or something in between. And whatever thought process says that P(Fatima_Is_Miracle) = 90% has to take these considerations into account.
(So if you're wondering what the conclusion of this Bayesian analysis is, the conclusion is that I don't think I can use Bayesian analysis for this, even with made-up numbers.)
Having seen the videos, I'd say your explanation of the "miracle" is essentially correct, and is easily explained by boring old meteorology. No need for fancy new illusions, and the cameras aren't having a stroke either.
A quick reminder: clouds can either block sunlight, or *reflect* it - which is why they appear either black or white, depending on their position relative to the sun from us. We all know this, but it's gonna be important.
So, what's happening in the videos, and - presumably - what had happened in Fatima.
There is diffuse, low-level, multi-layer cloud cover, with high-altitude winds moving the clouds about. That's it! That's all you need to explain pretty much everything.
Let's go over the "consensus testimony" point by point:
1. At the hour predicted by the child-seers, the rain stopped and a “window” of clear sky opened in the clouds, revealing the sun. It looked surprisingly pale, cool, and painless to gaze at, like the full moon.
You already explained that one, with a photographic example, to boot. The sun is obscured by a diffuse cloud which blocks out enough of its light to make it possible to look at it directly, but not enough to hide it completely.
2. It began to dance in a zig-zag pattern.
The clouds are moving, moreover, the different layers of clouds are moving at different speeds relative to one another. The amount of sunlight reaching the observer changes with time, as does the amount of light reflected from nearby clouds. Both of these are clearly observable in the 2010 video, and can cause the sun to appear to move, when its actual disc is obscured, but its rays fall onto a nearby cloud causing it to light up against the otherwise dark background with reflected light, giving the illusion that the sun has changed position.
3. It spun and shot off sparks like a firework wheel.
Given that the clouds will be moving across the sun's disc, they can create an illusion of motion in the sun itself. As for shooting off sparks, occasional breaks in cloud cover will result in the manifestation of short-lived "god rays". The 2009 video demonstrates this, with the "god ray" being directed at the camera, which causes it pulse when the amount of light hitting it suddenly overloads the sensor.
4. It changed colors, and everyone in the area was bathed in different-colored light, as if it were shining through stained glass.
Everyone has been staring at the sun for a while, with the amount of light hitting their eyes varying over time, as the clouds move across it, obscuring and revealing (again, see the 2009 video). They're getting the usual after-images, but in a random fashion, given that they're looking at a randomly variable light source that is, at its maximum, as bright as the sun.
5. It seemed to fall down to Earth three times, terrifying the onlookers and making them think the world was about to end.
This is the really neat one, and again well shown in the 2010 video: a combination of obscuring and reflection from surrounding clouds that causes the sun to appear to change its size, up to the point of washing out all across the sky. Probably even neater to see in person, but not particularly miraculous. Since we are dealing with fast moving clouds, these changes appear to be like the sun dashing forward and retreating.
6. Then it returned to its normal position, and the previously drenched crowd noticed they were miraculously dry.
Eventually, the clounds blocking the sun cleared up enough that direct sunlight became the brightest light source, and everything went back to normal. The drying most likely happened at its own pace - aided by the wind that we know was present - but by that time everyone was so miracle-minded, it was the juniper bushes all over again.
This doesn't purport to explain *everything*. For example, there's the matter of it happening at the predicted hour.
This gets into a trickier psychological issue: the people at Fatima came expecting to see a miracle, and the conditions happened to be right for this one. Likely, the phenomena outlined would have already been visible prior to the appointed time, but nobody was paying attention, because it was not yet time. In any case, I don't think anyone was keeping detailed time records.
What *did* happen is that somebody who was looking around for signs of the miracle looked up to the heavens, saw that the sun looked a bit off, and kick-started the whole thing by pointing to it as the sign of the miracle. Social contagion on fertile ground did for the rest.
So, yes, the "miracle of the sun" - as described - can be observed by anyone, anywhere the conditions are right. Indeed, most of us already might have. Had you shown me the 2010 video with no context, I'd simply have said "Neat video of sun shining through the clouds." and thought nothing more of it. Which is why you have so many examples, both in the records, and on video.
What if the meteorological conditions weren't right in Fatima on 13 October 1917? Well... we'd have a different miracle, most likely. When thousands of people descend to see a miracle, then, by Jingo!, they will have one! Any miracle will do.
Which is why it's so important to pre-register one's miracles.
The whole thing is also a great illustration of the limits of oral testimony. As a fun exercise, I invite everyone to try to describe what they see the sun doing in the videos here, importantly: without including anything about what is causing it to appear so (so, nothing about clouds, camera sensors, or anything of that sort). Now, ask your friends to do the same, and compare notes afterwards. I have a sneaky suspicion that the descriptions will seem a lot more strange and exciting than what is actually on record.
This only works if you assume that everyone is exaggerating far beyond the reality, and that it was actually very mundane. Why would a group of people feel so confident about it even years after the fact? It's possible, people can be goaded, but it seems implausible given the variety of kinds of witnesses. What you fail to not omit in your final challenge is that most would, even if they were wanting for words, clarify that it's nothing very unusual. These people were saying they never saw anything like it in their life, or only on special occasions.
I would describe it as either the Sun flashing, or its aura of light expanding and contracting. Nothing even remotely close to the descriptions of the witnesses. For example, saying everything is bathed in a certain kind of light is not just a normal afterimage. I also do not get any instinctual fear of terror that the Earth is about to be eaten. The videos don't show anything like an actual firework wheel in action. Etc.
- Do all religions have a concept of "miracles" such as that in Fatima?
- If not, have there been events that other religions would call a miracle for religions that don't?
- Has there ever been a miracle giving the people who witnessed it visions of a different religion than their own? Like Christians seeing visions not of Mary but of Vishnu or Thor?
Yes, actually. I’ve read several times over the years that visions of Christ and Mary are one of the two biggest reasons Muslims in the Middle East convert to Christianity
I should have asked better, apologies: do people ever have visions of religions they didn't already know about?
I know only of one story off the top of my head, I’ll see if I can find a source. There was a group of missionaries deep in a rural area of Africa trying to reach this remote village. After several days traveling by elephant, they finally make it. When they get there, the whole village gets super excited, and after the missionaries explain who they are and what they’re doing, the village elders inform them that their holy man had a dream from an unknown god that a white monkey would come in riding an elephant to tell them about his son.
I may have blurred the details there but you get the gist.
I don’t know if this counts but I have personally met someone who was raised Protestant and converted to Catholicism after having a vision of Joan of Arc while on holiday during a study abroad in college. She was studying in Germany, but had gone on a cycling trip to France. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she stopped for lunch in Joan of Arc’s home village, and had the vision while out in a meadow eating. She didn’t know who the saint was or anything about Catholicism at the time. I’ve heard of other Marian apparitions along those lines, where the person might theoretically know about Catholicism but have no idea who this woman appearing to them is.
I mean if it's a miracle, it doesn't have to be consistent right? Isn't (one of) the general idea(s) that the naughty rationalists don't get to see it or analyse it.
Nope! The Vatican encourages scientific exploration to guard against the faithful being misled by false miracles.
Crying emjoi!
Laughing emoji
You might thing they’re dumb but that’s the official stance. That’s why they allowed samples of the Shroud of Turin to be examined by non-sympathetic scientists. They didn’t have to do that lol.
From the literal Catechism of the Catholic Church:
159 Faith and Reason: “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”“Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.”
I don't actually think the Catholic church is dumb at all - for a system to last that long it most likely is quite an effective system.
But the specifics of this kind of thing are funny/crazy at times right.
There's a long history of faked relics, faked miracles, and con artists using the credulity of the masses to make money, as well as honest but mistaken people claiming they saw things which were apparitions or miracles. Add in the tendency of some people to claim to be seers and who go completely off the reservation and end up forming their own little cults, and that is why the Church is cagey about "so some guy/gal in Nowheresville claims Jesus is appearing every Thursday in their living room and giving them special divine revelations? And there are starting to be crowds turning up to witness this? Uh-huh, let's look into it".
What the Reformers in England liked to do was go around to monasteries and shrines and destroy alleged miraculous items or statues etc. that had been venerated and were the centre of pilgrimages, in order to prove the deception, deceit, and falsity of the Roman Catholic Church (and by contrast, how right, pure and faithful the new Anglican Church was) e.g. the Holy Blood of Hailes and so forth:
"Cromwell’s men were also instructed to hunt down any evidence of superstitious practices among the monks and nuns, notably the keeping of relics. They soon returned stories of a host of fake relics being used to impress or intimidate the occupants of the houses. A phial of liquid believed to be the blood of Christ was proven to contain only the blood of a duck, while a bottle containing ‘Our Ladies milke’ was ‘broken and founde but a peece of chalke’. Cromwell made sure that stories such as these were well publicised in order to pour scorn on the monasteries, and thus help to justify their dissolution."
(Borman, Tracy. Thomas Cromwell: The untold story of Henry VIII's most faithful servant). Hodder & Stoughton.)
Of course, the reformers had their own agenda in proving such to be fakes, so I do wonder about how much 'proof' was actually "well we couldn't find anything so we just said we did". But that's a different question.
How did they prove, in the 17th century, that the blood was specifically from a duck? Taste?
Another weakness of the theory is that it means the children just got very lucky that A) the weather cooperated and B) the posited psychology mechanism exists. It also seems like the Italian Marian apparition apparently independently verified as happening on the same day as the original Fatima apparition should count for something, too.
The children getting "lucky" is basically just the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. They didn't say what manner of miracle would be performed, merely that one would. If we didn't have this miracle, we'd get a different one, because you had a whole crowd of religious people waiting for a miracle to happen (and, therefore, anything seeming sufficiently miraculous would be taken as such).
We can take it a step further, and note the anthropic aspect: the only reason we're discussing the Fatima miracle is that something *did* happen, and enough people agreed it was miraculous. Had nothing like that happened, the children would have been in trouble, and the whole event long forgotten.
I take your point, but I think you’re mistaken here.
It seems very implausible that people would just make up a miracle if nothing had happened. It’s tantamount to saying that when a big crowd gets together expecting supernatural intervention, they (always? usually? sometimes?) get a positive result. But that is an empirical claim that I am not inclined to accept, though would be open to evidence.
But even if I granted that, remember that not everyone was expecting the miracle. The proposal at the end relies on objective, external conditions obtaining. The skeptics (and many of the religious people, too—we aren’t simpletons lol) would not have accepted that sort of “miracle.” The children would have to have gotten very lucky that they wound up with JUST the right conditions to end up with something observable by atheists and Catholics alike.
The assumption of the anthropic principle as you use it would seem to be that actually, tens of thousands of people gather expecting Marian apparitions quite regularly, and usually they’re disappointed. This is just the weird fluke where everyone actually saw something by chance. Since this relies on an empirical premise it’s hard to evaluate, and also hard to know what it even implies. Is that a reason to think these people DIDN’T witness something?
This is not the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. This was a called shot on a target that wasn't the minimum possible size.
Imagine it wasn't two young children who predicted the right time and place six months in advance. Imagine it was a psychologist and an eye doctor who said, six months in advance: Hey, I bet if we get a bunch of people to stare at the sun, they will collectively decide they saw something unusual. Then what happened happens.
Would we dismiss these two for not preregistering the exact results? They would probably be celebrated. Not as much as if they predicted exactly the sun falling and color changing, but you would still here about them today.
The actual children said come here and the laws of the universe will be suspended. People came, and witnessed something so inexplicable that its requiring rewriting our understanding of laws of the universe (brand new optical illusions interacting with brand psychology)
They would be celebrated, but not their non-existent explanation. It would be legitimate to say it's a lucky, maybe educated guess. Same as with the discovery of penicilin.
You might appreciate the incredulity the children met with in their earliest reports. They got lucky on just once but many times,
Alexander Scott, it's always a delight to read your crystal-clear thinking and intellectually honest, deep analysis. This blog post is truly epic and fascinating. But one point surprised me to a stronger degree. You consider the Philippines video as plausibly showing real variations in brightness (while aknowledging that you're unsure). I disagree on this specific point and, on the contrary, I think it constitutes evidence in favor of collective enthusiasm or suggestion bordering on hallucination.
I'm not a professional, but I enjoy playing with cameras as much as anyone, and to me it's blatantly obvious that the variations in brightness of the setting sun in this video are simply caused by the camera's automatic brightness correction reacting to the movement of the person holding it. Because yes, the guy (or woman) is definitely not standing still, but moving slightly up and down. The brightness variations are clearly correlated with that motion (with perhaps a tiny delay).
It's true that the variations in brightness coincide with the "oooh" and "aaah" reactions from the crowd, but that's because the movement of the person holding the camera is also correlated with the general level of excitement or collective trance.
The camera is pointing at a transition zone, a threshold where the bottom of the image is dark and the top is bright. At such a threshold, even a tiny downward movement is enough to make the auto-correction blow out the upper part (overexposure). This is especially true with ordinary cameras from a few years ago, before true HDR, multiple sensors, AI chips, etc.
It's possible the person was perfectly aware that they were playing with that threshold to create the desired effect, but it could also have been something its brain noticed without full conscious awareness.
Why am I so confident about this? Because I've often played with that kind of effect using devices that struggle to adjust brightness under similar conditions. Want a more dramatic sky? Just lower the camera a bit. Even with more modern devices, my experience is that taking pictures (or even more so, filming) at sunset often results in odd brightness corrections and even strange color shifts. I filmed a video this summer during unusual twilight weather, and the result was totally weird, despite being shot with a Pixel 8 Pro using the best settings.
My feeling is that it's almost surprising we don't see many more videos showing miraculous colors and brightness in the sky at this kind of gathering, given how easy it is to obtain odd results with a standard camera (without even mentioning editing and post-production)
PS: I'm not a stargazer, but I'm pretty sure I've witnessed some of the effects described here when looking at the sun on various occasions in my life, notably during sunsets. The usual afterimage, changing colors, blinking, possibly motion or spinning (though I'm less confident about those). Overall, strange things. But honestly, scotomas and ophthalmic migraines are even more impressive. The source is clearly the visual system, not the sun or God.
I’ve seen a few comments arguing the video was caused by camera movements, but you are the first person I’ve seen to argue that the guy was moving the camera in order to sync up with the crowd (because cameraman himself was part of the crowd!)
It’s a nice contribution to this discussion. I hope your comment gets featured when Scott does the inevitable “Comments on X” post that he usually does when a post generates a lot of discussion.
Here an email (1. April 2020) of me writing my computational vision professor which is an expert in neurology and vision. This event was very impactful at the time and I'm really glad I wasn't alone in witnessing it, it was the most supernatural phenomenon that I have experienced in my life. It felt like falling out of this world, falling out of the matrix or similar. If I wouldn't have experienced it first hand, I would have laughed at it, but having experienced it, well it was extremely special and I can imagine how if something of that significance happens to a religious person, it would make them a strong believer. Anways here the mail:
"""
I am a former student from <my_univserity> and I have a question for you.
Excuse the long email, but I could not explain the situation shorter.
I had an interesting event happen to me in summer in the US, Los Angeles last year. Which kinda seems very odd to me and I can not really explain it. My girlfriend and me were walking down a wide road in the suburbs of LA. It was 3.45pm and a sunny, blue sky day. There was no single cloud anywhere around us. The road was in usual US style broad and the houses on both sides of the road where 1-2stories high. Now we were both walking home and watching the boardwalk in front of us looking 5-10 meters in front of us, when suddenly it got dark, it felt like a very fast solar eclipse, it only lasted around 0.8-1.0s. The weird thing was, that it was not a single spot in front of us, that got darker, but the whole visual field/the whole area in front of us. Also it was not a hard shadow of an object, but kind of a soft shadow, like really very similar to a solar eclipse. We both immediately looked up but saw nothing and then looked at each other and asked ourselves what that was, but we both had no clue. I have never in my life experienced something like that and if there were not another person present who also experienced it, it would have made me question my sanity. There were some thoughts I had while it happened. My first thought was: 1. Who turned of the sun? Followed by, what unlogical thoughts are you thinking, nobody can turn of the sun. The only other feeling I had, was as if something big flew over us very fast.
Now I have searched for this phenomena online and was surprised to find some very similar sounding descriptions of this phenomena. The site is just a forum and sounds very unreliable and conspiracy theory like, but I just wanted to mention it: http://test.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread380219/pg1
Now I came up and read various theories what could have caused this, but the fact that both me and her saw it at the same time made me abandon all subjective theories, like it was just a glitch in my brain or my visual cortex. Which leads me to believe it was something external which affected both her and me.
Sunburn: We were at the beach the whole day and this could have been, if the event weren't so short and at the same time for both of us.
Sun rays not being everywhere continuously: I read the theory, that the sun does not emit always continuously light everywhere and that there are small gaps sometimes in between the light. I have never heard of this and it sounds improbable to me.
Magnetic field messing with both our brains: This is the theory which seems the most likely to me. At 10am that day there was a small earthquake at the beach and also at 2pm another small earthquake. I read that earthquakes can cause small changes in earths magnetic field.
I am reaching out to you in the hope that you could help me shed a bit light on this phenomena which happened to us. I would consider myself a quite scientific person and because it is concerning the visual field, I thought you might have an idea or might have heard about this before and know an explanation. How likely do you consider the earthquake magnetic influence theory? Have you heard of studies or more scientific avenues than a random forum, looking into this phenomena? In any case thank you for reading and thank you in case you find time to respond to this and I am curious to hear your thoughts.
Best wishes
"""
He did respond really quickly, but was at a loss for an explanation as well.
I tried to form a world model including that experience for a few months, but had to give up and just accept, that I can't explain everything, which for me is a very odd thought, because I would say I can explain nearly everything in the world, not in a detailed way, but in a "I know what books I would have to read or what the relevant keywords are or experts to ask", in a bounded error for the mental box of phenomena way. But this experience truly defied any explanation. After a while I simply stopped thinking about it, nothing much to be done since it never happened again.
Wouldn't that be a plane, or a bigger object even more distant, like ISS/satellite or an even farther celestial body like a meteor passing between the sun and the earth ? I had the experience with a plane (glider), however it was easy to spot the cause of the brief darkening. But the farther the object, the bigger and smoother the shadow.
Edit :Afterthougth. My guess is wrong, sorry. It would need the object to have an apparent diameter similar to that of the sun (like the moon). It could still be the good explanation. In my case, I saw the glider but not as easily as you could have think, because It was close to the sun.
> There are many statements in the diocesan inquiry which I was unable to get, because they were in Portuguese (and on paper, and therefore not machine-translatable).
Confused by this; can't you just take a picture or scan and upload it to ChatGPT? It will hallucinate some details, but you can use a few different trials across different AIs to see what details remain consistent.
The first one was 600 pages long.
I was reading this by a window and did not manage to resist the temptation
I read it at night and recommend others do likewise
I'm not going to chime in on whether I think this miracle is real or not. I've never been particularly interested in Marian apparitions, despite the soaking you get in them (or used to, at least) growing up Catholic in Ireland.
I would just like to note that one of the alternate explanations for "this wasn't a miracle" is that it was aliens. Yep. Since *clearly* miracles don't happen, and the sun doesn't behave like that, what was it people were seeing? Obviously it had to be a UFO! That explains the small circular object coming close and then retreating, rotating, etc.
Don't take this as proof of God, take it as proof of UFOs! 😁
"Sungazing is an ancient spiritual practice which, like most ancient spiritual practices, was invented by a 1900s quack doctor. According to its practitioners, staring at the sun for long periods heals your eyesight, improves your health, and confers spiritual benefits."
Thank you for this, now I know where Chesterton got his inspiration for the story "The Eye of Apollo":
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/204/204-h/204-h.htm#chap10
"The building was American in its sky-scraping altitude, and American also in the oiled elaboration of its machinery of telephones and lifts. But it was barely finished and still understaffed; only three tenants had moved in; the office just above Flambeau was occupied, as also was the office just below him; the two floors above that and the three floors below were entirely bare. But the first glance at the new tower of flats caught something much more arresting. Save for a few relics of scaffolding, the one glaring object was erected outside the office just above Flambeau’s. It was an enormous gilt effigy of the human eye, surrounded with rays of gold, and taking up as much room as two or three of the office windows.
“What on earth is that?” asked Father Brown, and stood still. “Oh, a new religion,” said Flambeau, laughing; “one of those new religions that forgive your sins by saying you never had any. Rather like Christian Science, I should think. The fact is that a fellow calling himself Kalon (I don’t know what his name is, except that it can’t be that) has taken the flat just above me. I have two lady typewriters underneath me, and this enthusiastic old humbug on top. He calls himself the New Priest of Apollo, and he worships the sun.”
“Let him look out,” said Father Brown. “The sun was the cruellest of all the gods. But what does that monstrous eye mean?”
“As I understand it, it is a theory of theirs,” answered Flambeau, “that a man can endure anything if his mind is quite steady. Their two great symbols are the sun and the open eye; for they say that if a man were really healthy he could stare at the sun.”
“If a man were really healthy,” said Father Brown, “he would not bother to stare at it.”
“Well, that’s all I can tell you about the new religion,” went on Flambeau carelessly. “It claims, of course, that it can cure all physical diseases.”
...Once Flambeau entered her office on some typewriting business, and found she had just flung a pair of spectacles belonging to her sister into the middle of the floor and stamped on them. She was already in the rapids of an ethical tirade about the “sickly medical notions” and the morbid admission of weakness implied in such an apparatus. She dared her sister to bring such artificial, unhealthy rubbish into the place again. She asked if she was expected to wear wooden legs or false hair or glass eyes; and as she spoke her eyes sparkled like the terrible crystal.
Flambeau, quite bewildered with this fanaticism, could not refrain from asking Miss Pauline (with direct French logic) why a pair of spectacles was a more morbid sign of weakness than a lift, and why, if science might help us in the one effort, it might not help us in the other.
“That is so different,” said Pauline Stacey, loftily. “Batteries and motors and all those things are marks of the force of man—yes, Mr. Flambeau, and the force of woman, too! We shall take our turn at these great engines that devour distance and defy time. That is high and splendid—that is really science. But these nasty props and plasters the doctors sell—why, they are just badges of poltroonery. Doctors stick on legs and arms as if we were born cripples and sick slaves. But I was free-born, Mr. Flambeau! People only think they need these things because they have been trained in fear instead of being trained in power and courage, just as the silly nurses tell children not to stare at the sun, and so they can’t do it without blinking. But why among the stars should there be one star I may not see? The sun is not my master, and I will open my eyes and stare at him whenever I choose.”
“Your eyes,” said Flambeau, with a foreign bow, “will dazzle the sun.” He took pleasure in complimenting this strange stiff beauty, partly because it threw her a little off her balance. But as he went upstairs to his floor he drew a deep breath and whistled, saying to himself: “So she has got into the hands of that conjurer upstairs with his golden eye.” For, little as he knew or cared about the new religion of Kalon, he had heard of his special notion about sun-gazing."
This couldn't be the effect of hallucinogens, potentially via smoke or similar in the local area? You can apparently smoke shrooms, but the effect is lessened and inconsistent. Could something like this not produce a similar localized-but-inconsistent effect, that hits everyone at about the same time?
I'll note that I sometimes hallucinate the approach of things I know are stationary. Usually the ground or walls, but sometimes the ceiling. I recall one occasion where the clouds gave the impression that they were falling to earth and would become fog in minutes. As far as I know that's not a thing that happens, but my eyes were convinced I was seeing it. Of course, when I mentioned it to my friend, she just gave me an odd look and called me crazy.
This is one of your best posts yet! As it happens, I have phone footage that looks remarkably similar to the last video you shared, which should be helpful. I’ll try to get it to you soon!
The dancing sun videos remind me of crown flash [1], which is (to me at least) one of the weirdest and most supernatural-looking weather phenomena I've come across. Here's an example I found randomly on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGKC1hZQSog though there are others too
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_flash
Amazingly written and very thorough. My only question is why the conclusion is phrased so tentatively, given all of the videos of people witnessing other sun miracles? Of course something like that is going to be the right answer. A bunch of people conditioned themselves to see a miracle and then stared at the sun, causing them to see things that the sun obviously didn't really do, and their reports are pretty inconsistent because of course they are.
Still an amazing write-up but you could have just led with the videos. What happened at Fatima? Something just like these.
> remarkable close
Typo
Typo thread?
>We will at try to at least do better
I’m reading “Meeting the Witnesses” - on p. 54 a witness called Higino Faria aims to have been “completely cured” by the miracle. The sickness in question was minor (“a severe cold and hoarseness”), so I take it that a psychosomatic explanation works here. But off the top of your head, were there other reported healings at Fatima, or is this report a one off?
"The Halifax Slasher was a typical supercriminal story."
If we're doing stories "ripped from the pages of The Fortean Times", I think my favourite has to be The Mad Gasser of Mattoon. Just the name alone is wonderful!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon
"The Mad Gasser of Mattoon (also known as the "Anesthetic Prowler", the "Phantom Anesthetist", or simply the "Mad Gasser") was the name given to an event of alleged mass hysteria in which a person or people allegedly committed a series of apparent gas attacks in Mattoon, Illinois, during the mid-1940s. More than two dozen separate cases of gassings were reported to police over the span of two weeks, in addition to many more reported sightings of the suspected assailant. The gasser's supposed victims reported smelling strange odors in their homes which were soon followed by symptoms such as paralysis of the legs, coughing, nausea and vomiting. No one died or had serious medical consequences as a result of the gas attacks."
I used to read a Catholic blog that thought the original Medjugorje miracles were fake, but that when the place started getting wider notice the Virgin Mary took advantage of the increased attention to do some real miracles. Opportunistic divine miracles.
Mary: sigh. Fine.
I have some experience with programming camera's to react to light levels. In short: optic sensors have an 'integration time' over which charge accumulates, when the sensor is read, the charge is dissipated. This can be programmatically varied typically between a few microseconds to tens of seconds. The value read by the sensor mostly varies linearly with the exposure time, but must be compressed into an 8-bit value, typically using a non-linear function such as logarithm which roughly matches how humans perceive light levels. Typically, the exposure time is adjusted to fit the majority of sensor values in the 8-bit range, attempting to minimize the number of over/under exposed pixels. For a given scene, increasing the exposure time will brighten everything, at the extreme end everything will be white. Decreasing exposure time will have the opposite effect, making everything darker until it's all black. Because of the logarithmic function, this will not happen evenly across the image, but it will affect everything including shadows and other surfaces not in direct exposure that are primarily ambient light. While watching these videos, it's worth remembering that most of our ambient light comes from scattering in the upper atmosphere, so for dimming of the sun to affect ambient light significantly, the interference would either have to be exo-atmospheric or large enough to affect a wide region (think massive obvious storm-cloud taking up most of the sky), while a change of exposure will automatically affect everything, including apparent ambient light levels (shadowed regions of the image will get brighter so long as they are not under-exposed).
When adjusting these values, you are typically relying on the values read from the sensor itself, to predict what exposure you need to use on your next readout, thus changing conditions can cause a mis-prediction, or a large adjustment that will cause the entire scene to change apparent brightness. This is what appears to me to be happening in the linked videos.
For example, in "miracolo del sole medjugorje" we see the sun is clearly overexposed while the majority of the scene is visible. At about 11 seconds, there is some sort of glitch in the system and we see a frame with an odd hatch pattern that is clearly some sort of failure in the image processing pipeline that appears to coincide with a slight zooming in of the scene. After this we start to get frames where everything is much darker, but typically only a frame at a time. At ~13 seconds, there is a 4 box grid superimposed over the sun, which looks like the digital overlay a camera puts on an object it's trying to focus on, though usually on the camera display and not the video itself. This suggests to me the person holding the camera is attempting to get the camera to focus on the sun specifically (which makes sense given the context), and the predictive algorithm isn't sure where to set its exposure and ends up flipping between two. Notice that when the frame is dark the sun appears smaller because fewer pixels are oversaturated, and other bright regions like the silver linings of clouds are still quite visible while dimmer objects have become pure black. I also note that there is a tree branch almost directly in line with the sun, such that sometimes the leaves are partially occluding the sun itself, which may be contributing to the predictive algorithm freaking out (remember, the algorithm is predictive, so the branch being in front of the sun influences future frames, not the frame it just took).
In "PRIEST IN MEDJUGORJE POSTS...", the sun appears normal, then appears to expand to fill the sky with overexposed white pixels, then shrinks back down to normal. However, notice the brightness of everything else in the scene while this happens: it also changes (in non-linear relation to what's going on with the sun), indicating a change in the exposure times. Furthermore, if you pause the video at say 0:23 (just as the sun begins to expand), take a screenshot, paste that screenshot into GIMP (or other photo editing software), and then use the exposure adjustment tool, it pretty much perfectly emulates the brightness changes seen in-video, including the apparent expansion of the sun in the sky.
In "Witness the ‘Dancing Sun’" we see a similar phenomena of the sun appearing to expand and contract in the sky. However, these also show the same effect of the rest of the scene getting brighter/darker matching a change in exposure and coincident increase of overexposed pixels surrounding the sun. These changes frequently match the camera motion: when the camera is pointed further down such that more of the scene captures the crowd while the sun is more isolated to the top of the photo, the sun expands and the scene brightens showing the crowd more clearly. When the sun is more centered, it darkens and shrinks and the crowd becomes darker and more obscured, again matching a pattern of exposure changes. Again, changing the exposure setting in GIMP largely reproduces this effect module some changes in color balance. As for why the crowd appears to clap in sync with this, my best guess is the sun being low on the horizon is legitimately affecting its brightness over time due to clouds or other atmospheric interference, and that is affecting the exposure predictions along with the motions of the camera. Regardless, it's clearly an exposure response since the entire scene is modulated (eg: the trees, of which we primarily see shadowed due to the low sun angle, get brighter/dark, as do the underside of the bleachers.
Since even in the darkest frames, the sun is still over-exposed (yea, the sun is very bright), we can never really see the sun itself and therefor can only speculate what people are witnessing personally. However, I think we can confidently say the phenomena the camera itself is witnessing is just an artifact of either changing or mis-predicted frame exposure times butting up against the small one-byte dynamic range brightness information is necessarily crammed into to make a digital photograph. Fun fact, software derived HDR imagery is just the process of taking multiple photographs at different exposure levels, using that to reconstruct a larger chunk of brightness information than 8-bits, then re-compressing it back into 8-bits but with a different scaling value so fewer pixels are over/under exposed.
I commented in the same direction, as well as other commentators, but your analysis is by far the best.
I think I slightly but permanently damaged my eyes by looking briefly at a partial solar eclipse, in a way that has not entered any medical records.
I didn't have eclipse glasses, and I figured that I accidentally get sun in my eyes sometimes, so I decided to chance a quick glance. I was indeed able to see that the sun was partially eclipsed, and I looked away immediately. But right away I had the sense that looking straight at it had been worse than the accidental exposures I had used to justify the risk. I had a really strong afterimage right at the center of my field of vision that was still pretty strong after a few minutes and never actually fully went away. It doesn't prevent me from seeing anything, and I can successfully ignore it most of the time, but it's there.
(It's possible it was already there and I just started paying attention to it after the eclipse incident. Subjectively, I don't think it was)
I think this is waaaaay more common than people believe. Also it is really hard to tell subjectively the difference between temporary even for a few months spots of blindness which heal after a while or actual permanently dead blind spots, which get filtered out by saccades and neural processing. I once was curious and looked at the sun, when it was very low on the horizon with a similar logic as you, luckily never directly looking at it, but keeping it in the periphery. It was a beautiful experience, just an amazing sunset, but I think I got some temporary blind spots after that. Imo they went away, but I never really tested if the spots were temporary or not.
About the fire and brimstone hell described by the children:
The whole "getting tortured for eternity" thing never made sense to me because of the way my body copes with pain. When I get hurt, I dissociate. My lizard brain takes over while my conscious mind takes a backseat and only does enough work to figure out how to prevent long term damage from whatever is going on. If long term damage happens anyways, I find a way to cope and life goes on. Eternal torture would likely result in me losing my mind completely and becoming some kind of cenobite. Is it not like that for everyone?
I imagine real hell would be more akin to having severe depression and panic attacks for all eternity but there's living people who experience that daily. It's hard to imagine how hell could be worse.
I have never had the pleasure of disassociating or passing out.
Before I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, my iron levels got so low that I came near to passing out on two separate occasions: once after lifting a 40-pound bag of water softener salt onto a shopping cart, and once after getting a needle stuck into my tricep while volunteering for the medical assistant students at my community college (I don't like needles any more than the next guy, but volunteers got free snacks and the students were mostly Latinas around my age). On both occasions, I became lightheaded, my vision went black, I couldn't hear anything but blood rushing in my ears, and a mixture of nausea and general unpleasantness came on so strong that I--I mean, frankly I was ready to just die, but I would've accepted passing out as a substitute. No dice: I got to be awake through the whole slow recovery process.
I ended up getting my intestine cut out. About two years later, I woke up with intense pain in my lower abdomen and in my shoulders. In short and in layman's terms, my intestines were coming apart and leaking digestive gases into my abdomen (medically, my ileal j-pouch--installed three years prior during my proctocolectomy due to treatment-resistant ulcerative colitis--had a microperforation as a result of chronic pouchitis).
The pain is difficult to quantify. I'd had plenty of needles stuck in me, including more than a few medication autoinjectors (the old formula Humira, which burned as it went in), and in general I was a healthy young man--intestinal stuff notwithstanding. I'm not bothered by pain most of the time, although, funny enough, little static shocks make me genuinely angry in a way almost nothing else does.
In any case, it will have to suffice to say that I could not lift my arms to knock on my father's door that morning; I had to headbutt the door instead, and eventually managed to drop my hand onto the door handle to open it. He drove me to the nearest emergency room--
Where I waited for sixteen hours before going in for surgery ("exploratory laparotomy with j-pouch resection" is such a delightful phrase).
During that time, I received two doses of morphine and one fresh bag of IV fluids, so I was not only in searing pain but also severely dehydrated (my condition means I don't absorb water well, and on a typical day will drink 4-6 L electrolyte-fortified water). Having worked as a patient transporter, I'd never understood the patients who just sat there moaning until that day. I was a quiet guy at the time--I hate making unnecessary noise, though as I get older I've gotten better at taking up space--but I could not stop myself simply moaning for a good portion of that time.
As a side note, this problem has come up three times since, although none as severe as the first; I have to remember when I go in and am asked to rate my pain that my "10" is somewhat higher than normal (xkcd 883). Whether it were better or worse than the pain of childbirth I cannot (and do not care to) know, but I think I can at least claim to understand something of the magnitude.
To your second point: hell could incorporate forms of suffering other than simple pain. When I woke up from this surgery, I discovered I'd been given an NG tube--naso gastric, running through the nose, down the throat, and into the stomach. While my pain tolerance is pretty high, my gag reflex is sensitive; any motion of the tube relative to my head would cause spasms which threatened to cause vomiting. To solve this, I'd keep the free end tucked into the pocket of my hospital gown, and I'd reach up and hold the tube when I needed to turn my head. This worked well enough while I was awake, so long as I didn't cough, sneeze, laugh, or hiccup. Of course, the moment I'd start to fall asleep, my head would move slightly, and I'd wake up gagging.
They removed the tube on my third and final day in the hospital, once my bowels had resumed their usual function, and I slept off-and-on for 12 hours. For about a week afterwards, every time I turned my head, I'd instinctively panic and reach up to grab a phantom NG tube. If I wanted to torture somebody for eternity, I'd just stick one of those into them, removing it periodically for a day or so to prevent death from sleep deprivation.
Also worth noting that many of the people who suffer from the conditions you list choose to deliberately stop living rather than continue, but the condemned would have no such escape.
Minor typographical correction: some of the text above the Dalleur map refers to figures in miles but it is in km on the map. For example, “Afonso Vieria, famous writer, 30 miles away” seems to refer to map item 1 that is 34 km from Fatima.
I wonder if there’s something involved with (1) which wavelengths of light trigger your pupil to contract, (2) which wavelengths are filtered by clouds, (3) which wavelengths cause retinal damage, (4), variation in items 1 and maybe 3 across the population, (5) variation in item 2 depending on where you are standing.
There could end up being a statistical distribution of how much eye damage occurred among people in a position to see something. This might help with the minority who saw more specific imagery that seems like hallucinations.
It's pretty obvious to me that the child-seers all ignored the advice given earlier to them not to look into the sun, found out you get awesome hallucinations if you do (especially if on a cloudy day), and confabulated their story into a a prophecy to convince other people to look into the sun, and because of the religious implications, the natural reaction wasn't 'wow these kids figured out something about looking at the sun', but 'wow these kids are prophets'.
This seems like something that would happen at a reasonable frequency.
When it comes to the testimony of Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio (who said that educated people didn't see something while uneducated people did) I think the best way to interpret what she said was that everyone saw the sun dance and turn silver etc. (which is why she says everyone saw that at the beginning) but that only uneducated people saw Jesus, Joseph, and Mary (aka the celestial court or the celestial apparition) and that was the proof of the apparitions she was looking for that was found lacking. I don't think her testimony provides good evidence of some people not seeing the sun miracle. When she says the educated people didn't see the celestial apparition she is talking about the appearance of Joseph, Jesus, and Mary not the sun miracle itself.
A relatively minor point, but: Pope Pius XII claimed to have witnessed the Miracle of the Sun from the Vatican Gardens on 30 and 31 October, as well as 1 and 8 November 8 1950. Apparently, he was planning at the time to confirm the Assumption of Mary as a dogma, and took this as a sign from God that he was on the right track. Obviously -- if we assume the Pope or somebody else isn't just flat out lying -- Dalleur's explanation doesn't work at all here. As much as in Benin, someone would DEFINITELY have noticed a giant luminous UFO hovering over Rome or its suburbs on an October afternoon in 1950.
Unfortunately, a quick google search did not turn up any records on the weather in Rome that week, but I would be very interested to know whether it was rainy or not. Maybe someone more diligent than I am can hunt up some yellowing Roman newspaper archives or meteorological observations.
That's a gigantic nerd-snipe
FWIW, I see visual hallucinations all the time. Usually it's a sign that I didn't quite read, so the missing part is filled in with...some word. I probably only notice this when the word is especially inappropriate. To me this seems similar to the way the blind spot gets filled in, and people just don't notice. So I EXPECT visual noise to lead to images that echo frequently seen things...echo, but not duplicate. So the elves and leprechauns that you mention are reasonable, but so are religious symbols that are frequently gazed upon. This is *my* explanation for "bigfoot" sightings, and it works just as well for things like this, where that is intentional strain placed on the visual system. Also people talk to each other, and like to agree on what they've seen, except when they intentionally want to stand out. So they tend to use the same words to describe the same thing even when it's inappropriate. (Just yesterday I did a search and found a bunch of different reports that described a galaxy as "sparkling", when what appears to have been meant by the original source is that there were a lot of bright blue stars at the periphery. But most reports said it was sparkling.)
>others from setting up a pipeline of PDF splitters, OCR software, and machine translation
What tools did you use for this? I have a Russian mathematical paper I've been meaning to read, but the length of it seems to make most PDF translation tools choke.
As I implied in my previous comment, I really don't see what the big deal is here (admittedly, I only skimmed the middle parts of the article). If you stare at the sun just a little bit, you'll start seeing all kinds of visual aberrations, usually manifesting as colorful spots in your field of view, as your retinas overload. Stare a bit longer, and you'll start getting semi-permanent retinal damage and thus much stronger aberrations. Staring at the sun is less damaging when it's dimmed, either due to the time of day, or due to being behind a cloud, or both.
Normally people have enough common sense not to stare at the sun, even when it's behind a cloud. But when they're caught up in mass religious fervor, common sense takes a back seat, and the placebo effect makes it harder to even notice the pain -- especially if the prophesied event starts off with the sun being dimmed, making it easier for the few early adopters to stare at it and get everyone else caught up in the feeling.
This scenario is consistent with most (arguably all) of the evidence. Lots of positive testimonies, check. Weird visual phenomena, check. A few negative testimonies (from observers who were not swept up in the wave of fervor and thus did not stare directly at the sun), check. Failure to record video evidence, check (digital cameras have different failure modes from human eyes). Repeat sightings, check (all you need are the sun, some clouds, and a bunch of hyped-up true believers). Sure, some kind of a sundog or a nimbus or a double rainbow or whatever would be helpful as well, but not strictly necessary.
Am I missing anything ?
I fully agree. However, the case was impressive and strong, testimony-wise, and deserved the meticulous discussion that Scott offered to us. After this work has been done, reaching a reasonable conclusion, it is tempting to think that it was simple and blatant from the beginning. But to me it is the sign that Scott did a great job.
As a Catholic, I'll share a few thoughts.
First, SA's explanation is plausible but still rather unlikely. The prophecies could create the priming, but not the weather event. Even if this is a relatively common weather event, it's still somewhat remarkable timing - my local metereologists cannot reliably predict rain even a few days out. And that's before you factor in everything else that isn't explained: the distant witnesses, the other visions, etc.
Second, I make very little of the fact that many people subsequently claimed to see similar miracles. Of course they did, Fatima is one of the most well-known miracles in the 20th century, and a huge number of people will fabricate or hallucinate something similar. The Church itself admits that fakery of miracles is common, even among genuine believers, that's why they are offiically investigated and treated with a great deal of skpeticism. Notably, the Church to this day refuses to give the official label of approval to Medjugorje. So I'd be more persuaded by similar phenomena reported *prior* to Fatima.
Third, fighting over miracles seems to me a bit beside the point, even if I were more engaged in whatever's left of the internet atheism wars. Individual Catholics are not obliged to buy into any particular miracle or saint. The Church's teaching on faith and morals is considered infallible and obligatory on all Catholics; that rule has never been extended to specific saints or miracles. So in the extremely unlikely event that Fatima could be conclusively disproved, the Church's dicastery for these things would take a big credibility hit, and many individual Catholics might feel their faith was shaken, but I personally would not change any of my theological views. I suppose this only works to my advantage if I'm arguing with atheists: if Fatima is a miracle their belief system is conclusively disproven, if it isn't, nothing changes for me (other than perhaps an increased skepticism of other Church-approved miracles). But I'm not sure all secularists are aware of this aspect of Catholic theology, and they probably should be.
> Even if this is a relatively common weather event, it's still somewhat remarkable timing - my local metereologists cannot reliably predict rain even a few days out.
Some selection effects are at work. If the crowd had gathered and nothing had happened, no one but perhaps enthusiasts of Portuguese history and visionary experiences would have ever heard of Fatima, and Scott wouldn't have written this substack post. I suspect there are plenty more instances where someone predicted a miracle, people showed up, and nothing happened, though I admit I don't know any of the top of my head (and, precisely because nothing happened, they've probably left a smaller documentary footprint).
Would it be a coincidence? Sure. Is such a coincidence -- granted this is a relatively common phenomenon -- less likely than the hypothesis that this really was a visitation of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God? On my view, taking the rest of the evidence for and against Christianity into account, no.
>Second, I make very little of the fact that many people subsequently claimed to see similar miracles. Of course they did, Fatima is one of the most well-known miracles in the 20th century, and a huge number of people will fabricate or hallucinate something similar.
I'm not sure this really matters. All that matters is that -- if Scott's readings of these other "sun miracles" at Lubbock, Benin, Medjugorje, etc. are correct -- then the phenomenon reported by the crowd at Fatima is reproducible, and probably natural, since we know there was nothing objectively unnatural going on with the sun at those places and times.
> then the phenomenon reported by the crowd at Fatima is reproducible, and probably natural
That’s exactly my point - if the criteria for reproduction is “people say they saw the same thing under natural conditions” then of course you’re going to be flooded with false claims of having seen the same thing over the last 100 years. These are not “reproductions” of the Fatima event.
The much more persuasive evidence of this being a relatively common phenomenon would be someone having reported the same thing (as an alleged miracle or otherwise) prior to 1910, or a similar account from someone who is not at all acquainted with or sympathetic to Catholic beliefs (hence, the redditor accounts carry more weight with me, since I assume they are overwhelmingly hostile to and ignorant about organized Christianity).
>then of course you’re going to be flooded with false claims of having seen the same thing over the last 100 years. These are not “reproductions” of the Fatima event.
If dozens or hundreds of people look into the sky and see the same thing the people at Fatima saw, that's a reproduction. Unless you want to claim that later witnesses -- of which there are apparently at least dozens, if not hundreds -- are lying, which I think would be hard to demonstrate. The fact that they were primed to see this phenomenon by prior knowledge of Fatima doesn't matter. Because if what the Fatima crowd saw was truly a unique miracle, then crowds of people shouldn't be able to see the same thing at various later (non-miraculous) times, no matter how hard they want to or expect to.
So two options:
1. This is a fairly common phenomenon, the witnesses at Lubbock, Benin, etc. saw the same thing the crowds at Fatima did.
2. The Fatima witnesses were privy to a miracle. The other witnesses were not. Ergo, since the other witnessess claim to have seen the same "Miracle of the Sun" seen at Fatima, they were either mistaken or lying about what they saw.
I think 1 is more likely, since there seems to be no evidence to suggest that the other witnesses were mistaken or lying.
>The much more persuasive evidence of this being a relatively common phenomenon would be someone having reported the same thing (as an alleged miracle or otherwise) prior to 1910, or a similar account from someone who is not at all acquainted with or sympathetic to Catholic beliefs
I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect this. It's very possible this phenomenon IS only remarkable in this particular context, and therefore we wouldn't expect records of it in a non-Catholic, non-miraculous context. If I was out in the street on a cloudy day, and I decided to stare at the sun for a little while for some reason and it started behaving really weird, I would almost certainly chalk it up to my decision to...stare at the sun. I probably wouldn't tell anybody about it, except maybe offhandedly in conversation with a friend or a family member, and there wouldn't be any record of it. I certainly wouldn't shout "Look at the sun!" and try to get a bunch of people to join me.
Likely the only instances where you would get this kind of group experience is when a great mass of people is gathered, fired up with religious expectation, and fully expecting or at least hoping to see something miraculous. Granting that this is a natural and fairly common but not THAT common phenomenon, it seems totally plausible that Fatima was the first time all of these factors came together, or at least the first time reasonably well recorded.
(e.g, if a bunch of peasants in 1750s Germany ALSO saw the "miracle of the sun" it would be unsurprising if there was no record of it)
> The fact that they were primed to see this phenomenon by prior knowledge of Fatima doesn't matter
I think it matters a lot, because at a minimum it’s not a truly “independent” reproduction, and there’s a much greater risk of motivated reasoning (whereas the actual Fatima miracle involved at least some witnesses who were motivated to believe the opposite).
> or at least the first time reasonably well recorded.
This argument veers into motivated reasoning. Fatima did not happen in the Middle Ages, by the 1910s astronomy was hundreds of years old. Also, the ancients spent thousands of years looking at the sky, often with religious ideas in mind, and many of them did so in a systematic way and/or kept pretty good records. You’re telling me this very scary, unusual solar phenomenon was going on for thousands of years on a regular basis - so regular it happened at bunch of times in the 20th century - and yet nobody wrote it down? Even in the 18th and 19th century? The ancient Greeks, Byzantines, Ottomans, etc all noticed and recorded other phenomena that look supernatural but aren’t - St Elmo’s Fire being an obvious one. It seems extremely unlikely that nobody noticed such a common solar phenomenon until 1910.
>I think it matters a lot, because at a minimum it’s not a truly “independent” reproduction, and there’s a much greater risk of motivated reasoning
If you agree motivated reasoning and staring at the sun can produce miracle reports indistinguishable from those at Fatima, that’s all there is to it. We’ve established no miracle is required to make people say, apparently honestly, “I saw the Miracle of the Sun.”
The argument would have to be that while this can happen with people already aware of Fatima, it’s much less likely to happen to people not expecting the MotS SPECIFICALLY (which would include the original Fatima crowd). I would simply disagreed. I think it’s only a little less plausible that a large group of people gathered in expectation — or at least hope — of A miracle, under favorable atmospheric conditions, would see MotS, even if they were not expecting that in PARTICULAR.
>You’re telling me this very scary, unusual solar phenomenon was going on for thousands of years on a regular basis - so regular it happened at bunch of times in the 20th century - and yet nobody wrote it down? Even in the 18th and 19th century?
thats the thing, MotS might not be all that scary or remarkable outside this very specific context. If Scott is right, sometimes on cloudy days, when you stare at the sun for a little while, it appears to spin, change colors, and move around.
In what circumstances would we expect records of MotS? Most people don’t stare at the sun, ever. I don’t think I’ve ever stared at the sun for more than a second in my life. It’s painful and pointless. And not only do you have to stare at the sun, you have to do it under particular conditions, which while not exceedingly rare, aren’t every day.
Still, we would expect a number of people to have done out of the billions that have lived through human history. But why would we expect records? If a friend told me “hey man I was staring at the sun for a while earlier and then it started spinning and changing colors and moving around” I would say “yeah no shit, why would you stare at the sun?” Like to me, not knowing anything about ophthalmology or meteorology but having experienced weird lights and flashing colors after staring at something bright, that sounds like a totally plausible thing that might happen when you stare at the sun and not really worthy of further consideration.
I really don’t think this would warrant much comment from astronomers or astrologers through history, most of whom were presumably smart enough not to stare at the sun for too long.
Like if you look at the sun and see MotS, on just an ordinary day with no religious significance, the vast majority of people are just going to chalk it up to the effects of staring at the sun for too long and probably won’t ever make any record of it. If they do tell other people, then those OTHER people would chalk it up to “stared at the sun too long.”
The only circumstances where I think it’s reasonable to expect records of this (granting that there aren’t any others — as you note, Scott seems to have found some on reddit) are ones meeting the following conditions:
1. Atmospheric conditions are right
2. A large group of people is gathered in an outdoor space with a good view of the sun
3. That group of people is specifically expecting/hoping to see something otherworldly
4. Mass media, communications, and literacy are developed enough not only to produce a number of witness statements, but to draw onlookers and reporters from well beyond the immediate area
Seems totally plausible to me Fatima is the first time all of those conditions were met.
> The argument would have to be that while this can happen with people already aware of Fatima, it’s much less likely to happen to people not expecting the MotS SPECIFICALLY (which would include the original Fatima crowd).
That’s exactly my argument, and I think it’s pretty well supported by basic human psychology. It’s a lot easier to knowingly fabricate something recognizable or pattern match to what you already know or have heard about - right down to how you describe that experience later to someone else. Realistically, most of it is probably fabrication, since none of it is anywhere near as well documented as Fatima. But the mere fact that after Fatima people faked or hallucinated Fatima-like events says little about whether Fatima was an actual miracle.
As for your point about the ancients not writing things down… I mean, we’ve got example in Scott’s own thread of individuals and small groups writing down solar phenomena that are a lot less remarkable. And we know the ancients recorded plenty of other similarly rare and spooky phenomena like SEF (I encourage you to look into how well this phenomena is historically documented despite being pretty damn rare). The idea that this solar phenomenon is easily observed under the right conditions but never once recorded in thousands of years of human history - including the first several hundred years after the start of astronomy as a formal science and 1900 years after Catholics started writing down miraculous events - is extremely implausible given what gets written down today and know about what was written down in the past.
But if you follow Scott's conclusions, there was nothing truly exceptional with the weather nor the sun. The main element is that people stared at the sun with a strong collective expectation to see something. And at least some had to see something because if anyone stares at the sun, it is inevitable to see visual aberrations, moderate for some and stronger for others. With the eyes of faith and collective enthousiasm, we can expect that a collective hallucination could easily build up on this basis.
You must have read a different post than I did.
The weather is exhaustively discussed in the post, but what I mean is that in the end Scott's cautious conclusion doesn't point at the weather being the central explanation. It's a part of the puzzle, but The other Miracles of the Sun examples and the stargazer's posts on Reddit favor the role of sungazing and psychology. I think you read the post differently because you dismiss the other Miracles of the Sun examples and the stargazers comments. You stay focused on the Fatima case, that is puzzling for sure, while Scott zooms out to find an answer.
> people stared at the sun with a strong collective expectation to see something
My point is that this is neither a description of what Fatima was (at least some people there were committed to *not* seeing anything) nor the phenomenon Scott describes (which requires at least some kind of specific weather, at least cloud cover).
Also, as Scott says in the original post, none of the witnesses mention staring at the sun. Instead, they heard someone say "Hey, look at the sun!", looked up, and saw it already behaving strangely.
Yes, but we can infer at least some were looking, as a cause of the aforementioned disappointment at a lack of a miracle beforehand.
I don't think the straightforward Bayesian approach to this fails in the way that you suggest it might.
Here's my understanding of how you do Bayesian updates: take your two possibilities for how the world might work (God exists, or God doesn't), and the evidence, and then ask how likely it is that you would see this evidence under either hypothesis. The ratio of these likelihoods gives you the factor that you should multiply your prior odds by in order to get your posterior odds.
Here's how I would apply this approach to the Fatima miracle. We are considering this miracle because it is the "final boss" of miracles. This is the event, out of all recorded history, that it is hardest to find a materialist explanation for. So the question we need to ask is: In a world without a God, what is the chance that the hardest event to explain would be about this hard to explain? Similarly, in a world with a God, what is the chance that the hardest miracle to explain in materialist terms would be about this hard to explain? Thought of this way, it seems that the update becomes fairly minor, and it probably won't change much if we also learn about the 2nd hardest example, and 3rd hardest, etc. In fact, phrased this way, the update may even go in the other direction (this is only because we're sneaking in the lack of still more impressive miracles into the one update, but I think that's the right way to approach the problem).
The problem with your framing, where we learn about each potential miracle individually, make an independent Bayesian update, and repeat, until we end up with a high probability of God's existence, is that it misses all the updates we should be making for occasions where miracles could have occurred but didn't. It is the equivalent of doing an independent Bayesian update on every scientific paper in a field that suffers from publication bias.
A lot of people do perform the incredibly naive calculation you describe, estimate a base probability, estimate the evidence under that theory, update. But that is not a grounded or principled approach. In my opinion, it is the core arrogance and stupidity of the rationalist community - that they apply these statistical concepts with great confidence and smugness while actually having little understanding of them.
The standard framework of a statistical tests is that you start with a hypothesis, observe the data, and then, observing the data, you can reject a hypothesis if the observed data had a vanishing chance of occurring under the hypothesis.
The Baysian approach is just this process intuitively extended to having a distribution placed over all possible hypotheses, and then you can update your probability distribution on the hypotheses. It fundamentally isn't coherent if you have an incorrectly specified hypothesis space. In your example, you posit two cases: case i) god exists and case ii) god does not exist. These two cases split the world in half and so seem fair.
But tacitly, the comparison is far more distorted: case i) our current understanding of reality is correct and complete and case ii) our current understanding of reality is incomplete. You are making a false equivalence between our understanding being incorrect / incomplete and god existing.
In short, you conflate rejecting the null hypothesis with accepting the alternate hypothesis.
To make the abstract discussion concrete, if we agree that the miracle seems outside the scope of our current understanding (e.g., of crowd psychology, political reasons to lie about events, eye bio-dynamics, atmospheric dynamics, astronomical events, etc...) then that is only evidence that our current understanding is incomplete (and it could just be that we have an erroneous understanding of any one of those factors).
A more proper Baysian analysis would start with a probability associated with all of those hypotheses (e.g., 10% chance we are wrong about eyes, 10% chance we are wrong about crowd psychology, 10% chance we are wrong about atmospheric dynamics, 0.001% chance the Judeo-Christian God Exists, 0.0001% chance Odin exists, etc...) and really the change in the belief of god from an any number of identical miracles appearing likely is just updating towards us being wrong about something (not specifically that God exists).
But honestly, attempting to correctly apply Baysian analysis to as complex a question does not seems possible, as the hypothesis space is too complex. This issue applies to much of the whole "Bayes for everything" approach so-called self identified rationalist like to uncritically tout.
I apologize, I don't have the discipline to come up with a thought in the first section of the post, hold onto it while reading the entire rest of a post of this length, then post the original thought at the end. So if these two points are addressed later, ignore me and i apologize.
1.I wonder if the sense that the sun was falling could be caused by a perceptual shift between perceiving the sun as a distant part of the heavens to perceiving it as a near object in the local sky?
Switching between the two interpretations of a Necker cube, I do get some sense that a corner is 'moving' towards/away from me as I reinterpret it as the 'near' or 'far' corner of the cube.
There is a fundamental ambiguity between size and distance in the visual field, where you can interpret the same image as something large and far or near and small. I do wonder if people could 'switch' that perception the way you do with a Necker cube, and get a sense of 'approach' as you go from thinking something is far to thinking it is near.
Obviously, the particular religious context and reactions of others around, plus the perception of the sun doing things that celestial bodies never do but near objects often do, could influence this flip in perception. (eg - the sun, moon, etc. are generally fixed and inanimate. Something that spins and moves is more like an animal or other animate phenomenon, and these are always nearby, never celestial).
As a modern scientist, I'm aware that if the sun got closer, it should also get bigger. Would this be obvious to rural peasants in 1917? In the moment of an extreme event causing religious hysteria? Maybe the sun just feels 'as big as The Sun' whether it is light-minutes away or light-seconds away, to someone in that context, and the understanding of size and distance is vague enough to not notice a discrepancy.
(experimental question - if someone sees lights in the sky and believes them to be distant stars, then realizes they are actually a nearby plane, is there any sense at all of 'approach' or 'falling', however minor or fleeting? Has anyone studied/experienced anything like this?)
2. Regarding the claim that the people involved would obviously know what afterimages from a bright light were, and recognized if that were part of the phenomenon. Would they?
I don't think I've ever seen an afterimage from bright light that didn't come from an electrified source. I don't think rural parts of Portugal would be very/at all electrified at this point (based on 30 seconds of Google, correct me if wrong).
Would peasants at this time/place have powerful gas lamps that would cause afterimages? Does any gas lamp cause an afterimage, or does it need it need to have focusing mirrors or etc. to do so? What is the *magnitude* of the afterimage from a gas lamp vs. the sun, would it be obviously recognizable as the same phenomenon to someone with no scientific/philosophical literacy, in the middle of a religious hysteria?
I don't remember ever seeing an afterimage from staring at a fireplace or campfire, which I've done a bit of in my days. Am I wrong about that? Would everyone with a fireplace know about afterimages?
Would the people here actually all be familiar with afterimages? Outside of staring at the sun, how would they encounter them?
>As a modern scientist, I'm aware that if the sun got closer, it should also get bigger. Would this be obvious to rural peasants in 1917?
I'm pretty sure rural peasants in 1917 were familiar with the idea that closer objects seem bigger.
There's a difference between understanding it when you see it in relation to normal nearby objects, and understanding it in a technical sense that you can put into words and know to apply to celestial bodies (if you even know what celestial bodies actually physically are, rather than seeing them as mystical objects)
>There's a difference between understanding it when you see it in relation to normal nearby objects, and understanding it in a technical sense that you can put into words and know to apply to celestial bodies
I don't know what you mean by "understanding it in a technical sense", but if you're familiar with the idea that closer things look bigger, there's no real reason not to apply that to the sun as well.
>(if you even know what celestial bodies actually physically are, rather than seeing them as mystical objects)
We're talking about twentieth-century Portugal here, not Ancient Egypt.
I filled out the form; no idea if my experience was the same illusion or what. I was watching a total eclipse through eclipse glasses, and long before totality the sun started to move, grow, and shrink. I never thought it was anything other than an optical illusion; I remember saying aloud that my brain must be trying to auto-adjust brightness and getting confused by the novel experience of using eclipse glasses. I hadn't heard of these miracles before, but I still kind of like my "explanation."
No miraculous experience, but I have seen the [thin clouds make the sun easy to look at with a crisp edge] phenomenon many times (midwest US, usually early in the morning, but occasionally nearer midday).
Also, I have on two occasions gotten visual hallucinations while staring at the full moon (the moon looked like a TV screen with random cartoon faces).
I like how casually you mention your second experience compared to how extraordinary it seems to me.
Maybe not useful, but better here than in the survey. I was surprised that green flash sunsets didn't get a mention, neither in your article nor in the comments. They're pretty common, stunning to see, and far from ormal expectations of the sun. They even photograph well, the wiki has some nice examples. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash
Very cool
The last video, the supposedly "good" one, seems to exhibit the exact same sort of auto-brightness adjustments based on camera motion up and down as the previous one where you pointed this out. Not sure what makes it better other than the crowd going along with the camera motions, which could easily be caused by the photographer reacting to the same thing the crowd is reacting at.
As a Portuguese Catholic, I was pleasantly surprised to see this. Always nice being noticed!
More to the point, I appreciate the intellectually honest deep dive and the care not to overstate your case. The only significant thing I'm left wondering (apart from the "loose threads" mentioned in the post) is whether similar events are known to have taken place _before_ 1917. The materialistic picture you're hinting at seems to suggest we should expect that to be the case. If that weren't the case, it would probably be evidence in favour of the "original" Fátima miracle being real/unusual - with possibly successive ones being strongly influenced by the expectations it set.
Sorry for the weird and personal question, but why do so many of the Portuguese eyewitnesses - and you - have the name Vieria? Same question about "da Silva" actually.
There was one previous Marian apparition (Tilly-Sur-Seulles, 1900) that had some weird lights coming out of the sun, although this wasn't similar to Fatima other than "sun involved in some way". My impression, discussed briefly in Section 3, is that people gradually started building the "signs in the sun" narrative over the first five apparitions, and this constrained expectations for the great miracle in the sixth.
Sorry for my internal sigh, but it's Vieira (not Vieria). I only half kid, but that's a very common misspelling.
"da Silva" is by far the most common Portuguese surname. If you told me you'd found a random Portuguese person that would be my guess for their surname.
"Vieira" is slightly less common but still among the most common. Speculatively, there's a town called Vieira not far from Fátima, which might have increased the prevalence of this surname locally. ("Vieira" means scallop, the symbol of St James the Greater, probably the most popular saint in the Iberian Peninsula; which probably contributed to its popularity.)
PS: Unrelated, but I must say I also really appreciated the Beatles lyrics!
I was also left wondering about the existence of similar events before 1917, but it's kind of funny that my thinking was the opposite of yours.
You seem to suggest that the absence of prior events gives weight to the real miracle theory, because people would be seeing illusions throughout history, whereas my immediate thought was that the absence of such events in the past would give weight to the materialistic theory because after Fátima, people around the world would start to expect similar miracles to occur, thus creating a sort of contagion effect. And the reason illusions in the past weren't interpreted as miracles was simply because there was no expectation of a big miracle occurring, kind of like the people from the subreddit.
I basically agree with your thinking for everything post-Fátima, but it looks like for Fátima in particular people wouldn't know what to expect to see so all explanations based on that expectation fail to explain this one in particular.
I find the Phillipines video fishy. At 3.11 the sun appears as a disk with the bottom of the disk just "touching" the top of some hills on the horizon. Three minutes later the sun is in the same position.
The earth rotates 360 degrees, 21600 minutes of arc every 24 hrs 86400 seconds. That is one minute of arc every 4 seconds. The sun is about 30 minutes wide, so it should move one diameter below or above the hills in around two minutes. Back in 1988 when I was vacationing in Jamacia I watched a sunset and timed it and yeah it goes down fast in a little over two minutes. And yes I could watch the sun go down as it was quite dim enough.
Well this sun did not move at all over 3 minutes. The direction is east so the sun should have moved 1.5 diameters above the hills, but it didn't.
The sun doesn't move straight up or down. It moves diagonally, and the relative amount of vertical vs. horizontal motion depends on the latitude and the time of year. At the north pole, for example, there's essentially no vertical motion and the sun just circles the sky endlessly until the season changes.
Also, what you're seeing in the video is not the solar disk. It's an extremely oversaturated part of the detector corresponding to the bright area of the sky around the sun. Point any camera at the sun with an exposure time that isn't ultra-short and you'll see the same thing.
I know the sun does not move vertically everywhere. But its the Philippines, 9 degrees N lattitude in March, so not much off of vertical. I also mentioned I watched the sun go down in Jamacia 18 degrees N lattitude, also in March, and it took a little more than two minutes to go down, I timed it (I was watching the sunset and wonders how long should a sunset take, did the mental calculation and came up with 2 minutes, which I found hard to believe. So I timed it and yeah the calculation was right (this was 1988, long before the internet and phones).
Based on what I was seeing I concluded it was some sort of optical effect, but I doubt it was just the phone, because the crowd was reacting so they were seeing this as well.
I look forward to all the people ignoring your warning & reporting their self-experiments of staring at the sun.
> Do mathematicians really number everything they say like this?
I know many mathematicians, and while none of them talk like this, if you told me you knew a mathematician who talked like this, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised, lmao. I'd say it's within three sigmas of average for mathematician quirkiness.
Isn’t it both the same mathematician? The names are identical, just his middle name is dropped once.
Not sure how relevant this is, or if someone as mentioned already, but the names of the Portuguese witnesses are very frequently misspelled. If someone tries searching the documents for the names with typos they might fail to find them.
Some are fine and text finders should successfully detect the text (eg missing accents, or using 'c' instead of 'ç')
For instante:
1. Goncalo should be Gonçalo (the cedilha, means the 'c' is pronounced like an s)
2. For pretty much for any combination of 'ao' 'ae' or 'oe' the first letter should have a tilde eg João instead of Joao.
3. Other examples of missing accents are names like Lúcio, Queirós, José
But some names have swapped or extra letters. For instance, it should be:
1. Manuel Perreiro da Silva -> Pereira instead of Perreiro
1. Maria Jose de Leimos Quieros -> Lemos Queirós instead of Leimos Quieros
2. Goncalo de Almedia Garrett -> Almeida instead of Almedia
3. Joao Martia Lucio Serra -> Maria instead of Martia
In some cases I couldn't find the name in the large Fátima documents, but I'm pretty sure they're misspelled. For instance, it probably should be:
1. Afonso Vieria -> Vieira instead of Vieria
2. Augusto Pereiro dos Reis -> Pereira instead of Pereiro
3. Izabel Brandao de Mela -> Isabel Brandão de Melo instead of Izabel Brandao de Mela
I wonder if these typos are just the result of typing manually of if it has something to do with the machine learning translation.
I'm unable to tell if there's anything wrong with the Italian names, but I'm kind of curious if the issue is also present there.
Also, for what it's worth, I visited Fátima multiple times throughout my youth. The sun always seemed to successfully follow the laws of physics.
I was tempted to point that out. I thought _Perreiro_ (besides looking like it comes from the Spanish noun _perro_ ‘dog’) was a misreading of _Ferreiro_ or _Ferreira_. However, Escot Aleksandre is known to spice his posts with deliberate typos.
My take on this is weirdly almost exactly the opposite of Scott's. I think I have a much higher prior on miracles being plausible than most people here; I would say I believe with high confidence that God exists with high confidence, with moderate confidence that at least some claims of miracles and divine revelation are real, and while I don't think it's probable that Christianity, specifically, is true, I don't have high confidence on the topic one way or the other. But the miracle at Fatima strikes me as one of the few points on which the "smugly-dismissive skeptic" take is not only correct, but clearly, obviously so.
The basic problem that I see with Scott's analysis is that, in attempting to be as charitable as he can to the opponents, he ends up holding his own side to a bizarre double standard. He devotes great effort to showing how various naturalist explanations fail to perfectly account for every detail of the recorded events, but he never thinks to ask whether the *religious* explanations fit the recorded details any better.
Even if we grant the assumption that the Christian God exists, what explanation is this supposed to allow for that's any less strained than the naturalistic ones Scott rejects? As Scott notes, it obviously can't be that God *actually* made the Sun depart from its usual path in the sky; if that were what happened, it would have been visible all across the planet, not just in Fatima and possibly a few surrounding areas. But if that's ruled out, then, as far as I can see, all that we're left with is:
1. The Virgin Mary appeared to tell people that something miraculous would happen at a particular time
2. When the time came, God chose to do... *something*... that would cause most (but not all) of the people there to start seeing similar (but not identical) sequences of weird things, because... reasons. IDK, God's ways are mysterious I guess.
How is this any better than saying "most (but not all) of the people there started seeing similar (but not identical) sequences of weird things, because of some unknown natural phenomenon. IDK, nature is mysterious I guess"?
I have to give credit to Scott, as always, for not going the smug sceptic route but honestly doing the work, even if he doesn't think this was a real miracle.
He treated the topic with respect, so God bless him! It's a lot fairer shake than these type of things get elsewhere, even from other believers, and believers can be just as smugly dismissive of the world views of non-believers, so we don't get to pat ourselves on the back there.
One trap most people fall into with religion generally is thinking everything about it has to be 100% true to be useful or valid. I believe something miraculous happened at Fatima. I don’t necessarily buy everything everyone said about it in 1910, including the seers themselves.
A lot of Catholicism recognizes that truth can exist in degrees while also being objective. For example, if you are baptized in a Protestant church and then become Catholic, the church will not baptize you again.
What does this have to do with anything I've said?
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I was responding to your conditional alternatives:
> But if that's ruled out, then, as far as I can see, all that we're left with is: 1. The Virgin Mary appeared to tell people that something miraculous would happen at a particular time …
I don’t think these are the only alternatives. For example, if you were a Protestant, you might claim Fatima was a miracle but Mary had nothing to do with it. Or you could say that Fatima is evidence of God’s existence because God made the world full of such incredible natural wonders, but deny that it was a miracle. I would say those positions are less true than my own, but more true than an atheists.
With respect to your second point, there’s any number of possible ways God could have altered the standard law of physics and/or human perception during Fatima itself. The definition of “miracle” in Catholicism is a deviation from the standard physical laws. At that point all bets about “how God did it” are off.
>I don’t think these are the only alternatives. For example, if you were a Protestant, you might claim Fatima was a miracle but Mary had nothing to do with it
I agree that, if you wanted, you could come up with a supernatural "explanation" for Fatima that's even vaguer and less useful than the one I proposed.
>With respect to your second point, there’s any number of possible ways God could have altered the standard law of physics and/or human perception during Fatima itself. The definition of “miracle” in Catholicism is a deviation from the standard physical laws. At that point all bets about “how God did it” are off.
I really wish there were a catchier name for this rhetorical move, where someone says "With respect to your point...", then proceeds to ignore your point and address an entirely different one.
In this case, my actual point was that, if Catholics are allowed to hand-wave the specific details of what happened with "God could have done something mysterious for mysterious reasons", then it should be equally legitimate for atheists to hand-wave away the details with "an unknown natural phenomenon could have happened mysteriously for mysterious reasons". Your response was to just repeat that you are hand-waving away the details with "God could have done something mysterious for mysterious reasons", which doesn't address the point at all.
My point was that you can’t simply laugh something off by nitpicking details about Catholic doctrine or the most specific accounts of what was seen and heard at Fatima. This would seem to be even more obvious if (as your original comment states) you believe in a God. God is by definition all-powerful, so the range of possibilities about what He is getting up to and how He goes about it is by definition very large. So it you believe in a God of some kind, especially a sort of nonspecific deist God, I don’t see how you could so easily dismiss Fatima on the basis of specific things that allegedly happened there, as opposed to being a likely supernatural event of some kind that was misinterpreted by people who practice a more specific religion. I guess that’s vague, but the vagueness is inherent both in God’s nature and in the generic deism you claim.
When I was a child I did have a weird, probably-OCD tendency to stare at the sun, particularly on long car trips. I would slowly work up to looking directly at it as my eyes adjusted.
All I can usefully report from this (thankfully-discontinued) practice is:
1. So far there's no evidence my vision was damaged in any way. (I wear pretty weak glasses that haven't changed much in two decades.)
2. I cannot report almost anything remotely related to these accounts. The closest I can say is that looking at the sun unsurprisingly gives you a sun-shaped afterimage; slight eye movements make this mismatch the real sun a little bit, resulting in the sense that there is a crescent of brighter light around part of it. My recollection is that sometimes this does seem like it's "spinning" around the sun, just because your eyes keep moving a little.
To be fair- did you ever do it for 5-10+ minutes at a time?
Loved this deep dive.
It frustrates me when skeptics don't take religious arguments more seriously.
(For example, the Bible was just accepted as four JEPD documents without ever explaining how exactly it was accepted. Or the Kuzari argument dismissed without proposing a serious alternative. Or the various miracle stories of Rabbi Schneerson. None of these are airtight arguments, but they are dismissed in a way that makes one wonder if the skeptic also has his trapped prior...)
I wonder if this can explain Ezekiel spinning wheels as well?
This whole article reminds me of St Elmo's fire which was also dismissed by skeptics until it was proven to be a real phenomenon.
I'm an atheist, but I am not familiar with the arguments you listed, so I can't exactly accept or reject them. That said, all of the religious arguments I've encountered so far (admittedly mostly from Christians) have been exceedingly poor. They tend to either be entirely circular ("the Bible is true because it says so in the Bible"); born of incredulity due to ignorance ("I don't understand how X happens therefore the only answer is God"); philosophical confusion ("let's assume that something exactly like God exists, 20 logical steps rooted in medieval understanding of the world later we can prove that thing is actually God"); or emotion ("God's nonexistence would lead to some outcome that would make me very sad, therefore God exists"). These arguments rarely tend to reach even the "trapped prior" stage; they're just fallacious.
The one type of argument I find reasonable is personal revelation -- but God, if he does exist, had chosen not to reveal himself to me (yet).
This is not to say that your specific arguments (or any other) are necessarily poor -- who knows, they could be the ones that finally convince me to embrace some kind of religion -- I'm just relating my lived experience, as it were.
The Kuzari is proof of mass revelation
Well, do you have a link or something ? I'd be curious to check it out, but as I'd said, my expectations are somewhat low. It's no slight against you personally; it's just that after you encounter 99 apologists, each of them saying "oh yeah that previous guy's arguments were weak, but I personally have ironclad proof", the 100th guy fails to generate breathless anticipation...
Basically the claim about how the revelation of Torah is unique because millions of people received it and orally transmitted it and they all said it's legit
Well, the main problem is that the patriarchal history got demolished by modern, academic history...
I’d recommend reading some of Edward Feser’s work, specifically his books on Aquinas (his blog is informative but he’s a bit of an internet pugilist).
I have not read anything by Feser, and I cannot claim to have any kind of formal in-depth training about Aquinas, either. However, I think (given my limited understanding) that Aquinas actually did a fantastic job in laying out his theology in a systematic manner. In fact, that's the problem: he did such a good job that modern theologians appear to be stuck in the Middle Ages -- even today, when we know that most of Aquinas's premises are untrue and his reasoning is occasionally flawed.
That’s exact what I thought before I read Feser, and now I’m Catholic. His whole thing is an update of those arguments for the modern era.
Do you have some links to his salient posts and/or books ? I checked out his blog, but there's a lot of stuff there, mostly unrelated to the topic at hand.
Yeah, his blog is a lot of fighting with people over the death penalty.
I suggest “Aquinas: a Beginner’s Guide” especially if you’re already familiar with Aristotle’s metaphysics and skeptical of them. The other one on Aquinas is “Five Proofs of the Existence of God.”
I’ve also heard “Scholastic Metaphysics” and “The Last Superstition” are good.
Aquinas is the
"let's assume that something exactly like God exists, 20 logical steps rooted in medieval understanding of the world later we can prove that thing is actually God"
camp
Please point out which “medieval understanding of the world” was disproven in such a way that Aquinas’ logic has been falsified. I find that most of this tends to be snarky nonsense about causes, when in fact they are perfectly fine if properly understood.
Aristotelian physics has been determined as useless for understanding physics empirically ages ago. Sure, the logic technically isn't falsified, but that's because it can't be in the way you demand. How am I supposed to do it when Aristotelian physics claims to start with unassailable, self-evident principles of movement, and that you can't start from particulars? It's a stonewalled system which is definitionally not amenable to any fundamental critique.
For our purposes, it is enough that it will simply keep giving you wrong (unsound) conclusions. It is at best some kind of folkway theoretical overlay. Only that part can be defended.
I’m sensing a lot of r/atheism. Nobody thinks you can use Aristotelian metaphysics to launch a space shuttle. But that’s not the point, as you’d know you’d read anyone other than Dawkins on this subject.
You’ve been hanging out with boring assed christians.
Is there any other kind ?
Sorry, sorry, but you left yourself wide open for that one :-)
Heck yeah there is!
I don't know if this is terribly relevant, but the thought occurred to me, so I'll plop it out here just in case. You mentioned some discordance between the sun gazing testimonies at Fatima, and those of scholarly, weird folk who intentionally risked eye damage in the past. This might be due to selection effects. Fatima seemed fairly unique in the breadth of people who decided to stare at the sun for ten minutes, but weird scholarly folk are definitely a unique, self-selected crowd of observers. It seems quite likely that they would approach the process in a way that deviates significantly from the norm.
This sort of flips the ending hypothesis on its head. Fatima isn't an unusual account of sun gazing, it's the normal result. But since normal people don't generally stare directly at the sun for ten minutes straight, we only have unusual accounts of sun gazing to work with.
The main problem with this, though, is simple: how did noone ever make the connection before? apparently
What connection do you mean?
"the Eucharistic Miracle of Lancio"
I have a soft spot for Eucharistic miracles, though I think if you don't accept the foundational belief you won't be convinced by them no matter what (it's entirely possible and not unreasonable to think that if the alleged Host does indeed turn out to be cardiac tissue, that just means a bunch of unscrupulous clerics back in the 8th, 13th or 15th century faked it up by cutting up the heart of a corpse and then pretending this 'miracle' happened during Mass somewhere sometime vague. If that's anyone's view, I can't criticise them for holding it).
I like the Mass of St Gregory, for instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_of_Saint_Gregory
And there's always something new to learn; an Aztec featherwork image of the subject, done either by or on behalf of the nephew and son-in-law of Moctezuma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_of_Saint_Gregory#/media/File:Huanitzin.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Alvarado_Huanitzin
"Don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin (or Panitzin) was a 16th-century Nahua noble. A grandson of Axayacatl, nephew of tlatoani Moctezuma II. He was initially the tlatoani (ruler) of Ecatepec before becoming tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, as well as its first governor under the colonial Spanish system of government."
This took me longer than any Scott post before. So, late to the party but here the 407th comment:
A) As a very minor theologian, I do not get what the fuss is about. If the (appearance of the) sun turned into a disco-ball right now for all to see, WTF would it made me update about except the possibility of the sun to appear as a disco-ball?!? Would it proof the existence of God, Buddha, Reincarnation, Matrix or Gilgamesh? Should we now follow the commandments or rape and rob and kill kittens?
A2) The funniest part of the whole topic are those people in the videos who stand among those miracles and could not care less. Because: wtf, indeed.
B) I fully agree with Sun-ism (not sun-gazingism), as St. Francis said:
"especially Sir Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendour! Of you, The Highest, he bears the likeness."
As a bushman said when asked if there is a God, he shrugged: "Sure, look: the SUN" (and sure as the sun shines, it does not care what we believe or do.) If sun-worshipping gives you good vibes, go for it (I do.), and to me the sun+clouds already are the most amazing show on earth, no need for further embellishments. Not sure there is a better God than the sun is; see Peanuts https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fb/6d/3f/fb6d3f6a2673c864a82f3d9ab5db29a7.jpg
D) This post took a looong time to become interesting; till the other miracles came up, I slugged through out of a sense of duty. Who wants to read a dozen testimonies like that? Not me. It was rewarding in the end. - Now was that a Yom-Kippur thing? I shall atone now, with Leonard Cohen "Repent!" and "There's a crack, a crack in every thing; that's how the light gets in" ("The Future" resp. "Anthem")
It's uncanny for this sun to act like a disco ball, because that's an unexplained phenomenon. It's uncanny for a child who claims contact with a supernatural being to be able to accurately predict when the sun will act like a disco ball. Despite those Reddit posts Scott found, there doesn't seem to be any strong evidence that simply staring into the sun causes the sun to act like a disco ball. So yes, this topic really is as interesting as Scott thinks it is.
Takes a rather un-canny god to do such pointless "miracles". And repeats them a bunch of times, sometimes even as a new tourist-attraction. But true: P is as interesting to Y as P is to Y. And more interesting to X resp. less to Z. Shrug.
Those reddits seem close enough to the 'miracle'-experiences, imho. What I found much more fascinating than effects of strong lights on our retina (esp. in combination with priming for sth supernatural + in a crowd of other primed primates): the complete absence of any "awe" by many/most of the bystanders during the "miracle" in Africa/Croatia.
Scott made the authorial choice to frame this topic inasmuch as it relates to our views of Catholicism and the stereotypical Christian God. He's following a long tradition here, and it's fine. But I am adamant there's so much more going on here. The Miracle of Fatima story really is huge in many different ways, or so it seems to me. There's an enormous amount of meat here clinging to these bones.
1. I am fine with Scott's choice(s).
2. If (ever) not; I'll change my mind to be fine with Scott's choices.
I do like the post. I an a way it reminds of his Top-Post about deworming medication against Covid.
Where's the meat? It is God's way to tell us what? To be Catholic? To look into the sun? To praise village boys and girls with visions? If the sun looks kinda strange - but beat them if it does not?? (must have happened sometimes; miracles that did not work out, do not get recorded) For what? To repent? How, why and: afaih, Jesus et al told people at length to repent plus how - and with rather more impressive miracles. Did those witnesses repent - except kneeling / the guys taking their hat off? Or shall we all take of one sandal and follow the water bottle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS42gDNvMAQ
I suspect that at least some of these cases might involve the turbulent mixing of warm and cold air.
Basically mirages, except not on the ground, and rapidly changing as the air swirls around.
I tried to make a rough pic of what this might look like in blender, with random blobs of "glass" set to a very low refractive index, and I got this
https://x.com/DonaldH49964496/status/1974088837795287391
So this looks like a possible explanation for the sun throwing off sparks, like a firework.
With blobs of air large enough to lens the whole sun being able to explain dancing, growing and shrinking.
Given chromatic aberration effects, this might also be able to explain some colors.
What's the Catholic church's official position on these? My understanding is that they do at times decide that a miracle was a real official miracle such as when deciding on sainthood. Is the Fatima miracle official? Are these other on-going places also considered official miracles?
Certain miracles and saints are declared “official” by the Vatican. However those determinations are not binding on individual Catholics. So unlike church teaching on abortion (for example), you aren’t obligated to accept any particular miracle as true.
Interesting. Is there a way to look up these specific miracles? I’m very interested in whether there is just a an officially determined miracle that occurs yearly on schedule with greater than 10% chance apparently. That seems so far removed from my mental image of a miracle (namely, that you never get them on demand).
The Church hasn’t recognized a recurring phenomenon as a miracle as far as I know.
Rather, the event at Fatima specifically was designated as a miracle.
The official responsibility for investigating miracles is with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith. Unfortunately their website is still from the 1990s so I can’t sort their publications easily, but their opinions on various phenomena are listed here along with other DDF publications:
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/doc_doc_index.htm
Note that DDF no longer officially labels events as supernatural, but rather simply disapproves or approves the promotion and veneration of certain apparitions and the like. The new guidelines are explained here:
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/amp/news/257722/vatican-norms-alleged-marian-apparitions
Thank you.
I thought I gained a kilogram last week, but it was just a mass hallucination.
Daa-aaaaad! >:(
I would disregard all “visions of cross, marry and etc”. We know that heavy religious people regularly insist on seeing things either because they actually see them or because they want to show strength of their faith. Event had people coming from other cities so no wonder there would be a bias towards such people. You don’t need any new effect to cause multiple reports of visions there it’s not like hundreds of people had them
Agreed. Imho, the very high inconsistency of the stories lends credence to the skeptical theory, and makes it likely that the simpler ones are real reports of an effect such as the later sungazer reports, whilst the more complex ones are a mix of priming & intentional fabrication. Maybe even sub-clinical psychosis for some.Not even just a religious people thing, even without it, most cultures kind of expect you to exaggerate it a little.
Is idea “staring at sun makes your vision weird” so unbelievable? People normally would stop staring at sun once they see afterimages since we don’t want vision to be impaired even temporary. Everyone knows you couldn’t trust your eyes for some small time if you stare at bright object too long. So I am not surprised there could be effect that would go unnoticed until something forces big mass of people to stare at sun and put too much effort into interpreting their sensations instead of immediately going to conclusions that you shouldn’t do it
Also I have seen my friend going into absolute ave when she first seen clearly visible double rainbow at the age of 18. It was indeed amazing but it’s not that rare. She wasn’t religious to my knowledge but I can imagine group of religious people seeing it as a miracle
I saw a phenomenon like the photo of the sun behind the clouds. Approximately September 15, 2025, St. Paul, MN, 7:30-8:00 am driving east. It also appeared that the visible disk was offset from where the sun really was. Weather was very foggy earlier, but fog was starting to clear.
How about this for a wheel? https://youtu.be/nrUMC_eB1kU?si=X5dH8bLO1slSfqU3
I used to stare into the sun as a little kid, before I knew better. In the age of like 4 maybe - and it is actually one of my most early memories.
Well the disc really sort of turned grayish yellow and started to kind of rotate and wobble a bit. If I were primed into expecting a miracle, I would surely had seen one.
Should be Dalleur (2021)
I was debating this with a Catholic friend and was reminded of this from Scott years ago, some things like the lattiude of the pyramids matching the speed of light do seem miraculous.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/
The pyramid case is one I've heard before that's actually really funny if you think about it, even if you just accept as a given that the pyramids were constructed via aliens or the supernatural.
Since it would imply that the aliens in question somehow knew that in the distant future humans would specifically develop the latitude longitude system along with the metric system and not any of a million other alternative measurement systems we could have invented.
That assumes they are independent.
Either that or the well documented development of the metric system secretly involved aliens which is a very funny conspiracy to hold! Because it implies that previous measurement systems like Fahrenheit were probably developed by humans, but somehow metric wasn't.
It also implies that the aliens either couldn't come up with a system better than metric, or that they deliberately arrogantly taught us their measurement system in secret even knowing it wasn't that good. Since if starting at first principle in the modern day you could do much better than the metric system, especially if you aren't wed to also using a suboptimal base ten number system.
Though time travel (if you don't dismiss that a-priori) would explain things more parsimoniously.
This is why Substack rules... 30,000 words on a subject like this from a thinking/writer like Scott. Yes please, yes please.
Scott mostly focuses on the nitty gritty details of how reliable the evidence looks, and I'm happy he did that because it's painstaking work and it's good that someone does it.
The cooler question obviously being: if (assume) this is true, THEN WHAT? Throw in a bunch of miraculous healings too, East and West, South and North. What does this tell us about reality?
People will jump to the "God" conclusion: a loving but inscrutable being with complete control over the universe, who freely chooses to do these things every once in a while. That will certainly work as an explanation, but (remember Ockham!), it's unnecessarily complicated. Why bring freedom and control into it? Why the ontological commitment of a separate being?
If praying hard can bring a Sun miracle or a miraculous healing, most kinds of physicalism/materialism are out. What is then the simplest update we can possibly land on?
I think it's basically a kind of Idealist or consciousness-centric view. You did something unusual and intense with your consciousness, and some tangible result came out in the world. What you just learned, then, is that consciousness has some direct causal power over the world, but this power only activates under some narrow conditions (given that many people pray and most don't seem to get miracles).
On a good day, I might just buy that.
Yeah I'm surprised he didn't bring up that for this to support a specifically catholic worldview you'd also need to explain all other miracle claims. And using demons as an explanation isn't just unfalsifiable, it puts you in a situation where you can't be justified believing that your own religion's miracles weren't also demon produced.
I (a practicing Catholic) love the intellectual honesty of this post.
I am not a fan of the Fatima secrets and their meanings (they seem to lack a bit of the spiritual elevation that makes me think my religion goes beyond mere superstition), but I must admit that, as my prior is that God's existence is more than 1% likely (it's more like 80-90% I guess, for a few reasons), the evidence is quite convincing.
Thanks again for this post!
Curious what you think about the similar reports from people on reddit. Since it would seem very strange to me for God to perform miracles that coincide with things that people sometimes see in non-miraculous contexts.
Not too sure about it.
What is surprising about Fatima possible miracle is that people saw right away that the sun was behaving strangely. It's not like they had to stare at it for a few seconds or minutes to see it strange, plus nearly all of them said that the sun began hurting again at the end of the phenomenon, implying that it didn't before.
Reddit sun gazers, if I understand correctly:
1. Don't always see fatima-like things (it's quite uncommon, even for them)
2. Do so only after staring at the sun for a while.
On the other hand, a miracle is something so dubious that, by default and however unlikely it sounds, I tend to prefer the rational explanation if there is one. So, not sure about the real odds of Fatima being a genuine miracle. I'd say 60% (out of nowhere)?
Plus, I'm not exactly sure what counts as a miracle: if God breaks the laws of physics, then we have to update the laws of physics to account for their occasional breakage. If He operates without breaking them, then we can always go for the "rational" explanation. Looks like we have limited knowledge of our world, because we live in it. It's hard to be sure what a real outlier event is, without outside knowledge of the whole system.
This is why I don't buy the proofs (or disproofs) of God's existence. And despite being quite scientific in my approach to things, I tend to think that our ability to "feel there must be something above who's really beautiful and who's very good" is the clearest (if not rigorous) indication of there being something or someone above.
Another indication is that scaling up systems with a lot of interactions (like atoms -> molecules -> bacteria -> humans -> humanity -> ??) seems to bring a greater consciousness (impossible to define without using an equivalent synonym, which is an indication it might be a standalone feature of our world) AND greater awareness of the elements of the system (there's no sign a molecule is aware of the atoms it is made of, but we are aware of our limbs, and you could argue that our intellectual knowledge of cells, organs and so on amounts to some kind of awareness). It's possible to envision the limit of this scaling-up as a being that is perfectly aware of itself and of what it is "made of" (maybe us, like the Bible might mean by "you are the body of Christ"?).
Not sure I stuck to answering your original question.... 😂
Law of nature: virgins do not give birth.
Miracle: a virgin giving birth.
The law of nature still stands. It still says "virgins do not give births."
> It's not like they had to stare at it for a few seconds or minutes to see it strange, plus nearly all of them said that the sun began hurting again at the end of the phenomenon, implying that it didn't before.
There didn't seem to be some specific amount of time that people had to look at the sun to see weird stuff. Plus even if there was (say 30 seconds) that wouldn't actually be incompatible with the reports. Since the people didn't claim to immediately see the sun change colors, they all said they saw it merely looking unusually dim at first (which is can be explained with clouds).
People's eyes not hurting is also unremarkable: Since first there wasn't some clear relationship between how much one's eyes hurt and how much weird stuff you see. Secondly pain in subjective and very easily missed if you're distracted like people were here.
I also think the lack of consistency between reports is a much bigger problem than Scott thinks it is: Since if 100 people saw a car crash you'd expect plenty of misremembering and differences between reports yes. However, you'd still expect that if 100 people were staring transfixed at this car crash when it happened, that at least a handful would have accounts of what happened which shared the same details (as well as including all the details seen in most reports).
Whereas the lack of even a handful of witnesses who: like that mathematician had very detailed records of their observations, but which also agreed with multiple other independent observations is suspect.
I mean come on, out of 70k people people couldn't even find 10 that had the same detailed account of events! Sure the unreliability of human memory may explain *most* accounts differing from each other, but to imagine not even %0.001 of accounts are consistent seems implausible.
To buy that level of disagreement was plausible I'd need to be shown other examples where an event has thousands of witnesses, yet nobody can find 2 that agree with each other on specifics.
>I tend to think that our ability to "feel there must be something above who's really beautiful and who's very good" is the clearest (if not rigorous) indication of there being something or someone above.
The issue I see with this line of reasoning is that you don't exactly seem to be looking for data points which *don't* fit the hypothesis. For instance if beauty and goodness are evidence for god, then logically ugliness and evil must be evidence against god, or alternatively evidence for an evil god. Since every argument one can provide for why some evil in the world isn't evidence against a good god, can be turned on its head to also serve as an argument for why the existence of good isn't evidence against an evil god: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_God_challenge
There's also another issue with this line of reasoning; which is that there's no good way of squaring it with an evolutionary explanation of our morality and sense of beauty: For instance we evolved for our morality to be extremely socially malleable and subject to self deception and various biases. Whereas there wasn't much impetus for our moral instincts to evolve to be logically consistent, as opposed to just "good enough" for how we evolved. Similarly our morality is extremely *specific*, for example any more r-type species than us which evolves intelligence and morality will almost certainly seem utterly morally repugnant to us. Since such a species would have evolved to treat their offspring as far more expendable, and so behavior we would consider extremely manipulative or abusive may be seen as perfectly acceptable.
So if a god with anything like a concern for human morality and beauty exists then it's utterly inexplicable that they just so happened to have a sense of beauty and morality that so perfectly coincided with one particular species of ape out of the near infinite space of possibilities. Well presumably minus the part where our morality is hardwired towards peer pressure and hypocrisy.
Also if once you appeal to intuition like this then you end up with the issue that monotheism empirically doesn't correspond most closely to our intuitions out of the various options: Since you can look cross culturally and see that the most "intuitive" religions would clearly have to be animism and/or polytheism. Whereas I don't know of any examples of monotheism not evolving from polytheism, with Judaism being a good example of this transitions happening (as biblical scholars point out a lot of stuff early on in the old testamate only makes sense if you realize Judaism evolved out of a pastoralist sect of the polytheistic Canaanite religion).
>Another indication is that scaling up systems with a lot of interactions (like atoms -> molecules -> bacteria -> humans -> humanity ->
This seems arbitrary, you can easily swap things out a lot there and it still works. For instance when people believed in the 4 humors they could have slotted them in before humans. Similarly you could easily just put "society" after humanity.
This argument also has similar problems to the ontological argument because you can use it to seemingly argue into existence an infinite number of hypothetical beings. For instance legos->lego people-> lego cities: Therefor continuing the trend there must exist a god of specifically lego to complete the pattern. Or you could also argue that there must exist somewhere a lego Dyson swarm, since that also fits the pattern.
I feel like Scott's gotta be right that there's something to do with weather conditions and clouds here. But I feel like this does not explain everything we know about the OG Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. In particular, it doesn't explain the photograph that appears to imply two point light sources in the sky, and it doesn't explain the consistent position of a "sun-like object" in the sky over Portugal.
To me, the clear-ish explanation seems to be that as Scott says, under the right weather conditions involving clouds and maybe rain, looking at the Sun can cause you to see trippy rainbow spiral stuff, especially if you are suggestible. Those conditions were met in the sky over Fatima. But separately and simultaneously, there was also a meteor that was falling to Earth south of Fatima. This meteor is what caused people to look up at the sky in the first place and notice the trippy rainbow spiral stuff when prior to 1910 nobody had noticed this was a thing, Hindu-milk-style. This meteor also explains the dual point light sources, the consistent position of a sun-like object in the sky over Portugal, and maybe even also the miraculous heat drying people's clothes (which wasn't present in the other Miracles of the Sun AFAICT) and maybe also the sun "falling to earth" (which wasn't present in the other Miracles of the Sun). (Although the fact that everyone agrees that it fell to Earth "3 times" is hard to explain. Maybe the first was the actual meteor falling and the rest was people noticing the rainbowy-sun-cloud-phenomenon, having been primed? But why exactly 3? This is a flaw in my theory. But at least it's also a flaw in Scott's theory without the meteor.)
By my theory, the miracle at Fatima is the only Miracle of the Sun that had both the cloud-sun phenomenon and the meteor; all other Miracles of the Sun, including the one in Italy, are lesser miracles that are only the cloud-sun phenomenon without any meteors, but after Fatima people were looking for them. This explains why Scott's attempt to locate a point light source for the Italian miracle, Fatima-style, failed; there was only a meteor at Fatima, not at Ghiaie. This also helps explain why the relatively skeptical crowd at Fatima were nevertheless convinced of the existence of God; it needed the additional detail of the meteor to be especially impressive. I'm speculating that later Miracles of the Sun, after the success at Fatima, involved less skeptical crowds in general.
I feel like there's more than enough evidence for the meteor that I feel it deserves to be added to the story at Fatima. That said, it does require the child-seers' prediction to have been much more impressive; they had to have called the meteor strike. That's a Bayes price I feel is worth paying, though. The child-seers successfully calling a meteor strike that coincides with a sun-cloud weather phenomenon is very impressive, but without doing any math I think the most impressive modern miracle of all time, the final boss of miracles, is allowed to be that impressive of a coincidence. It sounds like there were a lot of child-seers 100 years ago; the luckiest among them are probably allowed to as lucky as Fatima's. But who knows, it'd probably be better to do some math to back that up.
"In particular, it doesn't explain the photograph that appears to imply two point light sources in the sky, and it doesn't explain the consistent position of a "sun-like object" in the sky over Portugal."
The evidence for a meteor rests almost entirely on this (everything else doesn't require it, and there's evidence you'd have expected if it were a meteor that wasn't observed). Importantly though I should note that some other people did independent analysis of that photograph and very much didn't agree with the assessment of there being two light sources. It's just that the photograph is bad enough that it's not too hard to convince yourself you're seeing what you expect to see. Try looking at the oldest comments and ctrl-f photo that should find it.
This seems like a just-so explanation--a meteor came right at the exact moment that the children predicted, everyone looked up simultaneously at that moment, and the meteor (or parts of it) fell 3 times. I think it is more reasonable to say we just don't know.
I appreciate how much obsession went into this
"The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened."
Perhaps I missed it, but exactly how many of these people who were inclined towards skepticism were there and later reported seeing something, as far as we know? There is Avelino de Almeida, the newspaper writer, but which others? And Evan's article casts some doubt on the idea that his status as a skeptic was well established.
I’m not sure if there’s an exact number, but notable sceptics such as António Sérgio witnessed it. Most of Portugal’s elite at the time was not just atheistic but anticlerical.
https://cdiantoniosergio.cases.pt/nyron/Archive/Catalog/winlib.aspx?skey=81B56064EF164B5B9801D970B12C072E&option=cases%2Cassbib
ChatGPT says it’s uncertain if he saw it or not?
https://chatgpt.com/share/68e6d96c-e5c0-8009-b3b8-00e169e041db
To be fair, ChatGPT doesn't have access to old portuguese books such as this one: https://www.livraria-ler-com-gosto.com/fatima-cartas-ao-cardeal-cerejeira
Avelino de Almeida and José Maria de Almeida Garrett were mentioned in this piece, however you may be interested to know that the person who took the most famous photographs for O Século newspaper was in fact Jewish: Judah Bento Ruah (certainly related to the acress Daniela).
"Although the sun isn’t vastly clearer than any of the other videos, it’s obvious in this one that the oohs and aahs of the crowd match up with the pulses recorded on video - so it doesn’t seem like it can just be a camera failure. "
The only changes I see in the sun in that video are due to the camera moving. At 3:10, the camera zooms in, and the sun changes appearance. At 3:41, the camera pans up, and the sun becomes fainter. At 3:57, the crowd claps, but there's no obvious change in the sun. At 4:08 the camera pans right, and the sun brightens. To the extent that the oohs and aahs match up with the pulses--and I don't think they match up that well--it makes sense that the cameraman would move the camera when the crowd oohs and aahs.
Most phone cameras continuously adjust the exposure time according to some center-weighted average of how bright the frame appears. That works well if the whole scene is somewhat even in brightness, but fails catastrophically when you're filming the sun, especially if the sun is near the center of the frame, and especially especially if the horizon dividing a bright sky and a dark ground is also near the center of the frame. In such cases, small camera movements result in huge changes in exposure time. If the camera is panned toward the ground, the average pixel in the frame gets darker, and exposure time increases to compensate. If it's centered on the sun, the exposure time decreases. Whether the center of the frame is on the sun, on the sky, or on the ground, and how the phone's algorithm decides to weight the relative contributions of these regions of very disparate brightness, will either make the detector somewhat saturated by the sun or very saturated (because starting at 3:11, it's always saturated).
Even if the variations in the sun's brightness are real, they wouldn't be that surprising. The sun is rising over a mountain, and there are clouds in the sky. It doesn't take much for the sun to rise into a thin band of cloud and dim, or rise past one and brighten.
One thing not considered in this post is the prophecy fullfilled. Not the WWII and Russia one, the prophecy of "Virgin Mary will do cool shit on such and such time at such and such place".
There are crowds gathering to watch the prophesied miracles every now and then, and miracles mostly fail to materialize. Do we have a base rate for that? In a heavily religious country I'd expect there to be such an event at least every couple years.
We could get estimates of Fatima-tier miracle probability by multiplying this base rate by base rate of cool meteorological phenomena (plus maybe rates of meteors, volcanic explosions, etc.). If statistics predict about one Fatima per couple centuries, then prophecy doesn't need further explanation, this kind of event should've happened once or twice in the Age of Reason. If statistics suggest one such match in, say, ten millenia, then any materialistic explanation has one more issue to deal with.
I am absolutely blown away by this. This is such great work.
Reading this post took so long, by the end my phone screen had started dancing, spinning, changing colors, and hurling towards me.
More seriously, I wonder about possible refutations of the hypothesis here - are there examples of groups of people staring at the sun through clouds for a long time (either expecting a miracle or for any other reason) and *failing* to see anything remarkable? Everybody going home disappointed? If such examples exist, I would count this as a refutation of Scott’s hypothesis; if they don’t exist, as a confirmation (maybe collective disappointment is not a very exciting thing to record, but it seems that people gathering to stare at the sun expecting a miracle have not been all that rare in history; a potential negative result might well have been recorded). Apologies if I missed a discussion of this in this long post (between the dancing and the spinning).
I am afraid that there aren't many cases of groups intentionally going out and staring at the Sun through clouds for at least 5 minutes at a time, just for the heck of it lol
I am Italian from the south of Italy. I was talking to my mom about your analysis of the Fatima mystery (which is very famous here). My mom told me she had exactly the same experience when she was doing a "religious trekking" trip in a small city called Gallinaro (Frosinone). She was around 18 at the time (she is 70 now). She saw a pulsating sun, like it would get closer and closer and then the go back again. This effect repeated several times (3/4) and she got really scared.
Importantly, at the time she didn't know about this effect of the pulsating sun (she learnt about it later).
Also importantly she claimed they were not staring particularly at the sun nor they were expecting any miracle. They were actually sitting down on a bench nearby a cliff eating a sandwich.
She doesn't remember whether if was cloudy or not but she says she was able to stare in the sun, so maybe it was. As she was coming down the trip, her group met a local lady that confirmed those types of visions would occur there.
This place is famous cause a young little girl and her grandma had a vision in a cave ( little Jesus, no more details provided) few years back. When my mom visited the little girl was still alive, not sure about now. As I am writing this , she just told me the story so didn't have the time to research it independently .
Sorry for the many typos.
I want to address something. The Fatima mystery was already famous BUT not everyone knows about the pulsating sun effect. Indeed before reading this post I didn't know or didn't remember about this effect - although I surely knew about the Fatima story.
So it's possible that my mom knew about the Fatima story and still never heard of the pulsating sun effect when she had her experience.
I am happy to ask her more questions if you have them.
I could also plan a trip over there to take a look myself. If I do, I will surely try to record it
Apart from the one sun "miracle" I've personally seen (which I will input into your form when I have some time), there are two other rare weather phenomena my extended family has allegedly encountered.
One is ball lightning. It was seen by my grandmother who was extremely grounded and truthful, so I am pretty much certain that it exists.
The other was a phenomenon similar to the Fatima one with rotating (2 axes), moving sideways, downward, upward and color changes (though there were no purple color, only green and orange). It was allegedly seen by my other grandmother who is less trustworthy, but I would still be surprised to learn that she lied about something like this. She is still alive, so if anyone has some specific questions I can ask her.
EDIT: The circumstances: She was on a religous trip with other old Catholic people at Szilágynagyfalu (or Nusfalau in Romanian, diacritics omitted), Transylvania. She used to go to a lot of religous places, she didn't know at the time that there sometimes were sun miracles at this specific one. When it happened, one of her group members noticed (allegedly) and alerted the others who all saw it (allegedly).
Btw, my personally favoured hypothesis for my grandmother's vision is that the priest or the tour guide subtly made the old people there consume psychoactive drugs in some way. This probably sounds outrageous at first blush, but there are some arguments for it:
1. There is great money to be made if a place becomes known as a site where miracles happen.
2. The fraud is easy and cheap to execute, because you don't have to drug every tour group for the place to acquire rumors of miracles. It's enough if you choose the most vulnerable groups (eg. ones with only old people) and distribute the contaminated food item on the bus/inside the church under the guise of it being some holy/healing water/food. The amortized cost of drug is probably small.
3. It explains why the specific account of miracles differ slightly (as was the case with my grandmother's group): It's probably not hard to suggest the rough form of the miracle to people who you previously drugged, but you can't control the specifics.
4. My grandmother herself seemed a bit puzzled when I asked her about some specifics of the vision (eg. how can you see that a sphere is rotating if it has a completely uniform color?). (And she did not look like she was trapped in my masterful line of questioning.)
5. A few fraudsters existing globally is enough, because the places where miracles happen will quickly attract victims from far away. There is a large global demand for miracles. Therefore, the low prior on a priest or tour guide being a fraud is not as much of a problem.
The main counterarguments, as I see it:
1. This is very unlikely to be responsible for alleged miracles where there are a lot of people as it's probably pretty hard to drug so many people.
2. Why did I not hear about even just one case where a fraudster used some drug to fake miracles? If it's a viable method, surely some fraudster should have been caught somehwere in the world using this method of crime.
On the whole, I'm still unconvinced, but I also do not accept the other explanations for my grandmother's vision:
- Something supernatural happened -> extremely low priors
- Rare meteorological event -> Event seems too complex, unlike other meteorological phenomenon. Still, imo this is the second most likely.
In my opinion, it's probably something I'm not thinking of, but it's possible the real explanation is your complex, mixed one.
Well, to get the obvious one out of the way: was it cloudy on the trip? How long were they looking at the sun?
The confusion about sphere rotation is very interesting. That also matches the Fatima witnesses.
I don't remember her saying it was cloudy or it wasn't, but I'll ask next time we talk.
One person in her group noticed it and alerted her and she saw it instantly.
This week I talked with her and asked about this again, because last time she said she would ask Magdika (another person there). She now says that she thought about it some more and she misremembered, it was not rotating, and the specific path of sun was slightly different than the one she initially reported. However, it also came closer to them apparently.
I think I would remember the details of a miracle better if I saw one, so this is somewhat weird.
What did she notice instantly? Was there a progression from simpler to more complicated effects, or no?
I asked her. Here are the answers: There were no clouds. It was during a sunset. First, she noticed that she can look at the sun without pain, then that it is orange, then that it became green, then that it moves. She said that the whole phenomenon seemed realtively simple to her.
Thank you for the answers!
If anything, just how common this is seems to *reduce*, not increase, the odds that it's a miracle.
This seems like it's demanding a follow-up post. Since even if one didn't have compelling counterevidence of this being a miracle in the form of those reddit comments, there's still a deeper issue here:
Miracles with large numbers of witnesses like this aren't unique to any one religion. Which means you have to explain the observation of miracles outside of one's own religion. However if you say invoke demons, then you're left in the uncomfortable situation of not being able to be confident any of your own religions purported miracles *weren't* demons. Which is especially absurd if you're forced to believe that demon caused miracles must be more common than those caused by god.
It’s simple. God is showing us miracles all the time, and we only occasionally pay attention and make a big thing out of it. Why this is preferable to experiencing a miracle every day is beyond me, but it seems to be the case.
If the people seeing miracles were all one religion, or the miracles otherwise seemed to favor a particular religion then you'd have a point.
But how are you supposed to square the observations of miracles within different wildly theologically incompatible religions?
Like what model would allow for miracles to be observed in both polytheistic and monotheistic religions? At least without having the aforementioned issue where you can't attribute other religion's miracles to demons without logic dictating that probably applies to one's own religion as well.
>But how are you supposed to square the observations of miracles within different wildly theologically incompatible religions?
I think it’s because people crave miracles, and God manifests itself in numerous ways to lots of different kinds of people. In my view, miracles happen all the time and what is rare is forming a consensus.
Ok so now I'm very curious, what exactly is your theology?
Since at the very least I can't imagine you believe God cares too much about what people's specific beliefs are, if he's sending people with wildly different beliefs miracles they will each perceive as confirmation of their existing religious beliefs.
Essentially the theology of Spinoza.
First question: is there more than one omniscient God?
A: that wouldn’t make sense to me, but it would explain different miracles for different believers; but now we have a situation where more than one God is making more than one variety of people. I cannot wrap my head around that.
So one God responsible for the whole thing and completely embedded in its creation. (we can leave out the pantheon of gods for now- i.e. Greek and Roman.)
So if we are left with one God and multitudes of people who have different theologies, then surely we are introducing the complication and not God.
If you envision a God that stands apart from its creation, then to me, you have a God that is treating the universe like a video game and giving everyone a chance to win or lose (except we know that isn’t true.) That notion seems reductively anthropomorphic to me. We seek to make God more like ourselves.
I'm still not sure what exactly your theology here is supposed to be. Since it sounds deist adjacent, but obviously if God's sending miracles then they have to be at least a *somewhat* personal deity right?
Do you have some works based theology that lends itself to God not caring about people theology necessarily?
How closely does you theology match Spinoza? Since his wiki page says "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law" however I don't know how such a God can be squared with the view on miracles you previously endorsed.
As an aside, I was raised in the Anglican tradition so that atmosphere of a church and style and customs of a church is definitely something I am closer to, but that’s a cultural thing more than a theological thing
The model would be John Hick's religious pluralism! https://iep.utm.edu/hick/#H4
What is the best / largest-number-of-witness miracle from a different religion?
Sam Harris brings up Sathya Sai Baba quite a lot as an example of someone with thousands of still living followers who claim to have seen miracles performed by him. Though idk if there's any purported miracles which get into the 5 digits.
This seems to be a topic which chatgpt is frustratingly bad at helping me research, but I'd start by looking into Sathya Sai Baba and some of the UFO accounts with a decent number of witnesses that can't easily be dismissed as a secret military aircraft or well understand phenomenon.
Not exactly a miracle in the same sense as Fatima, but Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker's reincarnation research can be pretty interesting. I'd actually be interested in seeing you tackle that. Some of their cases leave me stumped, but maybe you can come up with an at-least relatively convincing naturalistic explanation, like you did here.
Predicting the date of something rare when 70k people take the bet seems damn most interesting here even if the phenomenon is not a miracle. I think the logical conclusion is that this just happens almost every day in this place. Then the questions are:
What's so special about this place? Could it be lake/see/river reflecting sun onto clouds causing interference of reflection with sun passing through the cloud?
And why not just visit this place and check what happens on rainy days in Autumn?
> I don’t know if this is a real picture or used lenses or something, but it’s pretty true to my experience.
> So why does every previous commentator act as if this is some cosmic mystery to be explained?
Most people derive the vast majority of their knowledge of the sun and moon from mythology, what other people tell them, rather than from personal observation.
For example, it drives astronomers nuts that people keep telling them the moon can't be seen during the day. This is easy to explain from a mythological perspective: the sun is what lights the sky during the day, and the moon is its nighttime counterpart. If the moon were present during the day, it would be the sun.
In fact, though, the moon appears in the sky during the day all the time. All you have to do to know this is occasionally look up, which isn't something people do.
I had no idea people believe that about the Moon. I see the Moon during the day very often...
I think the undertone here is mildly hysteric.
If all evidence contradicts God's existence except for a solitary piece that actually seems pretty good, one must ask, "is there a reason for God to use this one piece of evidence and this alone?"
And if the answer is no, you conclude it's a trick. When a magician performs on stage, you don't have to know in detail how each trick is performed, and if one seems impossible there's no need to go "holy shit magic was real all along??"
Of course if you do want to spend thousands upon thousands of words on that, there's Umineko.
I think for a lot of us, it's not about "evidence contradicting God's existence." In fact the very concept of "evidence contradicting God's existence" is leaves me cold. Does such a thing really exist? Maybe you could find evidence contradicting one conception of God or another, but how could you find evidence contradicting all possible versions of God that may exist?
It seems to me that for most atheists these days, at least the ones I have really talked to about this, their atheism is fueled by a LACK of evidence for any type of God existing.
One more issue I have with your argument here. According to this rubric, even if God came down in a chariot from heaven and gave you a personal theological lecture, that wouldn't be enough to convince you. Because that's just one data point.
That would convince me. I don’t really see why it should convince anyone else though.
As far as I know, there is only one dogmatically accepted variant of God taught by the Catholic Church.
Yes, there are logical issues with the CC's dogma that no shock and awe could fix. It would maybe convince me of some Olympian demigod at best. If you want to believe, all miracles are superfluous, and if you don't want to believe, you still have no reason to believe 100 % exactly what the theologian wants from you.
I'm not sure why you made this clarification when I was speaking more broadly about the ramifications of the miracle of Fatima for non-Catholics, if genuinely seen as a miracle. Surely it is absurdly limiting to stick to the binary of “Fatima miracle real, Catholicism vindicated” and “Fatima miracle not a true miracle, Catholicism false.” There must be many entirely separate ways of analyzing the incident.
There are certainly many ramifications, depending on its reality.
We had a long drive home from Northern Scotland on Saturday. My wife drove on the A9 heading south from Inverness. It was the the middle of the day, with lots of scattered cloud, and a pale sun visible to varying extents behind cloud covers of varying shades and thicknesses.
So I did a little sungazing. I should estimate for around a second a couple of times when the sun was behind light cloud; maybe for three seconds when it was behind darker cloud.
I did not perceive any non-yellow colouring. But I did get impressions (a) of far brighter yellow than was perceptible with a casual glance (b) an expanded sun and (c) separate - two or three - yellow balls in the sky. These perceptions lasted briefly after I had looked away.
I am pretty sure that had I been hoping to see "miraculous" solar effects as evidence for an important belief, particularly if I had been surrounded by like-minded people looking for the same thing, I would have been pretty excited.
In fairness, though, as someone highly sceptical about this "miracle", I was surely expecting perceptions like the ones I had yesterday.
The "three suns" perception put me in mind of the parhelion effect, most notably observed at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross during the first phase of the War of the Roses, when the future Edward IV is said to have persuaded his troops that the seeming appearance of three suns showed that the Trinity looked favourably on the Yorkist cause.
One basic problem I have is that this feels more like a conjuring trick than a miracle. You can believe or disbelieve that at Cana Christ turned water into wine, but the proposition is clear enough. The liquid was water, but then instantly became not-water. There was no deflected attention, substitution of alternative vessels, hypnosis, auto-suggestion, etc.
For the Fatima miracles, it is not true that the sun made strange movements, or that our planet did so altering our views of the sun. So we either have some mass hypnosis trick, or the misdirection that what people honestly thought was the sun was instead a temporary object introduced into the picture without being noticed, so that people thought they were looking at the sun, but were in fact looking at this rig up. I guess either if carried off are quite impressive, but all the same both seems different in kind from the straight up-and-down miracles attributed to Christ in the gospels.
Relevant is Newton's description of gazing at the sun indirectly using a mirror, and how suggestions could bring back the hallucinations, or thinking of other things could take them away. He did this at 22 and describes his experience to Locke many years later thus:
"The observation you mention … I once made upon my self with ye hazzard of my eyes. The manner was this. I looked a very little while upon ye sun in a looking-glass wth my right eye & then turned my eyes into a dark corner of my chamber & winked to observe the impression made & the circles of colours wch encompassed it & how they decayed by degrees & at last vanished. This I repeated a second & a third time. At the third time when the phantasm of light & colours about it were almost vanished, intending my phansy upon them to see their last appearance I found to my amazemt that they began to return & by little & little to become as lively & vivid as when I had newly looked upon ye sun. But when I ceased to intende my phansy upon them they vanished again. After this I found that as often as I went into ye dark & intended my mind upon them as when a man looks earnestly to see any thing wch is difficult to be seen, I could make ye phantasm return wthout looking any more upon the sun. And the oftener I made it return, the more easily I could make it return again. And at length by repeating this wthout looking any more upon the sun I made such an impression on my eye that if I looked upon ye clouds or a book or any bright object I saw upon it a round bright spot of light like ye sun. And, which is still stranger, though I looked upon ye sun wth my right eye only & not with my left, yet my phansy began to make ye impression upon my left eye as well as upon my right. For if I shut my right eye & looked upon a book or the clouds with my left eye I could see ye spectrum of the sun almost as plain as with my right eye, if I did but intend my phansy a little while upon it. For at first if I shut my right eye & looked wth my left, ye spectrum of ye Sun did not appear till I intended my phansy upon it; but by repeating this, appeared every time more easily. And now in a few hours time I had brought my eys to such a pass that I could look upon no bright object with either eye but I saw ye sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover ye use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together & used all means to divert my imagination from ye Sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in ye dark. But by keeping in ye dark & imploying my mind about other things I began in three or four days to have some use of my eyes again & by forbearing a few days longer to look upon bright objects recovered them pretty well, thô not so well but that for some months after the spectrum of the sun began to return as often as I began to meditate upon ye phænomenon, even tho I lay in bed at midnight wth my curtains drawn. But now I have been very well for many years, tho I am apt to think that if I durst venture my eyes I could still make ye phantasm return by the power of my fansy."
See https://aty.sdsu.edu/vision/others.html
intend my phansy ….
Beautiful
I reproduced the effect in the video by just moving the exposure slider (which appears as an on-screen control on an Android phone) while videoing the setting sun. The most plausible explanation is that even if the crowd were witnessing something, the specific person taking the video is most likely to be doing this on purpose to create the effect. People want to go viral.
The problem with the "anyone who stares at the sun for 10 minutes will seeing something like this on a cloudy day" hypothesis is that surely not every person began their gaze at the exact same time, yet they all freaked out at the time the children predicted. Some people probably came a few minutes early and started looking, some right on time, some maybe distracted by their family or someone in the crowd. So, I don't really think that is a good explanation.
Also, none of the witnesses mention staring at the sun *before* the strange phenomena started. Instead, it sounds like they looked up, and the sun was already acting weirdly.
Not directly mentioned in this article, but it can at least be inferred. How else would they be talking about disappointment from trying to see the miracle beforehand, and not finding any?
The vision beforehand had simply said there'd be "a miracle". There was no reason to think it would involve the sun in particular.
This is true, but reasonably explainable by the "Look!" shouts coordinating the crowd. The hypothesis also includes social priming.
For the rotating aspect, I think this can also be considered as not especially unusual: when the sun can be watched painlessly (yeah, don't do it ;-) ) and is clearly defined - usually it happens very close to the horizon with a faint fog or very thin clouds - it gives the impression of a rotating gold-copper-orange disc - completely featureless and flat, not a sphere with shadows like the moon, but still giving the impression to rotate somehow. I suspect it's because it's appear to slightly move/deform because of some lightbending by the atmosphere, and the brain interpret it as a disc rotating slightly off-axis (which may be what the witness meant when saying the sun was doing circles. Anyway, I would not count it as exceptional: this rotating hot copper disc sun can be seen maybe once or two times a year, at least where I live (Belgium)
I have never seen this and wouldn't have thought this was true - can anyone else confirm or not?
I have gotten a few emails from people who just seem to naturally see the sun in a very unusual way - I wonder if you're one of them.
I don't think I see it special: my vision is quite normal, a slight myopia now (but at the time of observation, before university years I had 10/10) and moderate daltonism. But my brother agreed about the impression it kind of rotated... and he have normal color vision.
Could be more of a "mental" thing tough, I am very scientifically minded and like to observe a little bit everything. So it may just be that the effect is mild and people do not really care (really paying attention to the sun in those condition is probably not something a lot of people do, it's not painful nor dangerous*, but not spectacular either. ...My brother agreeing but only after I mentioned "it looks like it's kind of spinning" points to a real but modest, probably widely shared optical illusion, not me having rare vision (daltonism is a quite common defect for men, and I do not think it plays a role here).
Also, the rotation is nothing like catherine spiral firework. If I had to descibe more in details, it would be like a impression of a mild funnel (or inverted funnel) leading to a very flat small hot copper sun disc which rotate, with well defined interface between the mild funnel and the sun disc. You cant say which direction it rotate nor if it's a funnel or inverted funnel, so clearly an illusion similar to the hollow face illusion, but that how it looks. No sparkling or irregularity....
*When I say not dangerous, it's if you do not insist once it becomes unpleasant or have clear after image...Seems like the people who did observe the sun share the same crazy-let's do a "scientific" observation mindset as I do, but also seems to lack minimal self preservation. I sometimes am a little bit careless too, but clearly it could have been much worse ;-p.
This turns a century-old miracle into a testable class of phenomena (crowd priming, safe solar viewing, entoptic effects and contagion). Seems like a template for understanding UFO flaps, Marian apparitions at other sites, Havana-syndrome clusters, mass psychogenic illness, AI hallucinations, maybe even finance manias. Same mechanics: expectation, shared attention, ambiguous stimulus, narrative convergence.
Regarding updating beliefs on miracles:
When I see someone who is really good at close "magic," making cards or coins disappear or whatever, I don't think "maybe magic is real."
Obviously we all do that. But I think there are two reasons for it. The obvious one, that magic and miracles always turn out to be "tricks." And the maybe not so obvious ones that if magic and miracles were real, I would expect to in live a different reality than we do, and I wouldn't expect these astounding techniques for bending the laws of physics to be used solely on making cards disappear, or making the sun pulsate for some random people.
The old cui bono principle
I've baysianed for zero to zero after reading this. What kind of god does this? Why? It's like believing hyper-technological aliens would traverse the galaxy to steal a cow.
Yep...
Both links to the newspaper article scans in this sentence are broken for me:
> [...] there is a grainy mostly-unreadable scan of the original October 15th article here, and a high-quality version of an October 29th magazine-style reprint here.
They're:
- https://antt.dglab.gov.pt/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2017/05/Aparicoes-de-Fatima.pdf
- https://hemerotecadigital.cm-lisboa.pt/OBRAS/IlustracaoPort/1917/N610/N610_master/N610.pdf
...and both work for me. They're PDFs, so if you're using a browser that can't load pdfs, that could be the problem.
Hmm, the second one works now (in Firefox on laptop). But the first one can't even be resolved by DNS. I wonder if it's my ISP blocking it or something. I'm in Singapore, for what it's worth.
This is an astonishing piece of research and writing, and I am continually amazed that you find the time for this production. I'm inclined to write my reaction up to a greater extent, but for now I'll provide a very tiny contribution.
I am a receptive audience for this work: a cradle Catholic, orthodox in belief and practice without any period away from the Church, more intellectual than "spiritual" about my faith, generally putting a comfortable but respectful distance between myself and some of the more esoteric Catholic practices (bone churches, mortification, intense Marian devotions), and generally - most importantly here - skeptical of the value of purported miracles. Modern ones, at least; I'm going to continue to believe that the Shroud of Turin is authentic until someone makes one of equivalent quality and properties. Mostly that's because I don't think that events like the Fatima sun-miracle are the way that God operates to perform miracles.
The miracles that I believe in tend to be not so much demonstrative as personal and necessary. That's what I take from the Gospels. The miracles that Jesus performed were mostly not done for great crowds, and were usually done out of intense personal need: one sick/dead girl is revived in front of her family. One paralyzed man is told to get up and walk while inside a crowded house. Jesus calms a storm and walks on water to save his twelve homies. Jesus only appears to a couple of women, then ten of his boys, after the resurrection. The most visible miracle, recorded more times in the Gospels than any other, involved the feeding of five thousand men with five loaves of bread and two fish. He didn't conjure up a big pile of food or cause it to fall from the sky. The miracle occurred as the crowd passed bread and fish to each other, hand-to-hand. Needless to say, Jesus didn't make the sun dance. When asked by two of his apostles to call down fire from Heaven, Jesus declines.
So because there were no big explosive "take a look at what I can do" miracles in the Gospels, I don't expect any to occur 1,900 years later. If God is going to reveal himself in an impressive way, he's going to do it on a small scale, and it will accomplish something other than bolstering a belief. And while I do believe that God acts in history to accomplish great things, God's hand tends to remain hidden, shrouding itself in improbable coincidences and in the heroic actions of unlikely individuals. No fireworks, just inspiration.
This understanding leaves room for the possibility that the visions of the child-seers were, as the Church says, "worthy of belief," even as we are likely to close in on a material explanation for the sun miracle. God worked personally with those children, and they influenced the world. And they're essential to the story: without them, the dancing sun has no meaning. It exists only to verify that the children saw what they claimed, but it is not necessary.
So thanks again for this. I would give you so much Reddit Gold if were not completely cringe
According to the children, the sweet, kind, angelic mother of God apparently tormented the children with visions of hell and encouraged them to physically hurt themselves to atone for the sins of others. I’m honesty not sure I’d call that worthy of belief
I've briefly tried staring at the full moon today, just for half a minute or so. It's actually quite cool! The rim seemed significantly brighter, and the microsaccades made it jitter wildly - despite my trying to focus on a single point. I imagine its much more extreme if you stare at the featureless sun. I might have gotten some hint of rotation, hard to tell. I definitely didn't see any crazy colors or the moon shooting towards me. Again, I've been looking for a short time only.
Try it out for yourselves! :)
Update: I wear glasses (short-sighted, about -2.5 dioptres each eye), and I've tried staring without glasses. Guess what, it actually starts pulsating and has a blue rim most of the time! I can totally see how something similar but more crazy can occur when looking at the sun with a bit of weather trickery involved.
Fun read, thanks!
I think two explanations are possible: one is that these citizens ingested a massive dose of an LSD like hallucinogen. We should go to rural Portugal and try to extract it from moldy bread and grain and other known sources of curative medicines.... or that this experience was actually a UFO type phenomenon of alien life forms infecting the spectators and putting on a hell of a light show for the local rubes.. just like close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's clearly not evidence of any kind of God... Anyway the god of the portuguese has proven to be a false one... so this Catholic boy aint buying this bull...
It seems unlikely that noone would mention that ingesting hallucinogens contributed.
Would love love love to see you deep dive into inexplicable medical miracles like Bruce Van Natta etc.
The flashing in the videos seems like a thing multiple layers of clouds could cause. If there's a low, thin, even layer and a high layer of more opaque clouds with small holes, then when a hole passes in front of the sun, the lower clouds will be backlit and flash like that.
A comment on the 'good video' of the Filipino Sun incident.
I find that this is very clearly a cell phone doing auto-adjustment on the exposure levels. How an experienced nature photographer didn't know this shocks me, although they do state they don't video the sun.
Turn off the sound and watch the link between the camera motion, specifically the motion that causes changes in the light and dark areas of the video frame, and the sun's brightness.
Every time the camera points lower to include more darker regions (everything below the horizon and the larger tree to the left) the brightness of the sun over exposes. When the framing points to the sun and lighter sky the exposure drops and the sun resumes it's 'normal' size.
I didn't bother to think about the sound. I watched on silent. But possibly the verbal cues are linked to the camera operator pointing the camera down as the 'lose concentration' due to the crowd verbalisations.
Crowd noise>camera operator loses mental focus on filming>arm relaxes slightly>camera lowers slightly>more dark areas in frame>exposure goes higher>sun over exposes.
Amazing stuff. This miracle story was often at the forefront of debates I had as a young cringe reddit atheist with orthodox rabbis who claimed they could empirically prove that all of ortho Judaisms claims are true because of the ‘kuzari principle’ - namely that Judaism must be true because it has the only instance of ‘mass divine revelation’. (Eventually I lost interest in debating partially because I lost my virginity to one of the rabbis daughters)
I think you put too much stock in the Catholic Church excommunicating someone and how much that reduces the odds that Mary was involved or not. Pope St. Leo I and St. Joan of Arc have also been excommunicated. Many seers are given difficult treatment by the Catholic Church at first.
Lot of people here say this is the the "best" miracle. I think the many spontaneous healings at Lourdes are perhaps better: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf though I'm not sure how to get the medical records myself https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/the-medical-bureau-of-the-sanctuary/
Our Lady of Zeitoun is also perhaps a better apparition. At least it has some cool photos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikdDzR-5EA8
Taking a different potential angle to miracle or natural phenomenon: You have a group of kids who know well in advance that they will need to perform an impressive miracle on a certain date. Maybe a few adults could help them in strict confidence. You have a photo of the event showing potentially two light sources, the sun plus something else.
Can anyone think of a way that you might plausibly fake, with a relatively low-tech setup, the miracle as observed? I'm thinking something along the lines of a big mirror ball suspended on thin twisted wire across the surrounding terrrain, although obviously that example isn't enough to cover what was seen.
It didn't show up until the real sun came out, which is one reason I'm thinking mirror/prism/whatever ball rather than light source. An object suspended on wires also tends to spin. But for it to appear to a whole crowd as if it's far above them, maybe it would have to be something more like a large mirored balloon.
For the record I think it's unlikely that the miracle was faked rather than being some other phenomenon. But seems worth considering whether there's a relatively simple way it could be done.
Speculative hypothesis that might be worth exploring: could the perceptual mechanisms involved in the Fatima Sun Miracle be related to those underlying Tögal visions in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism?
In Tögal (an advanced, traditionally esoteric practice), meditators report experiences of multicolored, moving light displays in response to sky or light gazing. The parallels with the Fátima reports are striking: light as a trigger, dancing colors, and evolving visionary forms.
If so, Tögal might provide a reproducible framework for studying how visual and neurological processes, shaped by expectation and attention, can generate experiences of radiance that are interpreted as miraculous or sacred.
Not a big deal but it looks like the guy's name is Dwight Longenecker (without the "r").
I'd like to contribute an experiment you can do at home to be convinced of a psychological aspect of the miracle, which supports the hypothesis in this post.
Set a timer for - at least five minutes, that's enough to get some effect for most people. Ten or even twenty if you're feeling ambitious.
Go somewhere with absolutely no light sources. For most of us, a bathroom will do if the lights both there and potentially shining under the door are off, although you're about to have to position things so you're not also seeing the next step in the mirror.
Light a tea candle. Start the timer. Look at the flame until the timer goes off. Do not look away.
Not everyone will experience anything strange, but distortions of the shape of the flame, and even pareidolia in the way it moves, are common. Hearing it seem to speak to you is rare, but not unheard-of.
Interesting effect for sure, but doesn't support the hypothesis. There is no pitch darkness in the sun miracle cases.
It's nowhere near sufficient to support all aspects of the hypothesis, but it does support that staring at light sources can at least sometimes produce strange perceptual distortions. Using a candle in darkness (or rather, in a place illuminated only by said candle) is a much safer demonstration than using the sun.
Yes, I don't think that's controversial. It's known to psychology. But it's useful to have one more thing easily replicable.
This is great, feels like good old slatestarcodex is back :) I enjoyed reading this so much, thank you Scott :)
Seems like the Ganzfeld effect might be relevant. Basically, if you tape halved ping pong balls over your eyes and sit under red lights, you begin to hallucinate after 10ish minutes. Perhaps with some additional social priming, this could lead people to see similar visions.
This probably doesn’t explain the Fatima miracle, but it might be interesting to see how much you can get people to converge on a common hallucination with the power of suggestion.
"What have I spent (conservatively) 18 hours of my life on?"
Pascal's wager, dude. And it's worth the 18 hours and much more.
I think the wager nonsense, but it's definitely a pet interest of mine...
Great article! I am on and off listening to They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos M. N. Eire which also may be of interest to you, about levitating monks and nuns - miracles just as well-attested, but arguably much easier to fake than Fatima. And as with Fatima, the political climate is important - these are not (as I initially thought) medieval mysteries, but take place during and after the Counter-Reformation, when mysticism could do with a boost.
Anyway I disagree that Fatima is the final boss of paranormal experiences. it's clear Gef the Talking Mongoose. If Gef was correct when he said he could split the atom, and was the fifth dimension and the eighth wonder of the world, that definitely requires an in depth substack post.