I spent so long in this post wondering whether you meant 6:40 AM or 6:40 PM before you mentioned it was around sunset. :P (I mean yeah I heard you talk about this at LessOnline but I didn't remember that part.)
I saw the sun as a pale disc a week or two ago -- did not get the after-effects, because my kid started asking what I was looking at and I realized I was setting a bad example. It would've been nice to have this post on hand then, to help me answer the questions he had about eye damage...
Your wife is cool. I used to have mindbending spiritual experiences on the regular, myself. Now it only really happens on Yom Kippur, sometime after the hunger signals turn off but before my leg muscles start to protest about how long the Ark has been open.
Every year during Neilah, I remember anew that this happens, and I feel silly for having forgotten about it the rest of the year when trying to make sense of the fasting practice.
That, and the realization I haven't used the bathroom since Musaf, which -- unlike the hunger and thirst and weakness, which all drive home my very-humanness -- actually does make me feel a little angelic.
This reminds me of an optical experience that I had in primary school, aged maybe 8 to 10. The lower panes of the classroom windows were of frosted glass. (I believe this was to prevent the prisoners being distracted by the glorious outdoors.) When the sun struck them, I discovered that by staring fixedly at the glow it made in the frosted panes, in a minute or two it would start to change colours, slowly drifting from one to another. Luminous and intense red, blue, gold, purple. Even white, once. Unlike staring at the sun, the light wasn't bright enough to be dangerous, or even to produce long-lasting afterimages.
I never attached any significance to this beyond "I wonder how that works?", and in fact I haven't thought about it in years.
Why must “Mirjana saw the Virgin Mary” and “Mirjana entered a powerful internally generated state” be mutually exclusive? The essay is open to strangeness as experience, yet much less so to strangeness as a feature of reality. When a plausible perceptual mechanism appears, that doesn’t mean the larger metaphysical question has been settled.
I don’t take the sun to have literally spun, and visions require scrutiny. But explaining the machinery of an experience may not exhaust what the experience discloses. Rationalism is superb at policing claims. That may be a different task from deciding what an experience ultimately means.
>he essay is open to strangeness as experience, yet much less so to strangeness as a feature of reality<
I would be interested in reading a longer version of this statement. I think I know what you're driving at, but I'm not sure. Assigning an inner experience as powerful as faith or spirit to an externality without really recognising the proper relationship of the two things is a difficult place, no matter how you look at it.
I think the difficulty is precisely that we don’t know the proper relationship between the two. I’m not saying that the power of an inner experience licenses a claim about an external being. Only that showing how an experience is generated or mediated internally does not, by itself, establish that it is self-contained.
All perception is internally mediated. The tougher question is whether some experiences disclose anything about reality beyond the mechanism producing them, and how we could tell. In Mirjana’s case I remain agnostic, but I think the essay moves rather quickly from a plausible account of how the experience happens to an assumption about what, if anything, the experience refers to.
> the difficulty is precisely that we don’t know the proper relationship between the two<
Or even if there is one for that matter. ! I would say there is what you see and then there is what is shown to you. 99 times out of 100 it's not very problematic but when you're talking about things that move people's souls, it's very important. I reckon if you see something that moves your soul, it's a miracle. Whether or not it matters that a thousand other people have seen it is inconsequential in that way of thinking about things. On a rudimentary level that is what very good magicians do. They encourage you to see something. I was on the beach once in Montauk at the end of the day. It was the fall and the weather was very grey and windy. The waves were coming in at a pretty steady pace and reasonably high, although not crashing. I was sitting off the beach and in the reeds just to protect myself from the wind a bit and then I started hearing these tones, like a breathy flute, like a whole bunch of breathy flutes. The tones would rise and fall but in no particular key, yet it still was not dissonant. It was something else entirely. It was the harmonics of the wind just at the right angle blowing across the waves. Maybe I was in exactly the right place to hear it but it was really magical, reminded me of the T.S. Eliot poem "I have heard the mermaid singing but they do not sing for me." I've never heard it before or since but I don't spend a lot of time on the beach so maybe it's quite common. I'm sure sailors heard it a lot. For me in that moment it was a miracle. I think there's miracles everywhere if you want to look for them. But I think my definition of a miracle is not what people are searching for here. They want one they can put in a box.
I think there are a few different meanings of “miracle” of miracle being used here. The essay is mainly asking whether an event gives public evidence of divine intervention. You’re using the word for an experience that changes how reality is felt, even when the physical explanation is ordinary. I’m somewhere between those. I don’t think an inward experience proves supernatural agency, yet i don't think that explaining how it happens exhausts what it discloses.
So I guess my response is that if every experience that moves the soul counts as a miracle, the word no longer distinguishes miracles from beauty or awe. Maybe that’s where we part ways...
Well you are absolutely right to make that distinction when it comes to theological matters. It is indeed a word that signifies a divine intervention. Interestingly enough when you go back and look at the root of the word, it does kind of imply nothing but a moment of wonder or awe but never mind. I suppose in a theological sense I do not believe in miracles it strikes me as a rather silly way for a divine entity to behave
A divine being performing conspicuous exceptions to natural order offends your aesthetics of divinity? It rather offends mine too.
Actually, stunts weren’t what I had in mind. I meant that an experience might be fully mediated by consciousness and still disclose something real through symbolic form. No broken laws of nature required, and no claim that the symbol should be taken literally.
Broadly speaking there are two classes of miracles in the world: those that could be the product of perceptual noise, and those who clearly *require* divine effort. A lot of the power of miracles rests upon them being in the second class. This is simply Bayesian math- a miracle that requires divine effort could not have arisen without divinity, and thus provides strong evidence that we are in a condition of divine influence. The more implausible it is without divine intercession, the stronger evidence it provides- that's what makes it a miracle. If upon sufficiently deep research it turns out that a miracle who is believed to be in the second class, actually rests clearly in the first, it consequently lowers the evidence value of the miracle- the probability that it could arise in the Godless world is higher than was believed.
I agree about the evidential weight of the solar event. If it can be produced by atmospheric conditions and retinal effects, then it is weaker evidence for direct divine intervention. That was why I said I don’t take the sun to have literally spun.
My point was about a different inference: whether identifying the internal mechanism of an experience establishes that the experience is therefore self-contained. Bayes can compare how likely an observation is under competing models, but it doesn’t by itself tell us that “Godless world” and “divine effort” exhaust the relevant possibilities.
It does not. But we already know people can produce internal miracles in unlimited supply. And many of those are mutually contradictory, so we know that even in a Godful world, an internal miracle cannot be trusted. Here it's not a problem of a lack of evidence so much as a lack of information. The idea of a true miracle is to cut through this- to tell who objectively has the favor of God and can tell us who's lying, who's crazy and who's for real.
I agree that an internal experience, however powerful, can’t by itself authenticate a doctrine or tell the rest of us who has God’s favour. Contradictory revelations make that clear.
I think we may be asking such experiences to do different jobs, though. You’re interested in a miracle as public certification: something that discriminates among rival claims and identifies who is “for real.” I’m asking the prior, looser question of whether an internally mediated experience might disclose anything genuine about reality, even when it cannot settle doctrine or serve as transferable proof. Its failure as an authentication device doesn’t necessarily make it informationally empty.
Oh yeah absolutely. I mean, I readily think that for instance an internally mediated experience can reveal something about your interiority at the very least. A lot of people seeing the Virgin Mary is certainly not *coincidence.* But you're not learning anything about the Virgin Mary as a feature of any external process, except in the boring-but-practical way that she's a cornerstone of those people's faith as practiced. I mean, I do certainly think it's interesting that all these people see Mary instead of Jesus or God or an angel.
This is where the disagreement reaches an impasse. Yours is a coherent naturalist position, and the very assumption I’m questioning. It treats “interiority” as a sealed domain, and the Virgin as either an external entity or a cultural object inside the mind. What drops out is the possibility that consciousness might disclose features of reality through symbolic or culturally available forms, without those forms being literal reportage.
And famously, Dame Julian, the author of "Revelations of Divine Love" had visions of Jesus, as did Margery Kempe, another mediaeval mystic. These do happen - see the origins of the Sacred Heart and Divine Mercy devotions.
Can you give an example of the kind of internally mediated experience you're talking about -- the kind that discloses something genuine about reality, without being something that can serve as proof?
The comments of one of the folks in this thread registers as near 100% chance AI-generated from GPTZero. I say this as one confused, not accusing. What are the community's thoughts about this? Is GPTZero an accurate measurement when at least some of its measurement criteria is the almost inhumanly perfect grammar I see constantly in this blog? I mean you knew it was bound to happen.
Is the person you have in mind Ben Giordano? I'm suggesting him after skimming the comments and noting his seem to be the ones that demonstrate most effort to be cogent and grammatically correct. (Of course, so does the sentence I just wrote.) I did not for a moment suspect the writer was AI. But then i rarely ask myself whether a reply is AI, unless something about it creeps me out. I may not be a good AI detector. I am also old enough to care more than most here about prose style, grammar, etc. (Learned to diagram sentences in school. Never got comfortable with netspeak. etc.)
A thing is true if and only if it improves the predictive power of a model, and truth is the thing that will affect our perceptions regardless of what we believe.
The problem with believing in the supernatural is that doing so will reduce our ability to accurately predict things like the effects of our actions, which is very dangerous both to ourselves and others. For example, if the Virgin Mary is real, then the Bible is likely true; if the Bible is true, then homosexuality is probably an abomination; if homosexuality is an abomination, then convincing your gay son to feel shame and repress his sexuality will improve his wellbeing. We might try to adopt a version of supernatural beliefs that won't harm people we love, but we can't know in advance what will and won't cause harm unless we believe true things.
Believing something true isn't harmful, but believing something untrue often is. One of our most important moral obligations is therefore to honestly try and believe only true things.
When we point out the mental machinery that might produce the perception of a miracle, that definitely doesn't disprove the miracle on its own- but there exists so much evidence against the supernatural that if we're honestly truth-seeking, we should have very low priors on supernatural explanations to begin with. Natural explanations can then provide a plausible explanation when none at all existed before.
I’ll respond briefly, but I won’t spend several rounds disentangling premises you seem to regard as self-evident.
The chief problem is that your argument moves from the possible reality of the Virgin Mary to the truth of the Bible, then to one disputed interpretation of homosexuality, and from there to a prescription for the psychological welfare of a gay child. Each step requires a separate argument. None is supplied. Bayes has been asked to do rather a lot of unpaid labor.
More importantly, I haven’t argued that the force of an inner experience authenticates a doctrine. My point is that explaining how an experience is internally mediated does not, by itself, settle what relation consciousness may have to reality.
I'm generally on board with you about the moral obligation to correct our false beliefs, but it's not the case, in the real world, that believing true things is never harmful. If we were rational agents, that might be true, but a large part of the value of religion may well be in how its beliefs motivate and discipline us, even if they're false.
An intrinsic commitment to know the truth will sometimes conflict with consequentialist ethical commitments, and I think it's a good idea to (1) not assume away such conflicts, and (2) to think about what you would do in such cases. My personal policy is to err heavily on the side of truth over other utility, partly because it seems I really do care about it intrinsically, and partly because I assume my biases will tend to underrate the utility of truth, so I should play it safe.
I think I have to confirm to see the sun at 12.00 at least once in my life. I already confirmed it (after reading the previous article) after 15.00, but I realized that I have never seen it before then. I think it should be plausible that between the sun being covered whole and sun being too bright to see, there should be somewhere in between that it's "safe" to see.
I have a number of responses to this post. The first three are all very personal.
Response no.1: This is almost insanely comprehensive. How fast does Scott compose, edit and input text?
Response no.2: Scott is absolutely hopeless at impersonating a journalist. The first thing you learn as a cub reporter is that when you approach people waving a notebook, they will either look through you or spit. Trust me on this.
Response no.3: I have never before seen a photo of the author. It may be relevant to this story that he looks a little like the Grand Inquisitor's private secretary.
Oddly, the one meteorological explanation apparently ignored by Scott is that what the original group of maidens saw was a sun dog, and that the phenomenon may, because of local climatic conditions, have been repeated more than once since then. According to Wikipedia, a sun dog is "an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to one or both sides of the Sun. Two sun dogs often flank the Sun within a 22° halo, parallel to the horizon."
I have seen a sun dog once in my life, low to the winter horizon on a Greek island; it looked as though three short rays with thicker ends (think indian club shapes) radiated from the center of a blurred and 'watery' sun. It was a gripping sight, but hardly an "in hoc signo vinces" moment.
Wikipedia goes on to give some fascinating suggestions for the etymological derivation of sun dogs: "Jonas Persson suggested that out of Norse mythology and archaic names — Danish: solhunde (sun dog), Norwegian: solhund (sun dog), Swedish: solvarg (sun wolf) — in the Scandinavian languages, constellations of two wolves hunting the Sun and the Moon, one after and one before, may be a possible origin for the term."
"This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported."
My annual renewal already came and went just recently, and not that I was having any particular misgivings, but this is a strong signal of "yep, I'm glad to help pay for things like this". Lots of people fret over how to stay (occupied|alive) in the post-AGI future; one could do much worse than pursuing a side career as a Researcher of Miracles.
It's also kind of amazing that a Bosnian woman wrote a book referencing a blog post in the future that you hadn't even written yet. With God, all hyperlinks are possible. Was this one of the Ten Secrets that's already come to pass?
I agree with Scott's wife that you shouldn't convert just because you've seen a miracle, although for mostly different reasons. I just don't assume that if supernatural forces exist, they would necessarily be honest. In fact, I can imagine more reasons why they wouldn't be.
The Virgin Mary may as well be Vishnu, Loki, an interdimensional alien prankster or any one of a myriad of other entities. I could easily accept any miracle as genuine, but the only conclusion I would draw from it would be that the supernatural exists.
I also find the contrary assumption — that supernatural beings are honest — somewhat telling when it comes to people seeing or wanting to see miracles. Especially when you consider that there's plenty of precedent for all sorts of magical creatures playing tricks on people in most belief systems.
Right, that's why for real evidence of Catholicism, you have to look into UFO sightings. After all, why would aliens advanced enough to stealthily visit use such silly spaceship shapes? It's more likely the devil would conjure up some visions to throw everybody off the trail.
(On reread, this was a little unfair, because you're not narrowing the scope down to any one of those. But only a little.)
So if you hear trumpet sounds coming from every direction and see the dead come back to life, and a guy floats down to you saying the second coming is here and see two armies gather, you conclude that vishnu, loki or an alien is up to no good today?
Depends. Is this just a vision or a quickly passing, one-time event, or are there actually armies gathering in front of me? Because the actual physical presence of swords, arrows, bullets, and such would definitely do a lot of heavy lifting in convincing me.
Even then, I'd probably still only be 50:50 on it being the actual Second Coming vs. some elaborate LARP by higher forces—mostly because I find the Book of Revelation-style rapture specifically quite silly.
You can never directly know that there is an actual physical presence of swords, arrows, or bullets. You only get to directly experience your perceptions. However, your perceptions are consistent long-term with the physical presence of such objects in my proposed hypothetical.
Therefore, my proposed hypothetical is a series of miracles (ie, seeming violations of physical laws) and if, in that hypothetical, you become convinced that Christianity is 50% likely to be true, then it seems inconsistent to not update preferentially (though possibly only a little) towards Christianity upon observing a single, Christian-flavoured miracle.
But if dishonest supernatural forces exist then you're screwed anyway.
If an apparition is either an honest Virgin Mary or a dishonest trickster god then you might as well assume it's an honest Virgin Mary offering you your one true chance at salvation. Because the payoff matrix for guessing it's the trickster god just isn't favourable -- even if you're right and you refuse to be fooled this one time then he'll just be back later with some other trick and you're going to fall for one eventually, might as well get it over with.
Should I send all my money to the Nigerian Prince in my mailbox too? After all, if they're a scammer they'll surely find some way to trick me eventually!
Just because someone is conveying messages that aren't true doesn't mean they have an unlimited ability to fool you. This remains true even if the sender has (some) supernatural power. For example: they might be motivated by something other than actually convincing people of falsehoods, they might be trying to trick *someone else*, they might be trying to fool people in general but aren't much concerned with you, they might not have a good understanding of what humans find convincing, they might have a limited ability to contrive seemingly convincing miracles, and so on.
Yes, for all the rationality, Scott has a weak spot about considering religions as monoliths, where one strong part could confirm the rest. To me they look more like jumbles of cultural content, so even if some supernatural parts were confirmed true, it would do nothing to confirm the rest.
Even if you fully trusted your vision of the Virgin Mary, she would still have to tell you explicitly which parts of which flavor of Christianity are correct (if any).
I don't know how you would get anywhere concrete with just a spinning sun—unless the sun starts talking.
Given fallibility on all sides, I'll side with a mystic over a committee of theologians, any time of the day.
I'm undecided about the metaphysics, but I directly know people who claim to have seen spiritual visions, and received messages. One person I know says they started receiving transmissions of a whole new religion, and instead of founding a sect, they just told the voices to go find another channel.
As Scott’s Wife: Yes, this. In the original conversation about it, I also made a point similar to this: that they could yet turn out to be correct about some miracles, and nothing else. In the absence of a compelling explanation connecting the two, I do not see them as bundled.
I still don't understand why you're chasing these miracles for evidence of God. If you're already operating on the prior that your existence and happiness has intrinsic value, then surely it's not a big leap to consider that the world is actively pushing for them. If one isolated miracle is all it takes to get you to convert, then why wait for it? The truth you're looking for has already been found and accepted by countless others. All you need to do is believe. You will never find a better truth.
He chases miracles because he considers them evidence for a particular interpretation of God (Catholicism in this instance), where a positive confirmation would make a decision of what sect to convert to easy. God for some perverse reason allows many contradictory sects to coexist, none of which has clear preponderance of evidence in its favor.
But why do you need evidence? Surely you have no doubts that morality and beauty are real. This is just one more step. What you want to be real can be real, as long as you believe. If you cannot see the truth in the first place, what difference does it make whether you're "correct"?
I can't remember Scott's position on this, but many ethical theories don't posit the Good as objectively real. Ethical emotivism is popular these days.
"What you want to be real can be real, as long as you believe."
I am deadly serious. And I do believe Scott believes in objective good. What else could justify such blind righteousness and moral utilitarianism? We all must believe in something, otherwise we'd simply fall apart. Nihilism only leads to death.
If the believer can't tell the difference, what difference does it make? It's real to them, and they can never see past their own perceptions to see otherwise. They have no insight into the true reality of their existence anyways, beyond the distorted reflections of it provided by their own senses. For all lifeforms, what they perceive and what is real to them are one and the same. They will never find any truth beyond those senses.
Why do you think we all must believe in objective morality? Why can't we recognize that morality is a result of evolution? That belief won't cause me to harm others, because my brain evolved to not like needlessly harming others.
I’ve stared at the sun behind clouds multiple times when it was at an angle of 42 degrees or less. I have never once seen anything close to the Fatima miracle. It sounds like a lot of these Medjugore visions are either similar and personal / visionary or public and very dissimilar. Since the visions happen in the early morning or late afternoon, it is quite disanalagous either way.
Here is a report of me staring at the sun. You can see some extremely vague similarity to Fatima if you squint and ignore at least ten core facts.
This observation took place on June 5, 2026 at 7:40 AM in the South East United States at about 10 feet above sea level when the angular elevation of the sun was about 14.5 degrees.
The sun was behind thick clouds but you could see light through them. The clouds did not part at any point during this observation. The light was attenuated enough that you could keep your eyes fixed for a while without being forced to look away. It did require some squinting though. I kept my eyes on the light for about thirty seconds to a minute with mild pain. My eyes felt only a little sore about 60 minutes later but no after images that much later even when closing my eyes. The soreness is reminiscent of going outside of your house on a really bright day and being surrounded by white concrete. The soreness in my eyes is less significant at 9:25 but still noticeable.
Because the clouds were so thick, I could not see a clear disc but just a blur of light. After keeping my eyes fixed for a while I could start to make out a circle with somewhat of an edge though slightly diffuse (probably due to my eyes adapting to the bright light). Less crisp of an edge than the full moon but more so than the initial blur I saw. The color of the diffuse disc was yellowish (sun yellow). I could see clouds moving in front of the sun and after keeping my eyes fixed for a while I could notice a little bit of flashing as if you were to shine a flash light against the wall in a dark room and move a ball back and forth in front of the flash light so the circular light on the dark wall flashes left to right.
The sun did not change position, it only had this back and forth flashing, and I could clearly see clouds in front of it. I also did not see anything that seems like rotation. It was a clear left to right to left motion all within the perimeter of the diffuse disc. I did not notice any color changes in the sun. I could not see any color changes in my field of vision. I did not even see a splotchy afterimage of color except when I closed my eyes in which case I saw a small tealish/purplish diffuse disc on the back of my eyelids that remained fixed at my center field of vision. When I opened my eyes, the afterimage was gone because the surrounding light overpowered it.
I also did not notice any flux of heat from the sun apart from the ambient air temperature which was warm.
At 5:35 PM on the same day, the sun light was unbearably bright even behind thick clouds with a little light coming through such that I could not make out a disc (sun was at 32.5 degrees elevation). Ten seconds of looking lead to significant eye pain. At 6:10 PM, there were no clouds, and the sun was blindingly bright at (25 degrees solar elevation)
I'm very confused about the jump in this article after the miracle observation. Nobody in Medjugorje claimed to have looked at the sun, right? What was the reason to look at it, then?
It feels like all of the hypothesis writing about the sun was written as a separate affair from the trip.
I believe the sun stuff has been reported there as one of the many miracles that happen there. The main miracle itself is only related in the sense that it started off the other miracles.
Love the commitment to empiricism, but absolutely taking your wife's side in the debate.
Part of the problem is that if miracles would compel a full worldview overhaul (not just "the world is weirder and shakier than I thought"), you wouldn't just have to convert to "Leo XIV" Catholicism, but to the children's flavor of "cover your arms or burn in Hell" Catholicism, which was extreme even by 1917 standards.
In the Bosnian case, you'd have to choose between: 1. "Yes, actually Mary, but the children's stories were largely nonsense" - in which case, what grounds remain for it even being Mary and not a Shoggoth with a votive candle?, or 2. "Yes, the whole thing is True Prophecy, and Jesus may have used a screwdriver."
Jesus reportedly worked as a professional carpenter for a decade or so before taking up the preacifyhing line of work. He was also reportedly omniscient. Is it really so hard to believe that, after painstakingly carving thousands of dovetail and mortise-and-tenon joints, he didn't say "screw it, ima invent the screwdriver fifteen centuries early; nobody will notice if I don't tell anyone"?
Well, he'd have had to tell the metalworker he brought in on the project. Maybe a promising research subject for any archaeologists or biblical historians looking for a dissertation topic.
Very intricate the first time, but I'm thinking indirect lost-wax casting in bronze would allow reasonably efficient "mass" production from a reusable primary mold. Wouldn't give particularly high-quality screws, but maybe enough for basic carpentry.
I think it would be entirely possible with first-century technology, but you're looking probably a full day's work and a lot of expensive materials to get a small number of poor-quality screws, and it would be much worse than doing things the normal first-century woodworking way.
Inventing superglue, on the other hand, would be a fun project for a bored omniscient ancient Judean carpenter waiting for his ministry to begin.
Was Jesus omniscient across time? Or was he just smart enough to speedrun the tech tree himself? If he was only omniscient in his own time, and there were no screwdrivers at the time, it's not clear how he learns about screwdrivers. Maybe he was watching alien carpenters in another galaxy?
Or course, any miracle is explainable if he's the son of god, but my priors tend to heavily down-weight accounts involving multiple gratuitous miracles.
These are good objections. Anything miraculous could also be explained by extremely technologically advanced aliens who want you to believe ... something?
I think the right approach would be to try to consider the _totality_ of the evidence, not just looking at individual cases.
If an angelic figure appears before you and permanently cures your disability with a touch, and then says "Catholicism is the correct religion" before vanishing, and this is witnessed by multiple people and also captured on video, you still shouldn't convert to Catholicism, because it's much more likely to be a different magical being playing a joke on you. If the actual Catholic God were real and wanted people to not be disabled and to believe in them, they would perform such miracles for everybody, not just you.
Yes, you have to apply conservation of expected evidence here.
Does Catholicism predict that this will happen and if so with what occurrence? If it does then it happening should update you towards Catholicism every time it happens and away from Catholicism every time it doesn't happen.
If it doesn't(and I don't think most Catholics would say this is the expected outcome and the Vatican has not confirmed it) then every time it doesn't happen you shouldn't update away from Catholicism but every time it does happen you should update away from it(because Catholicism made a wrong prediction).
The Catholic church teaches that yes, some of these are real. They happen sometimes, but not often. They generally happen to people who are already deeply devoted. Sometimes they'll happen when you pray for the intercession of someone _else_ who was deeply devoted.
Once you open the door to 'magical beings' of any kind, you've already left the materialist reservation, and then have to start asking questions like, "Did Jesus really come back from the Dead?"
The Catholic concept of God is really just "reality itself." The claim isn't that "reality exists" - of course we all agree it does - "but that reality wants a specific kind of committed relationship with you."
God showing up to every single person in explicit form would lead people to stoop searching for reality, seeking the truth. Instead, if you look at the broader pattern of supposed miracles, they tend to happen to and around people who were already devout to begin with.
My best 'science flavored' explanation here is that Mary is really something like an memetic attractor that people can 'tune into', and they tend to interpret those experiences through the lens of their cultural background. This maybe sort of explains why so Catholics seem to claim so many miraculous claims: they're really the only major game in town that tells people how to point their 'conscious antennas' anywhere near that attractor.
Of course, that's just my best science flavored explanation. I'm catholic because I think that explanation works even better than the science-flavored one :)
what entity do we even have evidence of that plays supernatural jokes on people? this is like saying to someone " no, you didn't really see a unicorn, you saw a fake unicorn created by slartibarti, god of levity, because the horn was the wrong color." you kind of need to have a specific being in mind not just a possible being, and that being needs proof of belief too.
I feel like there's no fun in playing tricks using supernatural powers anyway.
If I fool you into thinking there's a unicorn in your backyard by painstakingly painting a unicorn on the glass of your window then that's a good trick. If I fool you into thinking that there's a unicorn in your backyard by magically creating a perfect simulacrum of a unicorn then that's not a good trick, it's no fun at all.
A good prank leaves the victim thinking "Oh man, I wouldn't have fallen for that one if I hadn't been so gullible". If the victim is left thinking "Yeah okay fine well there was no way I wasn't going to fall for that perfect simulacrum" then it's no prank at all.
Really? You don't see the appeal in slowly driving people insane, alienating them from their loved ones and turning them against each other? You're no fun.
If you show somebody a supernatural burning bush and based on that convince them that you created the universe and are the ultimate arbiter of morality, I think that's gullibility.
I would say we have as much evidence for supernatural pranksters as we do for other supernatural beings.
Trickster gods, spirits, and demons are actually staples of mythology.
I'm also not sure why I need to have one specific being in mind in order to seriously consider the possibility of being tricked. I don't need to know which Nigerian is responsible to suspect that they might not be a prince in dire need.
I don't think we need any specificity. The vast majority of hypotheses consistent with the data won't include "Christianity is true". Maybe some reasonable priors in combination with the data get you partway to Christianity, but I don't see why we need to or should highlight hypotheses with any specificity
Wow. "Oh that Krishna, such a kidder! He's clearly appearing here in the Mohini avatar to confuse the Catholics, that little rascal!"
Preferring to believe in a deity from a completely different pantheon because you're scared spitless Christianity might be true and that would be ever so inconvenient for all the fun (sins) you want to keep on doing - that's some going.
I can understand denial based on "I'm a materialist atheist". I can't understand denial based on "I'm a materialist atheist and I would believe this was Raven rather than the Blessed Virgin".
It's right that you're calling out an unacknowledged reason people are rejecting Christianity. But I think it may be a somewhat good reason. Words like "good" and "evil" come apart at the tails (to use Scott's terminology), and I honestly don't know how to conclude that Christianity's sins are evil in the sense I care about. This is a semantic issue, related to Quine's translation argument, so I don't think any amount of believing the doctrines helps. Moral realism doesn't help either, because maybe I'm a realist about Humanist ethics but not Christian ethics. Or maybe they're both real and true, they're just talking about different things.
Personally I think Christianity's probably not true in its orthodox forms, but if it were, I don't see why I should take God's side.
"but if it were, I don't see why I should take God's side."
Remember that when our unaligned AI children are shoving you into the disintegrator. "I don't see why I should take humans' side, just because they have some weird words that come apart at the tails" 😁
Well I don't want our AI children to treat me like God. Maybe I should take his side in the sense that I try to take anyone's side (the sense in which I hope AIs take my side). But God doesn't strike me as a utility monster (he passes through the disintegrator unharmed) so I shouldn't give "his side" more weight than all the people and animals. Now if it could be shown that God does actually want only the best for us, I might change my tune, but I can't tell if Christian doctrine even addresses that question, strictly speaking, because the people who translated the Bible into the vernacular weren't aware of Quine's translation argument.
The reasos for my atheism goes a little deeper than anything like materialism. In this case, it's more like, I don't believe reality works in narratives humans find appealing. So you don't get to just neatly compartmentalize different religions in such an investigation, just because it would make for a clunky narrative.
Well, what about not wanting billions to be tortured forever? That is as good reason as any to be in denial about Christianity. Not "sins" which is just you smearing the outgroup (ie non-christians) as there are many good people who are not christian.
Good news, everybody! You can do whatever you like, from boiling kittens alive to the most depraved depths of your imagination, because Andrew has assured us there is no such thing as sin, that is just Smearing The Outgroup.
Oh wait, you didn't mean that, Andrew? You meant there *are* bad things which normal people disapprove of? Tsk tsk, and why should I be ruled by your subjective notions of what is good and bad? Now where did I put that big kitten-boiler again?
My point, which I believe my comment makes quite clear and you yourself have admitted to knowing, is not that there are no sins, but that not everybody who is non christian is so because of sin. Others may have other reasons like not wanting people to be tortured forever.
You smeared the outgroup by implying that anybody who is non christian is so because they want to sin. That is generalizing the outgroup and ignoring other possible reasons like being raised irreligious, or perhaps finding hell immoral. It is classic tribalist mentality.
I agree with what Frikgeek, wrote. To use some made up numbers:
- P(c) is the probability that Catholicism is basically true
- P(e|c) is the probability that when I who has some permanent disability, go to Medjugorje and it's 6:40 and I'm with a group of other pilgrims and I am at some holy hill, then it's the probability of having my disability cured, conditional on Catholicism being true.
-P(e|not c) is the probability of the above happening given Catholicism being false.
My numbers are something like
- P(c) = 1/1000
- P(e|c)= 1/10.000
-P(e|not c) = 1/12Million
this would update me towards being about 50/50 on Catholicism. And I guess around 50/50 on Aliens or something.
But I'm so uncertain about the numbers, I might also say my probabilities are one in a million and one in 12 million, in which case my P(c) only goes up to 12 in a thousand.
The sudden disappearance of pain that Mirjana mentions is also a frequent element of near death experiences, especially those brought about by an injury or a painful disease. Some of the people report that the pain comes back as soon as they reenter ther body, some claim that their pain was healed permanently.
Yeah, it would be interesting to hear that type of thing from the perspective of someone with a very practical and skeptical mindset. Usually when someone brings that type of thing up, I'm curious but also worried they're going to make up some nonsense and/or try to get me to join a cult.
In the same camp as Stephen. FWIW, the part I’d be most interested in is less pure qualia tourism and more — is it useful? How does the ability to shape experience on demand (if that’s an accurate way of putting it) relate to brains doing normal brain-stuff, like navigating the world, caring about things, managing emotions, solving problems, etc. Is it just a fun vacation from reality, or does it have day-to-day import?
Scott is slightly-mangling my commentary on something mentioned in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.
Ingram described a variant of approach to a shortly-before-no-self phenomenon that leads to experiencing "the universe becomes a toroid." I took my own stab at this variant later, and confirmed to myself that my sense-of-the-world indeed turns "toroid." I had previously had the "reality reduced to a single point" feeling, that he describes a few pages before.
Jumping headfirst that far into the book strikes me as a bit of a strange choice, and I do not expect you'll get much out of it that way. But you can search MtCTotB for "toroid," if you're interested in it? I had minimal imagery accompanying this particular experience; nothing particularly fancy or unique to add to it.
Thanks! I’d honestly love to hear more detail. I read MCTB a long time back and am familiar with some of this stuff but the toroid thing escaped me. I’m not trying to replicate it but the experience sounds fascinating and judging from this comment thread, others agree. If you’re ever up for it, your experience of the various consciousness states (?) or shapes would be amazing to read about. What exactly does it mean for consciousness to be a toroid? Some state where time doesn’t flow linearly or is it just the shapes that collapse? I’ve experienced “space” and distance disappearing briefly but I find that easier to wrap my mind around
Yes, I'd also like to hear her opinions on people like Nick Cammarata who rave about the possibility of becoming 100 times happer and how wonderful meditation is. Does she also think this is all fake or are only the hallucinations fake, but the happiness and feelings of bliss might still be real and valuable?
Mirjana's regular apparitions sound a lot like she's learned to enter the first jhana. She spends several days in mental preparation and is able to slip into it easily after so many years of practice.
> (I think the reason my wife’s experience was so much more impressive than mine was that her vision snapped the bright sun against bright clouds to “both sun and clouds are dim” and mine snapped them to “both sun and clouds are bright”, due to some kind of perceptual idiosyncrasy.)
She sees The Dress as gold and white and you see it as blue and black, right?
> Put your face about two inches from the screen and stare at the black dot.
Huh, approximately the only thing that happens for me is that at all the spots disappear (thereby making JPEG compression artifacts more clearly visible) -- except the purple ones.
> the visual system to interpret complex radial stimuli as rotating, and their movement as rotational movement…
These look like they're spinning like crazy if I use my left eye but like they're barely moving at all if I use my right eye, for some reason.
I feel there's a weird bias towards the specificity of the claimed miracles.
"Afterimages" is supposed to be an unsatisfactory explanation, because the reality of visual perception is very complex and thus produces relatively specific phenomena. But that's confusing the specificity of the point in reality we find ourselves in (i.e., all the physical details of how our vision works) with the specificity of the miracle claim.
The miracle witnesses do not put much stock in those specific details. If the sun had spun counterclockwise instead of clockwise, or the afterimages were of a specific color instead of rapidly shifting, they still would have claimed it to be a miracle. In fact, they do just this! Thus, the set of observations that would cause these witnesses to exclaim "miracle!" is actually quite large, and "afterimages" is a suitably simple theory that dismisses the entire set of purported miracles.
Similarly, I find it strange to be obsessed about the physical piece of paper. This is just one of many nonsensical claims that can easily be explained by faulty memory and perception, combined with preoccupation about said piece of paper. (To be clear, I'm charitably assuming that the book author is honest but mistaken).
If someone who never before claimed something weird would suddenly present a semi-credible piece of evidence, that would be worth investigating. But if someone makes dozens of non-credible claims, and among these there is one that happens to be semi-credible, that is much less surprising! It's basically p-hacking!
Now, I understand demanding to see the actual physical miracle, as a new-atheist type of debate move. But if we're actually investigating the claim, then we need to treat a physical piece of evidence very differently than the (non-physical) claim that a physical piece of evidence exists.
In conclusion, you are being way too charitable by investigating each of these claims as if it was a stand-alone, isolated claim. This is an attack vector against which many rationalists are insufficiently hardened.
Previously I posted about also having seen the "miracle" here https://substack.com/@tastyy329837/note/c-192433821. The wife's experience sounds exactly like my own, and I am very confident we observed the same phenomenon, whether or not it's the same thing that people saw at Fatima (which I'd guess was the same, but it's harder to be sure). I saw a spinning illusion in addition to everything else, and I also got the big temporary blind spot that went away after some minutes.
What portion of the Fatima witnesses were expecting the miracle of October 13 to be a sun-related miracle? I've been under the impression that they mostly expected 1) the Virgin to appear to them all directly, and 2) WW1 to end.
Huh, I experience chromotopsia pretty reguliarly. I can even do it on purpose: on a bright sunny say out if I close one eye for at least a minute while going about things normally, when I switch closed eyes after that everything will look blue out of one eye and red out of the other.
Thanks Scott, you’ve done great work. Many of us never took the miracles seriously enough to investigate, but starting with an open mind produced a much more thorough explanation, which is valuable.
Richard, I know you’re always right about everything all the time, but iirc your reasons for never taking miracles seriously was just your distrust of your own family extended onto all non-WEIRD people, along with a general distrust of testimonial evidence. I feel like you miss that there are actually many well-documented healings amongst modern Western people (Caleb Jackson listed out some that made it into academic journals), and not just Sun Miracles / people generally seeing weird things. Imo you kind of handwave away miracles conceptually for really no reason, and could do with an update to your understanding of the subject.
I've always been of the opinion that if God wants me to see a miracle, he will show me one himself, so there's no need to do a ton of research or take a trip anywhere. The most impressive miracle I've seen so far is that a little piece of ice fell off my ice cube tray that looked quite similar to a cross. Which is not terribly impressive considering that ice cube trays are laid out in a grid pattern, so any time I pour a little too much water in there it will spill over into the + shaped interstices. I'm hoping that if there is indeed an all-powerful God who wants to save my soul, he'll send me something better than that, but I'm not holding my breath or anything.
Scott's whole trip seems like an unfathomable waste of time from my perspective. But there's no doubt that it makes much more interesting reading than my ice tray.
I think you insistance that you had to convert after seeing the miracle strange, given that the Virgin very specifically said that you *didn't*, as noted in your article!
You're treating an universalist virgin as weaker proof that Catholicism is right, rather than as a stronger proof that universalism is right, which I find kind of strange. Surely the Virgin knows better than the Pope, and if you saw a miracle you should update your beliefs of what *she* said, not what the Pope said.
When I first learned about the Fatima miracle from Scott’s earlier post, I *immediately* thought to myself: “ok, if this actually happened, then it’s clearly some sort of optical illusion produced by staring at the sun.”
Scott has now taken an orders of magnitude longer, more entertaining, more illuminating journey to the same destination.
And that’s why he’s Scott Alexander, and why I can only ever be the #2 Scott A. of the rationalist blogging world: because he insisted on investigating the miracle in such a way that no reader could doubt that, if it *were* real, then he would come to believe it was real, and would fall at his feet and start praying to Jesus and Mary.
This was almost certainly an optical illusion with a consensus interpretation enforced via social contagion; that was obvious from the start and more so after careful but remote consideration in places like this. But the very small possibility that we might be wrong about that, would have very important implications. I disagree with "...and thus convert to Catholicism immediately", but it would still be hugely significant.
We are very fortunate to have someone willing and able to undertake this sort of on-site investigation, and reputable enough for us to trust his reports. Bravo, #1 Scott A, and thank you for this.
Yeah, a lot of the Fatimology debate is between "c'mon it's obviously just because they stared at the sun" and "no, here's some reasons why it couldn't have been that" and "okay, here's a model of how it could still have been staring at the sun".
With other branches like claims that the children's visions were naturalistically inexplicable.
Frankly the whole idea of converting to Catholicism after seeing a miracle was absurd and Scott's wife was completely correct. Even if the supernatural happened that day in some kind of proven way, it could just as easily be aliens or Harry Potter wizards. I don't understand why Scott seems to have this mental block, its been a consistent illogical note in these articles.
The sun miracle is much less likely in the possibly counterfactual worlds where Harry Potter wizards exist or where aliens are here than in the world where Catholicism is true. This means that a confirmed sun miracle is better Bayesian evidence for Catholicism than for those other things. Additionally, Harry Potter wizards existing has vanishingly small prior probability even compared to Catholicism being true (and I say that as an atheist), though imo aliens being here has much higher prior probability. I personally would not convert to Catholicism even after seeing a sun miracle, but these things depend on one's weighting of evidence, different people will do that differently, so let's be nice to each other's counterfactual religious views.
If we postulate the existence of space aliens or Harry Potter wizards, why would we expect them to be any more or less likely to produce sun miracles than the postulated Virgin Mary?
One thing we can be reasonably confident of is that, if there is a God, He is perfectly fine with having people believe in false gods due to their misinterpretation of apparent miracles, or being atheists if they don't see any convincing enough miracles. So we can't just look at a miracle and assume that its purpose was to convince everyone that a particular deity is real.
If flying saucers produce a "sun miracle" every time some damn fool engages the hyperdrive in the wrong part of the ionosphere, or if Harry Potter wizards form sun miracles every time they put the emphasis on the wrong syllable of "Apparate!", then we would expect a random smattering of non-illusory sun miracles, and we would expect the ones in Catholic regions to be ascribed to the Virgin Mary. The ones in Buddhist regions would get a different religious interpretation; in the United States they'd be seen as alien spaceships. And if the God of Abraham was behind any of these, we still don't know *why*.
Let's say you somehow become fully 100% convinced that wizards from Harry Potter exist. Will a natural, subsequent thought of yours be: "Huh, I guess Fatima was possibly supernatural"? I'm pretty sure it won't be that or, at least, much less likely to be that than in the case where you became fully convinced that Catholicism is true.
This is because even if wizards existed, they could do tons of supernatural acts of which a sun miracle is merely one particular one they have no special reason to actually do.
If you constrain your hypothesis further, by saying that "wizards from Harry Potter exist, and they do sun miracles every time they mispronounce a spell", then, indeed, your likelihood gets much greater: in a world where that's true, sun miracles are a near certainty! However, your prior becomes vanishingly small even compared to the already vanishingly small "wizards from Harry Potter exist" hypothesis' prior.
> This is because even if wizards existed, they could do tons of supernatural acts of which a sun miracle is merely one particular one they have no special reason to actually do.
But they do have reasons, right? Like some rogue Christian wizard trying to weaken the secular Soviet Union's grip on power by staging a miracle.
Saying that some entity produces a piece of evidence suggesting some untrue hypothesis X to deceive you is a classic case of an epicycle. Compare it with saying that yes, we've found dinosaur bones, but in a world where the devil exists, he would plant it, so it's not much of an evidence for a scientific worldview.
Also, if wizards exist, you have no reason to assume they are exclusively pro-Catholic. There would be some Soviet wizards too. In that case, the Soviet wizards in the audience would be just as likely to magically cover the fabricated miracle as the pro-Catholic wizards would be to create it imo.
The fossils would be weird too if we didn't have a good idea of how they were formed and how evolution functioned, and of how things were affected by time. But we do have a decent understanding of that, and we know that the world is much older than we are, so it's safe to make educated guesses that they're borne of natural processes. These same assumptions can't be made for unknown phenomena. You can't immediately rush to conclusions when you don't understand the underlying processes. Yes, the idea that they were caused by wizards is ridiculous... just as ridiculous as jumping to any other conclusion.
I agree. If it were not so, and Catholicism's posterior were greater than the sum of alternative hypotheses' posterior, then I would convert to Catholicism upon seeing the miracle, but I already conceded that I would not.
I also think he is joking, but I maintain that seeing a sun miracle at Međugorje *is* evidence for Catholicism even if the evidence does not overrcome the very low prior of it.
When people deny this, I always think of Jasnah from Stormlight archive. She is *the* atheist in the book series written by Brandon Sanderson, a mormon. She is supposed to represent cold rationaility and objectivity. The problem is, she lives in a world full of gods who interfere in the lives of people all the time. A good conception of rationality should lead us to believe in gods if they actually exist.
Right, but there's a difference between believing in gods as a class, and believing in one specific God over all others. An unambiguous but vague miracle points to the former more than the latter. If it is local in scope, it will probably be *interpreted* as pointing to whichever proposed deity is most popular in that area, but that's extremely weak evidence.
To tentatively challenge the claim that it's evidence for Catholicism: quite possibly, lots of miracles should push us further into a long tail of beliefs where Catholicism doesn't stand a chance. Like, if miracles are rare, then we can suppose the world is intelligible, and in an intelligible world, Catholicism is one of the 100 best-justified metaphysical theories (seems plausible to me). But if miracles are common, then Catholicism's claims of an intelligible world seem suspect.
I'm not asserting these things, and my gut feeling is often that Catholic-flavoured miracles do make Catholicism more likely. I just don't think my feeling is justified.
I might be the world expert at this point at reading Scott's facial expression, and he was at least somewhat serious about the "I might have to convert to Catholicism." It genuinely spooked me a bit.
Medjugorje is controversial, and that's as much as I'm happy to say. I don't like apparitions, which I know is highly ironic, but that's how my brain is wired. Unlike Fatima and Lourdes, Medjugorje has not been officially recognised as authentic apparition (and there seems to be a *lot* of local politics involved, as well as happening first while then-Yugoslavia was still a Communist state and then smack-bang in the middle of the breakup and the subsequent Bosnian war, and then we have the power struggle between the bishop and the major religious order, which happens a lot more throughout Catholic history than you'd think, because bishops govern the secular clergy but orders are self-governing*):
"On 2 April 1995, at the high point of conflict within the local diocese, Bishop Ratko Perić was kidnapped by Croat militiamen, beaten, and taken to a chapel run by one of the Franciscans associated with Medjugorje, where he was held hostage for ten hours. At the initiative of the mayor of Mostar, he was freed without bloodshed, with the help of the United Nations Protection Force."
As to physical explanations for seeing miracles, knock yourself out. It's a legitimate area of investigation. "Here is a physical explanation of natural phenomena as to why people thought they saw the sun changing colour, or statues moving, and that's why this is not a supernatural miracle" is perfectly fine. Why people, particularly young adults/teenagers are especially prone to this is also a legitimate field of enquiry. We had this locally back in the mid-80s and I didn't go near the place at the time, even with all the tour buses turning up, so I'm impressed Scott went out of his way to visit Medjugorje:
I'm a lot more dubious about continuing revelations and private messages etc. Those are where the real harm comes in. "God, via Our Lady, told me that X, Y, Z" and now we've got a possible schism and potential heresy brewing, and it easily turns into cult behaviour:
However, simply because one element has been shown to be capable of natural explanation, this does not invalidate the entire claim. That's something to remember. Speaking for the Catholic side, one does not have to believe Medjugorje is legitimate, but neither does one have to believe that it's all fraud and has been exploded by Science! disproving "miracles". It's up to what you find personally convincing, so long as you don't wander off the reservation into heresy etc. or start making inflated claims.
"Religious institutes normally begin as an association formed, with the consent of the diocesan bishop, for the purpose of becoming a religious institute. After time has provided proof of the rectitude, seriousness and durability of the new association, the bishop, having obtained permission of the Holy See, may formally set it up as a religious institute under his own jurisdiction. Later, when it has grown in numbers, perhaps extending also into other dioceses, and further proved its worth, the Holy See may grant it formal approval, bringing it under the Holy See's responsibility, rather than that of the bishops of the dioceses where it is present. For the good of such institutes and to provide for the needs of their apostolate, the Holy See may exempt them from the governance of the local bishops, bringing them entirely under the authority of the Holy See itself or of someone else. In some respects, for example public liturgical practice, they always remain under the local bishop's supervision."
As I might have said before, all of these official miracles have always seemed silly to me. So, let's assume there exists an omnipotent and omniscient being who wants to spread his message. He can see everything, from everyone's thoughts unfolding in real time to the exact location of every molecule of every grain of sand on every beach, and more. He can do anything. He could turn the Sun into a cube and make everyone on Earth fluent in Swahili, if he wanted to. So... how does this awesomely powerful being choose to communicate his supremely important message ? Why, via vague portents that are indistinguishable from atmospheric phenomena with a dash of retinal damage, of course !
Well, that's also the dude that put an evil talking snake in a garden so that it could bamboozle a couple of clueless dupes. I'd say that vague portents are very much on brand.
If I were God, I wouldn't do a miracle that 100% confirms me to everyone. That way you get religious authoritarian nations that are obviously not conductive to the qualities I would want humans to have. However, in some cases I could use miracles that are convincing to the people present to influence local conditions positively.
Ok, but consider rocks for a moment. Rocks exist. Everyone (plus or minus epsilon) believes they exist. There are some people who admire and/or study rocks, but most do not give them much thought in their day-to-day life. So, how come God revealed the existence of rocks in this way, but not the existence of himself ?
Rocks have no power and no moral prescriptions for humans, so even though many people believe they exist, they don't put them on the top of status hierarchies and consequently, don't restructure society in the name of rocks. Were I God, I'd allow people to know of rocks.
> Rocks have no power and no moral prescriptions for humans
But they do ! Rocks are incredibly powerful. Most rocks can support a tremendous amount of weight. Certain rocks can be used to start a fire, to detect the position of the Sun on a cloudy day, and even to produce various metals (plus many other uses). Some rocks can float; and some rocks are just beautiful. The reason you don't think of all these rock powers as miraculous is precisely because you are able to detect them pretty easily, but they are no less powerful for it.
As for moral prescriptions, rocks outperform gods here by a massive margin. A god's moral prescriptions can (and usually are !) be ignored or misinterpreted or perverted. The behaviour of rocks cannot. If you drop a rock, it will fall down, 99.9% of the time (barring special cases such as tornadoes or zero gravity environments). If you drop the rock on your foot, it will probably hurt, thus supplying you with immediate and undeniable negative feedback. Granted, rocks usually don't say "thou shalt not kill", and you can in fact kill someone with a rock... but wait a minute, why is it that you are able to do so ? Who had ordained it ?
The kind of power rocks have is importantly different from the kind of power a god has: the power has no mind behind it to direct it towards the mind's preferences. This explains why I know of no religion that focuses on rocks without imbuing those rocks with some kinds of minds, for example spirits. In contrast, tons of religions worship gods.
Surely, if the Miracle had caused you to convert at all, it should have caused you to convert to the idiosyncratic branch of Christianity described by the visionary's statements, not the mainstream Catholic Church? If I saw what I believed to be an indisputably true miracle with a Christian character, but it didn't quite correspond to the modern teachings of the Church, I would sooner think "well, I guess the Gospels really happened, but Paul and his successors got some stuff wrong" than "well, I guess I saw a real miracle, but I should ignore any aspects of it that don't fit Church canon".
> "screwdrivers, [...] not known for their presence in first-century Judaea"
I was astonished to read this! Didn't Archimedes design screws (albeit perhaps not as fasteners)? How could Biblical Judea - part of a vast empire that had hydraulics, pneumatics, vast valley-spanning aqueducts featuring complex architectural principles that outlast modern buildings by millennia, ocean-going ships, gears, crankshafts, bearings, drivechains, etc. etc. - possibly not have had screwdrivers?!
So, I looked it up on Wikipedia: it seems screws were invented between 900 BC and 600 BC, but screw*drivers* weren't invented until around 1480 AD. If this were true, I think it would be my new all-time favourite fact.
(...also, if true, being a carpenter in like 0 AD must have been bloody annoying...)
Disappointingly, though, I don't think it's quite true. As far as I can tell, Biblical-era screws (which were large and wooden, not small and metal) seem to have been driven by various sorts of crank-handle- or tap-handle*-like devices: I don't see why such devices shouldn't have been known to 0 AD artificers by some name that we could now reasonably translate as "screwdriver"..
The ancient screws the wiki is referring to seem to be screws that aren't used as fasteners, such as in a screw press. I don't think I'd call a crank used to press olives a "screwdriver" even if it is driving a screw-shaped mechanism.
I agree in general - both that they probably didn't use screws as fasteners and that the crank handle of (say) a water-screw shouldn't count as a 'screwdriver' - but I disgree with the screw press example specifically: the action of a screw press is mechanically close enough to the action of a screw fastener (unlike a water screw the press would be self-locking, would hold the upper press-plate fast against the press bed, would apply steady pressure, etc.) that if I had a bank of screw presses and a removable handle-like device used specifically for moving between them and tightening each one in turn, I think I would be willing to translate that device as 'screwdriver'.
(Why removable? I'm imagining quite a lot of torque is needed; the advantage of the screw press over the lever press is that it's much more compact - an advantage it would lose if it needed a long handle or crank-arm permanently attached. I searched for "ancient screw press" images and found things like this: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/2246056186/photo/wooden-press.jpg )
I'd be quite willing to call a crank-type or radial-handle-type device a 'driver'; it doesn't need to be an axial-handle-type device and doesn't need to be specifically for driving fasteners - any sort of screw will do - what I think matters more for me is that it's a specialised tool, not a general purpose handle that's used for a bunch of other non-screw applications besides, and that it's separate from the screw and intended to be used with lots of different screws, not an integrated part of a single device such as a screw-press.
"she was definitely not going to wear that headscarf-shawl thing that some Catholic women wear."
It's called a mantilla. I believe American Catholics call it a chapel veil, but it's a mantilla. And no, since the Vatican II reforms, you don't have to cover your head in church any more. This is personal choice (or, if very traditionalist, then required).
My religious education classes were held in the basement of a Catholic church. One time there was a funeral taking place upstairs and our teacher wanted us to see it. The girls covered their heads with paper napkins to abide by the rule.
A *reproducible* miracle, sure, agreed - but is this the case for a miracle that's verifiable but not reproducible?
(edit: just to be clear, I don't think there ever has been a miracle that's verifiable but not reproducible; I'm speaking purely hypothetically)
If every day the sun traverses the sky from east to west except for one day when, predicted by a Catholic shepherdess or something, it turned purple and bounced all around the sky like a ball in a bingo urn, and everybody, all our instruments, etc. all saw/recorded it, but it doesn't fit any of our models, we have no idea why it did so, we experienced no gravitational or other effects, and we don't expect it to ever do so again, I don't think that would be sufficient to make me consider myself a Catholic - but I do think I would nevertheless prefer to call it a "miracle" rather than a "regular natural phenomenon".
Have you looked into Bigfoot much? They’ve got a LOT of plaster casts of tracks. Like your sun example, there’s evidence and testimony and measurements from scientific instruments piled up all over the Pacific Northwest. Still, most empiricists require reproducibility, and don’t believe.
Fully agree that reproducibility is a stronger test than verifiability, and that things need to meet the stricter reproducibility test, not merely the verifiability test, in order to be considered natural phenomena.
Miracles, however, not being limited by the same rules as natural phenomena, are free to be verifiable but irreproducible. If we wanted to find miracles the "gap" between verifiable and reproducible is probably where we should look for them.
Is Bigfoot, then, a miracle? I wouldn't say so: I would not consider plaster casts and low-quality photographs to meet even the less-strict verifiability test; for that matter I do not consider that even Fatima, which seems far better supported by evidence than Bigfoot, meets the verifiability test.
*Could* Bigfoot be a miracle, even in principle? I suspect not: I think for the case of a sort of mysterious ape-man really for sufficient evidence I'd want to see him interviewed on the nine o'clock news - and that would meet the reproducibility test. So, there's probably no "verifiability gap" where evidence of Bigfoot could be verified but not reproduced. Either he's unverifiable and irreproducible (in other words, he doesn't exist) or he's both verifiable and reproducible (in other words, a natural phenomenon).
Please understand I'm not arguing in favour of miracles or supernatural phenomena: I don't think there ever has been one, and I don't think Fatima counts as one. I just disagree with defining miracles as exactly-identical to natural phenomena by fiat: if there ever were any supernatural phenomena, anywhere in this big weird universe that we don't understand, it would curtail our ability to recognise them.
I picked Bigfoot because it’s easier than miracles. There are plenty of reasons why Sasquatch experiences wouldn’t be reproducible. The easiest is just that maybe they’re more powerful than us. Faster, stronger, better at hiding than we are at searching.
What does your epistemology look like if it just so happens that human beings are not the top of the food chain? Ants could be very smart, and yet many existing phenomena are neither verifiable nor reproducible by them, because of their small size and power and weakness of eyesight. If you were an ant, how would you prove, one way or the other, whether your science is sufficient to correctly establish whether human beings are real and what their properties are?
What does Scott’s trip to Europe look like if we’re like ants compared to the Virgin Mary?
Thanks for this. My late grandmother had a Medjugorje obsession and although she almost never travelled, took the trip across the ocean and proselytize to us. This post shed some light on what this was all about.
One of my early memory was looking at a low angle sun while bored on a road trip with my parents and seeing the weirdness you drew in the multi circle image. I was probably 5yo and still remember it, so it mus have been very striking to me. I could see people giving various interpretation to this weird perceptual effect.
It is very cool that you followed this up. As you say, it is convenient that your wife saw the phenomenon before you did.
Why did you immediately think in terms of a miracle? When you described the Fatima phenomenon my immediate thought was some weird optical effect or optical illusion, even though I had no idea what. Even if I don't understand how or why, I had a lot more steps remaining before I seriously contemplate "God did it" and "the catholic version of God specifically". (And yes, if it's something like "a big head appears in the sky and announces that Catholicism is right", then I am very close to accepting that. Although I also don't automatically endorse doing what God says if it sounds to be wrong.)
Your theory does ring very true. When you described the Fatima miracle, I had no idea what sort of optical effect or optical illusion would be plausible, but your theory of a *somewhat* specific set of atmospheric effects, combined with weird optical effects, combined with "if you look at it for two minutes" feels like it does produce the sort of mass visions reported.
Although I may have missed, did that give any suggestions for why the miracle seemed to occur there specifically? Only because people are looking for it there?
Please no-one stare at the sun on my behalf, but I'm interested if other people end up replicating the effect. Or even if you can build an artificial one.
In retrospect, maybe you should have tried to replicate it elsewhere before travelling. Or listed the weird parts of the miracle and the possible explanations, and juggled them around to see if there's a combination that felt like it explained things, even if no explanation by itself was satisfying. Although I also absolutely did not think of any of that in advance.
If the UV rays are less focused and spread over a larger retinal area that might explain the different experiences. So I would be curious about whether your wife still sees the phenomenon without glasses and the time each of you got your glasses.
I think you being a second generation atheist just went through what those of us born into religious families all went through*. Being raised Mormon, you're inundated with stories of unexplainable Miracles and so the church must be true, and the only reason everyone else doesn't covert is because they just don't know about it yet. You don't leave religion by figuring out a logical explanation for each and every one of those. You leave it because you realize that *every* religion is inundated with stories of miracles. But they're all mutually exclusive, with the only correlation being they happen much more frequently to the uneducated and superstitious. Unverifiable eyewitness claims of odd things just are not very much evidence of something that's not mundane and shouldn't be treated as such. This extends to non-religious spheres like UFOs, alternative medicines, big foot, or crime waves.
Sigh. This is why you don't send a psychiatrist to do a survey taker's job. What he should have done was arranged for a local information, not necessarily someone who has seen the miracle, but a local who is broadly trusted by various other locals. This person or persons then introduces you to one or more willing interview subjects, who after answering questions introduces you to other willing subjects, etc. Oh well.
As for the explanations, sadly Scott's theories have no more empirical support, with respect to phenomena observed in this location, than the claims of miracles do. I say this as someone who expects that a scientific explanation would eventually be supported. What we really need is a group of people seeing the miracle while an astronomer takes careful readings.
As for his "experiment" with his wife or with a random crowd, I would gently remind Scott of the necessity of obtaining informed consent.
I also can't help wondering if she simply thought of the same thing first.
isn't the whole concept of the Virgin Mary a little heretical?
Like, Catholics are monotheistic. That's very important to them. OK, they have the trinity, but they get around that by saying that's all aspects of the same God. And they have saints performing miracles, but only when God feels like doing it for them. They don't have minor deities like some other religions do. Also, God seems like a very distant and mysterious figure, not some genie who's going to grant your wishes.
The Virgin Mary seems like a leftover from pagan religions. Or, if you will, wishful thinking. The idea, I guess, is that if Jesus isn't granting your prayers because he's being too much of an all-powerful mysterious sky father, the Virgin Mary can pull him by the ear, remind him that she's still his mom, and that be a good boy by granting regular human prayers. So you'll have better chance of a succesful prayer by praying to her than to God directly.
I dunno, it sounds nice, but it also sounds directly antithetical to most Christian theology, as I understand it.
No, but Catholics don’t think Mary is a goddess. And Mary isn’t anymore antithetical to Catholicism or Orthodoxy than the Trinity is. Surely the Trinity is harder to understand than ”God has a special relationship with some people”.
It just seems *suspiciously* as if they took a classic pagan belief about a motherhood goddess who you can get magical favors from through ritual offerings, and rebranded her.
Nothing you are saying there is new. Protestantism particularly disliked Marian devotion precisely because they considered it pagan, along with the intercession of saints.
Why does that ”seem” more suspicious than any other aspect of Christianity? Also, it is not as though there is some rule in Christian theology that says that Christian beliefs have to be maximally far from pagan ones.
I am also an atheist and not raised Catholic or anything, and I don’t share your feeling about this.
There is a very strong rule in monotheistic religion against polytheism. (In Torah/Ancient Testament, the focus is you should not WORSHIP the other gods, not so much denying their existence).
In fact the whole religious syncretism thing (local spirits being rebranded as angels/demons etc) is a huge and complicated deal in catholicism, with several schisms, massacres etc revolving around it as late as the 14th century. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism )
The catholic church keeps a very neat list of what entities you can and cannot believe in (official saints, including Mary, are fine) without committing idolatry.
Well, Catholics will also ask living people, especially "holier" people like monks and nuns, to pray for them. If you think a prayer is more significant/helpful when coming from a nun because you see the nun as holier than yourself, naturally a prayer from a saint in heaven would be even more significant, and a prayer from the mother of god even more so.
I do think the practice of praying to saints taps into the same mental/emotional space as praying to multiple gods, but on a purely theological level it's not different from asking living people to pray for you.
I don't want to jump all over you with hobnailed boots, but this is such a mish-mash hodge-podge of "well isn't this just like..." that oozed on outwards from 19th century attempts at finding the universal underlying themes of all religions, e.g. "every culture has had a dying god!" type of Golden Bough work, and misunderstanding of the doctrines involved that I'm doing a lot of heavy sighing here.
Yes, Charles, these things have been considered before. You will doubtless be happy to learn that sectarian Protestants of the more nutcase type went before you about "the Virgin Mary is pagan"; identification has been made with everyone from Isis ("did you know, dumb Catholics, that your Madonna and Child imagery is copied wholesale from ancient images of Isis with the infant Horus?") to Astarte and who knows who else:
Modern paganism/Wicca, though I may be thinking more of the 70s revival stuff, love them some "well ackshully Christian saints are only the Church taking over existing pagan gods and goddesses in order to let people continue worshipping them under the new regime!" And indeed, in some instances, this is true (more or less).
Cultus of saints? All been fought over during the Reformation. Misunderstandings about the nature of the Trinity? A varied series of heresies from the early days of the Church on downward, with the split in the 19th century or so, with American Protestantism as the most visible (it's always America, for some reason), where denominations sprung up like mushrooms based on the idea that there is only one God (e.g. the Unitarians):
"The idea, I guess, is that if Jesus isn't granting your prayers because he's being too much of an all-powerful mysterious sky father, the Virgin Mary can pull him by the ear, remind him that she's still his mom, and that be a good boy by granting regular human prayers. So you'll have better chance of a succesful prayer by praying to her than to God directly."
I can only smile here because there's some truth to that; devotional imagery of the kind where Mary pleads His humanity, by becoming incarnate through her, with her Son and He pleads His death with the Father in a chain of intercession for human supplicants is that train of thought (see the copious historical work on the rise of Marian devotion in the Middle Ages), but also the entire debate over the Theotokos, something that was fought over bitterly, because of the Christological significance:
Sorry if I hurt anyone's, uh, sacret cow, with my comment. I meant it to be humorous and cheeky, but it seems people took me more seriously than I intended. Anyway, thanks for all the interesting links about theology. I actually do enjoy reading about some of this stuff, even if I don't believe in it. I still think the cheesy like plastic figurines of Mary that places like this sell at souvenir stores look odd, though.
Tourist trap tat and souvenir stalls have been part of pilgrimage sites since forever. The Romans bought up the same crap when they did the "Visiting The Pyramids" tours of Egypt, the Christian pilgrims from the early days of the church into the Middle Ages went crazy for them:
They're tacky, they're tasteless, and they're part of human experience both religious and secular (let he who has never bought a Funko Pop cast the first stone).
"I am, not to toot my own horn, an expert at not hallucinating."
I think this is the crux of the "should you convert upon seeing a miracle?" debate. We know that some people are better than others at not hallucinating. If 500 people have seen sun miracles, those aren't a random sample of the population, they're going to be more hallucination-prone than average (even if God is regularly doing real sun miracles, people hallucinate all kinds of things all the time, it would take a second act of divine intervention to make sure none of the hallucinations randomly happened to be fake sun miracles). If a sun miracle happens to the guy who doesn't hallucinate even on psychedelics, that is stronger evidence than if the 501st sun miracle happens to some guy of unknown hallucinatory expertise.
Your wife argues that you shouldn't believe the miracle because, c'mon, hallucination is actually super easy, but she seems to be assuming that her experience generalizes. If she said "Hallucinating is super easy, I do it whenever I drop acid" then you would have a clear rebuttal that you don't, and this must be some kind of neurological difference between you. Plausibly, the thing where she can fold her consciousness into a torus and hallucinate is also a neurological difference.
If you're bad at hallucinating and your wife is good at it, then maybe you should convert to Catholicism upon seeing a miracle, and your wife shouldn't.
Years ago, I read James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. I found it weird in a lot of ways; as a psychologist, James mentions that hallucinations are actually not particularly uncommon, but most people who have them largely ignore them. One of the features he describes as distinguishing religious experiences is that they feel to the people having them like revelations of truth, which James clearly doesn't believe they always are, but for reasons which I could never figure out he seemed pretty confident that they sometimes are. But setting aside the weird experiences that just don't seem important, there are people who have very weird experiences that seem like they could be interpreted as having significant meaning, but without crediting them with much truth; A. J. Ayer had was seems like a textbook near death experience about a year before he actually died, and wrote about it, but he assumed that weird shit was going on in his brain because of his precarious condition and didn't take seriously the possibility that it was actually supernatural. Since we know that confidence and accuracy in general aren't nearly as correlated as we wish they were, I guess the existence of people reporting extremely weird experiences they don't think much of makes me suspect that the people who are absolutely certain they know what they experienced and what it meant are just displaying the kind of unjustified overconfidence people are often prone to.
Have you ever had (or felt you had) any of these revelations of truth/gnosis/etc? I am asking because I think that your difficulty understanding why James is confident in some of them probably stems from this. To me, it has seemed there is a broad spectrum of "weird experiences" that I see how /someone/ could find veridical, had they not ever seen much deeper, but there is a second class of experiences with the binary quality of being "more," that carry their own truth with them. No increase in degree of the first class can lead to the second. (It's been a while since I read James, so please assume my position is disjunct from his; I'm not claiming this is what he thought.)
I've had experiences of what I suppose I'd call intellectual insight, where, to take one case, at one point Goedel's incompleteness theorem just seemed obviously correct in an overwhelming "how could things possibly be otherwise?" way. It seemed similar to how James described the veridicality of the experiences he talks about, though he never considers that class of examples. This included in being an experience with a specific, limited duration (I of course still think Goedel's theorem is true, and had thought so for some time before the weird insight experience, but there was this strange period of absolute certainty that only happened that one time). And once the feeling passed, I didn't think that once having had the feeling added any more to my good reasons for believing the theorem than what I had based on the rest of my evidence. It was a pretty intense, strange experience while it lasted, though.
Here is the question I've always had about Fatima-esque miracles: Say we accept that the stories of people communicating with the Virgin Mary and seeing the miracles is true. Why is the only inference from that to the truth of Catholicism? Wouldn't it be equally explanatory and more parsimonious to posit, for example, a powerful magician who can induce hallucinations in people and has a vested interest in convincing them of the truth of Catholicism?
Okay, so first: where is this magician? How is he (I'm presuming it's a he, but it could be a she) zipping around the globe to various countries over a very prolonged period of centuries?
Second, where is he getting his mojo from? It's all got a (pseudo-) scientific basis and he's using drugs, hypnosis, psychological manipulation, technology etc. to pull off these fake miracles, *or* he's in league with supernatural powers of his own?
'Cos that second one is going to entangle you in the briars as well, if supernatural entities are real and can intervene in mundane human affairs.
Third, why does he want everyone to be Catholics? Is this the tired old trope of "priestcraft!" attached to everyone from the Colossi of Memnon on down? If he can pull off miracles (fake or real), why not found his own religion and be rich and powerful?
I can't answer any of these questions. My question is more: Why is the catholic God a MORE favourable explanation than the magician? I'm not saying you're saying this, but it's more that it seems to be an explicit premise of a lot of these miracle-related articles-i.e. if we accept the miracles as real there's nothing left but to accept catholicism
From the humorous way that you phrase it (if the sun visibly does seemingly-impossible trick, your wife needs to wear a headscarf-shawl thing) I know you're being tongue-in-cheek about instantly updating all the way to full Christianity, specifically Catholicism. Nevertheless, I think this expresses something in the rationalist norms about open-mindedness that moves epistemologically backward.
At the start of Chapter 2 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry sees some magic tricks, and instead of realizing something outside his understanding is going on and wondering what it could be, or considering alternatives, he instantly has an unwarranted cascade of updates through his entire worldview to a fixed conclusion.
At LessOnline, I participated in a panel discussion about your post against Solving Debates. My co-panelists took the position that debate is useful, and I took the position that it's not.
They spent ten minutes on a formal debate about whether the Shroud of Turin was real. I said the Shroud of Turin (like HPMOR's Chapter 2 miracles, or sun miracles) is a tip of a distant branch on the tumbleweed of a person's beliefs, and it would be out-of-sequence to suddenly cause us to update on more load-bearing beliefs and dispositions.
There is an entire chain of distinct claims in Christianity, many of which would involve their own evidence. Do we need to have perfect certainty, understanding, and control (to put it in David Chapman's terms) in an anthropomorphized form, which is God? Not everyone feels that need, and you can stop feeling it. Does God even have a Son? Not every religion agrees. And Christians, forgive me in advance for making it sound low-status, but I will say this just to illustrate the sheer number of claims to be "debated"... did God need to kill his own Son to forgive us for something our ancestors did when they were convinced by a talking snake, so you can live forever if you eat his flesh and drink his blood, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. Agree or disagree with that list, there's no sense smuggling it all in to "Shroud of Turin, yes or no?" which most Christians don't even need to care about.
More important is the concept of underlying dispositions, such as "the less reason there is to be certain one way or another, the freer I am to express unshakeable certainty." There are many more, and my argument for why these formal debates are unimportant is that they are a smokescreen for talking one's self into becoming consistent with a set of underlying dispositions which you have already shifted into.
I told my co-panelists they're at risk of being cultic. This reversed process, from a tiny branch of their belief tumbleweed into the more load-bearing stances, instead of being mindful of the dispositions and load-bearing stances from the outset, is probably why people adjacent to this scene get sucked into manipulative frames which they end up regretting. I could name three people known for manipulation, who most of you are probably already thinking about. I keep telling people, those three are only one small piece of the problem. The target-rich social environment is the biggest part of it.
Fascinating post overall, and I admire your open-mindedness and investigative spirit. But count me with the other commenters who are baffled by your suggestion that, even conditional on seeing a true miracle, you should convert to *Catholicism* of all things. I get that maybe you were being a little tongue in cheek in how you described this argument with your wife, played up the Catholicism bit for the drama of the blog post, etc. But taking it at face value, isn't this an extraordinary example of privileging the hypothesis? I mean, even you discussed in detail how Mirjana's revelations were totally at odds with doctrinal Catholicism. At most a "miracle" would be evidence for some fundamental misunderstanding we have about like, the laws of physics and/or human consciousness, and *maybe* evidence for something like prankster aliens, the "supernatural," or seams in the Matrix.
Given it's happening at sunset, have you considered a prolonged variant of a green flash like phenomenon as an alternative hypothesis? I wonder if, in principle, the idiosyncrasies of the local terrain and atmospheric conditions could lead to recurrent prolonged green flash like phenomena. If there was a prolonged super green like stimulus, perhaps it could explain everything seeming red afterwards.
Also, have you considered the possibility that in Mirjana's account of the watch hands reversing might represent be a transient reversal of left vs right laterality of the visual fields? If so, this seems to require a neurological rather than a retinal cause. (Reversal-of-vision metamorphopsia?)
Putting it together, I'm wondering if local conditions could somehow filter light wavelengths such that they hit the retina in abnormal, non-physiological conditions for a prolonged period, never seen under normal day-to-day lighting. With no existing template to process this information the mind might seek a top-down explanation of what is happening, which could vary in culturally distinct ways. A particularly strong episode (enough to cause hallucinations in several observers simultaneously) might lead to neural adaptation to an extent that when normal vision is initially restored, the left-right axis is transiently flipped when physiological retinal signals return and synchronise with neural efferents.
Sorry, I'm up late and didn't think the physics through well, and my knowledge of optics is poor. Basically I'm wondering if this site might function like a high intensity laser that shifts wavelengths and serially fatigue distinct cones, rather than an ultraviolet mechanism.
My take on miracles and convention: faith, by definition, doesn't obey rules of logic. Also, we do see pretty crazy things out there – what about the Λ cosmological constant, or galaxies rotating as pancakes – but astronomers aren't more religious than other occupations. So the "real" miracle isn't the Sun apparently going super-nova or any other external event, on the contrary it is something internal happening inside a person, and then the person realizes that yes, Catholicism (or some other religion, or faith, or the lack of it) is right and has been right all along! At that point the person no longer cares about what the Sun does or did, or a counter going from 500 to 501, they know they the Truth, and the rest is irrelevant.
This seeing Maria in place of sun, sounds like inpainting the brain does, typically putting human-like shapes/faces into areas which it can't see clearly. So perhaps the sun indeed caused some damage/bleaching/afterimage/disabling of this part of retina image and then depending on your priors you could see Maria or other entity in the hole
Scott sez, regarding Marjana's account of her visits with the Virgin
> I did find the level of detail in this description compelling
Mirjana's descriptions of the build-up to her visions of being with the Virgin Mary mention breathing and breathing sensations several times, and the mentions occur alongside her description of a gradually deepening altered state.:
>Anticipation steals my breath and makes me feel like I’m suffocating. I’m already halfway in another world […]
>As I kneel on the fat rock, facing the Blue Cross, I feel like I’m losing my breath.…I would probably hyperventilate or pass out if not for the calming effects of prayer. The feeling builds to a crescendo. I put my hand over my chest as if to prevent my heart from jumping out. I gasp for air. Suddenly it’s as if someone flips a switch - the world disappears, and I’m encompassed in a great, unending blueness.
While she describes a feeling of not getting *enough* air, it could be that in response to that feeling she is in fact overbreathing. And hyperventilation does produces changes in consciousness, including quite powerful ones if the person overbreathes enough to drive CO2 quite low. Maybe on the days when she is due to see the Virgin Mirjana gradually induces a powerful altered state by overbreathing to a greater and greater degree?
You could test this hypothesis easily with blood samples.
To me the most interesting thing about all this business is the seemingly arbitrary, yet repeating connection between Virgin Mary-seeing children and Sun miracles/optical effects. Presumably there are deep cultural and psychological explanations for all of it, but so far it doesn't seem that the surface has even been scratched...
I always figured it was something about the color of the sky, and the color of her coat. Mary wears blue in all the art. The world going blue, in that cultural context, is going to get attributed to Mary.
I actually don't think it's ridiculous to convert to a particular religion's beliefs and rules if one experiences incontrovertible proof, via a miracle, that the religion's claims are valid. Seems to me the experience utterly changes the rules, and compels you to throw out your science-based belief about how the world works. All you have to go on, after the miracle, is the claims of the religious tradition within which the it occurred.
As for "waiting for the miracle". I feel like I've been waiting for one all my life. I have never been able to feel more the a small tickle of belief for ideas that aren't supported by science, whether the ideas are entire world-views or smaller scale ideas (it's Ok to put your trust in Buddhist lamas, psychedelics reveal important truths, stuff like that). But I *yearn* for there to be more to the world than I know. I want a world with ghosts or magic or ESP, any of those things there's no rational reason to believe exist. It's like I'm fatigued and played out with the game of life in the science-based world. I want a fun variant! Maybe Scott has a case of the same craving?
But the miracle doesn't prove that a particular religion's claims are valid. Deiseach can chime in if I get this wrong, but I've read the Lutheran version of the bible (RSV in my day) cover to cover, and I don't think it's *that* different from the Catholic version. And I don't recall anything about sun miracles, or about miracles presented to random children, or recurring miracles in specific locations, or anything else that would seem like a good match for these things.
The Bible does claim that miracles are a thing that can happen, and that God sometimes uses them to further his own goals, but it's not a *particular* religion that claims this, it's a great many religions, probably a large majority.
So it's not Catholicism that is claiming sun miracles in Portugal or Yugoslavia for its own, it's the miracles that are claiming Catholicism. And that claim isn't coming through thousands of years of scriptural tradition, but from freaked-out children who have spent much of their lives knowing that Mary Mother of God is who you turn to when you need an extra dose of moral support, saying "...and then the voice in my head said it was Mary Mother of God and don't worry, everything will be OK, pass it on".
It would be at least somewhat more convincing if, when we get a sun miracle in Thailand, we get a bunch of previously Buddhist children saying "...and then the voice in my head said it was the Virgin Mary, whoever that is, and that everything would be OK but only if I accepted her kid as my Lord and Savior".
Yeah, OK, maybe my picture of how I'd respond to the miracle is made simple & dumb by my craving for one. Can you relate at all to a sort of fatigue that makes one crave a world with some profoundly new phenomena and rules? I don't think the craving influences my thinking much (see my post below about a possible explanation of the woman's experiences of talking with Mary), just makes me like fantasy and science fiction, including the softest of soft sci fi.
Oh, I absolutely understand that feeling. But I've always been wary of believing things because I wish they were true. Show me a sun miracle and rule out optical illusion or hallucination or the like, and I'll take the wonder and amazement with great joy and then sit down and think out how much updating the rest of my belies is really called for.
C S Lewis called a similar feeling Joy. Maybe you know. I say similar because he describes it as a yearning for some form of completeness or wholeness (or even something you can't express at all) that attaches to a thing or scene or awe-inspiring event, but the yearning is sweeter than the thing itself, because nothing in the world can really satisfy it except God.
Now I type it out, I think it's sufficiently different from what you're describing that it could use a new word.
> But the miracle doesn't prove that a particular religion's claims are valid
No, but it can be interpreted as a hint.
It may be pointless to speculate about the psychology of a god, but it's worth asking -- if a god did exist, why would they cause sporadic miracles? It's easy to imagine a god who never intervenes, or a god who makes their existence obvious, but why would a god choose to perform very occasional miracles affecting small numbers of people? The only reason I can think of is that they want to provide _just_ enough evidence of their existence, to ensure that those who really seek the truth can find it, without making the answer obvious to those who do not seek.
So if all the genuine miracles turn out to be Catholic-flavoured (Catholic-looking things happening to Catholics in Catholic towns), then that seems like pretty good evidence that the Catholic religion is the correct one. On the other hand if a Bodhi tree starts floating six inches above the ground in Bodh Gaya then you should probably convert to Buddhism, and if Coventry Cathedral starts rebuilding itself then you should become an Anglican.
> It may be pointless to speculate about the psychology of a god
It's surely not pointless to Christians themselves, who regularly try to convert people by trying to show that this world looks like one that God would want to make. Even Scott's Unsong was a largely a riff on this theme.
Interestingly enough, at some point towards the late Middle Ages, Christian philosophers themselves felt that they were putting their own God in a box a bit too much, and shifted strongly towards the other extreme: God as a sovereign will unconstrained by human ideas, aka voluntarism.
But that breaks apologetics a bit too much, so Internet Christians mostly walked back.
> On the other hand if a Bodhi tree starts floating six inches above the ground in Bodh Gaya then you should probably convert to Buddhism, and if Coventry Cathedral starts rebuilding itself then you should become an Anglican.
I remain baffled by this idea of taking religions as unitary packages which could be true or false as a whole.
As I said in another comment, they look to me more like complex bundles of culturally accreted beliefs. It would be massively weird to me if one were strictly true and all the other ones strictly false. And that holds *even* if there was something real about non-physical higher powers.
Someone says he converted from atheism to Catholicism due to personal experience. Did he imagine it all? Was it the result of illness? I can only take him at his word:
For most things, it is possible to mentally shift yourself on the spectrum from perceiving it in a sort of ho-hum everyday way, to seeing it "for the first time/as a child". I claim that a moderate portion of what psychedelics do is throwing you into that second way of viewing things by default, but it's actually a practiceable mental motion while dead sober. Examples include listening to a familiar song as background noise when working, and being able to deliberately shift into getting really into it/hearing it more for the first time. Also, going "oh, there's a mountain, eh, who cares" vs really perceiving it and going "whoa, that's a MOUNTAIN and it's glorious and so big and it is cool that the world has mountains". Try to pull it off sometime!
For science, I've found a helpful thing to do is intentionally rephrase stuff in the most amazing but technically-accurate way you can. For instance, you probably know about plutonium-238, that one isotope that decays rapidly enough to heat up nuggets of it to cherry-red, used on space missions. But imagine going back to the mid 18th century and presenting that to someone.
"This, is a POWER ORB. It continually releases its burning internal energy for the next century. Due to its comparative lack of a doom radiance which kills life and degrades fine machinery, it has great utility for machines which travel through the frozen void of space, as their lone ember-like source of heat and energy. Unfortunately, however it is such an exceptionally rare substance that difficulties in its production constrain the rate of such voyages."
"What methods are you using to heat up this metal to trick me?"
"Absolutely none, it's just Like That"
"If so, it is like no metal known to science. Pray tell, how is it made?"
"Elemental transmutation. Alchemy is real, it just requires exotic circumstances which no fussing around with chemicals in beakers can attain."
"Now I know you're joking. Have the alchemists crashed the gold market yet?"
"No. The circumstances are exceptionally costly to set up, and there are hidden laws to it, such that it is feasible to turn gold into lead, but not lead into gold."
Try doing this exercise with other conventional science things!
I admire Scott's dedication, but I have to say I'm highly amused by the outbreak of allergic reactions in the comments to the very notion of converting to Catholicism, of all the things! Be anything else, but a Papist? No, no, never shall the polluting influence of the Roman Antichrist touch these pure minds! Rather believe it is Coyote pulling his usual tricks, or aliens, or Ascended Masters with their mystic abilities doing all this, but not the Shame of the Seven Hills!
Now I'm wondering whether Judaism has anything involving sun miracles. Ezekiel's flaming wheels within wheels might sort of apply if you tilt your head and squint real hard, but I don't recall that being associated with the sun.
Maybe Moses and the bush that burned without being consumed? Though that's probably pushing it too far. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Joshua commanding the sun to stand still (an episode often quoted during the entire row with Galileo about "so are you contradicting Scripture there, mister? If the sun doesn't move, how could Joshua tell it to stay still?") and one I had no idea about until looking it up - making the shadow on a sun dial go backwards:
"The Sun Dial of Ahaz (The Shadow Goes Backward)
Book & Reference: 2 Kings 20:8–11 / Isaiah 38:7–8
The Event: King Hezekiah of Judah was deathly ill and prayed for healing. The prophet Isaiah gave him a sign: God would extend Hezekiah's life by 15 years. To prove this, God offered a choice—would Hezekiah have the shadow on the sun dial of Ahaz move forward ten steps or backward ten steps?
The Miracle: Hezekiah reasoned that it is natural for time (and a shadow) to move forward, so he requested the shadow to move backward. In response, God caused the shadow cast by the sun to retreat ten degrees on the stairway dial."
The plague of darkness in the exodus/passover story could be considered a sun (or anti-sun) miracle. Poetically, given the primacy of a sun god in Egyptian state religion, the message is "our god is stronger than your main god," but I am not a scholar and that could be anywhere between obvious and off-base for those who actually have studied it.
I also find those comments amusing. Some people here would rather choose a world view where the world is completely incomprehensible than one that involves theistic religion.
I know, right? What salvation do they expect to find at the end of the rabbit hole? The answers they desire are right in front of them, and yet they turn their backs on it out of their obsession for "truth". As if they would ever know the difference...
But that's what the world genuinely seems like to me, and I am not interested in turning around my entire life and helping a system of thought which exclusively claims the exact opposite as a necessity.
I love this. There must, simply must be a zillion other dimensions each with random starting settings to make our universe's uniquely zillionth-portion arrangement into something ordinary! And/or since every civilization will obvs start simulating civilizations, the odds of ours being the first one is millions, no wait trillions, no today I feel like billions, to one.
My fav one was someone commenting if an angel cured me of terminal illness and others witnessed it and also told Catholicism is true. I will still not believe it.
Just here to say, because you're getting a decent amount of criticism for it in the comments: I agree that if you experience a miracle that is very good reason to convert! Obviously so.
Probably not going to be a popular view here, but I tend to follow the approach in classical Stoicism, considering that everything is a miracle, that is, when viewed correctly 'as if viewing it for the very first time' (tanquam spectator novus, Seneca, Letters 64.6). Nature, the cosmos, everything - is astonishing (miraculum) in its beauty, complexity, and interconnectedness.
Doesn't this just make it harder to talk about actual miracles? Waking up every morning is a miracle, Moses parting the Red Sea is a miracle, but it seems helpful to have different words to use for these different concepts, or else you can't describe Moses parting the Red Sea in words that sound more interesting than you waking up in the morning.
Thank you. I don't think it does. 'Miraculum,' in classical Latin, could cover such phenomena as an eclipse, a vision of Castor and Pollux appearing in a battle to assist the Romans, and/or a sheep with two heads. It's more of a spectrum, perhaps, than today's understanding of a violation or suspension of the laws of nature (whatever we consider a 'law of nature' might be). In fact, the ancient Stoics considered both 'awe caused by storms, thunder, etc' and 'the order and regularity of the cosmos' to be reasons for believing in the gods - the very reverse of what seems to be the position you canvass in your essay, that a violation of the expected order would be a reason for believing in the Catholic God.
And it turns out that much smarter people than me have argued along these lines:
'In the past, some philosophers and theologians have urged us to
consider the supposed order, regularity, and harmony of the universe as
evidence of the existence of a benign and omnipotent god. But if order,
regularity, and harmony constitute evidence for God, then miracles
cannot also be accepted as evidence for his existence, for they are, to
follow the metaphor, dissonances in the harmony, holes in the
patterned fabric of the universe. Hence, a Christian believer cannot
have it both ways. A miracle, a violation of natural law or a
permanently inexplicable event, is a moment of chaos, a gap in the
spatio-temporal structure. If one were to occur it would therefore have
to constitute evidence against the Christian God’s existence...' Christine Overall, 'Miracles as Evidence Against the Existence of God,' The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1985) Vol. XXIII, No. 3, p. 370.
Are you arguing that if we see Moses part the Red Sea, this is no better an argument for God than the existence of thunder, and so (since we already know about thunder) we shouldn't increase our probability that God exists after seeing the Red Sea part?
Sort of. Or, more generally: if the magnificent order and beauty of the cosmos (the teleological argument, more or less) represent a good reason to believe in God, ruptures of the order don't represent a particularly good reason. They may even represent a reason not to believe in God, or at least in the same kind of God as was seemingly responsible for the predicted order. Or at the very least, there seems to be a tension, often overlooked.
I've never heard this term "snapping" before, but I assume it means when your brain experiences a new pattern and tries to match it with some other familiar pattern, that is probably responsible for most of the supernatural experiences people have. I had an interesting one this weekend deep in the woods of Vermont camping about 100 yards off of a mountain pond looking at it through the trees deep into twilight. All of a sudden the trees were illuminated as if a car was pulling in a driveway behind me... but I was 3 miles from the nearest road. I turned around anyway to see nothing but darkness, and turned back to see the trees lit up. Then I thought maybe an extremely bright moon, and turned around and up, but no moon at all... Turning back again and thinking about it, I realized my brain had started interpreting the twilight dappled pond between the trees as "trees", and the dark trees as "empty space/nothing"... Was pretty cool to resolve two different realities at once IRL on the Big Screen.
> I was also able to find some reports of this happening to people with early-stage snow blindness (ie on bright days when there’s lots of snow on the ground reflecting UV light), although I don’t know what their eye lens status was.
Yeah, this 100% happened to me as a teenager after being outside shoveling snow in bright sunlight. Everything was pink for a while after that, but I attributed this to "oh that's why the Inuit wear sunshades", not anything miraculous. (My lenses are fine.)
Snow blindness makes things pink for me as well—by far the most common color among people I've talked to about it (not a large or random sample). Sometimes after pink it will go into a green or yellow iirc. It also lasts on the order of minutes for me, and I think that's the norm for others.
About 10 minutes for me, and it was more of a pinkish-purple for me, that gradually faded back to normal instead of turning into a different color. Gives everything sort of a "cyberpunk neon nightclub" look.
I made my first serious shot at reading (skimming) your first two Fatima articles today, and then noticed that you'd published this.
I feel like the heresy is reason in itself to write Medjugorje off as a true Catholic miracle. Would be weird if Catholic!Mary repeatedly contradicted Catholic orthodoxy. There's still the supernatural hypothesis that it's demonic or something - but then if demons (or whatever) can stage somewhat Fatima-esque sun miracles, that's evidence against OG Fatima.
The secrets from Mary are an especially Fatima-esque touch. I'm interested to see them. Perhaps the end of the world will genuinely begin soon. One of the visionaries in the Garabandal apparitions said that there would be four popes until the end times, and there have been more than four popes since then:
And of course there's the threat of AGI destroying the world within the next few decades. I genuinely consider "an AGI will be the Beast of Revelations/Antichrist" a hypothesis about this stuff.
Of course, it'd be weird for the Medjugorje entity to give heresy and also true prophecies. If anything supernatural is even happening at all.
That long book quote is genuinely compelling and sweet. Makes me all the more drawn to Marian devotion.
I agree with your wife that you don't have to convert to Catholicism just because you see a miracle. A single Catholic miracle doesn't IMO prove Catholicism. What might prove Catholicism is how there's so many well-documented miracles proving Catholic-specific theology vs well-documented miracles proving any-other-religion-specific theology.
Not 100% sure this is a naturalistic explanation for the Fatima Sun Miracle - Ethan Muse always gets the last word - but it's an interesting development in Fatimology.
EDIT: Now that penttrioctium mentions it, actually going to Medjugorje was quite impressive - thank you!
Obvious conclusion is obvious. I appreciate you going through the actual experiment and writeup, because very rarely obviously true things are actually wrong so it's useful to occasionally verify them so we can find the occasional counterintuitive truth, and have stronger evidence to use against the contrarians who don't believe the obvious thing. But in the end, I don't think I learned anything here that wasn't covered in your previous posts on the topic.
Just about this miracle discourse in general: I am an atheist, but at certain points in my life I felt a kind of desire to believe in Christianity. Even though they are supposed to be evidence, these miracle stories actually would have made me somewhat less sympathetic to Catholicism, because apparently by becoming Catholic I would have been exposed to people who think that what the Virgin Mary supposedly told some child a hundred years ago is the most important event of the twentieth century, or that Padre Pio was one of the most important men of his time because he had wounds on his hands and sometimes impossibly high fevers.
I am aware that these are only a small part of Catholicism and lots of Catholics would share my general feeling about this.
If you're not going to accept the supernatural, then there's not much point in converting. You could join the same church as James Talarico, where the pastor is very happy to chop out all those pesky miraculous bits, but in that case you might as well be a Unitarian Universalist, or remain an atheist:
"On a recent Sunday morning at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, Jim Rigby asked his congregation ...Mr. Rigby, who has led St. Andrew’s since the 1980s and is a well-known activist locally...
Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service. He does not use the word “Lord,” because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God, he said. For that matter, he added, he does not much care for the word “God.” He uses it on occasion, he said, but he tries to use synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”
In his sermon that morning, he had referred to “the creative impulse of the universe,” which “can be called God, but it doesn’t have to be called God.”
A reasonable, rational, 'religion' based on "Yeshua Bar-Yosef, moral teacher" is nothing but air. Honestly? I'd go for Buddhism in preference.
The problem I mean here is not accepting the supernatural as such, it’s the corniness (for want of a better word) of these modern miracles and the kind of discourse where Ethan Muse’s analysis of eg whether people’s clothes were wet or dry, is taken seriously as something that should have an impact on people’s lives.
Ancient anti-Christian writers, whether Greco-Roman or Jewish, did not dispute the miracles of Jesus. They just attributed them to sorcery. So you left out a possibility: acknowledging the Virgin Mary, unblinking.
I still believe that the Fatima miracle was due to someone playing with an arc searchlight, invented a few years earlier. Most accounts are consistent with that and my own experience shining a searchlight at clouds during daytime.
Someone tried the "there's a reasonable explanation" for the apparition at Knock the same way, claiming it could have been someone putting on a magic lantern show.
I think some of the reaching for natural explanations is even more demanding of credulity than the alleged miracle; what, so somebody was able to haul around a bulky set of equipment, set it up and get it running, and nobody around saw this happening?
My favourite natural explanation still remains Ice Floe Jesus, for the walking on water. Since we have a large set of contributors on here from all over the place, does anyone know anybody living around the Sea of Galilee who can clue me in on the regular mini ice-floes that must form there because how else would some guy from Nazareth be able to time his alleged miracle so tightly unless these were a regular occurrence but also the local fishermen who grew up in the area had no idea they happened?
"The study points to a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions for development of a unique, localized freezing phenomenon that Nof and his co-authors call "springs ice."
In what is now northern Israel, such ice could have formed on the cold freshwater surface of the Sea of Galilee -- known as Lake Kinneret by modern-day Israelis -- when already chilly temperatures briefly plummeted during one of the two protracted cold periods between 2,500 and 1,500 years ago.
A frozen patch floating on the surface of the small lake would have been difficult to distinguish from the unfrozen water surrounding it. The unfrozen water was comprised of the plumes resulting from salty springs situated along the lake's western shore in Tabgha -- an area where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been documented."
Yes, the person playing with the searchlight could have told the visionaries in advance. Not necessarily alerting them to the fraud, though. They might have been made to genuinely believe that virgin Mary told them.
I did play with a searchlight in my early teens and I think, I did create most of the effects the witnesses observed.
In regards to the reversed watch and the parchment: what other stories of changed physical objects are connected to Medjugorje? I know of at least one: the former runner and running coach Alberto Salazar (who, I should point out, has gotten suspended for doping violations and then banned from coaching the US as a result of sexual abuse allegations), says that he had silver rosary beads that turned gold after visiting Medjugorje.
Of course, there is a natural explanation for that as well:
"Tarnishing and Plating Wear
Silver and Plated Metals: Many rosaries feature a silver coating over base metals like brass, copper, or bronze. With consistent handling and natural skin oils, this thin layer can wear away, revealing the base metal underneath and causing the chain or crucifix to look gold or bronze.
Oxidation: Silver naturally reacts with sulfur compounds in the air and oils on human skin, leading to a dark tarnish."
There's a 1980's news report by the famous journalist Stone Phillips here[1] on Medjugorje pilgrims where several of them claim this about their rosaries and/or necklaces.
Great stuff, looks like a fitting end to the rationalist miracle saga. On a side note, please tell your wife to start her cult already, my friends and I all want to join.
So rad to see you followed through on this by going on the damn trip! This feels like closure for those that have read along as you dove deeper into this. 10/10 : )
For anyone who saw the LessOnline talk, realized this was the same thing, and skipped to the comments, there's actually a lot more here and it's probably worth reading the part about Scott's fight with his wife and some of the other things that were left out of the talk
All I could think as I was reading this was "Your god is too small". As in, if the Catholic Christian god is real, why on earth would he be bothering with a miracle like this? It seems almost petty to give miracles (consisting purely of strange spiritual experiences) to those who stare at the sun in certain locations at certain times and not intervene in other ways. Just like how it would be ridiculous if god helped someone find a parking spot but failed to help starving children.
If this kind of miracle was happening, it would lead me to update in the direction of a trickster god, or a less-powerful god, or even aliens having a bit of fun, before it would make me think about converting to Catholicism.
I find this completely unsatisfying. If this phenomenon was so easy to observe, surely the thousands of people who read and comment on your blog should have put things to rest with ample evidence well in advance of your trip. The explanation at the end touches on this but doesn’t take into account the hundreds of people who would’ve surely tried it themselves at home after reading.
This leads us with several possible cognitive blind spots. 1. People did report the phenomenon but there was some mental block that prevented you from taking them seriously. 2. It’s actually rare and you got pretty lucky. 3. A real miracle.
As a liberal Protestant, I share a lot of your wife’s objections to converting to Catholicism based on a miracle. In fact your comment on the objectionable theology of the Fatima children made this quite clear. But from the other side: if you question God, he delivers, and you still stay skeptical, surely the consequences of unbelief are amplified.
Explanation (1) is the most likely but, somewhere in the back of your mind, you’ve got to be a little spooked right?
A phenomenon that requires you to travel halfway around the world to a small town in Croatia, is hardly "easy to observe".
Granted, if this is just a mundane trick of atmospherics and optics, it probably wouldn't have been too hard for any of us to experience and report some version of it. But still more than a trivial effort, and all we get for it is proof of the boring natural explanation that we all pretty much knew was the case. And all we have for anyone else is our unsupported word. So the reward for taking that effort, is very small. I certainly didn't think it was worth the bother.
What we care about, what would be worth looking for, is the small possibility that it is a genuine divine miracle. And if it is, you're not going to see it by occasionally looking at random bits of the California sky when there's high cirrus in the late afternoon. You have to go to a place where God is performing divine miracles on something resembling a schedule, and for His own ineffable reasons, he's apparently quite stingy about miracles and to the extent that He does them on a schedule, He doesn't seem to be scheduling them for the convenience of Bay Area Rationalists.
There is nothing unique to Medjugorje, Scott even says he expects the natural conditions happen every few weeks. Thus it should be an easy phenomena to reproduce. Surely many people tried; I can’t imagine that these posts generated so much interest, yet everyone said it was not worth the effort because they don’t believe in miracles. Thus we return to my three options.
And I of course agree with you that it seems theologically untenable. But in the part of your uncertainty quantified world view, where you allocate a non zero chance to the gods working in mysterious ways, this kind of experience should be deeply unsettling.
You are missing the point. Yes, the natural conditions happen every few weeks in many places. But we are comparing two different hypotheses, one of which is that this is not a natural phenomenon. And the unnatural phenomenon is only reported as regularly occurring in inconvenient places.
If you go out into the California desert on an appropriately-cloudy day and see a paler-than-usual sun with some vague irregular bits of color around it, you have proven nothing interesting. If you go out into the California desert on an appropriately-cloudy day and *don't* see a paler-than-usual sun with some vague irregular bits of color around it, you have still proven nothing interesting.
One more reason for "if this wacky incredibly unlikely thing is true, that's *really* important". So, yeah, glad Scott checked out the roadside attraction specifically.
Yeah my roadside attraction comment was actually referring to the phenomenon itself. I can't reconcile the idea of a God that encompasses all of creation, running this world like a science experiment with hamsters, and occasionally, just for the hell of it, creating some diversion that will excite and arouse. I completely understand it if I look at it as a human construction but when I really try to imagine what God is, I can't get by these things. It's not satisfying and if I accept it I have to say it's not even that interesting. It doesn't mean I am averse to what one might refer to as spirit because I'm not. If this sort of god exists, it has to be beyond my imagination just because. If there is an omnipotent god that I can contain in my imagination, that doesn't seem very reasonable to me as a proposition. And the idea that God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform, has to be a bigger idea than throwing out a few weird sunsets occasionally. I will turn this whole thing over to Spinoza now.
Lots of things are easily dismissed as hallucinations, even if they really were caused by something we don't currently understand. For example, suppose the Virgin Mary was just a scam being perpetuated by aliens trying to control the world through the catholic church.
This would not be evidence that Catholicism were _true_, so much as that it were indeed something much different from a hallucination.
To try and reduce that "it's a hallucination" escape hatch, try looking into medical miracles instead.
People can certainly hallucinate all kinds of images, but they can't generally hallucinate a new limb that actually works, for example. Look up some of the healing attested to Padre Pio. Or, just read about Padre Pio in general and see if you can come up with a plausible explanation of what the heck was going on there. Were his stigmata a consistent hallucination? Was he a con-man? How did they bleed for so long without going septic?
Padre Pio secretly ordered carbolic acid, admitted to having veratrine and possessed a surprising amount of chemical knowledge. I'm not a chemist and those chemicals supposedly can't cause the exact wounds that were observed, but it seems like a mighty coincidence that the guy known for weird wounds was an amateur chemist and had rare chemicals known for causing fake wounds.
That story has a perfectly innocent explanation: they ran a medical clinic and he used that acid to disinfect the injection sites. He said it was ordered secretly because they didn't have a prescription, and he didn't want the person carrying it knowing they were doing so.
How much of the evidence have you actually looked at here?
He had these wounds for something like 50 years, and for the most part he his days consisted of spending hours in a confessional. The wounds never went necrotic or got infected. He also had a bishop who hated him and tried everything he could to shut padre pio down and convince people he was a fraud.
Are we to believe this guy spent 50 years pouring acid on both hands so he could... sit in a confessional? And that his main critic never manged to solve the simple task of "cut off the flow of acid into the monestary?"
I've read a skeptical site and talked with AI and I did all this quite some time ago, so I don't expect that I currently know key details accurately. I admit that there is a consistent possible explanation where he is not a conman, but even if I can't disprove conclusively elements of that, it still seems weird that God would send the "could possibly be an effect of chemicals" miracle to the chemist priest.
If we are to get into the details instead of the bird's eye view:
At some point in my life I walked a lot every day with a very old, partly already disintegrated shoe. This caused water blisters, then blood blisters, then open wounds, but they never got infected and healed fully. I don't think one can conclude that open wounds necessarily cause infection or necrosis without divine miracle.
He got world-wide, historical fame out of it. Pouring acid on one's hand for that doesn't seem like a high price.
In defense of the bishop, I would also hate someone I strongly suspect mocks my faith by using cheap tricks to fake miracles and gets rewarded for it.
Supposedly, he ordered the carbolic acid for use as disinfectant and veratridine for a prank.
Re: your argument, is your position that you ought to convert if:
a) You experience something which you can't explain and has the emotional feeling/vibe of a miracle (say Jesus appears to hover in front of you and say: accept me into your heart).
b) You know that you experienced a miracle ...ie if you believe it was a miracle you should believe it was supernatural.
But b is basically a tautology while a seems like the claim your wife correctly rejects.
Though what religion you should convert to seems very unclear even with b. And I don't understand the relevance of the fact the revelations are heretical. Contradictory is an issue. Heretical is just finding an observation that disagrees with a currently popular theory.
You may be interested in the sun miracle I had one time in the bath:
I was in the bath and wanted to do fire kasina stuff and didn't have a candle so I stared at the overhead light that is slightly too bright for comfort and after a minute or two of real focus it did indeed start spinning, turning colors, and become one of the most strikingly beautiful things I'd ever seen. I understood at last the behavior of the noble Moth and resolved to stick with real fire for fire kasina because I didn't want to get so into this that it would start to damage my eyes.
"Mirjana seems not to realize that a parchment which shows different things to different people would itself constitute miraculous proof of God’s existence, and never mentions this again. If anyone should happen to meet her, this is the thing I want to ask about most."
This is consistent with the stated powers of the parchment. A person who sees the parchment by chance will see it as a shopping list because that's what's most likely to make them dismiss it as unimportant. The same power prevents Mirjana from realizing that the parchment has an easy to check miraculous power, she thinks the important thing about it is the contents and not the medium.
If you were to talk with Mirjana about it, you would likely forget to ask her about the parchment, perhaps by getting sidetracked into talking about a different miracle just like Mirjana is too distracted by the important secrets written on the parchment to notice the miracle of the parchment itself.
My very first thought when reading about the sun miracle was: Some sort of retinal stuff when looking directly at it combined with not-everyday atmospheric effect.
"AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time."
~10,000 witnesses simultaneously saw a UFO at a soccer match in Tuscany in 1954. They weren't gathered to see a miracle, and the UFO left behind "angel hair" which lab testing showed to be inorganic. This seems to be at least as good evidence as that of the sun miracles.
It seems consistient to believe in both Fatima and the Stadio Artemio UFO sighting; everyone has to choose a calibration for false positives vs. false negatives.
It seems inconsistent to believe in Fatima but not the Stadio Artemio UFO sighting, since they're in the same category, but the UFO has better evidence and less selection bias.
The fine-tuning objection appears too readily dismissed to me. Especially if you consider the possibility that Fátima was a real miracle but subsequent ones weren't. (Note for example how the Vatican does officially support Fátima but is noncommittal about Medjugorje.)
The children of Fátima had no prior sun miracles to bias their expectations. Scott himself hypothesizes that the conditions in Fátima had to be "more perfect" than at Medjugorje, yet there have been no reports of repeat miracles at Fátima despite it being a massive pilgrimage destination. What are the actual odds that you'll get just right conditions like that on a random mid-October day in Fátima? Surely the odds of failure had to be significantly large!
Classic post thanks. Do you think this has anything to do with Akhenaten the Egyptian pharaoh who converted everyone to monotheistic sun worship for a generation?
Curious if you had just set up a sign saying "I am doing a survey on people's experiences here for research purposes. If you have a few minutes, please come talk to me." and just waited if you would have gotten better results. I assume rando with a notebook is not some earnest, honest researcher but somebody trying to sell me magazines or get me to vote for so-and-so or something. Nice looking person politely sitting over waiting for me to come to him would probably have better luck at least with me.
Scott, I disagree with some of blah blah blah; and other stuff not worth saying. The part that is, is how beautiful it is to see this image of you and your wife, after so long admiring you as a sort of disembodied spirit on my internet.
I think we should keep in mind that a natural occurrence could still be a divine sign, especially if it’s so striking. Of course, not all instances of the phenomenon could be such signs, since their accompanying worldviews contradict each other. Some could be, however, especially if accompanied by truly supernatural occurrences indicating their heavenly significance.
And a cluster of such supernatural phenomena apparently happened at Fatima. The many accounts of flash-dried clothes have already been mentioned. Plus, a great public sign was predicted in advance by child seers at a time when the optical phenomenon proposed here was unknown. They even specified the correct day. Scott Alexander argues that his explanation “requires only a certain pattern of diffuse clouds,” which isn’t very unlikely, but what we should be considering here are not the conditions necessary for someone to experience some version of the phenomenon, but those necessary for tens of thousands to do so dramatically and simultaneously: not minimal conditions, but ideal ones, which are much rarer. Indeed, the first time Alexander’s wife saw it, he did not, indicating that the phenomenon can be experienced to greater or lesser degrees. With all of this considered, even if the apparent movement of the sun was natural, it seems the prediction was supernatural.
Moreover, the seers’ lives are associated with other seemingly supernatural occurrences as well. Here, for example, is the miracle that led to the canonization of two of them, Francisco and Jacinta, as described by the parents of the boy who received the miracle: “On the 3rd March 2013, at 8 p.m., our son Lucas, who was playing with his sister Eduarda, fell from a window from a height of 6.5 m. He was 5 years old. He fell on his head and had severe concussion, with loss of brain tissue. He was treated in our city, Juranda, but due to the severity of his clinical condition, was transferred to the Hospital of Campo Mourão, in Paraná. The trip lasted almost an hour. He arrived in deep coma. He had two cardiac arrests and underwent an emergency operation….
“As the days went by Lucas became worse. On the 6th March the doctors thought of transferring him to another hospital, since there were no basic conditions for someone his age. They told us that the chances of survival were low and if he survived, recuperation would be very slow and he would almost certainly have cognitive impairment or even be in a vegetative state. On the 7th we [called Campo Mourão Carmel]. On that day the Sister transmitted the message to the community. One of the Sisters ran to the relics of Blessed Francisco and Jacinta, that were near the tabernacle and felt the need to pray: ‘Little Shepherds, save this boy, who is a child like you.’ She was able to convince the rest of the community to pray only through the intercession of the shepherd children. And so they did. And we, as a family, began to also pray to the little shepherd children. And two days later, on the 9th March Lucas woke up well and started to talk, asking for his sister. On the 11th he left ICU and on the 15th he was discharged. He is perfectly well, without any symptoms or side-effects. What Lucas was before the accident he is now: his intelligence his personality, everything is the same. The doctors, some were non-believers, said there was no explanation for this recovery.”
So, I think the flash-dried clothes, the unlikely prediction, and the extraordinary healing—all of which seem supernatural—indicate the Miracle of the Sun to be a divine sign, even if the phenomenon itself was natural.
This whole thing was on my mind while I was hiking in Washington state's Olympic national forest, and I happened to catch the sun doing the "visible disk" thing through some clouds: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mbm6i1plI_4
This happened around 17:42 PDT, 2026-06-27, at 47.93249600985972, -123.40841963874503, giving an elevation of around 35 degrees. Staring at it for around 10 seconds, I did experience some wiggling and colored after images, which I found consistent with nystagmus / bright light interactions I've experienced before and did not feel in any way miraculous, but I can imagine for someone without that experience it might be somewhat confusing?
Could it be possible that these conditions are a coincidentally great spontaneous insight meditation focus?
A major aim of insight meditation is being able to clearly perceive the arising and passing of sense data. So, if a person is concentrating on one "image" for an extended period of time, but this "image" is actually rapidly providing new, notably different sense data, eventually their attention will be naturally drawn to what insight meditators are trying to focus on. You talked about people comparing the phenomenon to kasina (and that's probably also helps with good insight conditions), but that's samatha meditation, which is way more likely to give you warm fuzzy feelings or peace or clarity, rather than weird hallucinations.
Intense insight experiences tend to be the ones that give you really weird experiences or profound changes, it's your brain running up against a fundamental contradiction in how it processes data. And the suggestible mindset induced by going to a magic miracle hill could make it easier to pause the habitual interpretation of data enough to notice weird inconsistencies. Not sure if anyone brought that up on the past mention of meditation, but your description of how "the afterimages from the sun bled into the afterimages from the clouds in an odd, almost violent way" sounded like a perfect meditation focus. Waves are great, too.
So why are we fixated on the optical phenomena and avoiding discussing the jhana-like experiences of intense love, hearing sounds and otherwise being engulfed in the Heavenly Realm?
None of it needs to confirm or deny Catholicism. It can merely be an investigation into the millions of weird and strange states of consciousness people can experience.
When some people asked Jesus for a miracle, he said that no sign would be given them but the sign of Jonah: he was dead for three days, and rose again. There's your miracle.
I always know I’m in for a treat when a Cohen lyric lands in my inbox from Scott.
It's always good when it's Lenny.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/leonard-cohens-dark-faith/?ref=compact-newsletter&attribution_id=6a34b50e0b898d00018611bd&attribution_type=post
Love that song.
Scott: "Put your face 2 inches away from the screen and stare at the black dot"
Me 10 seconds later: "Ouch"
"oh god I really need to clean my screen"
I appreciate your commitment to empiricism; thank you!
Now that penttrioctium mentions it, actually going to Medjugorje was quite impressive - thank you!
I'm just jazzed that Scott's a Leonard Cohen fan.
Cohen quotes feature heavily in Unsong iirc
The conclusion of the whole thing reminded me of another classic:
"You know who I am
You've stared at the sun
Well, I am the one
Who loves changing from nothing to one."
Well, after twenty years of boredom trying to change the system from within...
I spent so long in this post wondering whether you meant 6:40 AM or 6:40 PM before you mentioned it was around sunset. :P (I mean yeah I heard you talk about this at LessOnline but I didn't remember that part.)
Also, typo: "one person in a ground"
I saw the sun as a pale disc a week or two ago -- did not get the after-effects, because my kid started asking what I was looking at and I realized I was setting a bad example. It would've been nice to have this post on hand then, to help me answer the questions he had about eye damage...
Your wife is cool. I used to have mindbending spiritual experiences on the regular, myself. Now it only really happens on Yom Kippur, sometime after the hunger signals turn off but before my leg muscles start to protest about how long the Ark has been open.
Every year during Neilah, I remember anew that this happens, and I feel silly for having forgotten about it the rest of the year when trying to make sense of the fasting practice.
That, and the realization I haven't used the bathroom since Musaf, which -- unlike the hunger and thirst and weakness, which all drive home my very-humanness -- actually does make me feel a little angelic.
According to Midrash Tanchuma, since Pharaoh pretended to be a god, he pretended to never use the bathroom, so he would get up early and sneak out to the Nile to relieve himself. https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Vaera.14.1?lang=bi
Personally I think that even that is kind of impressive; I certainly couldn't limit myself to one bathroom trip per day!
This reminds me of an optical experience that I had in primary school, aged maybe 8 to 10. The lower panes of the classroom windows were of frosted glass. (I believe this was to prevent the prisoners being distracted by the glorious outdoors.) When the sun struck them, I discovered that by staring fixedly at the glow it made in the frosted panes, in a minute or two it would start to change colours, slowly drifting from one to another. Luminous and intense red, blue, gold, purple. Even white, once. Unlike staring at the sun, the light wasn't bright enough to be dangerous, or even to produce long-lasting afterimages.
I never attached any significance to this beyond "I wonder how that works?", and in fact I haven't thought about it in years.
Great post!
"one person in a ground" -> "one person in a group", I thinK?
Thanks, fixed.
Also, "the crowd of pilgrims is so large taht it" --> "the crowd of pilgrims is so large that it"
FYI you’re missing the word “of” in “…the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed…”
Why must “Mirjana saw the Virgin Mary” and “Mirjana entered a powerful internally generated state” be mutually exclusive? The essay is open to strangeness as experience, yet much less so to strangeness as a feature of reality. When a plausible perceptual mechanism appears, that doesn’t mean the larger metaphysical question has been settled.
I don’t take the sun to have literally spun, and visions require scrutiny. But explaining the machinery of an experience may not exhaust what the experience discloses. Rationalism is superb at policing claims. That may be a different task from deciding what an experience ultimately means.
>he essay is open to strangeness as experience, yet much less so to strangeness as a feature of reality<
I would be interested in reading a longer version of this statement. I think I know what you're driving at, but I'm not sure. Assigning an inner experience as powerful as faith or spirit to an externality without really recognising the proper relationship of the two things is a difficult place, no matter how you look at it.
I think the difficulty is precisely that we don’t know the proper relationship between the two. I’m not saying that the power of an inner experience licenses a claim about an external being. Only that showing how an experience is generated or mediated internally does not, by itself, establish that it is self-contained.
All perception is internally mediated. The tougher question is whether some experiences disclose anything about reality beyond the mechanism producing them, and how we could tell. In Mirjana’s case I remain agnostic, but I think the essay moves rather quickly from a plausible account of how the experience happens to an assumption about what, if anything, the experience refers to.
> the difficulty is precisely that we don’t know the proper relationship between the two<
Or even if there is one for that matter. ! I would say there is what you see and then there is what is shown to you. 99 times out of 100 it's not very problematic but when you're talking about things that move people's souls, it's very important. I reckon if you see something that moves your soul, it's a miracle. Whether or not it matters that a thousand other people have seen it is inconsequential in that way of thinking about things. On a rudimentary level that is what very good magicians do. They encourage you to see something. I was on the beach once in Montauk at the end of the day. It was the fall and the weather was very grey and windy. The waves were coming in at a pretty steady pace and reasonably high, although not crashing. I was sitting off the beach and in the reeds just to protect myself from the wind a bit and then I started hearing these tones, like a breathy flute, like a whole bunch of breathy flutes. The tones would rise and fall but in no particular key, yet it still was not dissonant. It was something else entirely. It was the harmonics of the wind just at the right angle blowing across the waves. Maybe I was in exactly the right place to hear it but it was really magical, reminded me of the T.S. Eliot poem "I have heard the mermaid singing but they do not sing for me." I've never heard it before or since but I don't spend a lot of time on the beach so maybe it's quite common. I'm sure sailors heard it a lot. For me in that moment it was a miracle. I think there's miracles everywhere if you want to look for them. But I think my definition of a miracle is not what people are searching for here. They want one they can put in a box.
I think there are a few different meanings of “miracle” of miracle being used here. The essay is mainly asking whether an event gives public evidence of divine intervention. You’re using the word for an experience that changes how reality is felt, even when the physical explanation is ordinary. I’m somewhere between those. I don’t think an inward experience proves supernatural agency, yet i don't think that explaining how it happens exhausts what it discloses.
So I guess my response is that if every experience that moves the soul counts as a miracle, the word no longer distinguishes miracles from beauty or awe. Maybe that’s where we part ways...
Well you are absolutely right to make that distinction when it comes to theological matters. It is indeed a word that signifies a divine intervention. Interestingly enough when you go back and look at the root of the word, it does kind of imply nothing but a moment of wonder or awe but never mind. I suppose in a theological sense I do not believe in miracles it strikes me as a rather silly way for a divine entity to behave
A divine being performing conspicuous exceptions to natural order offends your aesthetics of divinity? It rather offends mine too.
Actually, stunts weren’t what I had in mind. I meant that an experience might be fully mediated by consciousness and still disclose something real through symbolic form. No broken laws of nature required, and no claim that the symbol should be taken literally.
Broadly speaking there are two classes of miracles in the world: those that could be the product of perceptual noise, and those who clearly *require* divine effort. A lot of the power of miracles rests upon them being in the second class. This is simply Bayesian math- a miracle that requires divine effort could not have arisen without divinity, and thus provides strong evidence that we are in a condition of divine influence. The more implausible it is without divine intercession, the stronger evidence it provides- that's what makes it a miracle. If upon sufficiently deep research it turns out that a miracle who is believed to be in the second class, actually rests clearly in the first, it consequently lowers the evidence value of the miracle- the probability that it could arise in the Godless world is higher than was believed.
I agree about the evidential weight of the solar event. If it can be produced by atmospheric conditions and retinal effects, then it is weaker evidence for direct divine intervention. That was why I said I don’t take the sun to have literally spun.
My point was about a different inference: whether identifying the internal mechanism of an experience establishes that the experience is therefore self-contained. Bayes can compare how likely an observation is under competing models, but it doesn’t by itself tell us that “Godless world” and “divine effort” exhaust the relevant possibilities.
It does not. But we already know people can produce internal miracles in unlimited supply. And many of those are mutually contradictory, so we know that even in a Godful world, an internal miracle cannot be trusted. Here it's not a problem of a lack of evidence so much as a lack of information. The idea of a true miracle is to cut through this- to tell who objectively has the favor of God and can tell us who's lying, who's crazy and who's for real.
I agree that an internal experience, however powerful, can’t by itself authenticate a doctrine or tell the rest of us who has God’s favour. Contradictory revelations make that clear.
I think we may be asking such experiences to do different jobs, though. You’re interested in a miracle as public certification: something that discriminates among rival claims and identifies who is “for real.” I’m asking the prior, looser question of whether an internally mediated experience might disclose anything genuine about reality, even when it cannot settle doctrine or serve as transferable proof. Its failure as an authentication device doesn’t necessarily make it informationally empty.
Oh yeah absolutely. I mean, I readily think that for instance an internally mediated experience can reveal something about your interiority at the very least. A lot of people seeing the Virgin Mary is certainly not *coincidence.* But you're not learning anything about the Virgin Mary as a feature of any external process, except in the boring-but-practical way that she's a cornerstone of those people's faith as practiced. I mean, I do certainly think it's interesting that all these people see Mary instead of Jesus or God or an angel.
This is where the disagreement reaches an impasse. Yours is a coherent naturalist position, and the very assumption I’m questioning. It treats “interiority” as a sealed domain, and the Virgin as either an external entity or a cultural object inside the mind. What drops out is the possibility that consciousness might disclose features of reality through symbolic or culturally available forms, without those forms being literal reportage.
"I do certainly think it's interesting that all these people see Mary instead of Jesus or God or an angel."
Garabandal (another unapproved apparition) got you on that. Allegedly the Archangel Michael appeared there first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garabandal_apparitions
And famously, Dame Julian, the author of "Revelations of Divine Love" had visions of Jesus, as did Margery Kempe, another mediaeval mystic. These do happen - see the origins of the Sacred Heart and Divine Mercy devotions.
Can you give an example of the kind of internally mediated experience you're talking about -- the kind that discloses something genuine about reality, without being something that can serve as proof?
Maybe love or grief. They don’t prove there’s a soul, but they illuminate another person’s reality and value in ways an argument never could.
The comments of one of the folks in this thread registers as near 100% chance AI-generated from GPTZero. I say this as one confused, not accusing. What are the community's thoughts about this? Is GPTZero an accurate measurement when at least some of its measurement criteria is the almost inhumanly perfect grammar I see constantly in this blog? I mean you knew it was bound to happen.
Is the person you have in mind Ben Giordano? I'm suggesting him after skimming the comments and noting his seem to be the ones that demonstrate most effort to be cogent and grammatically correct. (Of course, so does the sentence I just wrote.) I did not for a moment suspect the writer was AI. But then i rarely ask myself whether a reply is AI, unless something about it creeps me out. I may not be a good AI detector. I am also old enough to care more than most here about prose style, grammar, etc. (Learned to diagram sentences in school. Never got comfortable with netspeak. etc.)
A thing is true if and only if it improves the predictive power of a model, and truth is the thing that will affect our perceptions regardless of what we believe.
The problem with believing in the supernatural is that doing so will reduce our ability to accurately predict things like the effects of our actions, which is very dangerous both to ourselves and others. For example, if the Virgin Mary is real, then the Bible is likely true; if the Bible is true, then homosexuality is probably an abomination; if homosexuality is an abomination, then convincing your gay son to feel shame and repress his sexuality will improve his wellbeing. We might try to adopt a version of supernatural beliefs that won't harm people we love, but we can't know in advance what will and won't cause harm unless we believe true things.
Believing something true isn't harmful, but believing something untrue often is. One of our most important moral obligations is therefore to honestly try and believe only true things.
When we point out the mental machinery that might produce the perception of a miracle, that definitely doesn't disprove the miracle on its own- but there exists so much evidence against the supernatural that if we're honestly truth-seeking, we should have very low priors on supernatural explanations to begin with. Natural explanations can then provide a plausible explanation when none at all existed before.
I’ll respond briefly, but I won’t spend several rounds disentangling premises you seem to regard as self-evident.
The chief problem is that your argument moves from the possible reality of the Virgin Mary to the truth of the Bible, then to one disputed interpretation of homosexuality, and from there to a prescription for the psychological welfare of a gay child. Each step requires a separate argument. None is supplied. Bayes has been asked to do rather a lot of unpaid labor.
More importantly, I haven’t argued that the force of an inner experience authenticates a doctrine. My point is that explaining how an experience is internally mediated does not, by itself, settle what relation consciousness may have to reality.
I'm generally on board with you about the moral obligation to correct our false beliefs, but it's not the case, in the real world, that believing true things is never harmful. If we were rational agents, that might be true, but a large part of the value of religion may well be in how its beliefs motivate and discipline us, even if they're false.
An intrinsic commitment to know the truth will sometimes conflict with consequentialist ethical commitments, and I think it's a good idea to (1) not assume away such conflicts, and (2) to think about what you would do in such cases. My personal policy is to err heavily on the side of truth over other utility, partly because it seems I really do care about it intrinsically, and partly because I assume my biases will tend to underrate the utility of truth, so I should play it safe.
Strongly agree.
I think I have to confirm to see the sun at 12.00 at least once in my life. I already confirmed it (after reading the previous article) after 15.00, but I realized that I have never seen it before then. I think it should be plausible that between the sun being covered whole and sun being too bright to see, there should be somewhere in between that it's "safe" to see.
A D O R A B L E
To rephrase a computer game: Virgin Mary appears to Scott. He asks "Are you the miracle?!?" - "No, Scott Alexander - you are the miracle."
A fitting finale for Fatima
Unbelievably high effort post, thanks for writing this.
I have a number of responses to this post. The first three are all very personal.
Response no.1: This is almost insanely comprehensive. How fast does Scott compose, edit and input text?
Response no.2: Scott is absolutely hopeless at impersonating a journalist. The first thing you learn as a cub reporter is that when you approach people waving a notebook, they will either look through you or spit. Trust me on this.
Response no.3: I have never before seen a photo of the author. It may be relevant to this story that he looks a little like the Grand Inquisitor's private secretary.
I will be back with more...
I’ve been to Medjugorje so many times, I’m sure you have taken from there more than these weird and highly speculative theories
So are you a recently divorced Catholic now?
Catholics do not divorce. They use time travel to erase the marriage from the past; it's called annulment.
Oddly, the one meteorological explanation apparently ignored by Scott is that what the original group of maidens saw was a sun dog, and that the phenomenon may, because of local climatic conditions, have been repeated more than once since then. According to Wikipedia, a sun dog is "an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to one or both sides of the Sun. Two sun dogs often flank the Sun within a 22° halo, parallel to the horizon."
I have seen a sun dog once in my life, low to the winter horizon on a Greek island; it looked as though three short rays with thicker ends (think indian club shapes) radiated from the center of a blurred and 'watery' sun. It was a gripping sight, but hardly an "in hoc signo vinces" moment.
Wikipedia goes on to give some fascinating suggestions for the etymological derivation of sun dogs: "Jonas Persson suggested that out of Norse mythology and archaic names — Danish: solhunde (sun dog), Norwegian: solhund (sun dog), Swedish: solvarg (sun wolf) — in the Scandinavian languages, constellations of two wolves hunting the Sun and the Moon, one after and one before, may be a possible origin for the term."
Scott did consider it, but discarded the idea, because it differs from the reported phenomenon. From the first post on Fatima (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more):
"This is a sun dog. It’s caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere that refract sunlight in a very specific way. It’s very cool, but aside from a resemblance to a wheel, it looks nothing like the miracle of Fatima. A sun dog doesn’t have any unusual colors, it doesn’t change size, and it doesn’t spin (I’ve embedded a YouTube video not because a still image would be misleading - it wouldn’t be - but just in case you want to see for yourself how completely motionless it is). It’s just a halo shape with two smaller illusory suns on either side of the real one - something which no one at Fatima reported."
Next post: controlled trial, double-blind, placebo Madonna.
"Double-blind" sounds very unfortunate in this context.
That would be more properly St Lucy:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRIuHi1AIxpGSuSUcOqdNyqRup7VeewYMfUIMVFNBP4MQ&s=10
My annual renewal already came and went just recently, and not that I was having any particular misgivings, but this is a strong signal of "yep, I'm glad to help pay for things like this". Lots of people fret over how to stay (occupied|alive) in the post-AGI future; one could do much worse than pursuing a side career as a Researcher of Miracles.
It's also kind of amazing that a Bosnian woman wrote a book referencing a blog post in the future that you hadn't even written yet. With God, all hyperlinks are possible. Was this one of the Ten Secrets that's already come to pass?
I'm just so glad the Irish were nice.
I agree with Scott's wife that you shouldn't convert just because you've seen a miracle, although for mostly different reasons. I just don't assume that if supernatural forces exist, they would necessarily be honest. In fact, I can imagine more reasons why they wouldn't be.
The Virgin Mary may as well be Vishnu, Loki, an interdimensional alien prankster or any one of a myriad of other entities. I could easily accept any miracle as genuine, but the only conclusion I would draw from it would be that the supernatural exists.
I also find the contrary assumption — that supernatural beings are honest — somewhat telling when it comes to people seeing or wanting to see miracles. Especially when you consider that there's plenty of precedent for all sorts of magical creatures playing tricks on people in most belief systems.
Well put
Right, that's why for real evidence of Catholicism, you have to look into UFO sightings. After all, why would aliens advanced enough to stealthily visit use such silly spaceship shapes? It's more likely the devil would conjure up some visions to throw everybody off the trail.
(On reread, this was a little unfair, because you're not narrowing the scope down to any one of those. But only a little.)
So if you hear trumpet sounds coming from every direction and see the dead come back to life, and a guy floats down to you saying the second coming is here and see two armies gather, you conclude that vishnu, loki or an alien is up to no good today?
Depends. Is this just a vision or a quickly passing, one-time event, or are there actually armies gathering in front of me? Because the actual physical presence of swords, arrows, bullets, and such would definitely do a lot of heavy lifting in convincing me.
Even then, I'd probably still only be 50:50 on it being the actual Second Coming vs. some elaborate LARP by higher forces—mostly because I find the Book of Revelation-style rapture specifically quite silly.
You can never directly know that there is an actual physical presence of swords, arrows, or bullets. You only get to directly experience your perceptions. However, your perceptions are consistent long-term with the physical presence of such objects in my proposed hypothetical.
Therefore, my proposed hypothetical is a series of miracles (ie, seeming violations of physical laws) and if, in that hypothetical, you become convinced that Christianity is 50% likely to be true, then it seems inconsistent to not update preferentially (though possibly only a little) towards Christianity upon observing a single, Christian-flavoured miracle.
But if dishonest supernatural forces exist then you're screwed anyway.
If an apparition is either an honest Virgin Mary or a dishonest trickster god then you might as well assume it's an honest Virgin Mary offering you your one true chance at salvation. Because the payoff matrix for guessing it's the trickster god just isn't favourable -- even if you're right and you refuse to be fooled this one time then he'll just be back later with some other trick and you're going to fall for one eventually, might as well get it over with.
I refuse to be Pascal's Wagered by trickster gods.
Maybe that's why they don't show up in the first place!
Should I send all my money to the Nigerian Prince in my mailbox too? After all, if they're a scammer they'll surely find some way to trick me eventually!
Just because someone is conveying messages that aren't true doesn't mean they have an unlimited ability to fool you. This remains true even if the sender has (some) supernatural power. For example: they might be motivated by something other than actually convincing people of falsehoods, they might be trying to trick *someone else*, they might be trying to fool people in general but aren't much concerned with you, they might not have a good understanding of what humans find convincing, they might have a limited ability to contrive seemingly convincing miracles, and so on.
Yes, for all the rationality, Scott has a weak spot about considering religions as monoliths, where one strong part could confirm the rest. To me they look more like jumbles of cultural content, so even if some supernatural parts were confirmed true, it would do nothing to confirm the rest.
Good point.
Even if you fully trusted your vision of the Virgin Mary, she would still have to tell you explicitly which parts of which flavor of Christianity are correct (if any).
I don't know how you would get anywhere concrete with just a spinning sun—unless the sun starts talking.
Mary appearing at Medjugorje seems like evidence against Catholicism being entirely correct even, since apparently she and the pope disagreed so much.
Given fallibility on all sides, I'll side with a mystic over a committee of theologians, any time of the day.
I'm undecided about the metaphysics, but I directly know people who claim to have seen spiritual visions, and received messages. One person I know says they started receiving transmissions of a whole new religion, and instead of founding a sect, they just told the voices to go find another channel.
As Scott’s Wife: Yes, this. In the original conversation about it, I also made a point similar to this: that they could yet turn out to be correct about some miracles, and nothing else. In the absence of a compelling explanation connecting the two, I do not see them as bundled.
I still don't understand why you're chasing these miracles for evidence of God. If you're already operating on the prior that your existence and happiness has intrinsic value, then surely it's not a big leap to consider that the world is actively pushing for them. If one isolated miracle is all it takes to get you to convert, then why wait for it? The truth you're looking for has already been found and accepted by countless others. All you need to do is believe. You will never find a better truth.
He chases miracles because he considers them evidence for a particular interpretation of God (Catholicism in this instance), where a positive confirmation would make a decision of what sect to convert to easy. God for some perverse reason allows many contradictory sects to coexist, none of which has clear preponderance of evidence in its favor.
But why do you need evidence? Surely you have no doubts that morality and beauty are real. This is just one more step. What you want to be real can be real, as long as you believe. If you cannot see the truth in the first place, what difference does it make whether you're "correct"?
> Surely you have no doubts that morality and beauty are real.
The word "surely" seems a bit inflated here.
I can't remember Scott's position on this, but many ethical theories don't posit the Good as objectively real. Ethical emotivism is popular these days.
"What you want to be real can be real, as long as you believe."
This is false, no doubt about it.
They are being sarcastic, my impression from other comments of theirs is that they profess a particular form of naive nihilism.
If Scott didn’t change his mind on it in the last 17 years, then based on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M2LWXsJxKS626QNEA/the-trouble-with-good he is an anti-realist.
I am deadly serious. And I do believe Scott believes in objective good. What else could justify such blind righteousness and moral utilitarianism? We all must believe in something, otherwise we'd simply fall apart. Nihilism only leads to death.
If the believer can't tell the difference, what difference does it make? It's real to them, and they can never see past their own perceptions to see otherwise. They have no insight into the true reality of their existence anyways, beyond the distorted reflections of it provided by their own senses. For all lifeforms, what they perceive and what is real to them are one and the same. They will never find any truth beyond those senses.
> none of which has clear preponderance of evidence in its favor.
have you sincerely tried to gather the evidence yourself, looking at each different sect, maybe weighted by their population as a first pass filter?
>d for some perverse reason allows many contradictory sects to coexist,
the simple explanation here is, if there were just one religion, you couldn't freely choose it
>have you sincerely tried to gather the evidence yourself, looking at each different sect, maybe weighted by their population as a first pass filter?
No, the world doesn't look like supernatural plays any substantial role in it, so I've never considered that a worthwhile time investment.
Why do you think we all must believe in objective morality? Why can't we recognize that morality is a result of evolution? That belief won't cause me to harm others, because my brain evolved to not like needlessly harming others.
I’ve stared at the sun behind clouds multiple times when it was at an angle of 42 degrees or less. I have never once seen anything close to the Fatima miracle. It sounds like a lot of these Medjugore visions are either similar and personal / visionary or public and very dissimilar. Since the visions happen in the early morning or late afternoon, it is quite disanalagous either way.
Here is a report of me staring at the sun. You can see some extremely vague similarity to Fatima if you squint and ignore at least ten core facts.
This observation took place on June 5, 2026 at 7:40 AM in the South East United States at about 10 feet above sea level when the angular elevation of the sun was about 14.5 degrees.
The sun was behind thick clouds but you could see light through them. The clouds did not part at any point during this observation. The light was attenuated enough that you could keep your eyes fixed for a while without being forced to look away. It did require some squinting though. I kept my eyes on the light for about thirty seconds to a minute with mild pain. My eyes felt only a little sore about 60 minutes later but no after images that much later even when closing my eyes. The soreness is reminiscent of going outside of your house on a really bright day and being surrounded by white concrete. The soreness in my eyes is less significant at 9:25 but still noticeable.
Because the clouds were so thick, I could not see a clear disc but just a blur of light. After keeping my eyes fixed for a while I could start to make out a circle with somewhat of an edge though slightly diffuse (probably due to my eyes adapting to the bright light). Less crisp of an edge than the full moon but more so than the initial blur I saw. The color of the diffuse disc was yellowish (sun yellow). I could see clouds moving in front of the sun and after keeping my eyes fixed for a while I could notice a little bit of flashing as if you were to shine a flash light against the wall in a dark room and move a ball back and forth in front of the flash light so the circular light on the dark wall flashes left to right.
The sun did not change position, it only had this back and forth flashing, and I could clearly see clouds in front of it. I also did not see anything that seems like rotation. It was a clear left to right to left motion all within the perimeter of the diffuse disc. I did not notice any color changes in the sun. I could not see any color changes in my field of vision. I did not even see a splotchy afterimage of color except when I closed my eyes in which case I saw a small tealish/purplish diffuse disc on the back of my eyelids that remained fixed at my center field of vision. When I opened my eyes, the afterimage was gone because the surrounding light overpowered it.
I also did not notice any flux of heat from the sun apart from the ambient air temperature which was warm.
At 5:35 PM on the same day, the sun light was unbearably bright even behind thick clouds with a little light coming through such that I could not make out a disc (sun was at 32.5 degrees elevation). Ten seconds of looking lead to significant eye pain. At 6:10 PM, there were no clouds, and the sun was blindingly bright at (25 degrees solar elevation)
I'm very confused about the jump in this article after the miracle observation. Nobody in Medjugorje claimed to have looked at the sun, right? What was the reason to look at it, then?
It feels like all of the hypothesis writing about the sun was written as a separate affair from the trip.
I believe the sun stuff has been reported there as one of the many miracles that happen there. The main miracle itself is only related in the sense that it started off the other miracles.
Love the commitment to empiricism, but absolutely taking your wife's side in the debate.
Part of the problem is that if miracles would compel a full worldview overhaul (not just "the world is weirder and shakier than I thought"), you wouldn't just have to convert to "Leo XIV" Catholicism, but to the children's flavor of "cover your arms or burn in Hell" Catholicism, which was extreme even by 1917 standards.
In the Bosnian case, you'd have to choose between: 1. "Yes, actually Mary, but the children's stories were largely nonsense" - in which case, what grounds remain for it even being Mary and not a Shoggoth with a votive candle?, or 2. "Yes, the whole thing is True Prophecy, and Jesus may have used a screwdriver."
Jesus reportedly worked as a professional carpenter for a decade or so before taking up the preacifyhing line of work. He was also reportedly omniscient. Is it really so hard to believe that, after painstakingly carving thousands of dovetail and mortise-and-tenon joints, he didn't say "screw it, ima invent the screwdriver fifteen centuries early; nobody will notice if I don't tell anyone"?
Well, he'd have had to tell the metalworker he brought in on the project. Maybe a promising research subject for any archaeologists or biblical historians looking for a dissertation topic.
The screws to go with the screwdriver would probably be the harder bit. Quite intricate metalworking for biblical times.
Very intricate the first time, but I'm thinking indirect lost-wax casting in bronze would allow reasonably efficient "mass" production from a reusable primary mold. Wouldn't give particularly high-quality screws, but maybe enough for basic carpentry.
I think it would be entirely possible with first-century technology, but you're looking probably a full day's work and a lot of expensive materials to get a small number of poor-quality screws, and it would be much worse than doing things the normal first-century woodworking way.
Inventing superglue, on the other hand, would be a fun project for a bored omniscient ancient Judean carpenter waiting for his ministry to begin.
Was Jesus omniscient across time? Or was he just smart enough to speedrun the tech tree himself? If he was only omniscient in his own time, and there were no screwdrivers at the time, it's not clear how he learns about screwdrivers. Maybe he was watching alien carpenters in another galaxy?
Or course, any miracle is explainable if he's the son of god, but my priors tend to heavily down-weight accounts involving multiple gratuitous miracles.
These are good objections. Anything miraculous could also be explained by extremely technologically advanced aliens who want you to believe ... something?
I think the right approach would be to try to consider the _totality_ of the evidence, not just looking at individual cases.
If an angelic figure appears before you and permanently cures your disability with a touch, and then says "Catholicism is the correct religion" before vanishing, and this is witnessed by multiple people and also captured on video, you still shouldn't convert to Catholicism, because it's much more likely to be a different magical being playing a joke on you. If the actual Catholic God were real and wanted people to not be disabled and to believe in them, they would perform such miracles for everybody, not just you.
Yes, you have to apply conservation of expected evidence here.
Does Catholicism predict that this will happen and if so with what occurrence? If it does then it happening should update you towards Catholicism every time it happens and away from Catholicism every time it doesn't happen.
If it doesn't(and I don't think most Catholics would say this is the expected outcome and the Vatican has not confirmed it) then every time it doesn't happen you shouldn't update away from Catholicism but every time it does happen you should update away from it(because Catholicism made a wrong prediction).
The Catholic church teaches that yes, some of these are real. They happen sometimes, but not often. They generally happen to people who are already deeply devoted. Sometimes they'll happen when you pray for the intercession of someone _else_ who was deeply devoted.
Once you open the door to 'magical beings' of any kind, you've already left the materialist reservation, and then have to start asking questions like, "Did Jesus really come back from the Dead?"
The Catholic concept of God is really just "reality itself." The claim isn't that "reality exists" - of course we all agree it does - "but that reality wants a specific kind of committed relationship with you."
God showing up to every single person in explicit form would lead people to stoop searching for reality, seeking the truth. Instead, if you look at the broader pattern of supposed miracles, they tend to happen to and around people who were already devout to begin with.
My best 'science flavored' explanation here is that Mary is really something like an memetic attractor that people can 'tune into', and they tend to interpret those experiences through the lens of their cultural background. This maybe sort of explains why so Catholics seem to claim so many miraculous claims: they're really the only major game in town that tells people how to point their 'conscious antennas' anywhere near that attractor.
Of course, that's just my best science flavored explanation. I'm catholic because I think that explanation works even better than the science-flavored one :)
what entity do we even have evidence of that plays supernatural jokes on people? this is like saying to someone " no, you didn't really see a unicorn, you saw a fake unicorn created by slartibarti, god of levity, because the horn was the wrong color." you kind of need to have a specific being in mind not just a possible being, and that being needs proof of belief too.
I feel like there's no fun in playing tricks using supernatural powers anyway.
If I fool you into thinking there's a unicorn in your backyard by painstakingly painting a unicorn on the glass of your window then that's a good trick. If I fool you into thinking that there's a unicorn in your backyard by magically creating a perfect simulacrum of a unicorn then that's not a good trick, it's no fun at all.
A good prank leaves the victim thinking "Oh man, I wouldn't have fallen for that one if I hadn't been so gullible". If the victim is left thinking "Yeah okay fine well there was no way I wasn't going to fall for that perfect simulacrum" then it's no prank at all.
Really? You don't see the appeal in slowly driving people insane, alienating them from their loved ones and turning them against each other? You're no fun.
Not if there's no challenge to it.
I mean, fine, I can see the appeal in making a cat chase a laser pointer for a minute or two, but I wouldn't make it my full time job.
The interdimensional gods have achieved post-scarcity about ten million years ago. Everyone needs a hobby.
Think about the people collecting stamps. (And that's far from the weirdest thing you can collect.)
There's not even that many miracles happening at any given moment. One very bored dude might be enough.
If you show somebody a supernatural burning bush and based on that convince them that you created the universe and are the ultimate arbiter of morality, I think that's gullibility.
I would say we have as much evidence for supernatural pranksters as we do for other supernatural beings.
Trickster gods, spirits, and demons are actually staples of mythology.
I'm also not sure why I need to have one specific being in mind in order to seriously consider the possibility of being tricked. I don't need to know which Nigerian is responsible to suspect that they might not be a prince in dire need.
I don't think we need any specificity. The vast majority of hypotheses consistent with the data won't include "Christianity is true". Maybe some reasonable priors in combination with the data get you partway to Christianity, but I don't see why we need to or should highlight hypotheses with any specificity
Wow. "Oh that Krishna, such a kidder! He's clearly appearing here in the Mohini avatar to confuse the Catholics, that little rascal!"
Preferring to believe in a deity from a completely different pantheon because you're scared spitless Christianity might be true and that would be ever so inconvenient for all the fun (sins) you want to keep on doing - that's some going.
I can understand denial based on "I'm a materialist atheist". I can't understand denial based on "I'm a materialist atheist and I would believe this was Raven rather than the Blessed Virgin".
It's right that you're calling out an unacknowledged reason people are rejecting Christianity. But I think it may be a somewhat good reason. Words like "good" and "evil" come apart at the tails (to use Scott's terminology), and I honestly don't know how to conclude that Christianity's sins are evil in the sense I care about. This is a semantic issue, related to Quine's translation argument, so I don't think any amount of believing the doctrines helps. Moral realism doesn't help either, because maybe I'm a realist about Humanist ethics but not Christian ethics. Or maybe they're both real and true, they're just talking about different things.
Personally I think Christianity's probably not true in its orthodox forms, but if it were, I don't see why I should take God's side.
"but if it were, I don't see why I should take God's side."
Remember that when our unaligned AI children are shoving you into the disintegrator. "I don't see why I should take humans' side, just because they have some weird words that come apart at the tails" 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
Well I don't want our AI children to treat me like God. Maybe I should take his side in the sense that I try to take anyone's side (the sense in which I hope AIs take my side). But God doesn't strike me as a utility monster (he passes through the disintegrator unharmed) so I shouldn't give "his side" more weight than all the people and animals. Now if it could be shown that God does actually want only the best for us, I might change my tune, but I can't tell if Christian doctrine even addresses that question, strictly speaking, because the people who translated the Bible into the vernacular weren't aware of Quine's translation argument.
The reasos for my atheism goes a little deeper than anything like materialism. In this case, it's more like, I don't believe reality works in narratives humans find appealing. So you don't get to just neatly compartmentalize different religions in such an investigation, just because it would make for a clunky narrative.
Well, what about not wanting billions to be tortured forever? That is as good reason as any to be in denial about Christianity. Not "sins" which is just you smearing the outgroup (ie non-christians) as there are many good people who are not christian.
Good news, everybody! You can do whatever you like, from boiling kittens alive to the most depraved depths of your imagination, because Andrew has assured us there is no such thing as sin, that is just Smearing The Outgroup.
Oh wait, you didn't mean that, Andrew? You meant there *are* bad things which normal people disapprove of? Tsk tsk, and why should I be ruled by your subjective notions of what is good and bad? Now where did I put that big kitten-boiler again?
My point, which I believe my comment makes quite clear and you yourself have admitted to knowing, is not that there are no sins, but that not everybody who is non christian is so because of sin. Others may have other reasons like not wanting people to be tortured forever.
You smeared the outgroup by implying that anybody who is non christian is so because they want to sin. That is generalizing the outgroup and ignoring other possible reasons like being raised irreligious, or perhaps finding hell immoral. It is classic tribalist mentality.
It is quite the childish response to be honest.
I agree with what Frikgeek, wrote. To use some made up numbers:
- P(c) is the probability that Catholicism is basically true
- P(e|c) is the probability that when I who has some permanent disability, go to Medjugorje and it's 6:40 and I'm with a group of other pilgrims and I am at some holy hill, then it's the probability of having my disability cured, conditional on Catholicism being true.
-P(e|not c) is the probability of the above happening given Catholicism being false.
My numbers are something like
- P(c) = 1/1000
- P(e|c)= 1/10.000
-P(e|not c) = 1/12Million
this would update me towards being about 50/50 on Catholicism. And I guess around 50/50 on Aliens or something.
But I'm so uncertain about the numbers, I might also say my probabilities are one in a million and one in 12 million, in which case my P(c) only goes up to 12 in a thousand.
The sudden disappearance of pain that Mirjana mentions is also a frequent element of near death experiences, especially those brought about by an injury or a painful disease. Some of the people report that the pain comes back as soon as they reenter ther body, some claim that their pain was healed permanently.
I’d love to read a post by your wife describing her consciousness shaping experiences.
For real, that was (no offense to our host) the part of this I found most interesting.
Yeah, it would be interesting to hear that type of thing from the perspective of someone with a very practical and skeptical mindset. Usually when someone brings that type of thing up, I'm curious but also worried they're going to make up some nonsense and/or try to get me to join a cult.
100%. Me too. Actually I'll go higher: if that were a paid post I'd join (at least for a month) just to read it.
Well, somebody knows how to appeal to the practical! Noted.
In the same camp as Stephen. FWIW, the part I’d be most interested in is less pure qualia tourism and more — is it useful? How does the ability to shape experience on demand (if that’s an accurate way of putting it) relate to brains doing normal brain-stuff, like navigating the world, caring about things, managing emotions, solving problems, etc. Is it just a fun vacation from reality, or does it have day-to-day import?
Yeah absolutely
Absolutely
Scott is slightly-mangling my commentary on something mentioned in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.
Ingram described a variant of approach to a shortly-before-no-self phenomenon that leads to experiencing "the universe becomes a toroid." I took my own stab at this variant later, and confirmed to myself that my sense-of-the-world indeed turns "toroid." I had previously had the "reality reduced to a single point" feeling, that he describes a few pages before.
Jumping headfirst that far into the book strikes me as a bit of a strange choice, and I do not expect you'll get much out of it that way. But you can search MtCTotB for "toroid," if you're interested in it? I had minimal imagery accompanying this particular experience; nothing particularly fancy or unique to add to it.
Thanks! I’d honestly love to hear more detail. I read MCTB a long time back and am familiar with some of this stuff but the toroid thing escaped me. I’m not trying to replicate it but the experience sounds fascinating and judging from this comment thread, others agree. If you’re ever up for it, your experience of the various consciousness states (?) or shapes would be amazing to read about. What exactly does it mean for consciousness to be a toroid? Some state where time doesn’t flow linearly or is it just the shapes that collapse? I’ve experienced “space” and distance disappearing briefly but I find that easier to wrap my mind around
Yes, I'd also like to hear her opinions on people like Nick Cammarata who rave about the possibility of becoming 100 times happer and how wonderful meditation is. Does she also think this is all fake or are only the hallucinations fake, but the happiness and feelings of bliss might still be real and valuable?
Mirjana's regular apparitions sound a lot like she's learned to enter the first jhana. She spends several days in mental preparation and is able to slip into it easily after so many years of practice.
> (I think the reason my wife’s experience was so much more impressive than mine was that her vision snapped the bright sun against bright clouds to “both sun and clouds are dim” and mine snapped them to “both sun and clouds are bright”, due to some kind of perceptual idiosyncrasy.)
She sees The Dress as gold and white and you see it as blue and black, right?
> Put your face about two inches from the screen and stare at the black dot.
Huh, approximately the only thing that happens for me is that at all the spots disappear (thereby making JPEG compression artifacts more clearly visible) -- except the purple ones.
> the visual system to interpret complex radial stimuli as rotating, and their movement as rotational movement…
These look like they're spinning like crazy if I use my left eye but like they're barely moving at all if I use my right eye, for some reason.
I feel there's a weird bias towards the specificity of the claimed miracles.
"Afterimages" is supposed to be an unsatisfactory explanation, because the reality of visual perception is very complex and thus produces relatively specific phenomena. But that's confusing the specificity of the point in reality we find ourselves in (i.e., all the physical details of how our vision works) with the specificity of the miracle claim.
The miracle witnesses do not put much stock in those specific details. If the sun had spun counterclockwise instead of clockwise, or the afterimages were of a specific color instead of rapidly shifting, they still would have claimed it to be a miracle. In fact, they do just this! Thus, the set of observations that would cause these witnesses to exclaim "miracle!" is actually quite large, and "afterimages" is a suitably simple theory that dismisses the entire set of purported miracles.
Similarly, I find it strange to be obsessed about the physical piece of paper. This is just one of many nonsensical claims that can easily be explained by faulty memory and perception, combined with preoccupation about said piece of paper. (To be clear, I'm charitably assuming that the book author is honest but mistaken).
If someone who never before claimed something weird would suddenly present a semi-credible piece of evidence, that would be worth investigating. But if someone makes dozens of non-credible claims, and among these there is one that happens to be semi-credible, that is much less surprising! It's basically p-hacking!
Now, I understand demanding to see the actual physical miracle, as a new-atheist type of debate move. But if we're actually investigating the claim, then we need to treat a physical piece of evidence very differently than the (non-physical) claim that a physical piece of evidence exists.
In conclusion, you are being way too charitable by investigating each of these claims as if it was a stand-alone, isolated claim. This is an attack vector against which many rationalists are insufficiently hardened.
All this said, your time on this earth is your own, and if your idea of fun is to travel to eastern Europe and stare at the sun, then have at it! :)
Previously I posted about also having seen the "miracle" here https://substack.com/@tastyy329837/note/c-192433821. The wife's experience sounds exactly like my own, and I am very confident we observed the same phenomenon, whether or not it's the same thing that people saw at Fatima (which I'd guess was the same, but it's harder to be sure). I saw a spinning illusion in addition to everything else, and I also got the big temporary blind spot that went away after some minutes.
What portion of the Fatima witnesses were expecting the miracle of October 13 to be a sun-related miracle? I've been under the impression that they mostly expected 1) the Virgin to appear to them all directly, and 2) WW1 to end.
Huh, I experience chromotopsia pretty reguliarly. I can even do it on purpose: on a bright sunny say out if I close one eye for at least a minute while going about things normally, when I switch closed eyes after that everything will look blue out of one eye and red out of the other.
Thanks Scott, you’ve done great work. Many of us never took the miracles seriously enough to investigate, but starting with an open mind produced a much more thorough explanation, which is valuable.
Richard, I know you’re always right about everything all the time, but iirc your reasons for never taking miracles seriously was just your distrust of your own family extended onto all non-WEIRD people, along with a general distrust of testimonial evidence. I feel like you miss that there are actually many well-documented healings amongst modern Western people (Caleb Jackson listed out some that made it into academic journals), and not just Sun Miracles / people generally seeing weird things. Imo you kind of handwave away miracles conceptually for really no reason, and could do with an update to your understanding of the subject.
I've always been of the opinion that if God wants me to see a miracle, he will show me one himself, so there's no need to do a ton of research or take a trip anywhere. The most impressive miracle I've seen so far is that a little piece of ice fell off my ice cube tray that looked quite similar to a cross. Which is not terribly impressive considering that ice cube trays are laid out in a grid pattern, so any time I pour a little too much water in there it will spill over into the + shaped interstices. I'm hoping that if there is indeed an all-powerful God who wants to save my soul, he'll send me something better than that, but I'm not holding my breath or anything.
Scott's whole trip seems like an unfathomable waste of time from my perspective. But there's no doubt that it makes much more interesting reading than my ice tray.
I think you insistance that you had to convert after seeing the miracle strange, given that the Virgin very specifically said that you *didn't*, as noted in your article!
You're treating an universalist virgin as weaker proof that Catholicism is right, rather than as a stronger proof that universalism is right, which I find kind of strange. Surely the Virgin knows better than the Pope, and if you saw a miracle you should update your beliefs of what *she* said, not what the Pope said.
When I first learned about the Fatima miracle from Scott’s earlier post, I *immediately* thought to myself: “ok, if this actually happened, then it’s clearly some sort of optical illusion produced by staring at the sun.”
Scott has now taken an orders of magnitude longer, more entertaining, more illuminating journey to the same destination.
And that’s why he’s Scott Alexander, and why I can only ever be the #2 Scott A. of the rationalist blogging world: because he insisted on investigating the miracle in such a way that no reader could doubt that, if it *were* real, then he would come to believe it was real, and would fall at his feet and start praying to Jesus and Mary.
Seconded.
This was almost certainly an optical illusion with a consensus interpretation enforced via social contagion; that was obvious from the start and more so after careful but remote consideration in places like this. But the very small possibility that we might be wrong about that, would have very important implications. I disagree with "...and thus convert to Catholicism immediately", but it would still be hugely significant.
We are very fortunate to have someone willing and able to undertake this sort of on-site investigation, and reputable enough for us to trust his reports. Bravo, #1 Scott A, and thank you for this.
Well Croatia is pretty nice so hopefully he travelled around a bit!
Yeah, a lot of the Fatimology debate is between "c'mon it's obviously just because they stared at the sun" and "no, here's some reasons why it couldn't have been that" and "okay, here's a model of how it could still have been staring at the sun".
With other branches like claims that the children's visions were naturalistically inexplicable.
Instant classic, this post is a perfect example of why you are and will remain the one true caliph of rationality.
I thought Scott still recognized Yud as the caliph? Scott's one of the sahabah.
Youtuber Tor Parsons described Yudkowsky as the ceremonial monarch of rationalism, with Scott and some others as the people with real power.
Frankly the whole idea of converting to Catholicism after seeing a miracle was absurd and Scott's wife was completely correct. Even if the supernatural happened that day in some kind of proven way, it could just as easily be aliens or Harry Potter wizards. I don't understand why Scott seems to have this mental block, its been a consistent illogical note in these articles.
The sun miracle is much less likely in the possibly counterfactual worlds where Harry Potter wizards exist or where aliens are here than in the world where Catholicism is true. This means that a confirmed sun miracle is better Bayesian evidence for Catholicism than for those other things. Additionally, Harry Potter wizards existing has vanishingly small prior probability even compared to Catholicism being true (and I say that as an atheist), though imo aliens being here has much higher prior probability. I personally would not convert to Catholicism even after seeing a sun miracle, but these things depend on one's weighting of evidence, different people will do that differently, so let's be nice to each other's counterfactual religious views.
If we postulate the existence of space aliens or Harry Potter wizards, why would we expect them to be any more or less likely to produce sun miracles than the postulated Virgin Mary?
One thing we can be reasonably confident of is that, if there is a God, He is perfectly fine with having people believe in false gods due to their misinterpretation of apparent miracles, or being atheists if they don't see any convincing enough miracles. So we can't just look at a miracle and assume that its purpose was to convince everyone that a particular deity is real.
If flying saucers produce a "sun miracle" every time some damn fool engages the hyperdrive in the wrong part of the ionosphere, or if Harry Potter wizards form sun miracles every time they put the emphasis on the wrong syllable of "Apparate!", then we would expect a random smattering of non-illusory sun miracles, and we would expect the ones in Catholic regions to be ascribed to the Virgin Mary. The ones in Buddhist regions would get a different religious interpretation; in the United States they'd be seen as alien spaceships. And if the God of Abraham was behind any of these, we still don't know *why*.
Let's say you somehow become fully 100% convinced that wizards from Harry Potter exist. Will a natural, subsequent thought of yours be: "Huh, I guess Fatima was possibly supernatural"? I'm pretty sure it won't be that or, at least, much less likely to be that than in the case where you became fully convinced that Catholicism is true.
This is because even if wizards existed, they could do tons of supernatural acts of which a sun miracle is merely one particular one they have no special reason to actually do.
If you constrain your hypothesis further, by saying that "wizards from Harry Potter exist, and they do sun miracles every time they mispronounce a spell", then, indeed, your likelihood gets much greater: in a world where that's true, sun miracles are a near certainty! However, your prior becomes vanishingly small even compared to the already vanishingly small "wizards from Harry Potter exist" hypothesis' prior.
> This is because even if wizards existed, they could do tons of supernatural acts of which a sun miracle is merely one particular one they have no special reason to actually do.
But they do have reasons, right? Like some rogue Christian wizard trying to weaken the secular Soviet Union's grip on power by staging a miracle.
Saying that some entity produces a piece of evidence suggesting some untrue hypothesis X to deceive you is a classic case of an epicycle. Compare it with saying that yes, we've found dinosaur bones, but in a world where the devil exists, he would plant it, so it's not much of an evidence for a scientific worldview.
Also, if wizards exist, you have no reason to assume they are exclusively pro-Catholic. There would be some Soviet wizards too. In that case, the Soviet wizards in the audience would be just as likely to magically cover the fabricated miracle as the pro-Catholic wizards would be to create it imo.
The fossils would be weird too if we didn't have a good idea of how they were formed and how evolution functioned, and of how things were affected by time. But we do have a decent understanding of that, and we know that the world is much older than we are, so it's safe to make educated guesses that they're borne of natural processes. These same assumptions can't be made for unknown phenomena. You can't immediately rush to conclusions when you don't understand the underlying processes. Yes, the idea that they were caused by wizards is ridiculous... just as ridiculous as jumping to any other conclusion.
Miracle wizards and counter-miracle wizards in a new cold war. This would make a great novel. Susanna Clarke should write it.
This. The logic even connecting strange lighting events at Fatima to Christianity/catholocism in the first place is such a huge leap!
Well the point is that the miracle was predicted by Catholics who claimed it was from Mary. The miracle on its own doesn't point one way or the other.
Apparently, Medjugorje was also predicted by a Muslim mystic.
https://spiritdaily.com/blog/apparitions/archives-did-muslim-predict-medjugorje
The alternative hypotheses do individually seem less probable given a Catholic flavoured miracle, but they're so much more numerous.
I agree. If it were not so, and Catholicism's posterior were greater than the sum of alternative hypotheses' posterior, then I would convert to Catholicism upon seeing the miracle, but I already conceded that I would not.
I think he’s joking. Teasing his wife, and the reader.It’s funny that the king of rationalists has a sense of humour and his commentators do not.
And the girls did gave a universalist Christianity/religious belief. On the other hand Mary is very much a catholic icon.
I also think he is joking, but I maintain that seeing a sun miracle at Međugorje *is* evidence for Catholicism even if the evidence does not overrcome the very low prior of it.
When people deny this, I always think of Jasnah from Stormlight archive. She is *the* atheist in the book series written by Brandon Sanderson, a mormon. She is supposed to represent cold rationaility and objectivity. The problem is, she lives in a world full of gods who interfere in the lives of people all the time. A good conception of rationality should lead us to believe in gods if they actually exist.
Right, but there's a difference between believing in gods as a class, and believing in one specific God over all others. An unambiguous but vague miracle points to the former more than the latter. If it is local in scope, it will probably be *interpreted* as pointing to whichever proposed deity is most popular in that area, but that's extremely weak evidence.
To tentatively challenge the claim that it's evidence for Catholicism: quite possibly, lots of miracles should push us further into a long tail of beliefs where Catholicism doesn't stand a chance. Like, if miracles are rare, then we can suppose the world is intelligible, and in an intelligible world, Catholicism is one of the 100 best-justified metaphysical theories (seems plausible to me). But if miracles are common, then Catholicism's claims of an intelligible world seem suspect.
I'm not asserting these things, and my gut feeling is often that Catholic-flavoured miracles do make Catholicism more likely. I just don't think my feeling is justified.
I might be the world expert at this point at reading Scott's facial expression, and he was at least somewhat serious about the "I might have to convert to Catholicism." It genuinely spooked me a bit.
Also the BVM, to the embarrassment of some in the church, says that all faiths are valid.
Medjugorje is controversial, and that's as much as I'm happy to say. I don't like apparitions, which I know is highly ironic, but that's how my brain is wired. Unlike Fatima and Lourdes, Medjugorje has not been officially recognised as authentic apparition (and there seems to be a *lot* of local politics involved, as well as happening first while then-Yugoslavia was still a Communist state and then smack-bang in the middle of the breakup and the subsequent Bosnian war, and then we have the power struggle between the bishop and the major religious order, which happens a lot more throughout Catholic history than you'd think, because bishops govern the secular clergy but orders are self-governing*):
"On 2 April 1995, at the high point of conflict within the local diocese, Bishop Ratko Perić was kidnapped by Croat militiamen, beaten, and taken to a chapel run by one of the Franciscans associated with Medjugorje, where he was held hostage for ten hours. At the initiative of the mayor of Mostar, he was freed without bloodshed, with the help of the United Nations Protection Force."
https://www.ewtnnews.com/vatican/medjugorje-vatican-gives-green-light-to-marian-devotion-but-says-some-issues-need-clarifying?redirectedfrom=cna
As to physical explanations for seeing miracles, knock yourself out. It's a legitimate area of investigation. "Here is a physical explanation of natural phenomena as to why people thought they saw the sun changing colour, or statues moving, and that's why this is not a supernatural miracle" is perfectly fine. Why people, particularly young adults/teenagers are especially prone to this is also a legitimate field of enquiry. We had this locally back in the mid-80s and I didn't go near the place at the time, even with all the tour buses turning up, so I'm impressed Scott went out of his way to visit Medjugorje:
https://www.waterford-news.ie/news/40-years-since-the-moving-statue-apparitions-at-melleray-grotto_arid-67866.html
I'm a lot more dubious about continuing revelations and private messages etc. Those are where the real harm comes in. "God, via Our Lady, told me that X, Y, Z" and now we've got a possible schism and potential heresy brewing, and it easily turns into cult behaviour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat_Meal_Movement
However, simply because one element has been shown to be capable of natural explanation, this does not invalidate the entire claim. That's something to remember. Speaking for the Catholic side, one does not have to believe Medjugorje is legitimate, but neither does one have to believe that it's all fraud and has been exploded by Science! disproving "miracles". It's up to what you find personally convincing, so long as you don't wander off the reservation into heresy etc. or start making inflated claims.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_institute#Foundation_and_approval
"Religious institutes normally begin as an association formed, with the consent of the diocesan bishop, for the purpose of becoming a religious institute. After time has provided proof of the rectitude, seriousness and durability of the new association, the bishop, having obtained permission of the Holy See, may formally set it up as a religious institute under his own jurisdiction. Later, when it has grown in numbers, perhaps extending also into other dioceses, and further proved its worth, the Holy See may grant it formal approval, bringing it under the Holy See's responsibility, rather than that of the bishops of the dioceses where it is present. For the good of such institutes and to provide for the needs of their apostolate, the Holy See may exempt them from the governance of the local bishops, bringing them entirely under the authority of the Holy See itself or of someone else. In some respects, for example public liturgical practice, they always remain under the local bishop's supervision."
As I might have said before, all of these official miracles have always seemed silly to me. So, let's assume there exists an omnipotent and omniscient being who wants to spread his message. He can see everything, from everyone's thoughts unfolding in real time to the exact location of every molecule of every grain of sand on every beach, and more. He can do anything. He could turn the Sun into a cube and make everyone on Earth fluent in Swahili, if he wanted to. So... how does this awesomely powerful being choose to communicate his supremely important message ? Why, via vague portents that are indistinguishable from atmospheric phenomena with a dash of retinal damage, of course !
Well, that's also the dude that put an evil talking snake in a garden so that it could bamboozle a couple of clueless dupes. I'd say that vague portents are very much on brand.
If I were God, I wouldn't do a miracle that 100% confirms me to everyone. That way you get religious authoritarian nations that are obviously not conductive to the qualities I would want humans to have. However, in some cases I could use miracles that are convincing to the people present to influence local conditions positively.
Ok, but consider rocks for a moment. Rocks exist. Everyone (plus or minus epsilon) believes they exist. There are some people who admire and/or study rocks, but most do not give them much thought in their day-to-day life. So, how come God revealed the existence of rocks in this way, but not the existence of himself ?
Rocks have no power and no moral prescriptions for humans, so even though many people believe they exist, they don't put them on the top of status hierarchies and consequently, don't restructure society in the name of rocks. Were I God, I'd allow people to know of rocks.
> Rocks have no power and no moral prescriptions for humans
But they do ! Rocks are incredibly powerful. Most rocks can support a tremendous amount of weight. Certain rocks can be used to start a fire, to detect the position of the Sun on a cloudy day, and even to produce various metals (plus many other uses). Some rocks can float; and some rocks are just beautiful. The reason you don't think of all these rock powers as miraculous is precisely because you are able to detect them pretty easily, but they are no less powerful for it.
As for moral prescriptions, rocks outperform gods here by a massive margin. A god's moral prescriptions can (and usually are !) be ignored or misinterpreted or perverted. The behaviour of rocks cannot. If you drop a rock, it will fall down, 99.9% of the time (barring special cases such as tornadoes or zero gravity environments). If you drop the rock on your foot, it will probably hurt, thus supplying you with immediate and undeniable negative feedback. Granted, rocks usually don't say "thou shalt not kill", and you can in fact kill someone with a rock... but wait a minute, why is it that you are able to do so ? Who had ordained it ?
The kind of power rocks have is importantly different from the kind of power a god has: the power has no mind behind it to direct it towards the mind's preferences. This explains why I know of no religion that focuses on rocks without imbuing those rocks with some kinds of minds, for example spirits. In contrast, tons of religions worship gods.
Surely, if the Miracle had caused you to convert at all, it should have caused you to convert to the idiosyncratic branch of Christianity described by the visionary's statements, not the mainstream Catholic Church? If I saw what I believed to be an indisputably true miracle with a Christian character, but it didn't quite correspond to the modern teachings of the Church, I would sooner think "well, I guess the Gospels really happened, but Paul and his successors got some stuff wrong" than "well, I guess I saw a real miracle, but I should ignore any aspects of it that don't fit Church canon".
> "screwdrivers, [...] not known for their presence in first-century Judaea"
I was astonished to read this! Didn't Archimedes design screws (albeit perhaps not as fasteners)? How could Biblical Judea - part of a vast empire that had hydraulics, pneumatics, vast valley-spanning aqueducts featuring complex architectural principles that outlast modern buildings by millennia, ocean-going ships, gears, crankshafts, bearings, drivechains, etc. etc. - possibly not have had screwdrivers?!
So, I looked it up on Wikipedia: it seems screws were invented between 900 BC and 600 BC, but screw*drivers* weren't invented until around 1480 AD. If this were true, I think it would be my new all-time favourite fact.
(...also, if true, being a carpenter in like 0 AD must have been bloody annoying...)
Disappointingly, though, I don't think it's quite true. As far as I can tell, Biblical-era screws (which were large and wooden, not small and metal) seem to have been driven by various sorts of crank-handle- or tap-handle*-like devices: I don't see why such devices shouldn't have been known to 0 AD artificers by some name that we could now reasonably translate as "screwdriver"..
* (https://www.parktool.com/en-int/product/tap-handle-th-2)
The ancient screws the wiki is referring to seem to be screws that aren't used as fasteners, such as in a screw press. I don't think I'd call a crank used to press olives a "screwdriver" even if it is driving a screw-shaped mechanism.
I agree in general - both that they probably didn't use screws as fasteners and that the crank handle of (say) a water-screw shouldn't count as a 'screwdriver' - but I disgree with the screw press example specifically: the action of a screw press is mechanically close enough to the action of a screw fastener (unlike a water screw the press would be self-locking, would hold the upper press-plate fast against the press bed, would apply steady pressure, etc.) that if I had a bank of screw presses and a removable handle-like device used specifically for moving between them and tightening each one in turn, I think I would be willing to translate that device as 'screwdriver'.
(Why removable? I'm imagining quite a lot of torque is needed; the advantage of the screw press over the lever press is that it's much more compact - an advantage it would lose if it needed a long handle or crank-arm permanently attached. I searched for "ancient screw press" images and found things like this: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/2246056186/photo/wooden-press.jpg )
I'd be quite willing to call a crank-type or radial-handle-type device a 'driver'; it doesn't need to be an axial-handle-type device and doesn't need to be specifically for driving fasteners - any sort of screw will do - what I think matters more for me is that it's a specialised tool, not a general purpose handle that's used for a bunch of other non-screw applications besides, and that it's separate from the screw and intended to be used with lots of different screws, not an integrated part of a single device such as a screw-press.
"she was definitely not going to wear that headscarf-shawl thing that some Catholic women wear."
It's called a mantilla. I believe American Catholics call it a chapel veil, but it's a mantilla. And no, since the Vatican II reforms, you don't have to cover your head in church any more. This is personal choice (or, if very traditionalist, then required).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantilla
My religious education classes were held in the basement of a Catholic church. One time there was a funeral taking place upstairs and our teacher wanted us to see it. The girls covered their heads with paper napkins to abide by the rule.
An objectively verifiable miracle is the same thing as a regular natural phenomenon.
A *reproducible* miracle, sure, agreed - but is this the case for a miracle that's verifiable but not reproducible?
(edit: just to be clear, I don't think there ever has been a miracle that's verifiable but not reproducible; I'm speaking purely hypothetically)
If every day the sun traverses the sky from east to west except for one day when, predicted by a Catholic shepherdess or something, it turned purple and bounced all around the sky like a ball in a bingo urn, and everybody, all our instruments, etc. all saw/recorded it, but it doesn't fit any of our models, we have no idea why it did so, we experienced no gravitational or other effects, and we don't expect it to ever do so again, I don't think that would be sufficient to make me consider myself a Catholic - but I do think I would nevertheless prefer to call it a "miracle" rather than a "regular natural phenomenon".
Have you looked into Bigfoot much? They’ve got a LOT of plaster casts of tracks. Like your sun example, there’s evidence and testimony and measurements from scientific instruments piled up all over the Pacific Northwest. Still, most empiricists require reproducibility, and don’t believe.
Fully agree that reproducibility is a stronger test than verifiability, and that things need to meet the stricter reproducibility test, not merely the verifiability test, in order to be considered natural phenomena.
Miracles, however, not being limited by the same rules as natural phenomena, are free to be verifiable but irreproducible. If we wanted to find miracles the "gap" between verifiable and reproducible is probably where we should look for them.
Is Bigfoot, then, a miracle? I wouldn't say so: I would not consider plaster casts and low-quality photographs to meet even the less-strict verifiability test; for that matter I do not consider that even Fatima, which seems far better supported by evidence than Bigfoot, meets the verifiability test.
*Could* Bigfoot be a miracle, even in principle? I suspect not: I think for the case of a sort of mysterious ape-man really for sufficient evidence I'd want to see him interviewed on the nine o'clock news - and that would meet the reproducibility test. So, there's probably no "verifiability gap" where evidence of Bigfoot could be verified but not reproduced. Either he's unverifiable and irreproducible (in other words, he doesn't exist) or he's both verifiable and reproducible (in other words, a natural phenomenon).
Please understand I'm not arguing in favour of miracles or supernatural phenomena: I don't think there ever has been one, and I don't think Fatima counts as one. I just disagree with defining miracles as exactly-identical to natural phenomena by fiat: if there ever were any supernatural phenomena, anywhere in this big weird universe that we don't understand, it would curtail our ability to recognise them.
I picked Bigfoot because it’s easier than miracles. There are plenty of reasons why Sasquatch experiences wouldn’t be reproducible. The easiest is just that maybe they’re more powerful than us. Faster, stronger, better at hiding than we are at searching.
What does your epistemology look like if it just so happens that human beings are not the top of the food chain? Ants could be very smart, and yet many existing phenomena are neither verifiable nor reproducible by them, because of their small size and power and weakness of eyesight. If you were an ant, how would you prove, one way or the other, whether your science is sufficient to correctly establish whether human beings are real and what their properties are?
What does Scott’s trip to Europe look like if we’re like ants compared to the Virgin Mary?
I think I’m on your side
Thanks for this. My late grandmother had a Medjugorje obsession and although she almost never travelled, took the trip across the ocean and proselytize to us. This post shed some light on what this was all about.
One of my early memory was looking at a low angle sun while bored on a road trip with my parents and seeing the weirdness you drew in the multi circle image. I was probably 5yo and still remember it, so it mus have been very striking to me. I could see people giving various interpretation to this weird perceptual effect.
It is very cool that you followed this up. As you say, it is convenient that your wife saw the phenomenon before you did.
Why did you immediately think in terms of a miracle? When you described the Fatima phenomenon my immediate thought was some weird optical effect or optical illusion, even though I had no idea what. Even if I don't understand how or why, I had a lot more steps remaining before I seriously contemplate "God did it" and "the catholic version of God specifically". (And yes, if it's something like "a big head appears in the sky and announces that Catholicism is right", then I am very close to accepting that. Although I also don't automatically endorse doing what God says if it sounds to be wrong.)
Your theory does ring very true. When you described the Fatima miracle, I had no idea what sort of optical effect or optical illusion would be plausible, but your theory of a *somewhat* specific set of atmospheric effects, combined with weird optical effects, combined with "if you look at it for two minutes" feels like it does produce the sort of mass visions reported.
Although I may have missed, did that give any suggestions for why the miracle seemed to occur there specifically? Only because people are looking for it there?
Please no-one stare at the sun on my behalf, but I'm interested if other people end up replicating the effect. Or even if you can build an artificial one.
In retrospect, maybe you should have tried to replicate it elsewhere before travelling. Or listed the weird parts of the miracle and the possible explanations, and juggled them around to see if there's a combination that felt like it explained things, even if no explanation by itself was satisfying. Although I also absolutely did not think of any of that in advance.
I never thought the author of "The Last Temptation of Christ" (https://archive.org/stream/ScottAlexanderStories2017/ScottAlexanderStories2017_djvu.txt) would argue you had to convert if you saw a miracle. (And uh, you never told us if you converted.)
The article does say "We didn’t convert to Catholicism" right after the description of the miracle.
If the UV rays are less focused and spread over a larger retinal area that might explain the different experiences. So I would be curious about whether your wife still sees the phenomenon without glasses and the time each of you got your glasses.
I think you being a second generation atheist just went through what those of us born into religious families all went through*. Being raised Mormon, you're inundated with stories of unexplainable Miracles and so the church must be true, and the only reason everyone else doesn't covert is because they just don't know about it yet. You don't leave religion by figuring out a logical explanation for each and every one of those. You leave it because you realize that *every* religion is inundated with stories of miracles. But they're all mutually exclusive, with the only correlation being they happen much more frequently to the uneducated and superstitious. Unverifiable eyewitness claims of odd things just are not very much evidence of something that's not mundane and shouldn't be treated as such. This extends to non-religious spheres like UFOs, alternative medicines, big foot, or crime waves.
*Including excruciatingly long write-ups
Typo watch: "desgination"
As thorough a report as I’ve ever seen on this phenomenon as I’ve ever seen.
Extremely well done.
Can you explore UFOs next?
Scott exploring UFOs would be cool.
You actually went? Mad lad. Incredible follow through. Love it.
Sigh. This is why you don't send a psychiatrist to do a survey taker's job. What he should have done was arranged for a local information, not necessarily someone who has seen the miracle, but a local who is broadly trusted by various other locals. This person or persons then introduces you to one or more willing interview subjects, who after answering questions introduces you to other willing subjects, etc. Oh well.
As for the explanations, sadly Scott's theories have no more empirical support, with respect to phenomena observed in this location, than the claims of miracles do. I say this as someone who expects that a scientific explanation would eventually be supported. What we really need is a group of people seeing the miracle while an astronomer takes careful readings.
As for his "experiment" with his wife or with a random crowd, I would gently remind Scott of the necessity of obtaining informed consent.
I also can't help wondering if she simply thought of the same thing first.
In addition, it's usually helpful to run studies with N > 2 :-)
LOL
So as an edgy, annoying atheist, I have to ask...
isn't the whole concept of the Virgin Mary a little heretical?
Like, Catholics are monotheistic. That's very important to them. OK, they have the trinity, but they get around that by saying that's all aspects of the same God. And they have saints performing miracles, but only when God feels like doing it for them. They don't have minor deities like some other religions do. Also, God seems like a very distant and mysterious figure, not some genie who's going to grant your wishes.
The Virgin Mary seems like a leftover from pagan religions. Or, if you will, wishful thinking. The idea, I guess, is that if Jesus isn't granting your prayers because he's being too much of an all-powerful mysterious sky father, the Virgin Mary can pull him by the ear, remind him that she's still his mom, and that be a good boy by granting regular human prayers. So you'll have better chance of a succesful prayer by praying to her than to God directly.
I dunno, it sounds nice, but it also sounds directly antithetical to most Christian theology, as I understand it.
As you understand it, Christian theology equals (most) Protestant theology, then.
is there some branch of Christian theology that allows for polytheism?
No, but Catholics don’t think Mary is a goddess. And Mary isn’t anymore antithetical to Catholicism or Orthodoxy than the Trinity is. Surely the Trinity is harder to understand than ”God has a special relationship with some people”.
It just seems *suspiciously* as if they took a classic pagan belief about a motherhood goddess who you can get magical favors from through ritual offerings, and rebranded her.
Nothing you are saying there is new. Protestantism particularly disliked Marian devotion precisely because they considered it pagan, along with the intercession of saints.
Why does that ”seem” more suspicious than any other aspect of Christianity? Also, it is not as though there is some rule in Christian theology that says that Christian beliefs have to be maximally far from pagan ones.
I am also an atheist and not raised Catholic or anything, and I don’t share your feeling about this.
There is a very strong rule in monotheistic religion against polytheism. (In Torah/Ancient Testament, the focus is you should not WORSHIP the other gods, not so much denying their existence).
In fact the whole religious syncretism thing (local spirits being rebranded as angels/demons etc) is a huge and complicated deal in catholicism, with several schisms, massacres etc revolving around it as late as the 14th century. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism )
The catholic church keeps a very neat list of what entities you can and cannot believe in (official saints, including Mary, are fine) without committing idolatry.
Well, Catholics will also ask living people, especially "holier" people like monks and nuns, to pray for them. If you think a prayer is more significant/helpful when coming from a nun because you see the nun as holier than yourself, naturally a prayer from a saint in heaven would be even more significant, and a prayer from the mother of god even more so.
I do think the practice of praying to saints taps into the same mental/emotional space as praying to multiple gods, but on a purely theological level it's not different from asking living people to pray for you.
I don't want to jump all over you with hobnailed boots, but this is such a mish-mash hodge-podge of "well isn't this just like..." that oozed on outwards from 19th century attempts at finding the universal underlying themes of all religions, e.g. "every culture has had a dying god!" type of Golden Bough work, and misunderstanding of the doctrines involved that I'm doing a lot of heavy sighing here.
Yes, Charles, these things have been considered before. You will doubtless be happy to learn that sectarian Protestants of the more nutcase type went before you about "the Virgin Mary is pagan"; identification has been made with everyone from Isis ("did you know, dumb Catholics, that your Madonna and Child imagery is copied wholesale from ancient images of Isis with the infant Horus?") to Astarte and who knows who else:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Babylons
Modern paganism/Wicca, though I may be thinking more of the 70s revival stuff, love them some "well ackshully Christian saints are only the Church taking over existing pagan gods and goddesses in order to let people continue worshipping them under the new regime!" And indeed, in some instances, this is true (more or less).
Cultus of saints? All been fought over during the Reformation. Misunderstandings about the nature of the Trinity? A varied series of heresies from the early days of the Church on downward, with the split in the 19th century or so, with American Protestantism as the most visible (it's always America, for some reason), where denominations sprung up like mushrooms based on the idea that there is only one God (e.g. the Unitarians):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism
"The idea, I guess, is that if Jesus isn't granting your prayers because he's being too much of an all-powerful mysterious sky father, the Virgin Mary can pull him by the ear, remind him that she's still his mom, and that be a good boy by granting regular human prayers. So you'll have better chance of a succesful prayer by praying to her than to God directly."
I can only smile here because there's some truth to that; devotional imagery of the kind where Mary pleads His humanity, by becoming incarnate through her, with her Son and He pleads His death with the Father in a chain of intercession for human supplicants is that train of thought (see the copious historical work on the rise of Marian devotion in the Middle Ages), but also the entire debate over the Theotokos, something that was fought over bitterly, because of the Christological significance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theotokos
https://us.magnificat.net/magnificat_content/the-intercession-of-christ-and-the-virgin/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_bloemaert,_intercessione_di_ges%C3%B9_e_maria_a_dio_padre,_1615.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_and_the_Virgin_Mary_Interceding_for_Humanity
There's a whole lot of theology to cover in the various points in your comment and that's too much to go into here, so the tl;dr is "yeah, we know".
Sorry if I hurt anyone's, uh, sacret cow, with my comment. I meant it to be humorous and cheeky, but it seems people took me more seriously than I intended. Anyway, thanks for all the interesting links about theology. I actually do enjoy reading about some of this stuff, even if I don't believe in it. I still think the cheesy like plastic figurines of Mary that places like this sell at souvenir stores look odd, though.
Tourist trap tat and souvenir stalls have been part of pilgrimage sites since forever. The Romans bought up the same crap when they did the "Visiting The Pyramids" tours of Egypt, the Christian pilgrims from the early days of the church into the Middle Ages went crazy for them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_badge
They're tacky, they're tasteless, and they're part of human experience both religious and secular (let he who has never bought a Funko Pop cast the first stone).
It's called Mariolatry and it's a common point of criticism of Roman Catholics from Protestants. Epiphanius denounced it as early as the 300s.
"I am, not to toot my own horn, an expert at not hallucinating."
I think this is the crux of the "should you convert upon seeing a miracle?" debate. We know that some people are better than others at not hallucinating. If 500 people have seen sun miracles, those aren't a random sample of the population, they're going to be more hallucination-prone than average (even if God is regularly doing real sun miracles, people hallucinate all kinds of things all the time, it would take a second act of divine intervention to make sure none of the hallucinations randomly happened to be fake sun miracles). If a sun miracle happens to the guy who doesn't hallucinate even on psychedelics, that is stronger evidence than if the 501st sun miracle happens to some guy of unknown hallucinatory expertise.
Your wife argues that you shouldn't believe the miracle because, c'mon, hallucination is actually super easy, but she seems to be assuming that her experience generalizes. If she said "Hallucinating is super easy, I do it whenever I drop acid" then you would have a clear rebuttal that you don't, and this must be some kind of neurological difference between you. Plausibly, the thing where she can fold her consciousness into a torus and hallucinate is also a neurological difference.
If you're bad at hallucinating and your wife is good at it, then maybe you should convert to Catholicism upon seeing a miracle, and your wife shouldn't.
There ain't no entertainment
And the judgments are severe
The Maestro says it's Mozart
But it sounds like bubble gum
When you're waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come
beautiful storytelling, as always
Years ago, I read James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. I found it weird in a lot of ways; as a psychologist, James mentions that hallucinations are actually not particularly uncommon, but most people who have them largely ignore them. One of the features he describes as distinguishing religious experiences is that they feel to the people having them like revelations of truth, which James clearly doesn't believe they always are, but for reasons which I could never figure out he seemed pretty confident that they sometimes are. But setting aside the weird experiences that just don't seem important, there are people who have very weird experiences that seem like they could be interpreted as having significant meaning, but without crediting them with much truth; A. J. Ayer had was seems like a textbook near death experience about a year before he actually died, and wrote about it, but he assumed that weird shit was going on in his brain because of his precarious condition and didn't take seriously the possibility that it was actually supernatural. Since we know that confidence and accuracy in general aren't nearly as correlated as we wish they were, I guess the existence of people reporting extremely weird experiences they don't think much of makes me suspect that the people who are absolutely certain they know what they experienced and what it meant are just displaying the kind of unjustified overconfidence people are often prone to.
Have you ever had (or felt you had) any of these revelations of truth/gnosis/etc? I am asking because I think that your difficulty understanding why James is confident in some of them probably stems from this. To me, it has seemed there is a broad spectrum of "weird experiences" that I see how /someone/ could find veridical, had they not ever seen much deeper, but there is a second class of experiences with the binary quality of being "more," that carry their own truth with them. No increase in degree of the first class can lead to the second. (It's been a while since I read James, so please assume my position is disjunct from his; I'm not claiming this is what he thought.)
I've had experiences of what I suppose I'd call intellectual insight, where, to take one case, at one point Goedel's incompleteness theorem just seemed obviously correct in an overwhelming "how could things possibly be otherwise?" way. It seemed similar to how James described the veridicality of the experiences he talks about, though he never considers that class of examples. This included in being an experience with a specific, limited duration (I of course still think Goedel's theorem is true, and had thought so for some time before the weird insight experience, but there was this strange period of absolute certainty that only happened that one time). And once the feeling passed, I didn't think that once having had the feeling added any more to my good reasons for believing the theorem than what I had based on the rest of my evidence. It was a pretty intense, strange experience while it lasted, though.
Here is the question I've always had about Fatima-esque miracles: Say we accept that the stories of people communicating with the Virgin Mary and seeing the miracles is true. Why is the only inference from that to the truth of Catholicism? Wouldn't it be equally explanatory and more parsimonious to posit, for example, a powerful magician who can induce hallucinations in people and has a vested interest in convincing them of the truth of Catholicism?
Okay, so first: where is this magician? How is he (I'm presuming it's a he, but it could be a she) zipping around the globe to various countries over a very prolonged period of centuries?
Second, where is he getting his mojo from? It's all got a (pseudo-) scientific basis and he's using drugs, hypnosis, psychological manipulation, technology etc. to pull off these fake miracles, *or* he's in league with supernatural powers of his own?
'Cos that second one is going to entangle you in the briars as well, if supernatural entities are real and can intervene in mundane human affairs.
Third, why does he want everyone to be Catholics? Is this the tired old trope of "priestcraft!" attached to everyone from the Colossi of Memnon on down? If he can pull off miracles (fake or real), why not found his own religion and be rich and powerful?
I can't answer any of these questions. My question is more: Why is the catholic God a MORE favourable explanation than the magician? I'm not saying you're saying this, but it's more that it seems to be an explicit premise of a lot of these miracle-related articles-i.e. if we accept the miracles as real there's nothing left but to accept catholicism
From the humorous way that you phrase it (if the sun visibly does seemingly-impossible trick, your wife needs to wear a headscarf-shawl thing) I know you're being tongue-in-cheek about instantly updating all the way to full Christianity, specifically Catholicism. Nevertheless, I think this expresses something in the rationalist norms about open-mindedness that moves epistemologically backward.
At the start of Chapter 2 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry sees some magic tricks, and instead of realizing something outside his understanding is going on and wondering what it could be, or considering alternatives, he instantly has an unwarranted cascade of updates through his entire worldview to a fixed conclusion.
At LessOnline, I participated in a panel discussion about your post against Solving Debates. My co-panelists took the position that debate is useful, and I took the position that it's not.
They spent ten minutes on a formal debate about whether the Shroud of Turin was real. I said the Shroud of Turin (like HPMOR's Chapter 2 miracles, or sun miracles) is a tip of a distant branch on the tumbleweed of a person's beliefs, and it would be out-of-sequence to suddenly cause us to update on more load-bearing beliefs and dispositions.
There is an entire chain of distinct claims in Christianity, many of which would involve their own evidence. Do we need to have perfect certainty, understanding, and control (to put it in David Chapman's terms) in an anthropomorphized form, which is God? Not everyone feels that need, and you can stop feeling it. Does God even have a Son? Not every religion agrees. And Christians, forgive me in advance for making it sound low-status, but I will say this just to illustrate the sheer number of claims to be "debated"... did God need to kill his own Son to forgive us for something our ancestors did when they were convinced by a talking snake, so you can live forever if you eat his flesh and drink his blood, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. Agree or disagree with that list, there's no sense smuggling it all in to "Shroud of Turin, yes or no?" which most Christians don't even need to care about.
More important is the concept of underlying dispositions, such as "the less reason there is to be certain one way or another, the freer I am to express unshakeable certainty." There are many more, and my argument for why these formal debates are unimportant is that they are a smokescreen for talking one's self into becoming consistent with a set of underlying dispositions which you have already shifted into.
I told my co-panelists they're at risk of being cultic. This reversed process, from a tiny branch of their belief tumbleweed into the more load-bearing stances, instead of being mindful of the dispositions and load-bearing stances from the outset, is probably why people adjacent to this scene get sucked into manipulative frames which they end up regretting. I could name three people known for manipulation, who most of you are probably already thinking about. I keep telling people, those three are only one small piece of the problem. The target-rich social environment is the biggest part of it.
Fascinating post overall, and I admire your open-mindedness and investigative spirit. But count me with the other commenters who are baffled by your suggestion that, even conditional on seeing a true miracle, you should convert to *Catholicism* of all things. I get that maybe you were being a little tongue in cheek in how you described this argument with your wife, played up the Catholicism bit for the drama of the blog post, etc. But taking it at face value, isn't this an extraordinary example of privileging the hypothesis? I mean, even you discussed in detail how Mirjana's revelations were totally at odds with doctrinal Catholicism. At most a "miracle" would be evidence for some fundamental misunderstanding we have about like, the laws of physics and/or human consciousness, and *maybe* evidence for something like prankster aliens, the "supernatural," or seams in the Matrix.
Thanks, very interesting post.
Given it's happening at sunset, have you considered a prolonged variant of a green flash like phenomenon as an alternative hypothesis? I wonder if, in principle, the idiosyncrasies of the local terrain and atmospheric conditions could lead to recurrent prolonged green flash like phenomena. If there was a prolonged super green like stimulus, perhaps it could explain everything seeming red afterwards.
Also, have you considered the possibility that in Mirjana's account of the watch hands reversing might represent be a transient reversal of left vs right laterality of the visual fields? If so, this seems to require a neurological rather than a retinal cause. (Reversal-of-vision metamorphopsia?)
Putting it together, I'm wondering if local conditions could somehow filter light wavelengths such that they hit the retina in abnormal, non-physiological conditions for a prolonged period, never seen under normal day-to-day lighting. With no existing template to process this information the mind might seek a top-down explanation of what is happening, which could vary in culturally distinct ways. A particularly strong episode (enough to cause hallucinations in several observers simultaneously) might lead to neural adaptation to an extent that when normal vision is initially restored, the left-right axis is transiently flipped when physiological retinal signals return and synchronise with neural efferents.
Sorry, I'm up late and didn't think the physics through well, and my knowledge of optics is poor. Basically I'm wondering if this site might function like a high intensity laser that shifts wavelengths and serially fatigue distinct cones, rather than an ultraviolet mechanism.
I don't think green flash works because even though it happens *around* sunset, that could be as much as an hour before.
My take on miracles and convention: faith, by definition, doesn't obey rules of logic. Also, we do see pretty crazy things out there – what about the Λ cosmological constant, or galaxies rotating as pancakes – but astronomers aren't more religious than other occupations. So the "real" miracle isn't the Sun apparently going super-nova or any other external event, on the contrary it is something internal happening inside a person, and then the person realizes that yes, Catholicism (or some other religion, or faith, or the lack of it) is right and has been right all along! At that point the person no longer cares about what the Sun does or did, or a counter going from 500 to 501, they know they the Truth, and the rest is irrelevant.
Agreed; as I often say, if God existed and wanted me to be a Catholic, I'd be a Catholic, end of story.
This seeing Maria in place of sun, sounds like inpainting the brain does, typically putting human-like shapes/faces into areas which it can't see clearly. So perhaps the sun indeed caused some damage/bleaching/afterimage/disabling of this part of retina image and then depending on your priors you could see Maria or other entity in the hole
Damn this is awesome. I'm about halfway through and I'll have to come back to it.
I was raised Catholic and certainly heard about Fatima. The fact that you went to such great lengths to document this is impressive.
Scott sez, regarding Marjana's account of her visits with the Virgin
> I did find the level of detail in this description compelling
Mirjana's descriptions of the build-up to her visions of being with the Virgin Mary mention breathing and breathing sensations several times, and the mentions occur alongside her description of a gradually deepening altered state.:
>Anticipation steals my breath and makes me feel like I’m suffocating. I’m already halfway in another world […]
>As I kneel on the fat rock, facing the Blue Cross, I feel like I’m losing my breath.…I would probably hyperventilate or pass out if not for the calming effects of prayer. The feeling builds to a crescendo. I put my hand over my chest as if to prevent my heart from jumping out. I gasp for air. Suddenly it’s as if someone flips a switch - the world disappears, and I’m encompassed in a great, unending blueness.
While she describes a feeling of not getting *enough* air, it could be that in response to that feeling she is in fact overbreathing. And hyperventilation does produces changes in consciousness, including quite powerful ones if the person overbreathes enough to drive CO2 quite low. Maybe on the days when she is due to see the Virgin Mirjana gradually induces a powerful altered state by overbreathing to a greater and greater degree?
You could test this hypothesis easily with blood samples.
To me the most interesting thing about all this business is the seemingly arbitrary, yet repeating connection between Virgin Mary-seeing children and Sun miracles/optical effects. Presumably there are deep cultural and psychological explanations for all of it, but so far it doesn't seem that the surface has even been scratched...
I always figured it was something about the color of the sky, and the color of her coat. Mary wears blue in all the art. The world going blue, in that cultural context, is going to get attributed to Mary.
I actually don't think it's ridiculous to convert to a particular religion's beliefs and rules if one experiences incontrovertible proof, via a miracle, that the religion's claims are valid. Seems to me the experience utterly changes the rules, and compels you to throw out your science-based belief about how the world works. All you have to go on, after the miracle, is the claims of the religious tradition within which the it occurred.
As for "waiting for the miracle". I feel like I've been waiting for one all my life. I have never been able to feel more the a small tickle of belief for ideas that aren't supported by science, whether the ideas are entire world-views or smaller scale ideas (it's Ok to put your trust in Buddhist lamas, psychedelics reveal important truths, stuff like that). But I *yearn* for there to be more to the world than I know. I want a world with ghosts or magic or ESP, any of those things there's no rational reason to believe exist. It's like I'm fatigued and played out with the game of life in the science-based world. I want a fun variant! Maybe Scott has a case of the same craving?
But the miracle doesn't prove that a particular religion's claims are valid. Deiseach can chime in if I get this wrong, but I've read the Lutheran version of the bible (RSV in my day) cover to cover, and I don't think it's *that* different from the Catholic version. And I don't recall anything about sun miracles, or about miracles presented to random children, or recurring miracles in specific locations, or anything else that would seem like a good match for these things.
The Bible does claim that miracles are a thing that can happen, and that God sometimes uses them to further his own goals, but it's not a *particular* religion that claims this, it's a great many religions, probably a large majority.
So it's not Catholicism that is claiming sun miracles in Portugal or Yugoslavia for its own, it's the miracles that are claiming Catholicism. And that claim isn't coming through thousands of years of scriptural tradition, but from freaked-out children who have spent much of their lives knowing that Mary Mother of God is who you turn to when you need an extra dose of moral support, saying "...and then the voice in my head said it was Mary Mother of God and don't worry, everything will be OK, pass it on".
It would be at least somewhat more convincing if, when we get a sun miracle in Thailand, we get a bunch of previously Buddhist children saying "...and then the voice in my head said it was the Virgin Mary, whoever that is, and that everything would be OK but only if I accepted her kid as my Lord and Savior".
Yeah, OK, maybe my picture of how I'd respond to the miracle is made simple & dumb by my craving for one. Can you relate at all to a sort of fatigue that makes one crave a world with some profoundly new phenomena and rules? I don't think the craving influences my thinking much (see my post below about a possible explanation of the woman's experiences of talking with Mary), just makes me like fantasy and science fiction, including the softest of soft sci fi.
Oh, I absolutely understand that feeling. But I've always been wary of believing things because I wish they were true. Show me a sun miracle and rule out optical illusion or hallucination or the like, and I'll take the wonder and amazement with great joy and then sit down and think out how much updating the rest of my belies is really called for.
C S Lewis called a similar feeling Joy. Maybe you know. I say similar because he describes it as a yearning for some form of completeness or wholeness (or even something you can't express at all) that attaches to a thing or scene or awe-inspiring event, but the yearning is sweeter than the thing itself, because nothing in the world can really satisfy it except God.
Now I type it out, I think it's sufficiently different from what you're describing that it could use a new word.
Well, you're the pioneer here, let's hear one :)
> But the miracle doesn't prove that a particular religion's claims are valid
No, but it can be interpreted as a hint.
It may be pointless to speculate about the psychology of a god, but it's worth asking -- if a god did exist, why would they cause sporadic miracles? It's easy to imagine a god who never intervenes, or a god who makes their existence obvious, but why would a god choose to perform very occasional miracles affecting small numbers of people? The only reason I can think of is that they want to provide _just_ enough evidence of their existence, to ensure that those who really seek the truth can find it, without making the answer obvious to those who do not seek.
So if all the genuine miracles turn out to be Catholic-flavoured (Catholic-looking things happening to Catholics in Catholic towns), then that seems like pretty good evidence that the Catholic religion is the correct one. On the other hand if a Bodhi tree starts floating six inches above the ground in Bodh Gaya then you should probably convert to Buddhism, and if Coventry Cathedral starts rebuilding itself then you should become an Anglican.
> It may be pointless to speculate about the psychology of a god
It's surely not pointless to Christians themselves, who regularly try to convert people by trying to show that this world looks like one that God would want to make. Even Scott's Unsong was a largely a riff on this theme.
Interestingly enough, at some point towards the late Middle Ages, Christian philosophers themselves felt that they were putting their own God in a box a bit too much, and shifted strongly towards the other extreme: God as a sovereign will unconstrained by human ideas, aka voluntarism.
But that breaks apologetics a bit too much, so Internet Christians mostly walked back.
> On the other hand if a Bodhi tree starts floating six inches above the ground in Bodh Gaya then you should probably convert to Buddhism, and if Coventry Cathedral starts rebuilding itself then you should become an Anglican.
I remain baffled by this idea of taking religions as unitary packages which could be true or false as a whole.
As I said in another comment, they look to me more like complex bundles of culturally accreted beliefs. It would be massively weird to me if one were strictly true and all the other ones strictly false. And that holds *even* if there was something real about non-physical higher powers.
Someone says he converted from atheism to Catholicism due to personal experience. Did he imagine it all? Was it the result of illness? I can only take him at his word:
https://scifiwright.com/2011/09/a-question-i-never-tire-of-answering/
https://ljagilamplighter.com/2017/04/16/the-conversion-of-john-charles-wright-esquire/
Amazing read. Thanks for sharing. Though I am already a believer I wonder what a materialist atheist would say after reading it.
For most things, it is possible to mentally shift yourself on the spectrum from perceiving it in a sort of ho-hum everyday way, to seeing it "for the first time/as a child". I claim that a moderate portion of what psychedelics do is throwing you into that second way of viewing things by default, but it's actually a practiceable mental motion while dead sober. Examples include listening to a familiar song as background noise when working, and being able to deliberately shift into getting really into it/hearing it more for the first time. Also, going "oh, there's a mountain, eh, who cares" vs really perceiving it and going "whoa, that's a MOUNTAIN and it's glorious and so big and it is cool that the world has mountains". Try to pull it off sometime!
For science, I've found a helpful thing to do is intentionally rephrase stuff in the most amazing but technically-accurate way you can. For instance, you probably know about plutonium-238, that one isotope that decays rapidly enough to heat up nuggets of it to cherry-red, used on space missions. But imagine going back to the mid 18th century and presenting that to someone.
"This, is a POWER ORB. It continually releases its burning internal energy for the next century. Due to its comparative lack of a doom radiance which kills life and degrades fine machinery, it has great utility for machines which travel through the frozen void of space, as their lone ember-like source of heat and energy. Unfortunately, however it is such an exceptionally rare substance that difficulties in its production constrain the rate of such voyages."
"What methods are you using to heat up this metal to trick me?"
"Absolutely none, it's just Like That"
"If so, it is like no metal known to science. Pray tell, how is it made?"
"Elemental transmutation. Alchemy is real, it just requires exotic circumstances which no fussing around with chemicals in beakers can attain."
"Now I know you're joking. Have the alchemists crashed the gold market yet?"
"No. The circumstances are exceptionally costly to set up, and there are hidden laws to it, such that it is feasible to turn gold into lead, but not lead into gold."
Try doing this exercise with other conventional science things!
I admire Scott's dedication, but I have to say I'm highly amused by the outbreak of allergic reactions in the comments to the very notion of converting to Catholicism, of all the things! Be anything else, but a Papist? No, no, never shall the polluting influence of the Roman Antichrist touch these pure minds! Rather believe it is Coyote pulling his usual tricks, or aliens, or Ascended Masters with their mystic abilities doing all this, but not the Shame of the Seven Hills!
Ah, we still got it 🤣
Now I'm wondering whether Judaism has anything involving sun miracles. Ezekiel's flaming wheels within wheels might sort of apply if you tilt your head and squint real hard, but I don't recall that being associated with the sun.
Maybe Moses and the bush that burned without being consumed? Though that's probably pushing it too far. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Joshua commanding the sun to stand still (an episode often quoted during the entire row with Galileo about "so are you contradicting Scripture there, mister? If the sun doesn't move, how could Joshua tell it to stay still?") and one I had no idea about until looking it up - making the shadow on a sun dial go backwards:
"The Sun Dial of Ahaz (The Shadow Goes Backward)
Book & Reference: 2 Kings 20:8–11 / Isaiah 38:7–8
The Event: King Hezekiah of Judah was deathly ill and prayed for healing. The prophet Isaiah gave him a sign: God would extend Hezekiah's life by 15 years. To prove this, God offered a choice—would Hezekiah have the shadow on the sun dial of Ahaz move forward ten steps or backward ten steps?
The Miracle: Hezekiah reasoned that it is natural for time (and a shadow) to move forward, so he requested the shadow to move backward. In response, God caused the shadow cast by the sun to retreat ten degrees on the stairway dial."
The plague of darkness in the exodus/passover story could be considered a sun (or anti-sun) miracle. Poetically, given the primacy of a sun god in Egyptian state religion, the message is "our god is stronger than your main god," but I am not a scholar and that could be anywhere between obvious and off-base for those who actually have studied it.
No you are right on point. I've heard many a sermon talking about how the Exodus miracles were repudiations of the Egyptian gods' power.
I also find those comments amusing. Some people here would rather choose a world view where the world is completely incomprehensible than one that involves theistic religion.
I know, right? What salvation do they expect to find at the end of the rabbit hole? The answers they desire are right in front of them, and yet they turn their backs on it out of their obsession for "truth". As if they would ever know the difference...
But that's what the world genuinely seems like to me, and I am not interested in turning around my entire life and helping a system of thought which exclusively claims the exact opposite as a necessity.
I am not sure what system of thought you mean.
The stereotypical materialist atheist doesn’t think the universe is incomprehensible.
I ultimately consider myself an epistemic & philosophical skeptic
I love this. There must, simply must be a zillion other dimensions each with random starting settings to make our universe's uniquely zillionth-portion arrangement into something ordinary! And/or since every civilization will obvs start simulating civilizations, the odds of ours being the first one is millions, no wait trillions, no today I feel like billions, to one.
My fav one was someone commenting if an angel cured me of terminal illness and others witnessed it and also told Catholicism is true. I will still not believe it.
You know, one thing I do have to ask, Scott.
Was your survey-taking approved by an IRB?
Please tell me you didn't leave Bosnia without making it to Sarajevo!
Alas, I spent most of the trip in Croatia and only hopped over the Bosnian border for Medjugorje.
Just here to say, because you're getting a decent amount of criticism for it in the comments: I agree that if you experience a miracle that is very good reason to convert! Obviously so.
Scott, that love letter to your wife is one of the best tributes to a loved one I've ever read.
I hope you've updated your priors and appreciate your wife's perspective even more than you did before the trip.
Scott, I love your wife's transcendent smirk in the photo.
Probably not going to be a popular view here, but I tend to follow the approach in classical Stoicism, considering that everything is a miracle, that is, when viewed correctly 'as if viewing it for the very first time' (tanquam spectator novus, Seneca, Letters 64.6). Nature, the cosmos, everything - is astonishing (miraculum) in its beauty, complexity, and interconnectedness.
Doesn't this just make it harder to talk about actual miracles? Waking up every morning is a miracle, Moses parting the Red Sea is a miracle, but it seems helpful to have different words to use for these different concepts, or else you can't describe Moses parting the Red Sea in words that sound more interesting than you waking up in the morning.
Thank you. I don't think it does. 'Miraculum,' in classical Latin, could cover such phenomena as an eclipse, a vision of Castor and Pollux appearing in a battle to assist the Romans, and/or a sheep with two heads. It's more of a spectrum, perhaps, than today's understanding of a violation or suspension of the laws of nature (whatever we consider a 'law of nature' might be). In fact, the ancient Stoics considered both 'awe caused by storms, thunder, etc' and 'the order and regularity of the cosmos' to be reasons for believing in the gods - the very reverse of what seems to be the position you canvass in your essay, that a violation of the expected order would be a reason for believing in the Catholic God.
And it turns out that much smarter people than me have argued along these lines:
'In the past, some philosophers and theologians have urged us to
consider the supposed order, regularity, and harmony of the universe as
evidence of the existence of a benign and omnipotent god. But if order,
regularity, and harmony constitute evidence for God, then miracles
cannot also be accepted as evidence for his existence, for they are, to
follow the metaphor, dissonances in the harmony, holes in the
patterned fabric of the universe. Hence, a Christian believer cannot
have it both ways. A miracle, a violation of natural law or a
permanently inexplicable event, is a moment of chaos, a gap in the
spatio-temporal structure. If one were to occur it would therefore have
to constitute evidence against the Christian God’s existence...' Christine Overall, 'Miracles as Evidence Against the Existence of God,' The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1985) Vol. XXIII, No. 3, p. 370.
Are you arguing that if we see Moses part the Red Sea, this is no better an argument for God than the existence of thunder, and so (since we already know about thunder) we shouldn't increase our probability that God exists after seeing the Red Sea part?
Sort of. Or, more generally: if the magnificent order and beauty of the cosmos (the teleological argument, more or less) represent a good reason to believe in God, ruptures of the order don't represent a particularly good reason. They may even represent a reason not to believe in God, or at least in the same kind of God as was seemingly responsible for the predicted order. Or at the very least, there seems to be a tension, often overlooked.
I've never heard this term "snapping" before, but I assume it means when your brain experiences a new pattern and tries to match it with some other familiar pattern, that is probably responsible for most of the supernatural experiences people have. I had an interesting one this weekend deep in the woods of Vermont camping about 100 yards off of a mountain pond looking at it through the trees deep into twilight. All of a sudden the trees were illuminated as if a car was pulling in a driveway behind me... but I was 3 miles from the nearest road. I turned around anyway to see nothing but darkness, and turned back to see the trees lit up. Then I thought maybe an extremely bright moon, and turned around and up, but no moon at all... Turning back again and thinking about it, I realized my brain had started interpreting the twilight dappled pond between the trees as "trees", and the dark trees as "empty space/nothing"... Was pretty cool to resolve two different realities at once IRL on the Big Screen.
> I was also able to find some reports of this happening to people with early-stage snow blindness (ie on bright days when there’s lots of snow on the ground reflecting UV light), although I don’t know what their eye lens status was.
Yeah, this 100% happened to me as a teenager after being outside shoveling snow in bright sunlight. Everything was pink for a while after that, but I attributed this to "oh that's why the Inuit wear sunshades", not anything miraculous. (My lenses are fine.)
How long were things pink for? Did they change color at all before reverting to normal?
Some minutes, half an hour at most. All I remember is pink, but this was 20 years ago.
Snow blindness makes things pink for me as well—by far the most common color among people I've talked to about it (not a large or random sample). Sometimes after pink it will go into a green or yellow iirc. It also lasts on the order of minutes for me, and I think that's the norm for others.
About 10 minutes for me, and it was more of a pinkish-purple for me, that gradually faded back to normal instead of turning into a different color. Gives everything sort of a "cyberpunk neon nightclub" look.
> the crowd of pilgrims is so large taht it blocks the entire street
'taht' is a typo.
I made my first serious shot at reading (skimming) your first two Fatima articles today, and then noticed that you'd published this.
I feel like the heresy is reason in itself to write Medjugorje off as a true Catholic miracle. Would be weird if Catholic!Mary repeatedly contradicted Catholic orthodoxy. There's still the supernatural hypothesis that it's demonic or something - but then if demons (or whatever) can stage somewhat Fatima-esque sun miracles, that's evidence against OG Fatima.
The secrets from Mary are an especially Fatima-esque touch. I'm interested to see them. Perhaps the end of the world will genuinely begin soon. One of the visionaries in the Garabandal apparitions said that there would be four popes until the end times, and there have been more than four popes since then:
https://benthams.substack.com/p/are-the-fatima-children-unprecedented
And of course there's the threat of AGI destroying the world within the next few decades. I genuinely consider "an AGI will be the Beast of Revelations/Antichrist" a hypothesis about this stuff.
Of course, it'd be weird for the Medjugorje entity to give heresy and also true prophecies. If anything supernatural is even happening at all.
That long book quote is genuinely compelling and sweet. Makes me all the more drawn to Marian devotion.
I agree with your wife that you don't have to convert to Catholicism just because you see a miracle. A single Catholic miracle doesn't IMO prove Catholicism. What might prove Catholicism is how there's so many well-documented miracles proving Catholic-specific theology vs well-documented miracles proving any-other-religion-specific theology.
Not 100% sure this is a naturalistic explanation for the Fatima Sun Miracle - Ethan Muse always gets the last word - but it's an interesting development in Fatimology.
EDIT: Now that penttrioctium mentions it, actually going to Medjugorje was quite impressive - thank you!
Obvious conclusion is obvious. I appreciate you going through the actual experiment and writeup, because very rarely obviously true things are actually wrong so it's useful to occasionally verify them so we can find the occasional counterintuitive truth, and have stronger evidence to use against the contrarians who don't believe the obvious thing. But in the end, I don't think I learned anything here that wasn't covered in your previous posts on the topic.
Just about this miracle discourse in general: I am an atheist, but at certain points in my life I felt a kind of desire to believe in Christianity. Even though they are supposed to be evidence, these miracle stories actually would have made me somewhat less sympathetic to Catholicism, because apparently by becoming Catholic I would have been exposed to people who think that what the Virgin Mary supposedly told some child a hundred years ago is the most important event of the twentieth century, or that Padre Pio was one of the most important men of his time because he had wounds on his hands and sometimes impossibly high fevers.
I am aware that these are only a small part of Catholicism and lots of Catholics would share my general feeling about this.
If you're not going to accept the supernatural, then there's not much point in converting. You could join the same church as James Talarico, where the pastor is very happy to chop out all those pesky miraculous bits, but in that case you might as well be a Unitarian Universalist, or remain an atheist:
https://archive.ph/bHG8h
"On a recent Sunday morning at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, Jim Rigby asked his congregation ...Mr. Rigby, who has led St. Andrew’s since the 1980s and is a well-known activist locally...
Mr. Rigby does not use male pronouns for God, for example, because it is a kind of “violence” to imply to a girl that her brother is more like God than she is, he said in an interview after the service. He does not use the word “Lord,” because it conjures a wealthy, European, male God, he said. For that matter, he added, he does not much care for the word “God.” He uses it on occasion, he said, but he tries to use synonyms, because “it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”
In his sermon that morning, he had referred to “the creative impulse of the universe,” which “can be called God, but it doesn’t have to be called God.”
A reasonable, rational, 'religion' based on "Yeshua Bar-Yosef, moral teacher" is nothing but air. Honestly? I'd go for Buddhism in preference.
The problem I mean here is not accepting the supernatural as such, it’s the corniness (for want of a better word) of these modern miracles and the kind of discourse where Ethan Muse’s analysis of eg whether people’s clothes were wet or dry, is taken seriously as something that should have an impact on people’s lives.
I think, to defend the idea of small miracles, that any judgemental God can’t make himself too obvious or it would be all too easy to be moral.
Not seeing anything on hallucinogens is astonishing to me.
In Romanian, to leave someone staring at the Sun means to leave them hanging.
Does this blog post mean that the holiday is a tax write off?
Ancient anti-Christian writers, whether Greco-Roman or Jewish, did not dispute the miracles of Jesus. They just attributed them to sorcery. So you left out a possibility: acknowledging the Virgin Mary, unblinking.
It seems that some Chinese people have also reported seeing the sun rotate strangely when staring at it.
https://www.zhihu.com/question/277912071
I still believe that the Fatima miracle was due to someone playing with an arc searchlight, invented a few years earlier. Most accounts are consistent with that and my own experience shining a searchlight at clouds during daytime.
Someone tried the "there's a reasonable explanation" for the apparition at Knock the same way, claiming it could have been someone putting on a magic lantern show.
I think some of the reaching for natural explanations is even more demanding of credulity than the alleged miracle; what, so somebody was able to haul around a bulky set of equipment, set it up and get it running, and nobody around saw this happening?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searchlight#/media/File:American_searchlight_crew_and_equipment_in_action_on_Somme_front,_WWI_(32689502005).jpg
"Oh, don't mind me, Portuguese peasantry, I'm just trundling my searchlight up this hill for no particular reason at all!"
https://www.searchlightsvancouver.com/images/sperry-1.jpg
My favourite natural explanation still remains Ice Floe Jesus, for the walking on water. Since we have a large set of contributors on here from all over the place, does anyone know anybody living around the Sea of Galilee who can clue me in on the regular mini ice-floes that must form there because how else would some guy from Nazareth be able to time his alleged miracle so tightly unless these were a regular occurrence but also the local fishermen who grew up in the area had no idea they happened?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060417105522.htm
"The study points to a rare combination of optimal water and atmospheric conditions for development of a unique, localized freezing phenomenon that Nof and his co-authors call "springs ice."
In what is now northern Israel, such ice could have formed on the cold freshwater surface of the Sea of Galilee -- known as Lake Kinneret by modern-day Israelis -- when already chilly temperatures briefly plummeted during one of the two protracted cold periods between 2,500 and 1,500 years ago.
A frozen patch floating on the surface of the small lake would have been difficult to distinguish from the unfrozen water surrounding it. The unfrozen water was comprised of the plumes resulting from salty springs situated along the lake's western shore in Tabgha -- an area where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been documented."
The searchlight could have been (and probably was) kilometers away, behind a hill. Check out the terrain of the area. I did.
Was that someone playing with an arc searchlight in cohoots with the visionaries who had previously given the date of the miracle?
Has this been ever reproduced anywhere by anyone?
Yes, the person playing with the searchlight could have told the visionaries in advance. Not necessarily alerting them to the fraud, though. They might have been made to genuinely believe that virgin Mary told them.
I did play with a searchlight in my early teens and I think, I did create most of the effects the witnesses observed.
In regards to the reversed watch and the parchment: what other stories of changed physical objects are connected to Medjugorje? I know of at least one: the former runner and running coach Alberto Salazar (who, I should point out, has gotten suspended for doping violations and then banned from coaching the US as a result of sexual abuse allegations), says that he had silver rosary beads that turned gold after visiting Medjugorje.
Oh, that was a thing at the height of the publicity - people claiming their rosary beads had changed colour (I'd almost call it a craze):
https://medjugorje.com/rosaries-turning-gold/
Of course, there is a natural explanation for that as well:
"Tarnishing and Plating Wear
Silver and Plated Metals: Many rosaries feature a silver coating over base metals like brass, copper, or bronze. With consistent handling and natural skin oils, this thin layer can wear away, revealing the base metal underneath and causing the chain or crucifix to look gold or bronze.
Oxidation: Silver naturally reacts with sulfur compounds in the air and oils on human skin, leading to a dark tarnish."
There's a 1980's news report by the famous journalist Stone Phillips here[1] on Medjugorje pilgrims where several of them claim this about their rosaries and/or necklaces.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1MfY8uEEwU
I enjoyed the subtle comedic timing of putting the source of the hotel name into the footnote.
Great stuff, looks like a fitting end to the rationalist miracle saga. On a side note, please tell your wife to start her cult already, my friends and I all want to join.
No mention of the greenish spot and pink halo to the left of the sun in the 2nd photo? https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!h_Z1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9a50071-9ac5-43a9-919f-e096adc7ad8d_1346x1009.png
That's just lens flare imo.
The apparitions happening in a place where other claimed miracles (which we now know to have natural explanations) happened, makes me more skeptical.
So rad to see you followed through on this by going on the damn trip! This feels like closure for those that have read along as you dove deeper into this. 10/10 : )
For anyone who saw the LessOnline talk, realized this was the same thing, and skipped to the comments, there's actually a lot more here and it's probably worth reading the part about Scott's fight with his wife and some of the other things that were left out of the talk
All I could think as I was reading this was "Your god is too small". As in, if the Catholic Christian god is real, why on earth would he be bothering with a miracle like this? It seems almost petty to give miracles (consisting purely of strange spiritual experiences) to those who stare at the sun in certain locations at certain times and not intervene in other ways. Just like how it would be ridiculous if god helped someone find a parking spot but failed to help starving children.
If this kind of miracle was happening, it would lead me to update in the direction of a trickster god, or a less-powerful god, or even aliens having a bit of fun, before it would make me think about converting to Catholicism.
I find this completely unsatisfying. If this phenomenon was so easy to observe, surely the thousands of people who read and comment on your blog should have put things to rest with ample evidence well in advance of your trip. The explanation at the end touches on this but doesn’t take into account the hundreds of people who would’ve surely tried it themselves at home after reading.
This leads us with several possible cognitive blind spots. 1. People did report the phenomenon but there was some mental block that prevented you from taking them seriously. 2. It’s actually rare and you got pretty lucky. 3. A real miracle.
As a liberal Protestant, I share a lot of your wife’s objections to converting to Catholicism based on a miracle. In fact your comment on the objectionable theology of the Fatima children made this quite clear. But from the other side: if you question God, he delivers, and you still stay skeptical, surely the consequences of unbelief are amplified.
Explanation (1) is the most likely but, somewhere in the back of your mind, you’ve got to be a little spooked right?
A phenomenon that requires you to travel halfway around the world to a small town in Croatia, is hardly "easy to observe".
Granted, if this is just a mundane trick of atmospherics and optics, it probably wouldn't have been too hard for any of us to experience and report some version of it. But still more than a trivial effort, and all we get for it is proof of the boring natural explanation that we all pretty much knew was the case. And all we have for anyone else is our unsupported word. So the reward for taking that effort, is very small. I certainly didn't think it was worth the bother.
What we care about, what would be worth looking for, is the small possibility that it is a genuine divine miracle. And if it is, you're not going to see it by occasionally looking at random bits of the California sky when there's high cirrus in the late afternoon. You have to go to a place where God is performing divine miracles on something resembling a schedule, and for His own ineffable reasons, he's apparently quite stingy about miracles and to the extent that He does them on a schedule, He doesn't seem to be scheduling them for the convenience of Bay Area Rationalists.
There is nothing unique to Medjugorje, Scott even says he expects the natural conditions happen every few weeks. Thus it should be an easy phenomena to reproduce. Surely many people tried; I can’t imagine that these posts generated so much interest, yet everyone said it was not worth the effort because they don’t believe in miracles. Thus we return to my three options.
And I of course agree with you that it seems theologically untenable. But in the part of your uncertainty quantified world view, where you allocate a non zero chance to the gods working in mysterious ways, this kind of experience should be deeply unsettling.
You are missing the point. Yes, the natural conditions happen every few weeks in many places. But we are comparing two different hypotheses, one of which is that this is not a natural phenomenon. And the unnatural phenomenon is only reported as regularly occurring in inconvenient places.
If you go out into the California desert on an appropriately-cloudy day and see a paler-than-usual sun with some vague irregular bits of color around it, you have proven nothing interesting. If you go out into the California desert on an appropriately-cloudy day and *don't* see a paler-than-usual sun with some vague irregular bits of color around it, you have still proven nothing interesting.
The idea of an omnipotent god running a roadside attraction in rather capricious ways absolutely boggles my mind
One more reason for "if this wacky incredibly unlikely thing is true, that's *really* important". So, yeah, glad Scott checked out the roadside attraction specifically.
Yeah my roadside attraction comment was actually referring to the phenomenon itself. I can't reconcile the idea of a God that encompasses all of creation, running this world like a science experiment with hamsters, and occasionally, just for the hell of it, creating some diversion that will excite and arouse. I completely understand it if I look at it as a human construction but when I really try to imagine what God is, I can't get by these things. It's not satisfying and if I accept it I have to say it's not even that interesting. It doesn't mean I am averse to what one might refer to as spirit because I'm not. If this sort of god exists, it has to be beyond my imagination just because. If there is an omnipotent god that I can contain in my imagination, that doesn't seem very reasonable to me as a proposition. And the idea that God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform, has to be a bigger idea than throwing out a few weird sunsets occasionally. I will turn this whole thing over to Spinoza now.
Lots of things are easily dismissed as hallucinations, even if they really were caused by something we don't currently understand. For example, suppose the Virgin Mary was just a scam being perpetuated by aliens trying to control the world through the catholic church.
This would not be evidence that Catholicism were _true_, so much as that it were indeed something much different from a hallucination.
To try and reduce that "it's a hallucination" escape hatch, try looking into medical miracles instead.
People can certainly hallucinate all kinds of images, but they can't generally hallucinate a new limb that actually works, for example. Look up some of the healing attested to Padre Pio. Or, just read about Padre Pio in general and see if you can come up with a plausible explanation of what the heck was going on there. Were his stigmata a consistent hallucination? Was he a con-man? How did they bleed for so long without going septic?
Padre Pio secretly ordered carbolic acid, admitted to having veratrine and possessed a surprising amount of chemical knowledge. I'm not a chemist and those chemicals supposedly can't cause the exact wounds that were observed, but it seems like a mighty coincidence that the guy known for weird wounds was an amateur chemist and had rare chemicals known for causing fake wounds.
That story has a perfectly innocent explanation: they ran a medical clinic and he used that acid to disinfect the injection sites. He said it was ordered secretly because they didn't have a prescription, and he didn't want the person carrying it knowing they were doing so.
How much of the evidence have you actually looked at here?
He had these wounds for something like 50 years, and for the most part he his days consisted of spending hours in a confessional. The wounds never went necrotic or got infected. He also had a bishop who hated him and tried everything he could to shut padre pio down and convince people he was a fraud.
Are we to believe this guy spent 50 years pouring acid on both hands so he could... sit in a confessional? And that his main critic never manged to solve the simple task of "cut off the flow of acid into the monestary?"
I've read a skeptical site and talked with AI and I did all this quite some time ago, so I don't expect that I currently know key details accurately. I admit that there is a consistent possible explanation where he is not a conman, but even if I can't disprove conclusively elements of that, it still seems weird that God would send the "could possibly be an effect of chemicals" miracle to the chemist priest.
If we are to get into the details instead of the bird's eye view:
At some point in my life I walked a lot every day with a very old, partly already disintegrated shoe. This caused water blisters, then blood blisters, then open wounds, but they never got infected and healed fully. I don't think one can conclude that open wounds necessarily cause infection or necrosis without divine miracle.
He got world-wide, historical fame out of it. Pouring acid on one's hand for that doesn't seem like a high price.
In defense of the bishop, I would also hate someone I strongly suspect mocks my faith by using cheap tricks to fake miracles and gets rewarded for it.
Supposedly, he ordered the carbolic acid for use as disinfectant and veratridine for a prank.
When can we get a prediction market on whether Scott Alexander eventually converts to Catholicism?
I thought there already was one.
https://manifold.markets/Dfe2f/will-scott-alexander-convert-to-chr
I'm on No down to 10% myself.
Very beautiful post.
Re: your argument, is your position that you ought to convert if:
a) You experience something which you can't explain and has the emotional feeling/vibe of a miracle (say Jesus appears to hover in front of you and say: accept me into your heart).
b) You know that you experienced a miracle ...ie if you believe it was a miracle you should believe it was supernatural.
But b is basically a tautology while a seems like the claim your wife correctly rejects.
Though what religion you should convert to seems very unclear even with b. And I don't understand the relevance of the fact the revelations are heretical. Contradictory is an issue. Heretical is just finding an observation that disagrees with a currently popular theory.
You may be interested in the sun miracle I had one time in the bath:
I was in the bath and wanted to do fire kasina stuff and didn't have a candle so I stared at the overhead light that is slightly too bright for comfort and after a minute or two of real focus it did indeed start spinning, turning colors, and become one of the most strikingly beautiful things I'd ever seen. I understood at last the behavior of the noble Moth and resolved to stick with real fire for fire kasina because I didn't want to get so into this that it would start to damage my eyes.
Why would a miracle with no semantic content convert you to Catholicism specifically? Just because they called dibs on the phenomenon?
"Mirjana seems not to realize that a parchment which shows different things to different people would itself constitute miraculous proof of God’s existence, and never mentions this again. If anyone should happen to meet her, this is the thing I want to ask about most."
This is consistent with the stated powers of the parchment. A person who sees the parchment by chance will see it as a shopping list because that's what's most likely to make them dismiss it as unimportant. The same power prevents Mirjana from realizing that the parchment has an easy to check miraculous power, she thinks the important thing about it is the contents and not the medium.
If you were to talk with Mirjana about it, you would likely forget to ask her about the parchment, perhaps by getting sidetracked into talking about a different miracle just like Mirjana is too distracted by the important secrets written on the parchment to notice the miracle of the parchment itself.
My very first thought when reading about the sun miracle was: Some sort of retinal stuff when looking directly at it combined with not-everyday atmospheric effect.
"AFAICT the only example of tens thousands of people all saying they witnessed the same impossible thing, at the same time."
~10,000 witnesses simultaneously saw a UFO at a soccer match in Tuscany in 1954. They weren't gathered to see a miracle, and the UFO left behind "angel hair" which lab testing showed to be inorganic. This seems to be at least as good evidence as that of the sun miracles.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29342407
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadio_Artemio_Franchi#1954_UFO_sightings
Thats a great example. Will it be illogical to say I believe both in Fatima and UFO sighting of Stadio Artemio?
It seems consistient to believe in both Fatima and the Stadio Artemio UFO sighting; everyone has to choose a calibration for false positives vs. false negatives.
It seems inconsistent to believe in Fatima but not the Stadio Artemio UFO sighting, since they're in the same category, but the UFO has better evidence and less selection bias.
So you went somewhere remote to look for something very rare, only to discover ot can be found in your own home town. It's like The Alchemist.
The fine-tuning objection appears too readily dismissed to me. Especially if you consider the possibility that Fátima was a real miracle but subsequent ones weren't. (Note for example how the Vatican does officially support Fátima but is noncommittal about Medjugorje.)
The children of Fátima had no prior sun miracles to bias their expectations. Scott himself hypothesizes that the conditions in Fátima had to be "more perfect" than at Medjugorje, yet there have been no reports of repeat miracles at Fátima despite it being a massive pilgrimage destination. What are the actual odds that you'll get just right conditions like that on a random mid-October day in Fátima? Surely the odds of failure had to be significantly large!
Classic post thanks. Do you think this has anything to do with Akhenaten the Egyptian pharaoh who converted everyone to monotheistic sun worship for a generation?
Curious if you had just set up a sign saying "I am doing a survey on people's experiences here for research purposes. If you have a few minutes, please come talk to me." and just waited if you would have gotten better results. I assume rando with a notebook is not some earnest, honest researcher but somebody trying to sell me magazines or get me to vote for so-and-so or something. Nice looking person politely sitting over waiting for me to come to him would probably have better luck at least with me.
I so appreciated the setup of "do I test the contagiousness hypothesis with my wife? but i hate lying... but it's such a perfect experiment!"
the punchline was fantastic
Scott, I disagree with some of blah blah blah; and other stuff not worth saying. The part that is, is how beautiful it is to see this image of you and your wife, after so long admiring you as a sort of disembodied spirit on my internet.
Your wife's religious faith is impressive.
I think we should keep in mind that a natural occurrence could still be a divine sign, especially if it’s so striking. Of course, not all instances of the phenomenon could be such signs, since their accompanying worldviews contradict each other. Some could be, however, especially if accompanied by truly supernatural occurrences indicating their heavenly significance.
And a cluster of such supernatural phenomena apparently happened at Fatima. The many accounts of flash-dried clothes have already been mentioned. Plus, a great public sign was predicted in advance by child seers at a time when the optical phenomenon proposed here was unknown. They even specified the correct day. Scott Alexander argues that his explanation “requires only a certain pattern of diffuse clouds,” which isn’t very unlikely, but what we should be considering here are not the conditions necessary for someone to experience some version of the phenomenon, but those necessary for tens of thousands to do so dramatically and simultaneously: not minimal conditions, but ideal ones, which are much rarer. Indeed, the first time Alexander’s wife saw it, he did not, indicating that the phenomenon can be experienced to greater or lesser degrees. With all of this considered, even if the apparent movement of the sun was natural, it seems the prediction was supernatural.
Moreover, the seers’ lives are associated with other seemingly supernatural occurrences as well. Here, for example, is the miracle that led to the canonization of two of them, Francisco and Jacinta, as described by the parents of the boy who received the miracle: “On the 3rd March 2013, at 8 p.m., our son Lucas, who was playing with his sister Eduarda, fell from a window from a height of 6.5 m. He was 5 years old. He fell on his head and had severe concussion, with loss of brain tissue. He was treated in our city, Juranda, but due to the severity of his clinical condition, was transferred to the Hospital of Campo Mourão, in Paraná. The trip lasted almost an hour. He arrived in deep coma. He had two cardiac arrests and underwent an emergency operation….
“As the days went by Lucas became worse. On the 6th March the doctors thought of transferring him to another hospital, since there were no basic conditions for someone his age. They told us that the chances of survival were low and if he survived, recuperation would be very slow and he would almost certainly have cognitive impairment or even be in a vegetative state. On the 7th we [called Campo Mourão Carmel]. On that day the Sister transmitted the message to the community. One of the Sisters ran to the relics of Blessed Francisco and Jacinta, that were near the tabernacle and felt the need to pray: ‘Little Shepherds, save this boy, who is a child like you.’ She was able to convince the rest of the community to pray only through the intercession of the shepherd children. And so they did. And we, as a family, began to also pray to the little shepherd children. And two days later, on the 9th March Lucas woke up well and started to talk, asking for his sister. On the 11th he left ICU and on the 15th he was discharged. He is perfectly well, without any symptoms or side-effects. What Lucas was before the accident he is now: his intelligence his personality, everything is the same. The doctors, some were non-believers, said there was no explanation for this recovery.”
So, I think the flash-dried clothes, the unlikely prediction, and the extraordinary healing—all of which seem supernatural—indicate the Miracle of the Sun to be a divine sign, even if the phenomenon itself was natural.
This whole thing was on my mind while I was hiking in Washington state's Olympic national forest, and I happened to catch the sun doing the "visible disk" thing through some clouds: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mbm6i1plI_4
This happened around 17:42 PDT, 2026-06-27, at 47.93249600985972, -123.40841963874503, giving an elevation of around 35 degrees. Staring at it for around 10 seconds, I did experience some wiggling and colored after images, which I found consistent with nystagmus / bright light interactions I've experienced before and did not feel in any way miraculous, but I can imagine for someone without that experience it might be somewhat confusing?
Could it be possible that these conditions are a coincidentally great spontaneous insight meditation focus?
A major aim of insight meditation is being able to clearly perceive the arising and passing of sense data. So, if a person is concentrating on one "image" for an extended period of time, but this "image" is actually rapidly providing new, notably different sense data, eventually their attention will be naturally drawn to what insight meditators are trying to focus on. You talked about people comparing the phenomenon to kasina (and that's probably also helps with good insight conditions), but that's samatha meditation, which is way more likely to give you warm fuzzy feelings or peace or clarity, rather than weird hallucinations.
Intense insight experiences tend to be the ones that give you really weird experiences or profound changes, it's your brain running up against a fundamental contradiction in how it processes data. And the suggestible mindset induced by going to a magic miracle hill could make it easier to pause the habitual interpretation of data enough to notice weird inconsistencies. Not sure if anyone brought that up on the past mention of meditation, but your description of how "the afterimages from the sun bled into the afterimages from the clouds in an odd, almost violent way" sounded like a perfect meditation focus. Waves are great, too.
So why are we fixated on the optical phenomena and avoiding discussing the jhana-like experiences of intense love, hearing sounds and otherwise being engulfed in the Heavenly Realm?
None of it needs to confirm or deny Catholicism. It can merely be an investigation into the millions of weird and strange states of consciousness people can experience.
When some people asked Jesus for a miracle, he said that no sign would be given them but the sign of Jonah: he was dead for three days, and rose again. There's your miracle.
> would usually associated with churches
Typo