Your Lady of Fatima

A Response to Ethan Muse

This is a response to

Ethan Muse

and his recent article “Our Lady of Fatima.” Muse’s article is about events in the Summer and Fall of 1917 which the Catholic Church has concluded were miraculous. Muse argues in support of this conclusion. These events happened near Fatima, Portugal:

In May of 1917, Lucia dos Santos, a ten-year-old shepherd, reported seeing a luminous woman along with her two younger cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged eight and seven, respectively, while the three of them were out tending their flocks. Only Lucia spoke to the woman, the Lady. The Lady told Lucia that she was from Heaven and that she would only reveal her purpose on Earth if Lucia and the other children returned to their meeting place five more times over the next five months. The children returned home and word of the encounter soon spread. When he heard about the children’s story, Lucia’s parish priest instructed her mother to allow Lucia and the other children to follow the Lady’s directions; and so, the next month, June, Lucia and her cousins dutifully returned to the spot of the original apparition to receive the Lady’s testimony¹.

This time it is estimated that about 50 people accompanied them to the meeting. The Lady appeared to the children again, and she and Lucia spoke again. None of the adult attendees reported seeing or hearing the Lady — they only saw Lucia behaving as if she was speaking to someone. They didn’t miss much apparently: Lucia reported that all the Lady said on this occasion was that Lucia must learn to read in order to serve her purpose. Then the Lady ascended back into the sky.²

The next month, July, thousands of people accompanied the children. Again, no one saw or heard the Lady; again, they watched Lucia’s half of the conversation. According to Lucia, The Lady told her that everyone must pray the rosary to ease the war; Lucia asked the Lady about different petitioners in the audience looking for grace and healing; and the Lady promised to perform a miracle in three months which would “convert all.” After this the Lady ascended back into the sky.³

In August, local authorities apprehended the children and prevented them from going to meet with the Lady on the usual day. The reaction of the people who had begun to accompany the children, who were even then gathering in anticipation, was explosive. The children’s parish priest, Fr. Manuel Marques Ferreira, estimates that roughly 15,000 to 18,000 pilgrims had gathered; and that, as news spread of the children’s capture, the assembled pilgrims soon began to bray for his lynching, suspecting him as an accomplice in the abduction⁴. Some of these same excitable people reported that, when they attended the meeting place at the appointed time, they heard thunder and saw white clouds rise from the area where Lucia usually spoke with the Lady. A few days later, while she was out in the fields, Lucia got the sense that another apparition was imminent. She sent for her cousin Jacinta — Francisco was already with her — and “as soon as she arrived”⁵ the Lady made a ‘compensatory’ appearance to the children. Lucia reported that the Lady told her that, had the children not been detained, “Saint Joseph would have come with the Child Jesus to bring peace to the world. Our Lord would have come to bless the people. Our Lady of the Rosary would have come with a little angel on each side. Our Lady of Sorrows would have come with an arch of flowers around her.”⁶

In September, the children were once again allowed to attend their scheduled meeting. Fr. Ferreira estimates 25,000 to 32,000 pilgrims accompanied them. Once again, the crowds watched Lucia’s half of the conversation. According to Lucia, the Lady reaffirmed the importance of praying the rosary, saying that it would calm the war, which the Lady announced was about to end. The Lady said it would be proper to build a chapel there, at their meeting place. Lucia again interceded on behalf of the growing number of petitioners in the crowd, and in response the Lady said that some of them would receive help but that others would not. Lucia then tried to pass along a gift from one of them: two letters and a small bottle of scented water for the Lady to take with her when she returned to Heaven. The Lady told Lucia these things would not be convenient in Heaven, though, and so humbly left them on Earth when she again ascended to the sky.⁷

In October, on the 13th, the largest crowd yet gathered to watch the children make their final rendezvous with the Lady. Many tens of thousands of people. We must imagine this number was made up in large part by the tens of thousands of pilgrims who had been gathering at the site in the months prior. But journalists, professors, and other educated professionals were also now in attendance, curious to see what would happen. It was a rainy, overcast day. (We have some pictures of the event.) Some people in the crowd had umbrellas with them. Lucia took her usual place with her cousins, and the people watched as her half of her conversation with the Lady unfolded very much like the previous ones had. The Lady said that God was unhappy with the world. She reiterated the need for a chapel and that an end to the war was imminent. Lucia asked about a yet greater number of petitioners, and the Lady again said that some would receive help and some would not. Then the Lady ascended to the sky for a final time. As she left, Lucia called for the crowd to look to the sun.

The skies cleared up. Then, by most available reports, something very striking happened above Fatima. A lot of people saw a pale disc of light that didn’t hurt their eyes to look at, which moved around the sky in incredible ways. There is variation in its description — some mention it having “firework wheels” around its edges, some don’t⁸; some mention it spinning, some don’t⁹; some mention it bathing everything in purple or orange, some don’t¹⁰ — but there is also plenty of agreement. At the same time, other people at the event, looking in the same directions, did not see anything. A faithful woman, Izabel Brandao de Melo, strained in vain to see the solar spectacle that those around her were so rapturous about. But she could not.¹¹ We have reports of at least a few other people who also, affirmatively, did not see anything¹². One attendee, Pinto Coelho, a Catholic politician and lawyer, may have written that he saw something amazing in the sky like the others, but he definitely maintained from the beginning that it was a result of psychological suggestion¹³.

And that was it. The miracle was concluded.

Muse argues that the skeptical / naturalistic explanations for these events are not fit to purpose, basically, and that instead we should take the accounts as presented.

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To put a fine point on my response: I do not think that Muse’s argument is anywhere near “rigorous enough to persuade those that are strongly predisposed towards skepticism” that the events of Fatima, 1917, were authentically miraculous. Muse does not effectively argue against the idea that there is a psycho-social, rather than supernatural, explanation for the Six Apparitions. His claims about the Miracle of the Sun falter along similar lines — and insofar they succeed they hardly accomplish what he says they do.

One would think this is a purely empirical question anyway — shouldn’t we just look at the response to the article and judge from there? Are there many skeptical people in the comments who seem convinced, or not? But, of course, I think the claim being made here is that his arguments should be rigorous enough to persuade people who are strongly disposed toward skepticism — if those people have reasonable standards of proof and keep an open mind. You know: if skeptics aren’t convinced then ultimately that’s on them. That’s the idea.

So let this be a refutation of the idea that the unconvinced skeptics in the comments should be convinced.

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I. “Six Apparitions”

Here is how Muse summarizes the Marian apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima:

1. Six Apparitions

An adequate theory of Fatima has to explain the six apparitions.

• (Preannounced schedule) - Between May 13th and October 13th, 1917, Lucia dos Santos (age 10), Francisco Marto (age 9), and Jacinta Marto (age 7) reported six apparitions. After the first apparition on May 13th, Lucia reported the apparition told the children to return to the same location, the Cova da Iria, once a month for six consecutive months, on the thirteenth day of each month.¹ On August 13th, the children were detained by a local official, which prevented them from visiting the Cova that day.² On August 19th, the children reported a ‘make-up’ apparition at Valinhos, a field about a mile away from the Cova.³ The rest of the apparitions conformed to the schedule that had been announced in May.⁴

A minimalist account. The bullet-point heading, “(Preannounced schedule)” signals that this is actually the first piece of the argument already upon us: the apparitions happened on a pre-set schedule, on the thirteenth day of each month for six consecutive months (except for August). How does the skeptic account for this regularity if they think this is some kind of fevered hallucination, or childish lie?

Of course, the skeptic is unsurprised by this regular schedule of appearances and thinks it makes perfect sense, given the skeptic’s actual preferred naturalistic explanation:

The Skeptical Thesis: Lucia was a devout, precocious, charismatic 10-year-old child who had a genuinely-felt but observer-dependent religious vision on May 13th, 1917. In practice this probably meant staring at some shaft of sunlight and imagining things very vigorously. Her subsequent reports of what she 'saw' would not be a case of spontaneous confabulation or, more relevantly, source confusion (see section 1.2). We can imagine instead that Lucia understood the ‘source’ of her memory perfectly well but nonetheless categorized its content as real because of her religious faith. That she believed what she 'saw' (imagined) was an example of a kind of religious vision, naturally distinct from everyday vision. Her over-attached, wilting-flower cousins who followed her around like sick puppies even agreed after the fact that they saw the same thing as her! Framed in this way, guided by a mixture of religious faith, childish whimsy, preternatural charisma, and the social pressure of tens of thousands of eyes, Lucia had five more mystical experiences / public performances, concluding on October 13th, 1917.

According to this explanation, it makes perfect sense that the apparition made an appearance at these appointed times, because these were the times Lucia was present and expecting a vision. The children were the only people to ever report seeing the apparition after all, even when these scheduled visits were apparently drawing crowds in the tens of thousands. The authorities were kind enough to provide posterity with a sort of simple experiment for this suspicion when they apprehended the three young shepherds in August and prevented them from attending that month’s meeting. Lo and behold, on the day they couldn’t attend, the apparition was not seen in the location it said it would be in. Three days later, a mile away from the usual place, the apparition made an unscheduled visit to — you guessed it — the spot where the children were then currently located.

I assure you that the skeptic remains unperturbed to hear all of this.

The leaks in the argument’s hull get worse with the second subsection though:

• (Visual appearance) Following each of the apparitions, all of the children reported seeing a luminous figure. They described the figure as ‘a woman of extraordinary beauty’ that was ‘more brilliant than the sun.’ They reported that the figure was so bright that it was sometimes blinding.⁵ Even when questioned separately, the children agreed on many, various, and specific features of the figure’s attire, posture, gestures, and behavior: the figure invariably arrived from and departed towards the east, perched itself on top of a holm oak, wore a white dress with gold accents, wore a white cloak, held a white rosary in its hands, clasped its hands together above its waist when it was not speaking, and separated its hands to about shoulder-width apart when it was speaking.⁶

If you are sympathetic to Muse’s case, when you read about the consistency of the children’s descriptions — “Even when questioned separately” ! — you may imagine something almost clinical happening. The children being separated as soon as possible after the first apparition, each asked what amounts to a structured interview, etc. Certainly the evidence is being marshaled as if it had this sort of weight. But from the records Muse is working from this does not appear to be the case. Far from it: rather, what we find is what a skeptic would again expect to find: a less-than-rigorous investigation conducted by people ultimately eager to believe, where all sorts of suggestion could obviously creep into the questioning process.

The little in-line citations in the excerpts from Muse are to a document called “Documentação Crítica de Fátima Seleção de documentos (1917-1930)” or “Critical Documentation of Fatima, Selection of documents (1917-1930)”. As far as I can tell the document is only officially available in Portuguese. The English version of the title here comes from a machine-translated version of the document that Muse generated and was generous enough to share with me when I asked him how he was reading the documentation. A copy of that document is available here. (Muse has expressed his permission for me to share it freely.)

Muse says the children were questioned separately, but, turning to his first citation, Document 36, I do not see that any particular efforts were made to question the children separately — and in fact I see several instances were this idea is contradicted.

After giving a summary of the basic facts similar to Muse’s own, Document 36’s author, Fr. Manuel Marques Ferreira, launches into describing how he first questioned the three young visionaries:

As soon as the news began to spread that Our Lady had appeared on the thirteenth of May to the aforementioned children, and I became aware of it, which was about fifteen days later, I ordered the mother of the visionary Lucia to come to my house and parish residence and to be accompanied by her.¹⁴

So the first interview occurred two weeks after the first event. Plenty of time for the children to talk amongst themselves and a story to coalesce. Furthermore: no mention is made of the children being kept separate at any point after this. This does not appear to be a concern, generally speaking; there is no indication it was on anyone’s radar as something that might affect the integrity of the investigation. This is unsurprising — it was 1917 — people just didn’t think like that back then. Still, we might infer that efforts were made to keep the children separate, for vaguely forensic reasons, because Fr. Ferreira writes about questioning Lucia after each appearance of the apparition, and in each instance he writes that Lucia came only accompanied by her mother. But then we find out the actual reason for this as we reach the end of the document: Jacinta and Francisco’s parents were apparently nightmarishly uncooperative, “the true antithesis of Lucia’s parents,” and so he was not able to speak to Jacinta and Francisco nearly as much as Lucia¹⁵. By all appearances the children would have been interviewed as a group each month had Jacinta and Francisco’s parents not been so difficult to deal with. On pg. 173 for instance, Fr. Ferreira writes that on at least one occasion the children positively were questioned together about the appearance of the lady. Here, Fr. Ferreira is recounting all the details of the Lady’s dress that Lucia recalled — the same details which Muse quotes in his argument — how the Lady “wore a white dress with gold accents, wore a white cloak, held a white rosary in its hands.” Underneath that paragraph, Fr. Ferreira writes:

It seemed to her that she was wearing white socks, not gold, but she couldn't be sure because she was looking at little else but her face. Even on one occasion, in my presence, when Jacinta was also there, she turned to Jacinta and asked if she was wearing socks, because she hadn't noticed.¹⁶

This is direct evidence that the children were not kept separate during questioning — direct evidence of the children looking to one another to reinforce and interpret their memories. When the children were apprehended in August they were questioned together too. In general then there is no reason to think that any steps were taken to prevent the children from discussing their visions with one another — either during questioning or between questioning sessions — and, indeed, one imagines they would have done this endlessly. Is there any surprise that their accounts agreed so much?¹⁷ That they became so certain in what they had ‘seen’?

Doc 120 is more of the same. It is multi-author, the work of an investigative commission from the Catholic Church. It too illustrates the investigators’ priorities: less on separating the children and rigorously comparing their stories (which would have them behaving like modern skeptics), and more on finding “trustworthy” character witnesses and ensuring that the children haven’t been playing a mischievous trick on everyone. The first lines of the document’s second section sound a lot like Muse himself:

If it is proven that the children were sincere and that they were not deceived, there is a moral duty to admit their testimony and believe in the supernatural reality of the apparitions. The sincerity of the children cannot be doubted. How could three simple and ignorant children, one ten years old, another nine, and another six, perform a comedy ? How could they maintain their claims despite the threats made against them, the persecution they suffered, and the imprisonment they suffered?¹⁸

But of course the primary skeptical account is not that the children were fibbing or being deceitful. And it’s not that they were hallucinating at very specific times, or something like that. The most obvious skeptical explanation — which should be treated as the main explanatory alternative here, to the entire edifice of Catholic dogma — is what was stated above: basically, that children have strange and excitable experiences and ideas, sometimes; and that, when they relate these experiences and ideas to others, they may engage in communicating falsehoods without being dishonest.

Muse ostensibly addresses explanations of this sort in Section 1.2:

1.2 - Confabulation?

1.2.1 - Lucia

Children sometimes confuse imagination with reality. However, source confusion is sporadic and retrospective¹⁷—it can’t account for Lucia’s behavior during apparitions:

• (Speech) Witnesses observed that Lucia spoke aloud in a question–answer cadence during the apparitions, pausing as though listening before resuming her replies. Several of them were close enough to hear the specific petitions, questions, and responses that she vocalized. Their testimony was always in agreement with Lucia’s.¹⁸ That leaves no room for memory distortion: Lucia publicly enacted dialogue in real time and remembered it with fidelity.

• (Gaze) Witnesses observed that Lucia did not keep her eyes fixed on the figure continuously, but repeatedly diverted her gaze, as though it were difficult to maintain eye contact. When asked about this, she explained that it was because of the figure’s luminosity.¹⁹ Lucia’s spontaneous, involuntary reflexes confirm that her testimony about the apparition’s brightness was an accurate recollection of a notable feature of an entity that she perceived at a fixed location in real time.

Let’s stick to the cited evidence for now.

Number 17 is to four different psychological studies:

The first: “Schnider, A. (2003). Spontaneous confabulation and the adaptation of thought to ongoing reality. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4(8), 662–671.” A copy is available here.

Reviewing the article, we see that it is a study of spontaneous confabulation, and so we learn what this “spontaneous confabulation” term means — it refers to a very specific sort of amnesiac-adjacent behavior in people with brain injuries of various etiologies. It is something people sometimes do when they have severe memory deficits. The inclusion criteria for the paper’s study is having brain lesions of any etiology. Schnider (2003) is a study of an adult neuropsychiatric population carried out in order to better understand a specific symptom of disease; it has no obvious bearing on children’s penchant for having a looser relationship with reality than adults. Indeed the author is quite unequivocal: “by contrast, the profound confusion of ongoing reality that characterizes spontaneous confabulation only occurs after brain damage.”¹⁹ There are some remarks towards the end about what the study’s findings might mean about general memory but, again, I do not see any obvious connection with the purposes Muse puts it toward, viz. arguing that Lucia’s behavior is not consistent with a child mixing together fantasy and reality.

So. Could it be that the children got reality and imagination crossed in some way? Because the first citation doesn’t seem to speak to that. What about the second one? Its title is “Do monsters dream? Young children’s understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction” and so we should have good reasons for hoping so. A copy of it is available here.

This article speaks directly to the problem at hand, sure enough, but none of what it says seems to help Muse’s case. One of Muse’s constant refrains in the piece is that the children’s accounts were lucid, self-possessed, and consistent, and that this generally goes against theories which say the children were thinking or perceiving things mistakenly. But the whole thrust of Sharon & Wooley (2004) is precisely that children do often have especially malleable boundaries separating the real world from a fantastical one, and that when they fantasize and engage with these boundaries, they often do so with lucidity and consistency. From the conclusion:

But at the same time, as children believe in the reality of fantasy figures, or are unable to say with certainty that they are pretend, they treat them very differently from real entities in terms of the properties and abilities they are willing to grant. In this way, children seem to place fantastical entities in a separate category—neither unquestionably real nor pretend, but somewhere in between. This category could then form a natural bridge to the adult category of fantastical entities. Thus, rather than having misplaced the boundary between real and fantastical entities, young children are still in the process of actively constructing it.²⁰

This is the exact sort of thing someone hoping to foreclose psycho-social explanations of Fatima shouldn’t want to hear! This is an empirically-grounded model for The Skeptical Thesis! We can just state The Skeptical Thesis more precisely now:

The (Stronger) Skeptical Thesis: Children in particular engage in a form of thinking that blurs the boundary between real life and fantasy in a process of active construction, and they often remain cognizant of the ‘in-between’ ontological status these imagined entities occupy (Sharon & Wooley, 2008). On May 13th, 1917, Lucia engaged in precisely this kind of fantastical thinking, remaining aware all the while of the unique ontological category to which her constructed entity, the Lady, belonged. However, through the perspective of her religious faith, Lucia viewed this unique 'fantasy' category as containing real or perhaps even more-than-real entities -- entities which were not figures of her imagination, but of divine revelation. Her over-attached, wilting-flower cousins who followed her around like sick puppies even agreed after the fact that they saw what Lucia saw! Framed in this way, guided by a mixture of religious faith, childish whimsy, preternatural charisma, and the social pressure of tens of thousands of eyes, Lucia had five more mystical experiences / public performances, concluding on October 13th, 1917.

The third citation is, again, about spontaneous confabulation, a clinical symptom of brain injury and/or amnesia that clinicians need to be mindful of and understand better in order to properly care for their memory patients — but which has little do with the discussion we currently find ourselves in.

The fourth citation is a book chapter by the same author as the second citation. It is a long sort of survey chapter and, again, I do not see where it supports Muse’s overall case that Lucia and her cousins were not acting like they were getting reality and imagination blended together. If the survey had one single point, it would be that, even in young children, the imaginative faculty has rules, that it is not just disordered fancy. Given Muse’s depiction of the children as self-possessed and sound-minded, this is ineffective if he would like to foreclose some kind of fantastical thinking as an explanation for the children’s behavior.

May I now bring some of my own empirical literature to bear? I wanted to learn more about the psychological dynamics around religious experiences and charismatic figures, and in the course of my searches I found this review article²¹:

Hood, R. W., & Chen, Z. (2005). Mystical, spiritual, and religious experiences. Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, 348-364.

One section of this article deals with “Numinous and Mystical Experiences.” The first part of that section is a survey of some investigations into the meaning of the term “numinous and mystical experiences.” These are phenomenological, thinking-hard-in-an-armchair kind of investigations into the topic, from the early 20th century. Something they all agree on: these experiences are defined by the sense that one is in the presence of something Other, something different and greater than oneself²².

The second part of this section on “Numinous and Mystical Experiences” is about the empirical studies of the topic. To the extent that such a lofty topic as “numinous experiences” has been subjected to something as grubby as social scientific investigation, it has been in the context of surveying people: asking them whether they believe they’ve had these experiences. Reader, here is what I found interesting: in this single extant area of empirical research into numinous experiences, the one consistent empirical finding is this: children are especially likely to report having these kinds of experiences²³. The younger they are the more likely they are to report them. That’s the one thing we know about numinous experiences from an empirical standpoint: that younger children are more likely to report having them than older children and more likely still than adults.

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The main objection to my skeptical thesis — mentioned within it, but not rebutted directly by it — is that Jacinta and Francisco corroborated Lucia’s description of the Lady (even if they were more noncommittal on what she said). Am I claiming that all three children had the exact same kind of constructive imaginary experience? Six times!?!? I am not. I am claiming that Jacinta and Francisco conformed to Lucia in their recollection and interpretation of events, a bog-standard process of human psychology to which we know children are especially susceptible²⁴.

Muse argues against explanations of this sort in Section 1.2.2. We will work our way from the top to the bottom — which won’t take long, given what we’ve established so far:

1.2.2 - Jacinta and Francisco

Nor is it possible to dismiss Jacinta and Francisco’s testimony as memory conformity. That hypothesis would imply that the two children sat through six apparitions in which they didn’t perceive a luminous figure, but then immediately became convinced that they had seen an ineffably beautiful woman of surpassing brilliance. Memory conformity does not work like that. It can harmonize ambiguous details, but it can’t repeatedly and reliably prevent witnesses from recognizing a total disparity between their actual experiences and stories they are told immediately afterwards.²⁰

The hypothesis that Jacinta and Francisco conformed to Lucia in their recollection and interpretation of the events would not, in fact, imply that “the two children sat through six apparitions in which they didn’t perceive a luminous figure, but then immediately became convinced that they had seen an ineffably beautiful woman of surpassing brilliance.” It would imply they sat through one apparition in which they didn’t perceive a luminous figure, after which they were convinced by their big cousin Lucia that they had, in fact, been in the presence of a luminous figure. After this they would be primed and ready to experience things with this framing the next five times Lucia brought them with great pomp and ceremony to the now-sacral spot, surrounded by faithful crowds²⁵. Remember that in between apparitions they are talking with each other all the time about what she looked like and said!

We know that Jacinta and Francisco did not harmonize their testimony with Lucia’s whenever their experiences diverged. Francisco admitted he never heard the apparition’s words. On one occasion, Jacinta admitted she couldn’t hear because the crowd was too loud that day.²¹ If their perceptions had been wholly unlike Lucia’s—if they saw nothing at all—they would have been willing to admit that. The fact that they never did, even when they had strong incentives to distance themselves from Lucia’s claims, indicates their testimony was based on genuine experiences.

This is just one example of the peculiar geometrizing of human action which Muse commits to throughout the piece. If their perceptions were different, they would be willing to admit it. P → Q. You don’t need to be an underemployed psychology B.A. like your author to know that human behavior is rarely traceable along lines of sufficient causation like this. We can actually imagine all sorts of plausible scenarios where the younger children stick with Lucia’s account even if they believed they saw nothing at all — for instance, if they felt that to recant would be to abandon their beloved cousin, to betray her to the crowd.

But again the skeptical thesis about Jacinta and Francisco is not that they didn’t experience anything and/or were lying for some reason. The skeptical thesis is that the younger children interpreted the events according to the schema provided by their cousin Lucia and the crowds of people who piously attended to their every move. They genuinely believed that they were in the presence of something numinous (as we know children are wont to!) and deferred to their cousin Lucy to interpret that presence.

If Jacinta and Francisco were confabulating, they rapidly assimilated a surprising amount of detail about the apparitions’s apparel, posture, gestures, and movements. If their memories were pliable enough for that, their testimony would have drifted when the local official “tried all sorts of police tricks to make them contradict themselves, to force them to recant, and to extract from them the secret they claim the apparition has confided to them.” Yet that didn’t happen: the official was impressed by their resolve.²² Confabulators are amenable to suggestion—yet, again and again, the children demonstrated that they were unusually resistant to suggestion.

They were not confabulating. We’ve discussed that fact in detail above; I won’t reduplicate those efforts here.

In short: Muse fails to exclude the primary skeptical explanation for the behavior of the children re: the Marian apparitions.

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Let us meet on the field of cerebral combat under the banners of our chosen gods

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II. “The Miracle of the Sun”

So what about the thing with the sun?

The Skeptical Thesis: The reports concerning the Miracle of the Sun on October 13th, 1917, were caused by overlapping layers of influence, from the meteorological to the psychological to the ophthalmological. The various combinations and laminations of these influences might explain the differences in people's accounts of the phenomenon. At the end of the day: Yes, this is ultimately an instance of a crowd of people -- mostly fervent pilgrims -- staring up into the sky at the command of their prophet during the kinds of weather conditions that produce rainbows. We can imagine some combination like we just sketched producing the different kinds of experiences people reported without being forced to turn to divine intervention.

Muse’s arguments against these skeptical explanations are ultimately not effective. I will admit that the arguments in this section are made much more surely than the ones in Section 1. My impression is Muse has a lot more experience with natural science than he does with social science. Anywho. How does Muse address the different explanations invoked in the skeptical thesis?

Ophthalmological: a straightforward explanation for a lot of what was observed on October 13th would be crowd psychology + solar phosphenes — visual after-effects produced when we look at an intense light source like the sun. Phosphenes can occur even if the sun is dimmed by low cloud cover, in which case one would be able to stare at it for longer without immediate discomfort. Muse understands this: he responds to a related claim: he traces Dalleur’s (2021) argument and says that this is implausible because there are no reports of retinopathy among the people who were there that day, which we would expect if the object that people were staring at really was the sun. I say this is a wacky counter argument. We are talking about backwater Portugal, circa 1917. Where, pray tell, were we expecting the retinopathy to be reported? It’s not like researchers ran a keyword search of electronic medical records.

The other counterargument: the ‘‘‘experiment’’’ conducted by Dr. José Maria de Proença de Almeida Garrett, one of the witnesses. He turned around away from the sun during the event and didn’t see any classic signs of retinopathy, a possibility he was explicitly aware of. The world remained bathed in odd colors, but there were no moving spots like one encounters with phosphenes. Ok. But as mentioned, not everyone, even the most enthused endorsers of the event, experienced the same thing that Garret did — Avelino for instance did not. Why should Garret’s account of the miracle be dispositive? Garret’s recollection harmonizes mainly (but not completely) with his own father’s, with whom we must imagine he talked things over quite a bit.

Psychological: As I say the cheapest price for the Miracle of the Sun is crowd psychology + phosphenes. We just covered why phosphenes aren’t excluded as an explanation — the lack of reported cases of retinopathy is unmoving, and Garret’s testimony is far from dispositive — so what kind of psychology do we imagine? Conforming to group perceptions a la Asch²⁶; top-down perceptual processing²⁷; Predictive coding. You know, the kind of psychology and explanations that Muse himself needs recourse to unless he wants to admit the reality of every other sect’s vindicatory miracles. Let’s not be obtuse.

Muse says that these sorts of explanation are closed off to skeptics in the specific case of Fatima though because the crowd at the final apparition contained “freethinkers, journalists, lawyers, scientists, and mathematicians” among the throngs of pilgrims. These people had no reason to get swept up in the religious fervor of the crowd; their accounts therefore provide a cooled, secular perspective with which to compare the claims of the excited faithful. I think this underestimates the influence that massive crowds can have on individuals, but let’s not tarry over that. Muse quotes from three men to illustrate this trend: the journalist Avelino de Almeida and a father-son duo of professors: the professor of astronomy Dr. Gonçalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett and his son, the professor of law Dr. José Maria de Proença de Almeida Garrett. All three were educated men who described seeing incredible, inexplicable things in the sky above Fatima that day.

Avelino was certainly a journalist — a top-shelf journalist, even, judging from his article about Fatima and everything I’ve been able to find out about him. His freethinking credentials are difficult to doubt too: he’s described as the editor of the paper O Século, a periodical founded by someone whose own anticlerical credentials cannot be doubted. But this was the extent of the independent corroboration that I can make for his supposed freethinking agenda. For instance: I have searched unsuccessfully for the apparently Voltairian piece of impious wit he is said to have written before the event took place to mock those who came actually expecting a miracle. It is often cited to but rarely provided, it seems, in material about Fatima. It is not in the Critical Documents as far as I can tell — only Avelino’s now-famous articles from after the miracle appear to be included. Just how skeptical was he, exactly? Even if we can’t pin an exact answer to this question down, I do think Avelino is an excellent witness — and certainly the strongest individual witness on Muse’s side.

The two professors are less stalwart additions to Muse’s case than you might first believe — less obviously unbiased toward the idea of miracles and prophetic shepherd children than you might expect university professors to be. Let us begin with Professor Garret Sênior, the astronomy professor.

Professor Garret Sênior is the author of several documents in the Critical Documents. One of them is the sober, “concise, analytical” summary of his observations which Muse quotes from in his own piece. The others contain passages like this:

The things of God are manifested in abundant contradictions and persecutions. Similar to the apparitions of the Virgin of the Conception granted to Bernadette. How many inquiries, threats, and questions was the innocent shepherdess of Lourdes subjected to?

This is what happened to Christ during his evangelical life.

In Fátima, supernatural apparitions providentially manifest themselves in different ways, to overcome the indifference of the time, the lack of religious beliefs and the lack of morality.²⁸

Not exactly a freethinker! Now, to be fair: Professor Garret Señor was not some simple zealot with a Ph.D. Most of his contributions to the Critical Documents are charming proposals for experimental validations of different parts of the miracle, or else genuinely anguished expressions of confusion or doubt over the inconsistencies he could perceive.²⁹ But certainly he wasn’t a hard-nosed skeptic who came to Fatima unwilling to see miracles.

Then Professor Garret Júnior is that guy’s son. Not damning, of course! But unless we want to argue that Professor Garret Júnior was some atheistic rebel against his father’s religiosity, we have no particular reason to automatically count him among the ‘freethinkers’ and skeptics in attendance, supposedly inured to crowd psychology, just because he made his living as a professor.

Meteorological: One part of the skeptical claim is that atmospheric effects contributed to people’s experiences. You know: it was raining earlier in the day; the clouds cleared, but not entirely; and so, when the tens of thousands of excited religious people were directed to look at the sun to see something cool, they thought what they saw did look especially cool, because of light refraction, or something like that. Muse rejects this explanation. When it comes to rebutting natural explanations of the Miracle of the Sun, Muse mainly follows Dalleur (2021), a research paper from a team at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross at Rome which analyzed photographic and testimonial evidence from Fatima — in great detail — and concluded that no sound natural explanation currently existed for the evidence contained therein. This is where the argument from lack of reported retinopathies originates, as you may recall. This article is where Muse’s arguments about different rays of light and sudden drying of clothes come from too:

However, the most demonstrative case against Oom and Radford’s ad hoc hypotheses is that of the young man (Fig. 4) in D115, who has kept his kneeled stance for a few minutes at most. The five inches of the upper part of his pants are soaked (explainable by his jacket’s recent undoing, probably because of the heat radiated by LSa), while the areas exposed to LSa for a few moments are dry. Besides, the inner part of the right buttock, less exposed, is still half wet, except for the few folds lately exposed to LSa.³⁰

The article argues along multiple lines such as these against the view that the disc people described was just the sun behind some clouds, or something else to that effect:

From Dalleur (2021) -- click to expand

As we stand at the precipice of this recondite discussion (which I have a feeling Muse considers the very strongest part of the entire case), I would like us to pause. To enter a moment of reflection and presence. We are just over 8,000 words total. Substack estimates the read time of it all at 36 minutes and some 40 odd seconds. The article has 30+ footnotes / citations. I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim at this point that I haven’t engaged critically with the substance of Muse’s evidence and his arguments. You might ultimately disagree with its perspective — but this is a very solid, comprehensive article! It has been based on a thorough engagement with the sources and a lot of critical thinking. It has not hand-waived difficult issues or tried to engage in any other sort of chicanery. I have dealt with things forthrightly and head-on, for page, after page, after page.

And it is for that reason, at this point, that I feel comfortable asking:

We are now proving the existence of god by doing trigonometry on the shadows in old photographs. We are now proving the existence of god by ‘‘‘‘analyzing’’’’ the apparent wetness of different parts of clothing in old photographs. If these methods fail us, we may also have recourse to the testimony of several people who, after the event became national news, told subsequent inquiring parties that, yeah, they saw something that day too!³¹ To get here, we followed an illiterate farm child and her accounts of the invisible woman whom only she can speak to.

What the fuck are we doing? What are we talking about? What have I spent (conservatively) 18 hours of my life on?

What would it mean if we couldn’t find a perfect naturalistic explanation for why the photographs look precisely they do?

Are we saying we would have to endorse the doctrine of papal infallibility and the Church’s specific stance on the eucharist contra all other Christian sects — because why else would that guy’s pants be two different colors in that picture?

To borrow a Southern expression: we are picking the gnat shit out of the pepper at this point. The Marian Apparitions are in ribbons — there is zero compelling reason for a person with a skeptical outlook to believe in divine intervention in any part of that story, or in any story Muse tells in the future that resembles it. What is left then? An excitable crowd — whose core, critical mass was tens of thousands of devout pilgrims — saw something cool in the sky when it was told to look for it. The clouds seem to have parted at an opportune time to facilitate this. Fine, let’s stipulate that. Now we’re all supposed to take communion?

Skeptics should not be convinced by Muse’s arguments.

And they aren’t.

Thank you for sticking with me. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider giving it a Like. The Magpie is a very new publication and still has extremely low visibility. Liking my posts helps to get more people to see them. I would be eternally grateful!

1. Critical Documentation of Fatima, Selection of documents (1917-1930), pg. 171

2. ibid. pg 173

3. ibid. pg. 174

4. ibid. pg. 175-176

5. ibid. pg. 176

6. ibid. pg. 176

7. ibid. pg. 177

8. Dr. Gonçalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett describes firework wheels around the disc but his son, Dr. José Maria de Proença de Almeida Garrett, does not. In Avelino’s article he describes other witnesses having differing recollections about the details of the miracle (CDF, pg. 76)

9. Dr. Garret and Dr. Garret mention the object spinning rapidly but Avelino does not. Avelino mentions that some other witnesses claimed to have seen this.

10. Dr. Garret and Dr. Garret mention the landscape being bathed in purplish hues but Avelino does not. Avelino mentions some witnesses claimed that the sun itself changed color — but not that the landscape changed color.

11. The Whole Truth About Fatima, “‘THE CASE’ OF IZABEL BRANDAO DE MELO”

12. ibid., slightly below the same section. Fr. Michel treatment of these other contradicting examples isn’t exactly impressive. E.g. he dismisses the report that there were two unmoved English women by noting that the same author said there were two unmoved Portuguese women. “The women appear to have metamorphized,” the padre quips un-charmingly.

13. Dalleur, P. (2021). Fatima pictures and testimonials: in-depth analysis. Scientia et Fides, 9(1), 9-45., pg. 14

14. ibid. pg. 171

15. ibid. pg. 181

16. ibid. pg. 173

17. This is to say nothing of the interview procedure itself. Interviewing children is a notoriously tricky thing, and it is enormously easy to suggest things to them. This isn’t a concern with the 10-year-old Lucia, the fiery, Jeanne d'Arc in miniature of our story, but rather her two young co-visionaries and cousins: the nine year old Francisco and the seven year old Jacinta, both of whom would be dead within a few years of 1917. No mention in either document is made of efforts to avoid suggesting things to the children during wjat. Did the lady have a rosary in her hand? How far apart did she move her hands when she spoke? etc.

18. ibid. pg 431

19. pg. 663 of the linked PDF

20. pg. 308 of the linked PDF

21. Hood, R. W., & Chen, Z. (2005). Mystical, spiritual, and religious experiences. Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, 348-364.

22. ibid. pg. 356 in the linked PDF

23. ibid. pg. 357

24. Gordon, B. N., Baker-Ward, L., & Ornstein, P. A. (2001). Children's testimony: a review of research on memory for past experiences. Clinical child and family psychology review, 4(2), 157–181.

Bright-Paul, A., Jarrold, C., Wright, D. B., & Guillaume, S. (2012). Children's memory distortions following social contact with a co-witness: disentangling social and cognitive mechanisms. Memory (Hove, England), 20(6), 580–595.

25. Leichtman, M. D., & Ceci, S. J. (1995). The effects of stereotypes and suggestions on preschoolers’ reports. Developmental Psychology, 31(4), 568–578.

26. Asch, S. E. (2016). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In Organizational influence processes (pp. 295-303). Routledge.

27. Berns, G. S., Chappelow, J., Zink, C. F., Pagnoni, G., Martin-Skurski, M. E., & Richards, J. (2005). Neurobiological correlates of social conformity and independence during mental rotation. Biological psychiatry, 58(3), 245-253.

28. Critical Documentation of Fatima, Selection of documents (1917-1930), pg. 168

29. “I'm surprised Your Excellency doesn't mention the girl's statements about peace and the imminent return of Portuguese troops to Portugal. How do You reconcile these statements? I wish You could tell me something about this. It's true that this matter is material and profane, but it involves a prophecy that was very important today. Could the girl have made a mistake? Indeed, all this can still come to pass.” — ibid., pg. 148

30. Dalleur, P. (2021). Fatima pictures and testimonials: in-depth analysis. Scientia et Fides, 9(1), 9-45., pg. 17

31. One of the novel contributions of Dalleur (2021) is the analysis of “distant witnesses” of the Miracle of the Sun. But, of course, as the defenders of Our Lady have repeated again and again over the years, the event was attended by national press and photographers. By the time the pilgrims were beginning their march back home news wires about the events would have been sent back to cities for print. Perforce, then, any ‘distant witness’ whose testimony that Dalleur reviewed would have already been exposed to stories of the wondrous, exciting thing that happened that day. The only way this wouldn’t be the case would be if the testimonies Dalleur analyzed were also gathered on the same day as the miracle, before the next morning’s newspapers hit the streets.