Really wonderful response - I was working on a response of my own that was about a third of the way done, but this is much better than I could have done! I really appreciate you taking the time to lay out what should be (but seemingly is) obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds!
For what it's worth, I didn't see this paper quoted: https://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/MirSun.pdf This physicist (perhaps unwisely) did his own experiments looking into the sun and experienced many of the same visual impressions reported by witnesses there. It's hard for me to take any of the major apologetic defenses seriously after having read it.
Thanks for giving this a thorough look. The children’s visions of the apparition remind me of the Ariel UFO sightings. A UFO documentary had aired on local tv shortly before the event, which might’ve primed the children’s imaginations. Some of the children reported seeing the UFO and its occupants and “hearing” telepathic message from them about saving the world, others did not. In the Fátima case, It’s not hard to imagine why subjects like learning to read, the Great War, the rosary, and The Virgin Mary might’ve been on Lucia’s mind when she saw her vision.
As you indicate, The Miracle of The Sun appears to be best understood in the context of all that led up to it. A group of thousands of devout pilgrims, convinced they’d been witnessing monthly miracles (without actually seeing or hearing anything) and hungry for confirmation drew false conclusions regarding what they saw in the unpredictable atmospheric conditions that exist when rain is intermittent.
It’s certainly possible a Catholic miracle took place that that day in 1917, but I think there are plenty of more likely explanations that a reasonable person might naturally favor.
Ethan did block me on this account so I’m unable to respond directly to his comment, but in both his original post and comments here, he maintains that the children’s behavior is impossible for reasons that are completely inscrutable to me.
😂 It seriously strains credulity that such impeccable witnesses could have hallucinated or told a clever, pious story to help their village and pilgrims be strengthened in their faith. This is WAY more unlikely than that the Virgin Mary decided to vindicate Catholicism to the world by speaking to one devout Catholic child and making thousands of pious believers experience 10 different things. Probably God, Mary, and Jesus have just been too busy the past several centuries to speak to any skeptics directly and predict the following day’s winning lotto numbers to prove their infallibility. (On a serious note, if the Christian idea of god wanting to be believable but not overwhelmingly so to protect the virtue of faith is true and Jesus is purposely choosing not to be convincing enough to save all people—consider these verses from the book of Mark: “10 And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.
11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:
12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.”—well, that would be a terrifying vision of god. “Have fun burning in hell for all eternity because I decided make all the Christian miracles as sketchy and ambiguous as possible!” Pretty terrifying prospect. I wonder if Christian leaders of yore had any ulterior motive for preaching that hellfire awaits those who don’t listen to them and obey on faith? I wonder if poor illiterate peasants could be scared into submission to the church if they were taught such a doctrine from an early age? Just a thought…)
Thank you for taking the time to do this. As a cognitive psychologist I wanted to weigh in but haven’t had the time due to deadlines. But it seems so obvious to me how this could happen from how children perceive the world and interact with others, how children and others act under social pressure and reinforcement, and what we know about multiple-witness testimony/interaction, and research into the malleability of memory. It seems similar to the way a few super motivated counselors convinced children and co-constructed memories they’d been abused in absolutely unbelievable/impossible ways during the Satanic Panic, or how we’ve shown that eyewitnesses often change not just their details but their confidence levels (from fuzzy to sure, for example) under questioning by police that’s not done perfectly. So many ways a kid could confuse imagination and reality in the million subtle ways we know they do, and then get socially reinforced when people actually believe what she says she thinks she saw and keep reinforcing it.
We just need way, way, way stronger evidence to take this seriously.
And as you said, Muse’s article starts off so painfully weak: taking as “evidence” the fact that the kids returned to the place each month when Lucia’s initial ideation was about then returning each month…like, yeah. That’s not evidence! That’s what you’d expect whether she’s confused, buys into her own confusion, or outright lying (not saying this is the case), or, yes, if the miracles happen.
Likewise, though, I don’t think your argument that it’s disconfirming to not have a miracle happen without the kid on the 13th is any good - obviously if the kid is part of the whole miracle thing, then her not showing up at the right spot could indeed lead to no miracle there that day (and even a compensatory one soon after; sure, why not?). Of course, it doesn’t matter because, again, miracles happening where Lucia is and/or where she says they’ll be is kinda…no evidence at all when the miracle is something she herself is making up to fit the expectations that thousands now have for her original belief/claim/story.
FWIW, Muse told me he was a cognitive science student before I blocked him for insisting I was lying (I wasn't lying and he had no good reason to think I was). I addition to the weak arguments for Fatima, Muse is also rather belligerent and probably needs to chill a bit.
Interesting you mention his belligerence, as it was something I noticed too — not just in him, but in many Catholics, even when I approach them as someone who is genuinely open to being converted. This strikes me as particularly odd given that converting others is seemingly quite a good thing for Catholics to do. The widespread hostility ends up making me more skeptical of Catholicism than pretty much any other part of the religion, as a lack of control of one's emotion and constant anger does not strike me as a sign of spiritual wisdom. That's not an indictment of Catholicism itself, but I think that, if someone believes Catholicism is true, then they should make an effort to take a different approach, lest they turn others away from the truth.
Idk, if your model of ultimate perfection is a god who is okay with letting people burn eternally in hell for not reciting the rosary, maybe it’s not a big deal to lose patience with foolish people online whose hearts aren’t ready to accept the truth. If it’s just part of God’s plan that some people will harden their hearts and thereby land themselves in the pit, *Muse* didn’t make them that way. They should have believed already and not waited for proofs like a doubting Thomas even if people like Muse are generous enough to extend the proofs so clearly and convincingly.
What struck me as odd about him specifically is that I said upfront that I'm not trying to prove him wrong, but just to ask what I might be missing, noting that I actually believe Christ was resurrected and that the miracles occurred and were supernatural in origin. And then he took my argument (basically, "it's possible this being mistakenly believes himself to be God, but is right about everything else", which is the Buddhist view) and kept reframing it as me talking about a being who is "bafflingly confused" or trying to be deceptive even after corrected that misunderstanding during the conversation. So this isn't even a situation where someone's heart is hardened, it's someone who's directly asking to be converted, and even then I was treated with aggression and my points were completely strawmanned. I did not get the sense of Christian love, and I don't really have a good explanation for that approach.
I don't even see why miracles are so important for Catholic apologetics anyway. The Jewish scriptures are clear that magic powers don't mean the person is acting in behalf of Yahweh.
Ultimately the power of religion is in the impact it has in values and meaning for a person, not cheap parlor tricks to show off.
Plus the lady of Fatima, with her all black eyes and short skirt, sounds more like a demon girl from anime horror anyway.
To be clear, despite the claims of some enthusiasts and apologists, the Church does not require the faithful to believe that Mary appeared to the three children at Fatima. It, and all such post-apostolic religious experiences (Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, Our Lady of Lourdes, the Divine Mercy), are considered private revelation, and the most the Church can do is declare them worthy of belief, which is to say that there is nothing in them that is contrary to the faith and no reason to believe that the person or people claiming to have had this revelation are being dishonest.
Many supposed apparitions are not ratified in this way. though you are still allowed to believe they are genuine, so long as they don't include outright heresy. Many of the religious visionaries have been canonized, including the ones I mentioned, and the devotions have been incorporated into the life of the church (e.g. Divine Mercy Sunday or the feasts of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima), but even these are not complete endorsements.
In short, you can be a Catholic in perfectly good standing and fully endorse everything in this post.
Also, I wonder if you've heard of the book "They Flew" by Carlos Eire? I haven't seen it mentioned by name, but it definitely seems to be lurking in the background here. Eire is a history and religious studies professor at Yale who wrote a book recounting in detail the claims of flying saints in the Reformation and early modern periods. He's much less polemical than Ethan, but he goes through the major cases in some detail, including those approved by the church, like Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Cupertino, as well as those that were rejected and whose would-be mystics admitted to fabricating their experiences.
He grants that no historical inquiry can definitively settle the question or establish the possibility of miracles, but he argues that the amount of testimony equals just about anything else from this time, and many of them appear to lack the priming and social pressure that can be associated with visions or other intense religious experiences. Several of Teresa's levitations, in particular, take place in mundane contexts and in front of outsiders who are more confused by the whole thing than enraptured (and, for what it's worth, "are this person's feet on the ground or not?" seems like a way more straightforward question to me than "what's going on with those children experiencing some kind of vision and is that the sun or a Divine light?").
It's an interesting book, at any rate. And once again, happy that my post cleared some stuff up.
Ethan Muse also said he has a background in physics(undergrad level) and statistics in grad level. And also some amateur knowledge of anatomy. So, he knows cognitive science, physics, statistics, and some human anatomy. And wait... Are all these actual fucking degrees or the dude took a few courses and claims such knowledge?
As a “cognitive psychologist,” I’d expect you to know that there are no precedents for a group of adolescents repeatedly, predictably, and simultaneously entering into delusive trances where they mistake imagination for perception in real time. I’d also expect you to know that there are many counter-indications to spontaneous confabulation and memory conformity in the reports/behavior of the children.
Satanic panic isnt analogous at all - that is a forced confabulation paradigm. And your point about confusing imagination and perception goes against the developmental psychology literature - you shouldnt invoke your profession if your arguments are personal conjecture that are not based in actual evidence.
“Muse’s article starts off so painfully weak” - this is just a problem with reading comprehension on your part. You put something in quotation marks that I didnt say - I hope you arent that sloppy in your professional work. The beginning was laying out the salient data points that needed to be explained - I didnt assume my reader was familiar with them and jump into debunking skeptical hypotheses. I present specific arguments against lying, confabulation, and hallucination in the subsequent sections. I dont think you should confidently insult the work of another person if your critique is going to be based on failing to read and interpret what they wrote and then falsifying quotes.
Like a lot of others here, it seems Ethan has blocked me. I can no longer access my replies to him. Feel free to post any thoughts you have that you hope will reach a more diverse audience outside his curated threads, or else a lot of us can no longer read them.
That is unfortunate! I was really enjoying the comments of the essay being a staging ground for discussion.
Didn't realize blocking had a retroactive effect on stuff you'd already posted like that. I would be happy to copy + paste your own exchanges in this comment section into DMs for your own records, if you'd like.
Thanks Evan, but I used Joe’s workaround and can now view them by using a private browser without logging in. The block just means I‘ve been effectively muted there.
I’m actually not sure. The only direct exchange we had took place in the comments section of his Fátima post. Feel free to read it. It was an odd exchange but I didn’t feel like it was confrontational in the slightest.
One last thing I’ll add on this is that with modern technology, other sun miracles have been disproven. It’s pretty common for lots of pilgrims to get together and look at the sun and claim to see things. In one such event in Georgia, a local skeptics group brought a modified telescope and were not able to see what other people claimed to see.
So basically a "control group" for the eyes. Also makes sense that we would see other miracles of the sun given how much traction the Fatima one gained.
1. I started going the the Documentação critica de Fátima in the original language to examine the citations, and I came to the same conclusion that the children clearly weren't kept separate.
2. The strongest piece of evidence for the event is from an article by Alvelino de Almeirda in the Ilustração Portuguesa. He was a writer for the anti-clerical magazine Ó Seculo. His article ends essentially by saying, "I saw something, but science and the church can argue about what it was. I don't care to know it ("Não curo agora de sabe-lo.")
3. "Picking gnat shit out of the pepper" is a really good expression.
This is the second part of a two-part comment. In this comment, I am replying to your criticism of my analysis of the Miracle of the Sun.
Phosphenes don't match the phenomenology that the witnesses reported at all, so it is a non-starter. And you can't just say 'crowd psychology' to explain the convergence on rich phenomenology by diverse witnesses, including highly educated and hostile witnesses. Your explanation of the distant witnesses was even worse: it would have been perfectly natural for the witnesses to interpret the Miracle of the Sun as a solar event based on the testimony. That is how most of the residents interpreted it, that is how the national media interpreted it, etc... But then there was no reason that all of them, no matter their orientation relative to the Sun, converged on perceiving a pale disc above the Fatima sector (and didn't harmonize with other features of the crowds account that were apparently only perceptible in the Cova direction) It also doesn't explain the undesigned coincidence of their bearings that exactly corresponds to an atmospheric volume that was at a low elevation above hill that were due South of the Cova. There are specific details about where in the sky they perceived the disc that cohere.
(Ophthalmology) The hypothesis of thin cloud cover is contradicted by all of the witnesses: There is moral unanimity that the clouds formed an aperture around the luminous source. The risk and strength of phosphenes is a function of exposure and duration, so this also indicates that they would have been in conditions that were unusually unfavorable to phosphene-induced mass hysteria. If there were phosphenes, then it is very surprising that the only testimony that we have about after-images asserts they weren't there.
Either way, your explanation of retinopathy is not tenable: If thousands of people truly fixed their fovea on either the attenuated or unattenuated midday sun, continuously, for ~10 minutes without protective gear, the response curve for retinopathy should have seen thousands of cases of debilitating injuries that would have been impossible to miss. You get non-neglible incidence in cases of 30 second exposure with partial occlusion during eclipses. But that is not what we are dealing with here: the dose–response curve for retinopathy is not linear - beyond ~1–2 minutes, you’re already at supra-threshold exposures with expected incidence that literally approaches 100% of the crowd developing symptomatic central scotomas. There also would have been nearly 100% incidence of short-term acute photophobia that lasted hours after the event.
(Shadows) The point is that the luminous and infrared shadows are objective, independent (interpretive errors should be uncorrelated) physical traces that lend themselves to a coherent interpretation that is multiply corroborated by different strands of witness testimony. That seems like great evidence to use to discriminate between an objective and subjective interpretation of the events.
I don't understand the problem with doing trigonometry on the shadows? The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the exclusion of the sun is robust. Even very old cameras project light through a fixed lens onto a flat plane. That guarantees the same rules of perspective as modern optics. Distortions from old lenses are usually radial, but these do not alter the basic fact that straight lines remain straight and converge consistently. Graininess, contrast loss, or uneven exposure can obscure fine detail, but they do not generate 'fake' vanishing points.
Also dont under stand the problem with analyzing the patterns of wet/dry contrasts? That uses gross luminance differences that far exceed the tonal biases of early film stocks. The zones 'S', 'W', and 'D' are ideally oriented relative to the camera and the source for avoiding photographic distortions, the underlying fabric is a mid-tone, and they have morphology that is totally inconsistent with distortions. So, using the photographs of the event to corroborate what witnesses reported about extraordinary rapid drying of garments also seems fair game.
And I find it especially compelling that everything 'clicks': Non-solar source that is localized to the south of the Cova at a low elevation above the hills is supported by the luminous shadows, and an undesigned coincidence that follows from the bearings of distant witnesses. The witnesses were able to comfortably and safely stare - it had to be skewed towards long-wavelengths. Lo-and-behold the rapid drying indicates that it was IR-rich and UV-poor. What's more, the shadows prove that there was an overhead source that reduced contrast and glare. I could keep going with these 'hand-and-glove' fits among all the aspects of the story, but I think it is especially unreasonable to dismiss the physical traces as too 'trivial' in light of them
(Unfortunately I cant reply to Ethan’s 1st part of his 2 part comment for some reason, so I’m replying here.)
>Your skeptical hypothesis involves Lucia blurring the fantasy-reality distinction in a way that is unprecedented and implausible.<
Your miracle hypothesis involves a virgin mother rumored to have died about 2,000 years ago appearing magically before a little girl to communicate God’s will to humanity in a way that is unprecedented and far more implausible.
How can you repeatedly point to science not supporting conventional, if unlikely, explanations and then in the same breath assert that miraculous, phantasmic explanations, completely unrecognized by science, are far more likely?
Much of this debate seems to be rationalizing away the phenomenon of children behaving how children (and even adults) sometimes do: suggestible, imaginative, cueing off each other, even lying and convincing themselves of the lie to avoid getting in trouble.
No one here seems to be claiming children are incapable of coherence, lucidity or of distinguishing reality in their normal lives. That can be true...while also admitting that young children sometimes let their imaginations run wild and come up with lucid, sincere, coherent stories that are nonetheless illusory. Just like the mass suggestibility of crowds does not mean humans aren't normally rational.
Your adolescent children enter into delusive trances where they cant tell the difference between imagination and perception in real time? You should get that checked out.
Its precisely the problem when apologists have their religion or preferred explanation as the null hypothesis. Appeals to Bayes' Theorem need a verifiable baseline probability for the priors, which is impossible with supernatural events.
What do you think about the potential susceptibility of the crowd, given many of them had already proven willing to believe that despite neither hearing nor seeing a woman speaking to the children, the woman was nonetheless there? Do you think their devout faith might have played a role in coloring their interpretation of what they did (and didn’t) see?
I remember hanging out with wiccans in college. They all got together and had regular "vision quests" to a "castle mansion" wherein we would imagine ourselves in a celestial palace of sorts, and we would explore the place together in our minds.
Because we were all predisposed to believing we were all astral projecting into the same ethereal place, it was remarkably easy to cue each other on what one person announced they saw (a staircase, gazebo, etc.) so that everyone else suddenly and instantly wove it into their own visualization. Looking back its so obvious how we were all creating a collective imaginative story and calling it something supernatural. It all appeared to be very lucid to the outside observer as we were talking ourselves through it. It was usually one or two people who provided most of the content as well. And these were college students!
It amazes me that some Catholics downplay children's imaginations, cueing, anticipation, suggestibility to justify all this.
I’ll note that the research from actual scientists on reported experiences of feeling “out of body” or near death typically involve content fitting that person’s existing beliefs and experiences.
Religious people having an OBE/NDE “vision”/perception/hallucination report their religion’s god(s) and such. Children often report seeing…their peers. Not angels but the other kids from school! Because that’s the most relevant part of their daily life and schemas.
It makes sense that people find meaning in such events it is precisely because it is tied to their lives. Trying to insist that one population's set of religious experiences or miracles is the standard, while everyone else is wrong, seem to miss the significance of religious experience to begin with.
People rarely if ever stare at the sun directly for very long, precisely to avoid harming their vision. Instead they consciously or instinctively blink, shift their eyes or look away briefly precisely to avoid the glare. Those movements alone and the afterimages of the sun can create a large variety of experiences.
That so many people had different accounts of how the sun actually behaved and many did not, is more consistent with different people looking at the sun in these different ways and seeing different types of afterimages and such. All without long term vision damage.
Color changes caused by sunlight exposure to the eyes in particular are also fairly common. Every time I go out on a summer day to skim my pool for even a few minutes, and the solar glare reflects off the white concrete, everything else ends up looking like it has a purple or yellow aura for a few minutes afterwards.
The entire point is that people didn't have protective gaze aversion reflexes which indicates that they were not staring directly at the Sun. The OP tried to explain that away by saying that there was visible attenuation - but that makes the retinopathy problem worse, not better.
There is moral unanimity that people were able to painlessly and effortlessly fixate on the Sun throughout the entire event - even among the single witness that apparently claimed that she saw nothing extraordinary. There was no indication from any witness of gaze aversion, photophobia, or inconstancy in fixation. We have photos at irregular intervals during the event, and they show simultaneous fixation from everyone in the crowd - that strongly supports the unanimous testimony of universal, continuous fixation on the light source throughout the entire event.
There is moral unanimity among the accounts about: (i) pale, moonlike disc, (ii) comfortable, painless, prolonged fixation, (iii) rapid rotational motion. There is substantial agreement, but not complete unanimity, about (a) vertical motion, (b) Catherine wheels, (c) saturated, alternating colors.
Importantly, the vast majority of differences in testimony are not discrepancies. They are cases where many witnesses reported a detail, but some witnesses did not report that detail (they did not positively assert that it didn't happen). The vast majority of the differences are plausibly explained by differences in emphasis. The rest is plausibly explained by attentional differences, viewpoint-dependence of particular optical effects, perceptual idiosyncrasies, and memory effects. Notably, if you exclude the testimony of illiterate/uneducated and only focus on the lettered/educated, the degree of convergence is extremely high.
There were no reports of after-images, and the only reports that mention them are educated people that checked for them to ensure it wasn't a retinal effect. The color effects that you are mentioning don't match the phenomenology of the alternating, saturated colors that are described in the witness reports and they are symptomatic of phototoxicity that is strongly correlated with many other behavioral and phenomenological signatures that were not reported at all.
1. You'll have to define "moral unanimity" for us.
2. You are also exaggerating the agreements of witnesses. When you bring up differences being "is plausibly explained by attentional differences, viewpoint-dependence of particular optical effects, perceptual idiosyncrasies, and memory effects" that is precisely what I am saying. Of course if a bunch of people look at the sun there will common elements because of shared biology, AND they will have some differences due to the aforementioned factors.
3. You are also downplaying the lack of this experience among witnesses. Many claimed to see nothing at all...not just one. Per Fatima accounts:
"Among the more educated classes, no one told me that they had seen the celestial apparition, but it is certain that all of them, learned and unlearned, manifested their faith."
“I see, I see the Lady!!! Look, in this direction between those two clouds, don’t you see it?” We all looked in the direction indicated but... none of us saw more than the clouds. However, the man full of faith said: “Arrest me if you want, but I will always say what I saw”! The woman [referring to the wife of the man who saw something] didn't see anything, but she was overjoyed that it was her husband who had seen it, because she did not believe it; She believed, she didn't need to see."
4. One does not have to consciously avert their eyes or blink: the iris itself contracts and the eyeballs can twitch without you knowing...it's a defense mechanism to avoid harm. Not everyone who stares at the sun gets eye damage and photos of people staring at "regular intervals" only show behavior of those people at those instants. Yet the twitching of eyeballs or subtle eye and face movements would not be captured on camera. Of course, photos of the sun itself at the time of the miracle show nothing unremarkable, either.
5. My experiences line up with your witnesses. Remember this guy:
"Fearing that I was suffering from an affection of the retina, an improbable explanation because in that case one could not see things purple-colored, I turned away and shut my eyes, keeping my hands before them to intercept the light. With my back still turned, I opened my eyes and saw that the landscape was the same purple color as before."
"And in fact everything, both near and far, had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask. People looked as if they were suffering from jaundice, and I recall a sensation of amusement at seeing them look so ugly and unattractive. My own hand was the same color."
This is literally what I was talking about experiencing! When I read these accounts I think "Oh yeah, been there."
Moral unanimity is approximately 100% consensus among many reports that comment specifically on an issue.
You assert that I am exaggerating the agreement, but provide no warrant for that assertion so I'm not sure where to go from here other than to refer you to the CDF so that you can check for yourself.
You are misreading the accounts that you are interpreting as people seeing nothing. When they are talking about celestial apparitions, they are referring the reports of peasants that they saw the Holy Family in the sky during the Miracle of the Sun. They go on in the same text to explicitly clarify that everyone they spoke to claim to see something extraordinary in the sky. The one about the guy seeing the Lady isnt even from October 13th, it is from August 13th.
Iris contraction can't reduce exposure by anywhere near enough to mitigate retinopathy hazard to the degree required (nor to prevent the more robust gaze aversion reflexes from triggering). Microsaccades actually increase the risk of retinopathy, because they increase the damage zone. The irregular intervals are random samples of crowd behavior that can be used to independently corroborate their consensus testimony about gaze. If there were adequate gaze diversion happening, it would be highly improbable for the photographs to depict the features they do. There are no direct photos of the light source itself at the time of the miracle, because of the limitations of early 20th century camera equipment. So you are clearly just making stuff up at this point.
And I simply don't believe your account - the descriptions you quote don't match the sort of auras that you would have plausibly experienced, so you are either exaggerating or just making it up completely.
The problem with all this, is that it is grounded in eyewitnesses which by nature are inherently unreliable, especially those primed to expect something and already predisposed to wanting to believe. A wide body of research over 50 years has shown people will come up with all sorts of false memories with minimal prompting, especially among groups who experience the event and then talk to each other about it. This doesn't mean the Fatima crowds didn't experience the natural effects of looking into the sun under the specific conditions of that day and time, more that they exaggerated and added to their experiences as they talked to each other.
The refusal to believe my own mundane experiences with the effects of sun sort of gives the game away, doesn't it?
But don't take my word for it: "sun gazers" claim seeing different colored auras and lights of different shapes emitting from the sun, and say they can do it for long periods without retinopathy. I don't recommend sun gazing, but it's also worth noting that solar retinopathy heals on its own within 1-6 months in most cases. The Fatima folks only had once instance of brief sun exposure to their eyes, rather than long term, so it's not surprising we didn't see any documented cases, especially in rural Portugal in 1917.
You may also be interested in this paper, which has someone (perhaps unwisely) staring into the sun themselves for a while and reproducing a wide range of experiences reported by witnesses at Fatima. I'd post a quote but for some reason the formatting is messed up. But here's the paper in its entirety: https://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/MirSun.pdf
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm going to split this comment into two parts: This one will comment on your objections to my analysis of the six apparitions. The next one will comment on your objections to my analysis of the Miracle of the Sun.
The goal of my piece was neither to persuade all skeptics nor to make it rationally obligatory for skeptics to accept Catholicism based on the evidence for this miracle alone. It was to present a case that is rigorous enough that a fair-minded skeptic admit that it was strong evidence, even they ultimately withheld belief because of other considerations.
SIX APPARITIONS
- Factual error: The children were questioned separately on multiple occasions. Here are two examples, but I can provide additional citations if you want.
Document 17 by Leonor de Avelar e Silva
"We witnessed a lengthy interrogation, conducted with each child separately. They answered frankly, promptly, and with the utmost simplicity. However, it's clear they don't like being questioned, that it bores them, and that they only answer because they feel obligated to."
Document 120 (the Official Report of the Diocesan Canonical Investigation)
"Since they wouldn't tell, they threatened to fry them in oil. At that point, in the presence of the children, the administrator told a nearby man to prepare a cauldron of hot oil.
He then called Jacinta, saying she was the first to be burned. She went promptly, and Lúcia, in her testimony, naively adds that she went without saying goodbye. They interrogated her and put her in a room. They then called Francisco, telling him that Jacinta was already burned and that he would suffer the same fate if he didn't reveal the secret. They interrogated him and sent him to the same room. Then it was Lúcia's turn. They told her that her cousins were already burned and that she would suffer the same fate if she didn't reveal the secret. Although she thought it was true, the seer was not afraid, as she herself declares. They sent her to her cousins, and a man said that all three of them would soon be burned
- Your skeptical hypothesis involves Lucia blurring the fantasy-reality distinction in a way that is unprecedented and implausible. You won't find a single case report that involves (i) perceptual source attribution + fine-detail, (ii) real-time behavioral correlates.
The entire point of citing Schneider was to establish that spontaneous confabulation is retrospective and diagnostic of neuropathy. It is a literature review, not a study.
I dont understand why you think Sharon-Woolley supports your theory. Here are quotes:
-"The view that children confuse fantasy and reality is at odds with a large
body of research showing that children as young as three years are able to make various
other non-reality/reality distinctions. For example, by three years of age, children can distinguish a mental entity, such as a thought or an image, from the real physical object it represents (Estes, Wellman, & Woolley, 1989; Wellman & Estes, 1986)"
-You yourself quote this passage: "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."
Sharon-Woolley (as well as the book with shared author) gives us criteria that we can use to differentially diagnose whether a report is sourced from imagination or ordinary perception. They establish that even very young children refuse to make certain property-attributions for imagined entities, that perceptual plausibility is a significant constraint on whether they are willing to assert reality, that willingness to attribute reality is strongly correlated with high suggestibility, and that the distinction sharpens as children developmentally mature (their samples are 3-5 years old, which is a demographic that is much, much more susceptible than adolescents - so using criteria that are derived from this group is very charitable to the skeptic), etc...
There are other issues, like dialogue complexity, trans-episodic reliability, narrative and memory stability, content markers, etc... that I would go into if I had more time to write this response. The stuff about numinous experience isn't analogous to the case at hand, but I don't deny that children, in general, have a higher hazard for anomalous experiences.
You write "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 crowds."
--This doesn't fix the problem. Either you are saying that they had expectation-induced perceptual experiences, in which case you need to deal with the objections to hallucination, or they had expectation-induced confabulation accompanied by perceptual attribution that operated consistently and reliably, and that enforced a perceptual asymmetry between the children across all the apparitions but led to indiscriminate assimilation from Lucia otherwise. There is also plenty of positive evidence for discrepancies between the children that make no sense if they were assimilating a script, but that do make sense if there were attentional differences during the experiences. Then there is the issue that the form of confabulation that never happens (as shown above) would now need to happen in synchrony repeatedly for multiple people in conformity to a preannounced schedule.
To me, Sharon-Woolley seems largely unrelated to the issues here.
Sharon-Woolley is about whether young children know, when asked, which entities are real and which are imaginary. It’s true that 10-year-olds are typically well past that type of confusion. If Lucia were asked whether monsters or dragons were real, she would have said no. But if she were asked whether the Virgin Mary were real, she would have said yes! So would her father and community! This is a quite different question from whether children create imaginary personal experiences or how they categorize memories of those experiences.
The other main point of Sharon-Woolley is that young children are better able to make distinctions about specific properties than about the overall property of real versus imaginary. To quote the paper, “children must come to recognize” that “even one non-human biological property is enough to consign [an entity] to the realm of fantasy.” Young children who haven’t yet recognized this can still associate certain fantasy properties with other ones, suggesting that they’ve already started to establish separate mental categories for real and fantasy entities, even if those categories are not yet fully labeled or delineated. But again, I don’t see how that observation makes any difference in this case. The Virgin Mary does have “non-human biological propert[ies]”, but they do not consign her to the realm of fantasy for adults, let alone 10-year-olds.
The same footnote in the original post that cites Sharon-Woolley also cites papers related to confabulation, which seem more relevant. That said, after checking some of them… the citations are to the entire papers rather than any specific passages, and though I have not read all the papers, I’m skeptical that they establish that confabulation is necessarily “sporadic”.
The same combination of whole-paper citations and categorical conclusions also occurs in the “hallucination” section. That section has some long quotes, but they're of religious sources rather than any of the psychology papers.
Plus, the post treats confabulation and hallucination as two separate explanations, with dishonesty as a third, when the most plausible skeptical explanation would involve some combination of all of them. It’s not as if they are independent factors that could only occur together by implausible chance. A false recollection caused by a hallucination leads to cognitive and social pressure to conform, which can be relieved through memory conformity[2], dishonesty, or both.
Overall, it now seems to me like the psychology section of the original post is not as well-sourced as it seemed on first impression. If you do ever write a comprehensive response, I'd encourage you to rely more on specific quotations to buttress these arguments.
Full disclosure: I am a skeptic. However, I am legitimately interested in obtaining the best possible argument against my existing beliefs.
[2] I’m categorizing memory conformity as a form of confabulation because the post does, although from some quick research I’m not sure the literature treats it that way.
I love this response. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable (look up Elizabeth Loftus). Children are also very susceptible to forming false memories (see the Satanic Panic).
I’m surprised not many people in the comments who are responding to Ethan are mentioning that the reliability of the info we have is questionable, considering most of it is selectively collected, interpreted, and filtered through Catholic sources - which have a vested interest in “proving” miracles. Even the DCF isn’t immune to this, despite being a valuable resource due to how many primary sources it contains.
I’m not saying there are no neutral reports of what happened - just none that validate a genuine miracle.
There is no way that all the locals and gathering crowds didn’t put some form of pressure on the kids to keep it going. I’m curious about what sparked those beliefs in the first place. I also suspect that the “persecution” the kids suffered was very played up to make them look like heroes in the face of radical skepticism. I wouldn’t be surprised if officials pressured them to recant, but we don’t know how much they said, what they said, if the children refused to say much, how long it went on, etc.
There are just too many gaps for me to sincerely believe it happened.
I've mentioned that if they asked for witnesses to come forward then the self-selection bias kicks in. Another mentioned how those who didn't see anything were dismissed in some way or another.
Come to think of it, how many witnesses did they record? If there were thousands of people there, it's likely going to be a very small sample size.
It's also super important to point out that we have testimony from someone who admits they didn't see it... but still claims that they believe strongly it did happen and they just weren't pure enough for Mary to reveal herself or whatever. Great evidence that "universal testimony" shouldn't be taken to actually imply that everyone had the actual experience, since there was clear psychosocial pressure to affirm it even without having actually seen anything.
Ethan claims those negative witnesses were talking about not seeing celestial visions, rather than not seeing the solar effects. Can you show the specific quotes and context?
Actually I think you're right. Those are people talking about not seeing various appearances across different points. In terms of the October 13th event, https://fatima.machado-family.com/vol1/#calibre_link-543 contains quotes starting in Chapter X which include people saying they saw nothing. Ctrl + F "saw nothing" yields results in this area. One in particular stands out:
"Finally G. de Sede quotes... the testimony of Lucy, who declared on several occasions: «I myself saw nothing!» Indeed, absorbed by the Vision that she contemplated during this time, contrary to all the other pilgrims, she did not see the solar miracle in all its successive phases. That is easily understandable.
And that is all! It is astonishing that G. de Sede was unable to quote a single valid testimony of somebody who clearly affirmed that he saw nothing!"
The author, inexplicably to me, determines that Lucy's testimony is invalid with no reasoning.
"In 1950, Father Martindale mentioned “two English ladies” who had not seen anything either."
In terms of the DCF on page 306, Jose's testimony is vague, but he says he went almost every month (he doesn't single out october, just that he went many times) and said he saw nothing.
"Almost every month José Alves went there on the 13th after May, and he saw nothing, he only heard others say that they saw things in the sky. He did not hear the noise in August. Many times he heard people say that a little smoke appeared. He never felt like taking off his hat, but now he never dares to pass by there without taking off his hat and saying some Hail Marys. He gave a piece of land for the work [the sanctuary], and he gave it gladly, and he is not sorry he gave it."
And then lastly are non-quotes. The biggest one to me is Lucia's mother, who was skeptical before and after the event, but there's no sources I can find that mention if she saw it either way. It's interesting to me that her testimony of the event is absent but that's not disconfirmatory I suppose.
Additionally in meet the witnesses on page 34, Arturo didn't see it, and that's specifically referring to the sun miracle in october. The naysayers are again treated harshly, basically character assassinating them.
"And this poor man’s lonely death in 1955 refusing the
Sacraments, leaves us with one of the most sobering thoughts
If the miracle events were based on real effects of looking at the sun, it would be reasonable that pretty much everyone who looked at the sun saw *something* they could describe.
However, I also question how the witnesses were collected. Did they put out a call for witnesses or seek them out (and under what criteria...random or targeted)? We would absolutely expect self-selected witnesses to be those who were most disposed to remembering the events in the most miraculous terms, while those who didn't remember anything if much to not respond.
The way they dismiss the testimony they don't like also reduces their objectivity.
Really wonderful response - I was working on a response of my own that was about a third of the way done, but this is much better than I could have done! I really appreciate you taking the time to lay out what should be (but seemingly is) obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds!
For what it's worth, I didn't see this paper quoted: https://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/MirSun.pdf This physicist (perhaps unwisely) did his own experiments looking into the sun and experienced many of the same visual impressions reported by witnesses there. It's hard for me to take any of the major apologetic defenses seriously after having read it.
Thanks for giving this a thorough look. The children’s visions of the apparition remind me of the Ariel UFO sightings. A UFO documentary had aired on local tv shortly before the event, which might’ve primed the children’s imaginations. Some of the children reported seeing the UFO and its occupants and “hearing” telepathic message from them about saving the world, others did not. In the Fátima case, It’s not hard to imagine why subjects like learning to read, the Great War, the rosary, and The Virgin Mary might’ve been on Lucia’s mind when she saw her vision.
As you indicate, The Miracle of The Sun appears to be best understood in the context of all that led up to it. A group of thousands of devout pilgrims, convinced they’d been witnessing monthly miracles (without actually seeing or hearing anything) and hungry for confirmation drew false conclusions regarding what they saw in the unpredictable atmospheric conditions that exist when rain is intermittent.
It’s certainly possible a Catholic miracle took place that that day in 1917, but I think there are plenty of more likely explanations that a reasonable person might naturally favor.
Ethan did block me on this account so I’m unable to respond directly to his comment, but in both his original post and comments here, he maintains that the children’s behavior is impossible for reasons that are completely inscrutable to me.
😂 It seriously strains credulity that such impeccable witnesses could have hallucinated or told a clever, pious story to help their village and pilgrims be strengthened in their faith. This is WAY more unlikely than that the Virgin Mary decided to vindicate Catholicism to the world by speaking to one devout Catholic child and making thousands of pious believers experience 10 different things. Probably God, Mary, and Jesus have just been too busy the past several centuries to speak to any skeptics directly and predict the following day’s winning lotto numbers to prove their infallibility. (On a serious note, if the Christian idea of god wanting to be believable but not overwhelmingly so to protect the virtue of faith is true and Jesus is purposely choosing not to be convincing enough to save all people—consider these verses from the book of Mark: “10 And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.
11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:
12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.”—well, that would be a terrifying vision of god. “Have fun burning in hell for all eternity because I decided make all the Christian miracles as sketchy and ambiguous as possible!” Pretty terrifying prospect. I wonder if Christian leaders of yore had any ulterior motive for preaching that hellfire awaits those who don’t listen to them and obey on faith? I wonder if poor illiterate peasants could be scared into submission to the church if they were taught such a doctrine from an early age? Just a thought…)
Thank you for taking the time to do this. As a cognitive psychologist I wanted to weigh in but haven’t had the time due to deadlines. But it seems so obvious to me how this could happen from how children perceive the world and interact with others, how children and others act under social pressure and reinforcement, and what we know about multiple-witness testimony/interaction, and research into the malleability of memory. It seems similar to the way a few super motivated counselors convinced children and co-constructed memories they’d been abused in absolutely unbelievable/impossible ways during the Satanic Panic, or how we’ve shown that eyewitnesses often change not just their details but their confidence levels (from fuzzy to sure, for example) under questioning by police that’s not done perfectly. So many ways a kid could confuse imagination and reality in the million subtle ways we know they do, and then get socially reinforced when people actually believe what she says she thinks she saw and keep reinforcing it.
We just need way, way, way stronger evidence to take this seriously.
And as you said, Muse’s article starts off so painfully weak: taking as “evidence” the fact that the kids returned to the place each month when Lucia’s initial ideation was about then returning each month…like, yeah. That’s not evidence! That’s what you’d expect whether she’s confused, buys into her own confusion, or outright lying (not saying this is the case), or, yes, if the miracles happen.
Likewise, though, I don’t think your argument that it’s disconfirming to not have a miracle happen without the kid on the 13th is any good - obviously if the kid is part of the whole miracle thing, then her not showing up at the right spot could indeed lead to no miracle there that day (and even a compensatory one soon after; sure, why not?). Of course, it doesn’t matter because, again, miracles happening where Lucia is and/or where she says they’ll be is kinda…no evidence at all when the miracle is something she herself is making up to fit the expectations that thousands now have for her original belief/claim/story.
FWIW, Muse told me he was a cognitive science student before I blocked him for insisting I was lying (I wasn't lying and he had no good reason to think I was). I addition to the weak arguments for Fatima, Muse is also rather belligerent and probably needs to chill a bit.
Interesting you mention his belligerence, as it was something I noticed too — not just in him, but in many Catholics, even when I approach them as someone who is genuinely open to being converted. This strikes me as particularly odd given that converting others is seemingly quite a good thing for Catholics to do. The widespread hostility ends up making me more skeptical of Catholicism than pretty much any other part of the religion, as a lack of control of one's emotion and constant anger does not strike me as a sign of spiritual wisdom. That's not an indictment of Catholicism itself, but I think that, if someone believes Catholicism is true, then they should make an effort to take a different approach, lest they turn others away from the truth.
Idk, if your model of ultimate perfection is a god who is okay with letting people burn eternally in hell for not reciting the rosary, maybe it’s not a big deal to lose patience with foolish people online whose hearts aren’t ready to accept the truth. If it’s just part of God’s plan that some people will harden their hearts and thereby land themselves in the pit, *Muse* didn’t make them that way. They should have believed already and not waited for proofs like a doubting Thomas even if people like Muse are generous enough to extend the proofs so clearly and convincingly.
What struck me as odd about him specifically is that I said upfront that I'm not trying to prove him wrong, but just to ask what I might be missing, noting that I actually believe Christ was resurrected and that the miracles occurred and were supernatural in origin. And then he took my argument (basically, "it's possible this being mistakenly believes himself to be God, but is right about everything else", which is the Buddhist view) and kept reframing it as me talking about a being who is "bafflingly confused" or trying to be deceptive even after corrected that misunderstanding during the conversation. So this isn't even a situation where someone's heart is hardened, it's someone who's directly asking to be converted, and even then I was treated with aggression and my points were completely strawmanned. I did not get the sense of Christian love, and I don't really have a good explanation for that approach.
I don't even see why miracles are so important for Catholic apologetics anyway. The Jewish scriptures are clear that magic powers don't mean the person is acting in behalf of Yahweh.
Ultimately the power of religion is in the impact it has in values and meaning for a person, not cheap parlor tricks to show off.
Plus the lady of Fatima, with her all black eyes and short skirt, sounds more like a demon girl from anime horror anyway.
To be clear, despite the claims of some enthusiasts and apologists, the Church does not require the faithful to believe that Mary appeared to the three children at Fatima. It, and all such post-apostolic religious experiences (Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, Our Lady of Lourdes, the Divine Mercy), are considered private revelation, and the most the Church can do is declare them worthy of belief, which is to say that there is nothing in them that is contrary to the faith and no reason to believe that the person or people claiming to have had this revelation are being dishonest.
Many supposed apparitions are not ratified in this way. though you are still allowed to believe they are genuine, so long as they don't include outright heresy. Many of the religious visionaries have been canonized, including the ones I mentioned, and the devotions have been incorporated into the life of the church (e.g. Divine Mercy Sunday or the feasts of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima), but even these are not complete endorsements.
In short, you can be a Catholic in perfectly good standing and fully endorse everything in this post.
This is super interesting — thank you for sharing
Glad to be of service.
Also, I wonder if you've heard of the book "They Flew" by Carlos Eire? I haven't seen it mentioned by name, but it definitely seems to be lurking in the background here. Eire is a history and religious studies professor at Yale who wrote a book recounting in detail the claims of flying saints in the Reformation and early modern periods. He's much less polemical than Ethan, but he goes through the major cases in some detail, including those approved by the church, like Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Cupertino, as well as those that were rejected and whose would-be mystics admitted to fabricating their experiences.
He grants that no historical inquiry can definitively settle the question or establish the possibility of miracles, but he argues that the amount of testimony equals just about anything else from this time, and many of them appear to lack the priming and social pressure that can be associated with visions or other intense religious experiences. Several of Teresa's levitations, in particular, take place in mundane contexts and in front of outsiders who are more confused by the whole thing than enraptured (and, for what it's worth, "are this person's feet on the ground or not?" seems like a way more straightforward question to me than "what's going on with those children experiencing some kind of vision and is that the sun or a Divine light?").
It's an interesting book, at any rate. And once again, happy that my post cleared some stuff up.
Ethan Muse also said he has a background in physics(undergrad level) and statistics in grad level. And also some amateur knowledge of anatomy. So, he knows cognitive science, physics, statistics, and some human anatomy. And wait... Are all these actual fucking degrees or the dude took a few courses and claims such knowledge?
As a “cognitive psychologist,” I’d expect you to know that there are no precedents for a group of adolescents repeatedly, predictably, and simultaneously entering into delusive trances where they mistake imagination for perception in real time. I’d also expect you to know that there are many counter-indications to spontaneous confabulation and memory conformity in the reports/behavior of the children.
Satanic panic isnt analogous at all - that is a forced confabulation paradigm. And your point about confusing imagination and perception goes against the developmental psychology literature - you shouldnt invoke your profession if your arguments are personal conjecture that are not based in actual evidence.
“Muse’s article starts off so painfully weak” - this is just a problem with reading comprehension on your part. You put something in quotation marks that I didnt say - I hope you arent that sloppy in your professional work. The beginning was laying out the salient data points that needed to be explained - I didnt assume my reader was familiar with them and jump into debunking skeptical hypotheses. I present specific arguments against lying, confabulation, and hallucination in the subsequent sections. I dont think you should confidently insult the work of another person if your critique is going to be based on failing to read and interpret what they wrote and then falsifying quotes.
Like a lot of others here, it seems Ethan has blocked me. I can no longer access my replies to him. Feel free to post any thoughts you have that you hope will reach a more diverse audience outside his curated threads, or else a lot of us can no longer read them.
EDIT 9/24: Ethan unblocked me (thanks, Ethan)
That is unfortunate! I was really enjoying the comments of the essay being a staging ground for discussion.
Didn't realize blocking had a retroactive effect on stuff you'd already posted like that. I would be happy to copy + paste your own exchanges in this comment section into DMs for your own records, if you'd like.
Thanks Evan, but I used Joe’s workaround and can now view them by using a private browser without logging in. The block just means I‘ve been effectively muted there.
What did you get blocked for? I blocked him because he insisted I was lying and would not retract the accusation. Really lame behavior.
I’m actually not sure. The only direct exchange we had took place in the comments section of his Fátima post. Feel free to read it. It was an odd exchange but I didn’t feel like it was confrontational in the slightest.
Very annoyed I have to open an incognito browser to see the argumentative comments lol
Wow he is blocking everyone?
I was the first block I think, but yes haha
One last thing I’ll add on this is that with modern technology, other sun miracles have been disproven. It’s pretty common for lots of pilgrims to get together and look at the sun and claim to see things. In one such event in Georgia, a local skeptics group brought a modified telescope and were not able to see what other people claimed to see.
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2009/11/the-real-secrets-of-fatima/
So basically a "control group" for the eyes. Also makes sense that we would see other miracles of the sun given how much traction the Fatima one gained.
1. I started going the the Documentação critica de Fátima in the original language to examine the citations, and I came to the same conclusion that the children clearly weren't kept separate.
2. The strongest piece of evidence for the event is from an article by Alvelino de Almeirda in the Ilustração Portuguesa. He was a writer for the anti-clerical magazine Ó Seculo. His article ends essentially by saying, "I saw something, but science and the church can argue about what it was. I don't care to know it ("Não curo agora de sabe-lo.")
3. "Picking gnat shit out of the pepper" is a really good expression.
Yea, it's still weak evidence though. Skeptics can be duped and sometimes convert.
It's just personal, impartial testimony. It only states what the author claimed to see, and it didn't say one way or another that it was a miracle.
This is the second part of a two-part comment. In this comment, I am replying to your criticism of my analysis of the Miracle of the Sun.
Phosphenes don't match the phenomenology that the witnesses reported at all, so it is a non-starter. And you can't just say 'crowd psychology' to explain the convergence on rich phenomenology by diverse witnesses, including highly educated and hostile witnesses. Your explanation of the distant witnesses was even worse: it would have been perfectly natural for the witnesses to interpret the Miracle of the Sun as a solar event based on the testimony. That is how most of the residents interpreted it, that is how the national media interpreted it, etc... But then there was no reason that all of them, no matter their orientation relative to the Sun, converged on perceiving a pale disc above the Fatima sector (and didn't harmonize with other features of the crowds account that were apparently only perceptible in the Cova direction) It also doesn't explain the undesigned coincidence of their bearings that exactly corresponds to an atmospheric volume that was at a low elevation above hill that were due South of the Cova. There are specific details about where in the sky they perceived the disc that cohere.
(Ophthalmology) The hypothesis of thin cloud cover is contradicted by all of the witnesses: There is moral unanimity that the clouds formed an aperture around the luminous source. The risk and strength of phosphenes is a function of exposure and duration, so this also indicates that they would have been in conditions that were unusually unfavorable to phosphene-induced mass hysteria. If there were phosphenes, then it is very surprising that the only testimony that we have about after-images asserts they weren't there.
Either way, your explanation of retinopathy is not tenable: If thousands of people truly fixed their fovea on either the attenuated or unattenuated midday sun, continuously, for ~10 minutes without protective gear, the response curve for retinopathy should have seen thousands of cases of debilitating injuries that would have been impossible to miss. You get non-neglible incidence in cases of 30 second exposure with partial occlusion during eclipses. But that is not what we are dealing with here: the dose–response curve for retinopathy is not linear - beyond ~1–2 minutes, you’re already at supra-threshold exposures with expected incidence that literally approaches 100% of the crowd developing symptomatic central scotomas. There also would have been nearly 100% incidence of short-term acute photophobia that lasted hours after the event.
(Shadows) The point is that the luminous and infrared shadows are objective, independent (interpretive errors should be uncorrelated) physical traces that lend themselves to a coherent interpretation that is multiply corroborated by different strands of witness testimony. That seems like great evidence to use to discriminate between an objective and subjective interpretation of the events.
I don't understand the problem with doing trigonometry on the shadows? The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the exclusion of the sun is robust. Even very old cameras project light through a fixed lens onto a flat plane. That guarantees the same rules of perspective as modern optics. Distortions from old lenses are usually radial, but these do not alter the basic fact that straight lines remain straight and converge consistently. Graininess, contrast loss, or uneven exposure can obscure fine detail, but they do not generate 'fake' vanishing points.
Also dont under stand the problem with analyzing the patterns of wet/dry contrasts? That uses gross luminance differences that far exceed the tonal biases of early film stocks. The zones 'S', 'W', and 'D' are ideally oriented relative to the camera and the source for avoiding photographic distortions, the underlying fabric is a mid-tone, and they have morphology that is totally inconsistent with distortions. So, using the photographs of the event to corroborate what witnesses reported about extraordinary rapid drying of garments also seems fair game.
And I find it especially compelling that everything 'clicks': Non-solar source that is localized to the south of the Cova at a low elevation above the hills is supported by the luminous shadows, and an undesigned coincidence that follows from the bearings of distant witnesses. The witnesses were able to comfortably and safely stare - it had to be skewed towards long-wavelengths. Lo-and-behold the rapid drying indicates that it was IR-rich and UV-poor. What's more, the shadows prove that there was an overhead source that reduced contrast and glare. I could keep going with these 'hand-and-glove' fits among all the aspects of the story, but I think it is especially unreasonable to dismiss the physical traces as too 'trivial' in light of them
(Unfortunately I cant reply to Ethan’s 1st part of his 2 part comment for some reason, so I’m replying here.)
>Your skeptical hypothesis involves Lucia blurring the fantasy-reality distinction in a way that is unprecedented and implausible.<
Your miracle hypothesis involves a virgin mother rumored to have died about 2,000 years ago appearing magically before a little girl to communicate God’s will to humanity in a way that is unprecedented and far more implausible.
How can you repeatedly point to science not supporting conventional, if unlikely, explanations and then in the same breath assert that miraculous, phantasmic explanations, completely unrecognized by science, are far more likely?
And it’s complete bullshit that it’s “unprecedented and implausible” for kids to blur the fantasy reality line. I have kids! I’ve met others!
They’re usually not confused - but occasionally, they are! They often lie! You can’t reliably tell if they’re lying!
Much of this debate seems to be rationalizing away the phenomenon of children behaving how children (and even adults) sometimes do: suggestible, imaginative, cueing off each other, even lying and convincing themselves of the lie to avoid getting in trouble.
No one here seems to be claiming children are incapable of coherence, lucidity or of distinguishing reality in their normal lives. That can be true...while also admitting that young children sometimes let their imaginations run wild and come up with lucid, sincere, coherent stories that are nonetheless illusory. Just like the mass suggestibility of crowds does not mean humans aren't normally rational.
Your adolescent children enter into delusive trances where they cant tell the difference between imagination and perception in real time? You should get that checked out.
Qualifying unwanted alternatives until you can reject them is a fun party trick, but it won’t work out for you
Underdescribing evidence is a fun party trick, but it wont work out for you
Its precisely the problem when apologists have their religion or preferred explanation as the null hypothesis. Appeals to Bayes' Theorem need a verifiable baseline probability for the priors, which is impossible with supernatural events.
What do you think about the potential susceptibility of the crowd, given many of them had already proven willing to believe that despite neither hearing nor seeing a woman speaking to the children, the woman was nonetheless there? Do you think their devout faith might have played a role in coloring their interpretation of what they did (and didn’t) see?
I remember hanging out with wiccans in college. They all got together and had regular "vision quests" to a "castle mansion" wherein we would imagine ourselves in a celestial palace of sorts, and we would explore the place together in our minds.
Because we were all predisposed to believing we were all astral projecting into the same ethereal place, it was remarkably easy to cue each other on what one person announced they saw (a staircase, gazebo, etc.) so that everyone else suddenly and instantly wove it into their own visualization. Looking back its so obvious how we were all creating a collective imaginative story and calling it something supernatural. It all appeared to be very lucid to the outside observer as we were talking ourselves through it. It was usually one or two people who provided most of the content as well. And these were college students!
It amazes me that some Catholics downplay children's imaginations, cueing, anticipation, suggestibility to justify all this.
I’ll note that the research from actual scientists on reported experiences of feeling “out of body” or near death typically involve content fitting that person’s existing beliefs and experiences.
Religious people having an OBE/NDE “vision”/perception/hallucination report their religion’s god(s) and such. Children often report seeing…their peers. Not angels but the other kids from school! Because that’s the most relevant part of their daily life and schemas.
It makes sense that people find meaning in such events it is precisely because it is tied to their lives. Trying to insist that one population's set of religious experiences or miracles is the standard, while everyone else is wrong, seem to miss the significance of religious experience to begin with.
People rarely if ever stare at the sun directly for very long, precisely to avoid harming their vision. Instead they consciously or instinctively blink, shift their eyes or look away briefly precisely to avoid the glare. Those movements alone and the afterimages of the sun can create a large variety of experiences.
That so many people had different accounts of how the sun actually behaved and many did not, is more consistent with different people looking at the sun in these different ways and seeing different types of afterimages and such. All without long term vision damage.
Color changes caused by sunlight exposure to the eyes in particular are also fairly common. Every time I go out on a summer day to skim my pool for even a few minutes, and the solar glare reflects off the white concrete, everything else ends up looking like it has a purple or yellow aura for a few minutes afterwards.
The entire point is that people didn't have protective gaze aversion reflexes which indicates that they were not staring directly at the Sun. The OP tried to explain that away by saying that there was visible attenuation - but that makes the retinopathy problem worse, not better.
There is moral unanimity that people were able to painlessly and effortlessly fixate on the Sun throughout the entire event - even among the single witness that apparently claimed that she saw nothing extraordinary. There was no indication from any witness of gaze aversion, photophobia, or inconstancy in fixation. We have photos at irregular intervals during the event, and they show simultaneous fixation from everyone in the crowd - that strongly supports the unanimous testimony of universal, continuous fixation on the light source throughout the entire event.
There is moral unanimity among the accounts about: (i) pale, moonlike disc, (ii) comfortable, painless, prolonged fixation, (iii) rapid rotational motion. There is substantial agreement, but not complete unanimity, about (a) vertical motion, (b) Catherine wheels, (c) saturated, alternating colors.
Importantly, the vast majority of differences in testimony are not discrepancies. They are cases where many witnesses reported a detail, but some witnesses did not report that detail (they did not positively assert that it didn't happen). The vast majority of the differences are plausibly explained by differences in emphasis. The rest is plausibly explained by attentional differences, viewpoint-dependence of particular optical effects, perceptual idiosyncrasies, and memory effects. Notably, if you exclude the testimony of illiterate/uneducated and only focus on the lettered/educated, the degree of convergence is extremely high.
There were no reports of after-images, and the only reports that mention them are educated people that checked for them to ensure it wasn't a retinal effect. The color effects that you are mentioning don't match the phenomenology of the alternating, saturated colors that are described in the witness reports and they are symptomatic of phototoxicity that is strongly correlated with many other behavioral and phenomenological signatures that were not reported at all.
1. You'll have to define "moral unanimity" for us.
2. You are also exaggerating the agreements of witnesses. When you bring up differences being "is plausibly explained by attentional differences, viewpoint-dependence of particular optical effects, perceptual idiosyncrasies, and memory effects" that is precisely what I am saying. Of course if a bunch of people look at the sun there will common elements because of shared biology, AND they will have some differences due to the aforementioned factors.
3. You are also downplaying the lack of this experience among witnesses. Many claimed to see nothing at all...not just one. Per Fatima accounts:
"Among the more educated classes, no one told me that they had seen the celestial apparition, but it is certain that all of them, learned and unlearned, manifested their faith."
“I see, I see the Lady!!! Look, in this direction between those two clouds, don’t you see it?” We all looked in the direction indicated but... none of us saw more than the clouds. However, the man full of faith said: “Arrest me if you want, but I will always say what I saw”! The woman [referring to the wife of the man who saw something] didn't see anything, but she was overjoyed that it was her husband who had seen it, because she did not believe it; She believed, she didn't need to see."
4. One does not have to consciously avert their eyes or blink: the iris itself contracts and the eyeballs can twitch without you knowing...it's a defense mechanism to avoid harm. Not everyone who stares at the sun gets eye damage and photos of people staring at "regular intervals" only show behavior of those people at those instants. Yet the twitching of eyeballs or subtle eye and face movements would not be captured on camera. Of course, photos of the sun itself at the time of the miracle show nothing unremarkable, either.
5. My experiences line up with your witnesses. Remember this guy:
"Fearing that I was suffering from an affection of the retina, an improbable explanation because in that case one could not see things purple-colored, I turned away and shut my eyes, keeping my hands before them to intercept the light. With my back still turned, I opened my eyes and saw that the landscape was the same purple color as before."
"And in fact everything, both near and far, had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask. People looked as if they were suffering from jaundice, and I recall a sensation of amusement at seeing them look so ugly and unattractive. My own hand was the same color."
This is literally what I was talking about experiencing! When I read these accounts I think "Oh yeah, been there."
Moral unanimity is approximately 100% consensus among many reports that comment specifically on an issue.
You assert that I am exaggerating the agreement, but provide no warrant for that assertion so I'm not sure where to go from here other than to refer you to the CDF so that you can check for yourself.
You are misreading the accounts that you are interpreting as people seeing nothing. When they are talking about celestial apparitions, they are referring the reports of peasants that they saw the Holy Family in the sky during the Miracle of the Sun. They go on in the same text to explicitly clarify that everyone they spoke to claim to see something extraordinary in the sky. The one about the guy seeing the Lady isnt even from October 13th, it is from August 13th.
Iris contraction can't reduce exposure by anywhere near enough to mitigate retinopathy hazard to the degree required (nor to prevent the more robust gaze aversion reflexes from triggering). Microsaccades actually increase the risk of retinopathy, because they increase the damage zone. The irregular intervals are random samples of crowd behavior that can be used to independently corroborate their consensus testimony about gaze. If there were adequate gaze diversion happening, it would be highly improbable for the photographs to depict the features they do. There are no direct photos of the light source itself at the time of the miracle, because of the limitations of early 20th century camera equipment. So you are clearly just making stuff up at this point.
And I simply don't believe your account - the descriptions you quote don't match the sort of auras that you would have plausibly experienced, so you are either exaggerating or just making it up completely.
The problem with all this, is that it is grounded in eyewitnesses which by nature are inherently unreliable, especially those primed to expect something and already predisposed to wanting to believe. A wide body of research over 50 years has shown people will come up with all sorts of false memories with minimal prompting, especially among groups who experience the event and then talk to each other about it. This doesn't mean the Fatima crowds didn't experience the natural effects of looking into the sun under the specific conditions of that day and time, more that they exaggerated and added to their experiences as they talked to each other.
The refusal to believe my own mundane experiences with the effects of sun sort of gives the game away, doesn't it?
But don't take my word for it: "sun gazers" claim seeing different colored auras and lights of different shapes emitting from the sun, and say they can do it for long periods without retinopathy. I don't recommend sun gazing, but it's also worth noting that solar retinopathy heals on its own within 1-6 months in most cases. The Fatima folks only had once instance of brief sun exposure to their eyes, rather than long term, so it's not surprising we didn't see any documented cases, especially in rural Portugal in 1917.
https://eyewiki.org/Solar_Retinopathy#Medical_Follow-up
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/solar-retinopathy
You may also be interested in this paper, which has someone (perhaps unwisely) staring into the sun themselves for a while and reproducing a wide range of experiences reported by witnesses at Fatima. I'd post a quote but for some reason the formatting is messed up. But here's the paper in its entirety: https://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/MirSun.pdf
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm going to split this comment into two parts: This one will comment on your objections to my analysis of the six apparitions. The next one will comment on your objections to my analysis of the Miracle of the Sun.
The goal of my piece was neither to persuade all skeptics nor to make it rationally obligatory for skeptics to accept Catholicism based on the evidence for this miracle alone. It was to present a case that is rigorous enough that a fair-minded skeptic admit that it was strong evidence, even they ultimately withheld belief because of other considerations.
SIX APPARITIONS
- Factual error: The children were questioned separately on multiple occasions. Here are two examples, but I can provide additional citations if you want.
Document 17 by Leonor de Avelar e Silva
"We witnessed a lengthy interrogation, conducted with each child separately. They answered frankly, promptly, and with the utmost simplicity. However, it's clear they don't like being questioned, that it bores them, and that they only answer because they feel obligated to."
Document 120 (the Official Report of the Diocesan Canonical Investigation)
"Since they wouldn't tell, they threatened to fry them in oil. At that point, in the presence of the children, the administrator told a nearby man to prepare a cauldron of hot oil.
He then called Jacinta, saying she was the first to be burned. She went promptly, and Lúcia, in her testimony, naively adds that she went without saying goodbye. They interrogated her and put her in a room. They then called Francisco, telling him that Jacinta was already burned and that he would suffer the same fate if he didn't reveal the secret. They interrogated him and sent him to the same room. Then it was Lúcia's turn. They told her that her cousins were already burned and that she would suffer the same fate if she didn't reveal the secret. Although she thought it was true, the seer was not afraid, as she herself declares. They sent her to her cousins, and a man said that all three of them would soon be burned
- Your skeptical hypothesis involves Lucia blurring the fantasy-reality distinction in a way that is unprecedented and implausible. You won't find a single case report that involves (i) perceptual source attribution + fine-detail, (ii) real-time behavioral correlates.
The entire point of citing Schneider was to establish that spontaneous confabulation is retrospective and diagnostic of neuropathy. It is a literature review, not a study.
I dont understand why you think Sharon-Woolley supports your theory. Here are quotes:
-"The view that children confuse fantasy and reality is at odds with a large
body of research showing that children as young as three years are able to make various
other non-reality/reality distinctions. For example, by three years of age, children can distinguish a mental entity, such as a thought or an image, from the real physical object it represents (Estes, Wellman, & Woolley, 1989; Wellman & Estes, 1986)"
-You yourself quote this passage: "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."
Sharon-Woolley (as well as the book with shared author) gives us criteria that we can use to differentially diagnose whether a report is sourced from imagination or ordinary perception. They establish that even very young children refuse to make certain property-attributions for imagined entities, that perceptual plausibility is a significant constraint on whether they are willing to assert reality, that willingness to attribute reality is strongly correlated with high suggestibility, and that the distinction sharpens as children developmentally mature (their samples are 3-5 years old, which is a demographic that is much, much more susceptible than adolescents - so using criteria that are derived from this group is very charitable to the skeptic), etc...
There are other issues, like dialogue complexity, trans-episodic reliability, narrative and memory stability, content markers, etc... that I would go into if I had more time to write this response. The stuff about numinous experience isn't analogous to the case at hand, but I don't deny that children, in general, have a higher hazard for anomalous experiences.
You write "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 crowds."
--This doesn't fix the problem. Either you are saying that they had expectation-induced perceptual experiences, in which case you need to deal with the objections to hallucination, or they had expectation-induced confabulation accompanied by perceptual attribution that operated consistently and reliably, and that enforced a perceptual asymmetry between the children across all the apparitions but led to indiscriminate assimilation from Lucia otherwise. There is also plenty of positive evidence for discrepancies between the children that make no sense if they were assimilating a script, but that do make sense if there were attentional differences during the experiences. Then there is the issue that the form of confabulation that never happens (as shown above) would now need to happen in synchrony repeatedly for multiple people in conformity to a preannounced schedule.
To me, Sharon-Woolley seems largely unrelated to the issues here.
Sharon-Woolley is about whether young children know, when asked, which entities are real and which are imaginary. It’s true that 10-year-olds are typically well past that type of confusion. If Lucia were asked whether monsters or dragons were real, she would have said no. But if she were asked whether the Virgin Mary were real, she would have said yes! So would her father and community! This is a quite different question from whether children create imaginary personal experiences or how they categorize memories of those experiences.
The other main point of Sharon-Woolley is that young children are better able to make distinctions about specific properties than about the overall property of real versus imaginary. To quote the paper, “children must come to recognize” that “even one non-human biological property is enough to consign [an entity] to the realm of fantasy.” Young children who haven’t yet recognized this can still associate certain fantasy properties with other ones, suggesting that they’ve already started to establish separate mental categories for real and fantasy entities, even if those categories are not yet fully labeled or delineated. But again, I don’t see how that observation makes any difference in this case. The Virgin Mary does have “non-human biological propert[ies]”, but they do not consign her to the realm of fantasy for adults, let alone 10-year-olds.
The same footnote in the original post that cites Sharon-Woolley also cites papers related to confabulation, which seem more relevant. That said, after checking some of them… the citations are to the entire papers rather than any specific passages, and though I have not read all the papers, I’m skeptical that they establish that confabulation is necessarily “sporadic”.
The same combination of whole-paper citations and categorical conclusions also occurs in the “hallucination” section. That section has some long quotes, but they're of religious sources rather than any of the psychology papers.
Plus, the post treats confabulation and hallucination as two separate explanations, with dishonesty as a third, when the most plausible skeptical explanation would involve some combination of all of them. It’s not as if they are independent factors that could only occur together by implausible chance. A false recollection caused by a hallucination leads to cognitive and social pressure to conform, which can be relieved through memory conformity[2], dishonesty, or both.
Overall, it now seems to me like the psychology section of the original post is not as well-sourced as it seemed on first impression. If you do ever write a comprehensive response, I'd encourage you to rely more on specific quotations to buttress these arguments.
Full disclosure: I am a skeptic. However, I am legitimately interested in obtaining the best possible argument against my existing beliefs.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6357982/
[2] I’m categorizing memory conformity as a form of confabulation because the post does, although from some quick research I’m not sure the literature treats it that way.
How do you define “strong evidence?” I’m confused by the distinction you’re making in the second paragraph.
Bayesian definition of evidence. A datum with a probability that is much higher conditional on Catholicism than conditional on its negation.
Amazing. What's your best estimate for how long it took you to research/write all this?
If you and Ethan wanted to have a discussion about this, I’d love to host it on YouTube.
Oh man. The idea of that makes my stomach hurt a little bit. But I'm open to it. What sort of timeline did you have in mind?
If you'd be interested in doing it, send me your email and we can try to set something up!
DM sent
None in particular.
I think ppl need to request access for the document - I can’t open it
Thanks for flagging this. I adjusted the sharing settings. Give it another try when you have a moment
Excellent article. Did anyone consider whether that who's kneeling peed his pants?
I love this response. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable (look up Elizabeth Loftus). Children are also very susceptible to forming false memories (see the Satanic Panic).
I’m surprised not many people in the comments who are responding to Ethan are mentioning that the reliability of the info we have is questionable, considering most of it is selectively collected, interpreted, and filtered through Catholic sources - which have a vested interest in “proving” miracles. Even the DCF isn’t immune to this, despite being a valuable resource due to how many primary sources it contains.
I’m not saying there are no neutral reports of what happened - just none that validate a genuine miracle.
There is no way that all the locals and gathering crowds didn’t put some form of pressure on the kids to keep it going. I’m curious about what sparked those beliefs in the first place. I also suspect that the “persecution” the kids suffered was very played up to make them look like heroes in the face of radical skepticism. I wouldn’t be surprised if officials pressured them to recant, but we don’t know how much they said, what they said, if the children refused to say much, how long it went on, etc.
There are just too many gaps for me to sincerely believe it happened.
I've mentioned that if they asked for witnesses to come forward then the self-selection bias kicks in. Another mentioned how those who didn't see anything were dismissed in some way or another.
Come to think of it, how many witnesses did they record? If there were thousands of people there, it's likely going to be a very small sample size.
EDIT: deleted
It's also super important to point out that we have testimony from someone who admits they didn't see it... but still claims that they believe strongly it did happen and they just weren't pure enough for Mary to reveal herself or whatever. Great evidence that "universal testimony" shouldn't be taken to actually imply that everyone had the actual experience, since there was clear psychosocial pressure to affirm it even without having actually seen anything.
Mormons have this dodge too...many of their eyewitnesses saw with "eyes of faith".
Ethan claims those negative witnesses were talking about not seeing celestial visions, rather than not seeing the solar effects. Can you show the specific quotes and context?
Actually I think you're right. Those are people talking about not seeing various appearances across different points. In terms of the October 13th event, https://fatima.machado-family.com/vol1/#calibre_link-543 contains quotes starting in Chapter X which include people saying they saw nothing. Ctrl + F "saw nothing" yields results in this area. One in particular stands out:
"Finally G. de Sede quotes... the testimony of Lucy, who declared on several occasions: «I myself saw nothing!» Indeed, absorbed by the Vision that she contemplated during this time, contrary to all the other pilgrims, she did not see the solar miracle in all its successive phases. That is easily understandable.
And that is all! It is astonishing that G. de Sede was unable to quote a single valid testimony of somebody who clearly affirmed that he saw nothing!"
The author, inexplicably to me, determines that Lucy's testimony is invalid with no reasoning.
"In 1950, Father Martindale mentioned “two English ladies” who had not seen anything either."
In terms of the DCF on page 306, Jose's testimony is vague, but he says he went almost every month (he doesn't single out october, just that he went many times) and said he saw nothing.
"Almost every month José Alves went there on the 13th after May, and he saw nothing, he only heard others say that they saw things in the sky. He did not hear the noise in August. Many times he heard people say that a little smoke appeared. He never felt like taking off his hat, but now he never dares to pass by there without taking off his hat and saying some Hail Marys. He gave a piece of land for the work [the sanctuary], and he gave it gladly, and he is not sorry he gave it."
And then lastly are non-quotes. The biggest one to me is Lucia's mother, who was skeptical before and after the event, but there's no sources I can find that mention if she saw it either way. It's interesting to me that her testimony of the event is absent but that's not disconfirmatory I suppose.
Additionally in meet the witnesses on page 34, Arturo didn't see it, and that's specifically referring to the sun miracle in october. The naysayers are again treated harshly, basically character assassinating them.
"And this poor man’s lonely death in 1955 refusing the
Sacraments, leaves us with one of the most sobering thoughts
about man in the atomic age of Communism.2"
https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Meet_the_Witnesses.pdf
If the miracle events were based on real effects of looking at the sun, it would be reasonable that pretty much everyone who looked at the sun saw *something* they could describe.
However, I also question how the witnesses were collected. Did they put out a call for witnesses or seek them out (and under what criteria...random or targeted)? We would absolutely expect self-selected witnesses to be those who were most disposed to remembering the events in the most miraculous terms, while those who didn't remember anything if much to not respond.
The way they dismiss the testimony they don't like also reduces their objectivity.