is the smartest person I’ve ever met and among the best philosophers. Dustin Crummett is the best philosopher I’ve ever met and among the smartest people. Dustin’s a sort of liberal, effective altruism aligned Anglican. Ethan’s a recently converted hardcore infernalist turbo-Catholic—talking to him about Catholicism is guaranteed to scare the hell out of (into?) you. Dustin has described Catholicism as ▶provably false; Ethan thinks it’s provably true.
I have witnessed Ethan and Dustin seriously debate a number of people. I have never witnessed them lose or even be stumped (for example, here is Dustin ▶demolishing Catholic apologist Trent Horn in an abortion debate. That’s an impressive feat; Trent is a very good debater.) A bit after Scott released his bombshell Fatima investigation, I got Ethan and Dustin together to debate the Fatima sun miracle. The debate was long-anticipated by a number of people, and it is finally open to the public.
It was the most epic debate I have ever witnessed. Very large amounts of new, interesting, and non-obvious ground was covered. Pretty much every important point on both sides of the Fatima dispute was discussed.
Ethan’s debate prep consisted of machine-translating hundreds of pages of Portuguese documents, carrying out a bunch of his own independent calculations, memorizing all the relevant facts, including being able to quote witness statements almost verbatim, looking up Portuguese census data, and then for good measure learning about which nearby cities you’d be able to see a localized emitter from in Portugal.
Dustin’s consisted of spending about ten hours reading on the internet.
For this reason, Ethan was clearly better prepared. He probably spent dozens of times longer reading about the subject. So on points where Ethan had some complex technical argument that Dustin didn’t have a response to, I didn’t update much in Ethan’s direction.
Because of Ethan’s greater preparation, Dustin wasn’t really able to respond to various technical points. For example, at one point Ethan mentioned the Dalleur argument about the angle of the light source. Dustin’s response was basically to shrug and say he hadn’t looked into it. Many such cases. Nonetheless, Dustin held his own extremely well (friend of the blog declared Dustin’s holding his own despite less preparation an “aura win,” though some scholars dispute this). They both scored a number of strong blows against the other’s case.
This will be a very opinionated review. I’ll first impartially lay out what they both said. Then, I’ll describe what I think about their claims after spending many hours investigating them. Though be warned: investigating Fatima takes you down some weird rabbit holes about fairies, child psychology, the Mormon witnesses, and penis-stealing witches. By digging into Fatima, one learns lessons that are important for pretty much any miracle investigation.
There is a lot of nitpicking about a bunch of different points. So I thought it would be worth first describing the basic facts and laying out the core views on offer—how Ethan sees the miracle vs how Dustin sees it.
Three children, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto claimed to have appearances of the Virgin Mary. Lucia and Jacinta saw and heard her. Francisco just saw her. These appearances occurred at regular intervals. A bunch of eyewitnesses saw Lucia and her cousins talking as if Mary was there. The children were asked to recant, and threatened with torture. They didn’t recant.
The children predicted that on October 13th, there would be a big miracle done so that “everyone may believe.” On October 13th, a bunch of people gathered in a field. Basically everyone, including the skeptics in attendance, said that they saw the sun do crazy things. These include: spinning, changing color, coming close to Earth, being less bright so you could see it without hurting your eyes, and bathing the surrounding landscape in all sorts of weird colors. This is contrary to its usual behavior.
Ethan’s theory is that God did a miracle to create a secondary light source in the sky. This is, he claims, how the miracle was pulled off. He doesn’t think God gave the people a vision; he thinks God made a big sky light.
Here’s roughly how Ethan sees things.
Lucia and her two cousins are effectively unimpeachable witnesses. They displayed bizarre psychological phenomena utterly unprecedented in cases of delusion. There are no other examples of non-psychotic children entering delusive trances for extended periods of time of the kind entered by all three of them. And we know they were sincere from their behavior—among other things, they did not recant even when threatened with torture, and acted how you’d expect if they believed it. So skeptics will already have to take an enormous probability hit in positing some kind of massive, unprecedented psychological phenomenon of a type never seen before.
Then, Lucia predicts that there will be a huge miracle seen by everyone on October 13th, 1917. Amazingly, there is such a miracle: nearly everyone at Fatima agrees that the sun moved, changed color, changed the color of the landscape, dried people’s clothes, and did all sorts of other craziness. If this is an illusion, it is a very big coincidence that a giant powerful illusion occurred right at the time Lucia predicted.
Then, amazingly, we have independent evidence for the veracity of this giant colossal miracle. Ethan claims that by analyzing photographs, we can see naturally inexplicable drying patterns. And by analyzing the light beams from the photographs, we can see that there was a second light source, apart from the sun. Additionally, there are distant witnesses who attest to the light source. And if people were staring at the sun, glare would have forced them to turn away and hurt their eyes.
So overall, we have:
Unimpeachable witnesses.
A very improbable prediction of a giant colossal miracle.
That miracle is confirmed by everyone, including skeptics hoping to debunk it.
We have a bunch of physical evidence left behind that confirms the miracle.
So the Ethan story is: giant colossal miracle + all the other evidence independently supports the miracle=a proof of Catholicism.
The Dustin story goes as follows: Lucia managed to get her cousins to think they were seeing the Virgin Mary. The famed “miracle of the sun” involved people looking at the sun and seeing weird stuff that is similar to what people see when they look at the sun in suggestible conditions. Decades later, Lucia made up that she’d received secrets from Mary, which is where all the important theology was drawn. So even if the miracle was a real miracle, given that the secrets are obviously bogus, it wouldn’t confirm Catholicism.
How trustworthy is Lucia? That was the first main point of dispute. If you don’t care about this at all, and just want to hear about the spinning of the sun, feel free to skip to section 4. Though be warned: this was a big and very substantive part of the disagreement. It also matters for whether the miracle would vindicate Catholicism specifically vs merely vindicating the supernatural.
The miracle of the sun took place in 1917. Lucia’s memoirs written in 1942 revealed that Mary had entrusted Lucia with three secrets in 1917. The first two secrets revealed in that memoir were:
A terrifying vision of hell.
A message saying that God wants to establish the immaculate heart of Mary in the world, that Mary would come to ask for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart, that if her requests were heeded, Russia would be converted and there would be peace; if not, Russia would spread her errors throughout the world, promoting wars and persecutions of the Church, and that in Portugal the dogmas of the faith would always be preserved.
Then the third secret was a vision, published by the Vatican in 2000, of a Bishop in white making his way through a ruined city. This one is the weirdest but the least discussed in the debate.
Then, she says, in 1929, Mary told her that the time had come for Russia to be consecrated to her immaculate heart. To “consecrate” Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means to formally dedicate the nation to Mary’s maternal care and protection through an official act by the Pope. Mary says that if this was done, then there would be peace and mass conversions in Russia.
**Dustin: **This is extremely suspicious. Why is it that we only hear about Lucia predicting the war after it happens? Why is it that we only learn about Mary being concerned about geopolitical events after Lucia becomes an older Catholic who is concerned about geopolitical events? Lucia “predicted” the Soviet Union spreading huge errors and communism after it happened and she “predicted” world war two after it happened. Why can’t she predict anything *before *it happens?
This is suspicious in a way characteristic of frauds. Often fraudulent ancient documents that claim to have been written earlier make “predictions,” correctly about the past—and we can correctly date them by seeing when their predictions stop being accurate. It is surprising given authenticity that Lucia has a judicious record of what happened up until the time the secrets were revealed, and then her predictions become sketchy and inaccurate.
Ethan: It’s true that the secret was only made public long after the sun miracle, but that’s because Lucia only was given the right to reveal the secrets in 1927. We know by 1927 the secrets had been written down and shown to five independent people.
And we have other evidence that they were revealed earlier. Jacinta, on her death bed, talked about a coming war. At one point, when a skeptic criticized Lucia’s claim to have received the secrets earlier, she wrote back telling of a list of people she’d told, and suggested the skeptic ask them.
In fact, the Bishop of Leiria wrote a letter in 1937 to Pope Pius XI confirming that persecution in Russia would end if Russia was consecrated and that war was imminent. So we know Lucia knew ahead of time about this, and yet she wasn’t banging on the Pope’s door.
Dustin: It’s not so obvious that if the story was changed, the eyewitnesses would reveal it. The miracle of the holy fire is a farce, and yet many bishops, over a very long time period, have not revealed this. Fatima is probably similar.
Ethan: Sure, I guess it’s possible that Lucia changed the story and we never heard from any of the eyewitnesses except the ones who seem to confirm the earlier story. But you are the one raising this as an evidential challenge to the miracle. You’re the one who says that this undercuts Lucia’s credibility.
My verdict: a point for Dustin. Ethan misstated the contents of the letter: the letter to the Pope only reveals that consecrating Russia to Mary’s immaculate heart would “end the persecution in Russia.” It says nothing about stopping war. I discuss in an Appendix the situation in more detail, but my guess is that the details in the secrets were filled in later. Lucia also claims in her 1941 memoirs that Mary revealed Jacinta and Francisco would die soon, but she’d stick around for longer, yet conveniently we don’t hear about that till after it happened. It seems like Francisco and Jacinta might have mentioned their imminent predicted death!
Dustin: By Lucia’s account, she was, for an extended period of time, sitting on information about how world war two could have been prevented. But if so, why wasn’t she banging on the Pope’s door and demanding he consecrate Russia?
Ethan: The letter sent from the Bishop of Leiria indicates that she did, before the war, try to get the Pope to consecrate Russia to stop the war (though remember, the letter doesn’t actually say that).
Dustin: If she could prevent world war two from killing millions of people, she should do more than get the bishop to send a letter to the Pope in 1937! Especially because God just did a giant miracle vindicating her.
Ethan: But we know she at least believed it by 1937, and yet she didn’t do the thing that you think she should do.
My verdict: a point for Dustin, in light of the fact that the letter doesn’t say what he claimed. Lucia’s behavior just seems sort of suspicious. This isn’t hugely evidentially relevant, though, because we know that Lucia believed consecrating Russia would stop war at an earlier time and this didn’t impact her behavior.
Dustin: Lucia predicted that after the consecration occurred, there’d be peace and mass conversions in Russia. There has not been peace and mass conversions in Russia. This is despite a number of attempted consecrations:
1942: Pope Pius XII consecrated the Church and the human race to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on October 31, 1942, and on July 7, 1952, consecrated the Russians specifically.
1982: Pope John Paul II consecrated the world at Fatima on May 13, 1982.1984: Pope John Paul II performed another consecration on March 25, 1984.2022: Pope Francis consecrated Russia and Ukraine by name on March 25, 2022.
In fact, Lucia thought that the consecration done by John Paul II was a successful consecration. So the obvious question: why wasn’t there peace?
Ethan: It’s not at all clear that the consecration *was *successful or even that Lucia *thought *it was successful. The original consecration, for example, involved consecrating the world. If you ask me to pray for you, and I pray for the world, I haven’t really met your request.
Dustin: Sure, you can have gripes with the exact wording. But it would be pretty surprising if both Mary and the Pope thought that the consecration had been successful, but really Mary wanted some hyper-specific linguistic formula before she’d be willing to stop the widespread butchering. Why hasn’t Mary tried to clear it up or been clearer on the needed wording?
Under the Francis one, he consecrated Russia and Ukraine. This is like praying for you and your enemy, which definitely counts as a valid act of praying for you.
Funny bit from the debate (31:10):
Ethan “I think it’s pretty clear” [that the consecration was unsuccessful].
Dustin “Apparently it’s not clear to the fucking Pope, man. It’s not clear to Lucia.”
**Ethan: **I think there’s providence behind the Popes screwing it up. The people refraining from honoring Mary’s intention are sinning and wanting to be ecumenists.
**Dustin: **And we never heard this from Lucia? It seems totally bizarre that Mary would need some hyper specific set of words to be said, but that wouldn’t be super clear, and it wouldn’t even be clear to Lucia.
**Ethan: **You can pose similar questions for conditional prophecies in the Bible and for why God choose to fulfill his will through Christ. It’s hard to predict in advance how God will behave. Certainly I wouldn’t have guessed most of God’s behavior in the Bible.
My verdict: A point for Dustin again. It does seem like deeply bizarre behavior from Mary to require some specific linguistic formula, bring about peace in Russia if that formula is said, but to be so ambiguous about it that the failure of the consecration is highly non-obvious. The fact that on Ethan’s worldview other Biblical prophecies if taken literally worked that way doesn’t make the problem better (and they seem disanalogous in various respects)! I think generally you should think if you’re a Christian that Biblical errors are a byproduct of error on behalf of human authors, but that is very different from how things worked at Fatima, where Mary was simply directly dictating the prophecy to Lucia.
**…
