A while ago, a mysterious internet writer of great intellectual power called wrote a reply to me on the miracle of the sun. Their aim in that piece was to disprove the arguments that Dustin Crummett and I make against the miracle of the sun. It turns out (though I knew this ahead of time) that the authors were none other than my good friends and .
The piece was really well researched. Joe and Noah are brilliant. They are also amazing people. Nonetheless, I had major disagreements with their response. In this reply, I comprehensively reply to their reply to my reply to Dustin’s reply to Ethan’s reply to skeptic’s replies to the Fatima sun miracle. I won’t respond to their points in order, but instead in order of importance: I’ll start with the points most relevant to determining whether a miracle happened and then move on to the complex weedsy details.
In Joe and Noah’s piece, they refer to the objections shared by Dustin and me as the Cradelstein objections. I think Cradelstein sounds insanely cool—a bit like Kripkenstein—and so will repay the favor by referring to the Joe and Noah hybrid as Joah.
Before I proceed, let me present a very brief summary of the miracle. Three shepherd children claimed to witness apparitions of the Virgin Mary that adhered to a monthly schedule. Crowds would often witness their conversations with a figure that the crowds couldn’t see. The children predicted that on October 13th, 1917 there would be a big miracle done “so that all may come to believe.” Then, in October, a giant crowd of people gathered and witnessed the sun be painless to gaze at, change colors, look like it was crashing to Earth, spin, etc. This is reported by almost everyone in attendance.
Joah’s first section is dedicated to rebutting the claim made by Dustin and me that the miracle of the sun doesn’t have anything to do with Mary. They point out that there is actually a pretty long-standing tradition relating Mary to the sun. Fair enough! I never thought this argument had much weight, but I consider this a good response and hereby retract this objection.
(Context for title).
The most serious objection to Fatima is that there are lots of other cases where people look at the sun and report similar experiences to the ones the Fatima witnesses experienced. Often we have it on video that the sun was physically normal. Other times, the apparitions conflict with Catholicism, so it would be really embarrassing for the Catholic if they were a miracle. Other times we have lots of people saying they see nothing, so that it’s pretty clear there was no miracle. Other times, as in Medjugorje, the appearances are so common that it’s pretty implausible that they’re miraculous.
So it’s pretty clear that phenomenology like Fatima—where people see the sun spin, not be painful to gaze at, change the colors of the landscape—can be repeated naturally. Read Scott’s post linked above for more details. For example, after a kind of crazy woman who warned of the Rothschilds and said that she saw George Washington predicted a sun miracle in Necedah, one report on the topic notes:
Reading hundreds of documented, independent testimonials from the Van Hoof vision on November 7, 1950, I was overwhelmed by the number who claimed to see the sun spin and abnormally glow. I leafed through the pages, searching statement after statement, some written a decade or more
afterthe event, but none less passionate than the first. How could hundreds of people see the exact same manifestation? What really happened?At exactly noon, as Mary Ann Van Hoof was about to share her spiritual message with the crowd of 50,000, the clouds rapidly parted and the sun broke through. Many in attendance claimed they were instantaneously warm and dry.
People exclaimed, “Look! The Sun!” And according to the written documents, the sun appeared, spinning. Muted from its normal hue, the brilliant light did not hurt their eyes. The orb turned lavender, navy, gold and red. Then, the sun came careening toward earth and zigzagged across the sky, not only once, but again nearly 30 minutes later. (Sourced from the book: Testimonials of Pilgrims, Queen of the Holy Rosary Mediatrix of Peace Shrine)
…
I am spellbound by the knowledge that my family, Mary Ann Van Hoof and the bizarre public apparitions all came together at the exact time predicted – like some kind of extraordinary cosmic force.
And note: her apparition occurred at solar noon, when the sun was very bright. also has been able to find other sun “miracles” that occurred at solar noon. Now, maybe you think Necedah was demonic, but a bunch of people in attendance saw nothing—which would be weird if demons were making people see things.
Scott Alexander found many examples of people seeing sun “miracles”—some are on YouTube, and in some areas of the world, like the Philippines, similar sun miracles supposedly happen all the time. also found one from Thailand, various ones before Fatima, and found some Eastern Orthodox ones that are at least somewhat similar. Fatima isn’t unique.
Why is this such an embarrassment for the Fatima crowd?
Three reasons. First, it means that there’s a natural explanation of a lot of the weirdest features of Fatima. People can, in mundane natural settings, predicted in advance, see the sun appear to fall to Earth, not be painful to gaze at, change colors, change the colors of the landscape, etc. This was what seemed impressive at Fatima originally. Now, we learn that it’s demonstrably natural and happens all the time in some places.
Second, natural events generally happen more than once. So the naturalistic explanation of Fatima ~guarantees that there would be other similar events. The supernatural explanation doesn’t. In fact, it’s pretty weird if God does a bunch of miracles that are a lot like Fatima, when their main effect is to cast doubt on the veracity of Fatima.
Third—and this is the most important point—it makes the Fatima miracle ridiculously weird. If there is going to be some naturally-explicable sun miracle, given naturalism, it is guaranteed that it will resemble the standard thing that people see when they stare at the sun in suggestible settings.
In contrast, if God is going to do a miracle, then it would be very surprising if the light that he chooses to manifest in the sky bears many different striking similarities to what people see when sungazing in religious settings. If God is going to do a sky miracle, why in the world would he make the sky light he creates look in many different surprising and independent ways exactly like what you see when sungazing?
If God was doing a miracle in the skies over Fatima, the odds it would resemble in all its most impressive features mundane sungazing is very close to zero. Ask: if ahead of time you were told that God was going to do a giant miracle in the sky, would you expect it to bear about six different suspicious features that also accompany mundane sungazing. The features shared by mundane sungazing are:
The sun not being painful to gaze at.
The sun changing colors.
It appearing to spin.
It changing the colors of the landscape.
It looking like it’s crashing to Earth.
The odds of having all those features is ~0 if it was a miracle, while it’s ~1 if it was natural given that all these things happen when people look at the sun in suggestible settings. So this fact alone ends the debate. It’s a KO; Fatima is dead, find a new miracle!
Joah’s first reply strikes me as very weak:
It’s unclear what is suspicious about it. Surely the fact that the Miracle of the Sun looked superficially like something natural is not a good reason to doubt that it was miraculous. Most miracles are bound to look superficially like something natural, simply because there are so many natural things they might superficially look like.
It’s not suspicious that it looked like something natural. It’s suspicious that the natural thing that it looks like is precisely the natural thing that you should think they were staring at if it wasn’t a miracle. If Fatima looked like some exotic rare weather event, that wouldn’t discredit it much. But if it looks like what people say the sun looks like when you stare at it—and people were staring at the sun—that’s a big problem.
Sungazing effects would cast doubt on the Miracle of the Sun if they constituted a remotely plausible
alternative explanationof the evidence.
Even if sungazing doesn’t match every single detail, the presence of religious analogues is still strong evidence against the miraculous explanation of Fatima for the reasons I described before. If God was doing a sun miracle, it’s very surprising that he’d make it look like mundane sungazing in ~6 different ways. So the sungazing explanation has both a defensive and an offensive component. The defensive component gives the non-Catholic a good explanation of Fatima’s most surprising features. The offensive component makes the miracle that the Catholic has to posit occurred look ridiculously weird. It’s as if God was going out of his way to make the evidence weak, by having Fatima’s phenomenology match ordinary sungazing.
Joah then run through a list of reasons they don’t think the sungazing explanation could have been adequate. I don’t buy any of these.
The light source seen by the witnesses at Fatima was comfortable to stare at, which means it did not cause the retinal overstimulation necessary to produce sungazing effects.
But the same thing is reported during mundane sungazing. At Necedah, for example, which very clearly wasn’t miraculous, the earlier source reports “Muted from its normal hue, the brilliant light did not hurt their eyes.” As Scott notes, many of the Fatima witnesses claimed, after seeing Fatima, to see later recapitulations of the same phenomena. At Medjugorje, sun “miracles” happen all the time—one witness reported:
I saw the solar phenomenon in Medjugorje with my dear late mother, along with a large group of people, in 2010. It was a wonderful and unforgettable spectacle. It was possible to watch it without discomfort. It pulsated and changed colors around me, red, blue, green... incredible. I’ve read various explanations, but none can match or explain what I saw. Only something from the sky could have created it. I rule out an atmospheric phenomenon. From what I’ve heard, it doesn’t happen often, but only every now and then.
So not being painful to gaze at isn’t *at all *unique to Fatima. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception—and we could give many more examples of it being present.
Not only was the light source comfortable to stare at, but at least fifteen witnesses noted that the object was seen against the backdrop of a “clear sky”, “blue sky”, “free from all clouds”, etc. The midday Sun is not comfortable to stare at in the absence of cloud coverage.
A bunch of witnesses also describe the sun being obscured by clouds—about as many as say it was cloudless. In fact, some make it sound like the sun passed through clouds of differing depth, which would explain why some testimonies describe it passing away from clouds. They may have confused lighter clouds with no clouds. In addition, if the witnesses started by looking at the sun behind clouds, and then it moved out from behind clouds, the difference in brightness might not hurt their eyes—because their eyes were already used to the sun when it was veiled by clouds but still bright.
In any case, at Benin city, witnesses describe the sun being unobscured, even though on video ▶it seems like it was partially obscured by clouds (though it’s a bit hard to tell what was going on). At Necedah, the earlier source declares “At exactly noon, as Mary Ann Van Hoof was about to share her spiritual message with the crowd of 50,000, the clouds rapidly parted and the sun broke through.” So this kind of testimony is not unique to Fatima. And remember, at Necedah, it’s clear there was no miracle—as even Ethan agrees—because lots of people saw nothing!
The colors cast by the light source on the surrounding landscape were noted by witnesses who had their backs turned to the Sun in order to avoid optical illusions.
There were two people who noted this: Manuel Gonçalves Júnior and Carlos Silva. Goncalves said that he didn’t deliberately look at the sun, not that he didn’t see the sun. He also reports the presence of smoke, which may, if real, have partially contributed to the sun’s optical effects. I’m not that surprised that one of the hundreds of witnesses reported this kind of thing—especially given the ambiguity of the testimony. I couldn’t find the date of Carlos Silva’s testimony; Muse’s source was from 1960, and it wasn’t in the DCF, so I assume it was a lot later. In any case, I’m not at all impressed by the evidence from two people—one a year later, one many years later—saying they saw the optical effects without looking at the sun. Eyewitness accounts are very unreliable about these kinds of things.
The witnesses experienced convergent visual phenomenology, whereas sungazing effects would have been idiosyncratic.
It was similarly convergent at Dhammakaya, Necedah, and most of Scott’s other cases. There’s agreement about the basic phenomenology, even though there’s disagreement about exactly which colors the sun became—both at Fatima and the other cases.
The witnesses all saw the miracle at the same time, whereas the onset of sungazing effects would have been staggered.
Again, same with all of Scott’s cases. Rather than trying to speculate from the armchair, without any evidence, about what crowds in suggestible religious settings would see when they look at the sun, you should look to see what *actual crowds do see *when in suggestible religious settings they look at the sun.
Multiple witnesses
distinguishedthe light source from the Sun.
As best I can tell, there are two people who report this. If there were two light sources in the sky, probably a lot of people would have noticed. So if anything, I take this to be reasonable evidence *against *Joah’s hypothesis.
Photogrammetric evidence and testimony from distant witnesses show that the light source seen by the Fatima witnesses was not the actual Sun but a localized emitter. Many of the distant witnesses saw precisely what we would
expectthem to see given their distance and orientation relative to the Cova. Especially probative here are cross-group undesigned coincidences between testimonial reports. For instance, witnesses in Alburitel describes athreefold descent of the “Sun” when looking towards the Cova (and away from the actual Sun), which exactly corroborates testimonies to threefold descent from people at the Cova.
Neither I nor Joah have the technica…
