On Religion and the ‘Miracle of Fátima’
My friend Peter has recently written on miracles, here and here.
I have never been particularly religious. I went to a rural primary school bent on indoctrinating children with Protestantism, to limited effect. And to especially limited effect for me, as my parents - having rebelled against their own Christian upbringings - were determined that I should grow up an atheist, dedicated to scientific inquiry.
And so, I became interested in science. I hung out almost exclusively in atheist circles throughout my education. I grew up in environments that saw religion, and religious education in particular, as a nuisance. Agnosticism was fine, I suppose, but full-throated belief was stupid.
And so, dutifully, I became who I was supposed to be. An atheist, occasionally moonlighting as an agnostic.
At this point, I am a full-time agnostic - and it’s an easy job, too. Sitting on the fence, hedging one’s bets. I’ve long thought that it’s a decent career path. But is a decent career enough for me? I’m an ambitious type of person. And I have similarly ambitious friends, and some of them are Christian, and it seems to pay well for them.
This post is part of my recent efforts to find out more about religion, and Christianity in particular.
In conversation with those friends, and reading Peter’s posts, one particular miracle has piqued my interest. I am used to cut-and-dry schemes to deal with religious claims, but this one seems somewhat impervious to the familiar rationalist tools sharpened over the last century and more by Messrs. Darwin, Dawkins, Hitchens and others. It is the Miracle of the Sun, or the ‘Miracle of Fátima’.
Having done a bit of reading, I still don’t believe that the ‘Miracle of Fátima’ is anything supernatural. But I do feel I could be convinced.
I advise reading the Wikipedia page on the Miracle of the Sun before reading my post, to get an understanding of the event and the issues at play.
What follows began as a paragraph or so, and developed into a short essay.
Now, without further ado, here is a first attempt at some arguments for my position.
Fátima of the gaps?
My broad feeling on the miracle is quite a simple one. There is no scientific narrative that explains convincingly what happened at Fátima. Not collective hysteria, not entoptic phenomena, not anything. But the mere fact that no scientific explanation can be found does not immediately prove a miracle.
And to be fair, I don’t know that there are many people totally convinced that a miracle happened, even in religious circles. Acting as if convinced, perhaps - but are they really, totally convinced? I’m not so sure. But that’s a topic for another post.
Collective Illusion and Mass Hysteria
Another explanation is that this could be a collective illusion - people were expecting it to happen, and they saw it happening. Educated people did not see it happening (as I understand). So presumably they also did not observe the dried clothes phenomenon and so on as well.
Instances of mass hysteria and collective illusion are well-documented. This is a thing that happens.
So, if the Miracle of the Sun was some sort of collective illusion phenomenon that can happen in humans, what would we expect to see? I would contend:
Some seeing and not others
People seeing different things and some of them overlapping (someone said “look at the sun!”, not “look at the sun, it’s moving in X precise way!” and thus people were free to imagine what they wanted. Plausibly people near to each other saw similar things because of conferring and so on)
One random dude on a boat having seen it (and who knows if he actually wrote the letter etc.)
There is then the related issue of social pressure. If you say you haven’t seen the miracle, you may be outcast as a heretic (among family/friends). See the Asch conformity experiments, for example.
On the dried clothes, after being out in the sun for a bit your clothes do get drier, and if you want to believe that they’ve been miraculously dried, it doesn’t seem to me a massive stretch to believe that.
I feel like there must be something in these children as well. I just can’t figure out what. But why these three random kids, two of whom died soon after? Sherlock time on that one.
Also, it seems there’s this one De Marcia guy or whoever that wrote most of the stuff about it. A single source is obviously dodgy.
But then there are other witnesses, though they’re still a small proportion of the tens of thousands who supposedly saw it. I guess those others may not have been literate, or if they wrote about it those records aren’t around any more. They probably told others and hence the story spread throughout Portugal and Spain.
The Sun
Another thing about this - say it had been something more easily observable. Like, everyone saw a large boulder rise 50m into the air, zoom about a bit, and then fall again. I’d believe that more. The sun is hard to look at anyway, let alone observe in detail. It makes funny patterns on your retina even after looking away. It’s a prime suspect for ‘seeing things that aren’t really there’, IMO.
Also, I see no reason for people to claim it didn’t happen unless it actually didn’t happen. In that case, it’s in people’s minds. But then people’s clothes were dried. So then the whole thing seems super sketchy.
Collective Bullshittery Theory
I actually feel it’s possible the whole thing is a load of collective bullshittery. Possibly even that people were paid or coerced into reporting this. Poor people in rural Portugal need money. And this would also explain not everyone seeing it and so on. Coercion from local church figures also possible. I’ve read eg Requien por un Campesino Español, which shows that pre-war rural Iberian Catholics with power can be…not very nice people.
Sun Dogs?
Various scientific explanations have been posited for what happened, including Sun Dogs. But the Sun Dogs stuff is just such a poor argument from whoever thought of it that it’s barely worth debunking. I mean, the chances of sun dog on that particular day etc. Gimme a break on that one, Mr. Scientist.
But also, any other claim that this is a scientific phenomenon also has to contend with the unlikeliness of so many people gathering to see this phenomenon, without prior knowledge that it would occur, at that time.
Conclusion
Overall, I feel like if there’s a religion that loads of people believe, at some point it’s likely that something like this will happen. And there are many weak arguments against it. I believe one of those is likely to be right vs the miracle claim - I’m not ready to relinquish by skeptical shackles quite yet - but I could be convinced otherwise.