The Miracle of Fátima (Reply to Peter)
I recently wrote a post on the Miracle of Fátima, which was responded to here by my friend Peter. I would note that Peter knows more about the subject than I due to having done somewhat more research. What follows is a response to his response - a mixture of attempt to understand, and attempt to argue.
It is an attempt to make the best case I can against his arguments, conceding points where necessary. I find it increasingly hard to make a compelling case against the idea that some kind of miracle occurred. I’m still skeptical - if asked to bet, I’d certainly bet that nothing supernatural happened. After all, the mere fact that I can’t disprove it sitting from my desk doesn’t mean in the slightest that it happened. But I’d make my bet with somewhat sweaty palms and a niggling sense that I could actually be wrong on this one. I assign it some non-trivial, but still small, probability.
Peter: It does seem a minority of people didn’t observe this. I think the claim that it was the educated who didn’t witness it has been superimposed by sceptics – the count who observed it and became converted, the sceptical journalist who observed it, and the nun all are examples of educated people who did observe the Miracle of the Sun. Indeed, the one identified witness who didn’t observe it was the lady’s carriage driver – she suggested he must’ve been feeding the horses at the time!
Whether there were varying rates of observing the miracle across education (and, as I spell out above, I’m not sure there were) would also only be relevant if there was a clear link by which the more educated are less likely to be suggestible. This is not true.
The possibility of suggestion, hallucination, and conformism is transient here nonetheless – as I say, I think it is the only sceptical argument to the Fatima miracle that makes any sense.
I think people are more suggestible in domains about which they know less, and I think less educated people are more likely to be suggestible in a more general sense. I haven’t been able to find any research on this (and I doubt research sufficiently applicable to this situation exists), but it seems straightforwardly true. Atheism has been able to grow due in part to better scientific education1.
I’m also happy to accept that some educated people observed it.
Some educated people, mind. It was claimed ‘no one educated’ said they saw it. It’s not as if the count and the journalist (and the nun - who, let's be honest, is hardly an impartial observer) were the only educated people there (as I understand it). But I feel this is more of a point for you to clear up as you know more about the situation than I do.
Peter: I think the power of conformism is definitely relevant here. But fear of being cast out as a heretic is definitely not. The Church was slow to accept the miracle as believable. At the time, the Church was annoyed with the children for raising the profile of the Church at a time with a Portuguese government hostile to organised Christianity. If anything, proclaiming the miracle was going against the grain of both legal and Church authorities.
What I’m imagining is Catholic families and friendships that would be torn apart or at least shaken by someone denying a miracle. This is something of a ‘story’ - it’s not a perfect argument - but I think it has weight regardless of the views of the Church. I think the point on the views of the Church is more powerful as an argument against my coercion point later.
Another point - it is generally reported that people ran away from the Sun, fearing what was going to happen. But I feel this could easily be a stampede phenomenon. If the people around you are running away, you’ll run too, before thinking.
Brief responses to a few other points made by Peter:
On the children - that was just a musing. There is no reason why any given person would have a revelation. And on reflection I doubt it’s relevant.
On De Marchi - granted, he’s not the only source.
On the number that reported seeing the miracle. It does seem very likely to me now that most saw the miracle. My chink of doubt is that I don’t yet have totally hard evidence of this. We have reports from various sources that this was the case, but not the sources themselves. This may seem hyper-skeptical, or asking too much, but I don’t think it is. If a group of people had an agenda - the nun, the newspaper reporter, the count - they could exaggerate the number that saw this. But again, I no longer believe it to be likely that they’ve done significant amounts of exaggeration.
The Sun
A quote from Peter:
Feels a bit like taking a clear example and then saying ‘well it could’ve been better’. E.g., if I saw a car grow wings and fly and then said ‘would’ve been clearer if it was a truck, cars are kinda small’.
What I was actually getting at was entoptic phenomena.
I also disagree with your example - that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that if I wanted to see something that was not actually there, looking at the Sun would be the first thing I’d do. It makes a funny pattern on the retina. This is not a great argument - I’m not suggesting any specific phenomenon - but it does seem convenient that the Sun was the source of this miracle. The point of the flying boulder example is that boulders do not do funny things to people’s eyes, and I’m unaware of any such clear miracles.
Not to mention that, reading the accounts, it’s not totally clear to me that this was not just a simple change in the weather. The accounts suggest the breaking of clouds, changing colours and so on - these are familiar phenomena to all of us, and can occur suddenly. Whilst it is evidence of the supernatural if these things occurred in the fantastical way they are reported, it’s not totally clear to me that people weren’t just making a miracle out of a molehill here. (Though this too doesn’t touch the point about the Sun’s movements - the evidence suggests that you had to look at the Sun to see the miracle, after all).
But also - it could have been better. Believers must contend with the fact that we have thus far no ‘science-approved’ miracles for which there are no remotely plausible alternative explanations. Any miracle-believer must provide a reason why God does not produce a clearly-measurable, unquestionable miracles, so that all may believe. I don’t think that’s necessarily a difficult task for them, but they must still rise to it.
Given that a minority of people didn’t observe it, these may well just be those who were filtering out odd events they were not open to see. This sounds far fetched, but consider the gorilla example. There is a man dressed as a gorilla – but those focused only on the ball do not see him in plain sight.
I’m not really convinced by this. If the phenomenon was so small as to be missable, that just makes me more skeptical of the phenomenon and think more that it could have been entoptic.
On ‘Collective bullshittery theory’, I take the point that the Church didn’t like it.
A final thought
Has there ever been anyone on the skeptical side with enough resources to look into this in enough depth? I’m not sure there is. By enough depth, I mean really, really consider arguments of entoptic phenomena, incentives to exaggerate reporting, conformism and so on like those I’ve put forward in this post. And perhaps we will never get answers. I still think some sort of collusion between or exaggeration from those reporting the event is possible.
Conclusion
I set out to find reasons not to believe in this miracle, feeling like it would be quite easy. My conclusion is not that it definitely happened - far from it, I feel nothing supernatural happened. I have never observed anything supernatural myself, and I trust that evidence more than I trust words on a screen. But I would note that, making my arguments, I increasingly feel like a conspiracy theorist trying to debunk NASA’s manned moon mission. And needless to say, I don’t want to be one of those.
(Perhaps this seems a circular argument - atheist education is ‘better’, therefore those educated on natural selection and so on are ‘better’ educated - but I don’t agree. I think almost everyone would agree that everyone is better educated now than 100 years ago, regardless of what was taught).