I'm continually surprised to discover how wide the gap in experience is between us WEIRDOs and folk who are more anthropologically "normies". Have you read happened to read Daniel Everett's "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes"? The whole book is worthwhile for a bunch of reasons, but he opens with the most relevant part for this conversation. While living with the Pirahas, a tribe in the Amazon, he and his daughter are called to the river, where many of the other villagers are pointing to a "god" who is standing on the other side. He writes:
"Even I could tell that there was nothing on that white, sandy beach no more than one hundred yards away. And yet as certain as I was about this, the Pirahas were equally certain that there was something there. Maybe there had been something there that I missed seeing, but they insisted that what they were seeing, Xigagai, was still there."
His young daughter came out to have a look, and like her father, saw nothing. Everett continues:
What had I just witnessed? Over the more than two decades since that summer morning, I have tried to come to grips with the significance of how two cultures, my European-based culture and the Pirahas culture, could see reality so differently. I could never have proved to the Pirahas that the beach was empty. Nor could they have convinced me that there was anything, much less a spirit, on it.As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another’s views more readily. But as I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally."
(Note: I'm quoting some of the interim text from Rod Dreher, who blogged about this, but it is a faithful quote from the book as I remember it, though I've misplaced my copy at the moment.)
We've still got to consider the possibility that we're the ones who aren't seeing what's really there, and the natives/peasants/illiterates are. I think it's much less likely (which I suppose I would), but the parts of this that concern me are:
1. We invest far more resources into ensuring we socialise people to see reality "correctly."* I don't mean woeness in education, I mean math, science etc in education. Primitive cultures presumably do this more haphazardly as it comes up. I'd expect our worldview to get this wrong.
2. We assign social status heavily on only seeing things that are "really there." At the extreme end we medicate/detain people who hallucinate too much, but you should never underestimate how many ostensibly educated people will have some kind of ghost story experience that they avoid talking about due to embarrassment. If I looked at the sun and saw it dancing around the sky and no-one else reacted, there's a decent chance I wouldn't tell anyone.
3. We have a worldview that admits a very discrete set of things as capable of actually happening or existing, and rules out a lot of things as "impossible." If saw one of the chairs in my dining room levitate off the ground, do a 360 degree spin and then land precisely where it was, I'd immediately write it off as something I didn't really see/a hallucination. A primitive person could call it a miracle, a poltergeist, maybe sometimes chairs do that etc. I'm fairly confident I don't keep "hallucinating" vividly and then forgetting about it (other than dreams), but it's plausible that a lot of sensory edge cases resolve into the worldview-approved version.
4. We explicitly teach children that their imaginary friends aren't real, but as children a lot claim they can really see/interact with them (apparently - I've never encountered the imaginary friend thing in real life).
I think all of this is massively outweighed by the fact that we're just objectively better at using our worldview to achieve engineering results, so saying we're wrong is limited. I'm less sceptical of the idea that raw sense data is a total mess of noise that we selectively filter into something useable that reflects reality, and WEIRD filter more out due to having a more robust worldview, but I've no idea if that's really right.
*All the scare quotes are for things that seem obviously genuine to me but which could be up for debate if the WEIRD people are wrong.
Ooh, excellent devil's advocating! I think each of those points have strength, but (like you) I wonder if the opposite of some of them have even more.
For example, I agree that we hold a rigid worldview, teach kids to conform, and give social status to those who do... but my sense is that we do that less than most other historical societies. (I have relatives, for example, who talk to aliens, so crystal healings... and they're beloved members of their community!)
Your point about engineering is excellent, and reminds me of that xkcd that suggests that a lot of paranormal beliefs, if true, should be able to make bank: https://xkcd.com/808/
WEIRD is an acronym referring to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, i.e. the sorts of people in this comments section, as opposed to medieval peasants, hunter-gatherers, military aristocrats, junta looters, etc.
My bad! Chastity's answer is precisely right (and delightfully tart). The acronym comes from the anthropologist Joseph Henrich, who introduced the term in 2010 as part of a paper that's caused a minor apocalypse in the social sciences, pointing out that the typical subject of most psychology experiments is ludicrously ATYPICAL of the average human being (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20550733/). A useful tool for one's cognitive utility belt!
Suppose fifty eyewitnesses say they saw you stab a man in broad daylight. I might conclude: "If there were only one eyewitness, we wouldn't really be sure if he were lying or not. But caring about it being fifty rather than one is the sample size compensation fallacy. So there's no strong reason to believe you stabbed the man."
I think the answer here is - if it were only one eyewitness, we might dismiss him as unusual in some way - a liar, or someone with an axe to grind against you, or feeble-minded and easily manipulated.
Once we have fifty, we know those things are probably not true. So we can't explain this away by appealing to unusual characteristics of the eyewitness. We need to accept that an average ordinary person, in the same situation, would also say he saw you stab the man.
This is a weaker statement than "you definitely stabbed the man". It could be that your identical twin stabbed the man. Increasing the sample size from 50 -> 50,000 doesn't do much to rule this out. (I do think it maybe does a little to rule it out, because you might expect that in a crowd of 50,000, at least one person is some kind of freakish super-recognizer skilled at telling twins apart, and that person might speak up - but I'm not really attached to this).
So I think there are two steps:
- Going from 1 -> 50 is genuinely useful in eliminating negative outliers and getting you to average
- Going from 50 -> 50,000 has limited use beyond that, as you describe
I disagree with the rest of the post on a more factual level.
First, as we discussed, many of the witnesses were not peasants. We don't have enough negative witnesses to really calculate with good sample size whether peasants were more likely to see the event than others, but the very small n we have says not really. One of the advantages of large sample sizes is that you do get the occasional journalist or science professor, and these people seem to have seen the same as everyone else. If you want to say nobody in Portugal was trustworthy by aspect of Portuguese culture, there were some foreigners too.
Second, although we can't 100% rule out strong selection pressure to find positive witnesses and silence negative ones, the evidence we have seems to push against it. The Diocesan inquiry specifically asked negative witnesses to come forward. There was another inquiry that specifically looked for educated professionals to make sure they saw the same thing as everyone else. John Haffert writes that of his ~200 interviews, 198 were positive and 2 were negative. I brought up the anti-clerical climate of the time to argue that if there had been negative witnesses, many of them would have had incentives to come forward, and many newspapers would have had incentives to publish them.
I think the most likely conclusion is that 90%+ of the people at Fatima, including the well-educated people and the foreigners, saw the effect. I think given the large sample size of the crowd, we can conclude that for any given random person, had they been at Fatima, there's a 90%+ chance they would have seen the effect.
I agree with you that this cannot help us conclude between "there was a real miracle" and "there is some very strong illusion that causes lots of people to see a spinning sun under the right circumstances", and that adding more people (100,000! 1,000,000!) would not further change the balance between these two effects. I thought of my post as an attempt to investigate the claim that there's a strong illusion which would cause 90%+ of people to see a spinning sun under the right circumstances, which is a priori pretty strange (most sungazers don't see it, and if you try to look at the sun you'll notice it's not spinning or changing color), but does have some weak evidence in support (the occasional sungazer who does see it, fire kasina, etc).
"One of the advantages of large sample sizes is that you do get the occasional journalist or science professor, and these people seem to have seen the same as everyone else..There was another inquiry that specifically looked for educated professionals to make sure they saw the same thing as everyone else. John Haffert writes that of his ~200 interviews, 198 were positive and 2 were negative."
The thing is that "educated professional" covers a lot of ground. Sam Harris is an educated professional, so is Rod Dreher. It matters which kind we're talking about. That's why I put so much stress on finding people who had a record of skepticism before the event. Harkness-Murphy noted that one astronomer cited as an educated professional was highly religious. I think you might underestimate how much conformity traditional cultures have, even among the relatively educated. I've seen polls of the developing world where 99% or 100% of the population believes in God.
Many people in the developing world are of course doctors and lawyers and such, but they don't think like elites in Western nations do. Again, this undersells it, because almost no country today has a 30% literacy rate like Portugal did at the time.
Same applies to the foreigners who were there. Who were they? The kind of person who would make the trip on the world of a ten year old child might be quite biased.
"I brought up the anti-clerical climate of the time to argue that if there had been negative witnesses, many of them would have had incentives to come forward, and many newspapers would have had incentives to publish them."
Again, this depends on some skeptics actually having been in attendance, which we are unable to find evidence for except for one case. I agree if the crowd was 70,000 we might expect a few. But I don't know, if you're in a crowd and 99% of people are religiously inclined and a huge portion of them are 100% convinced they saw something miraculous, you may come to doubt your own senses. I feel this would be much less likely to happen with a Christopher Hitchens type, or an intellectual with a solid worldview and contempt for the peasants. But again, we only appear to have one case of an actual skeptical intellectual there.
Precisely this. Scott says: "One of the advantages of large sample sizes is that you do get the occasional journalist or science professor" missing here the relevant continuation "...who likely thought it reasonably plausible that God was about to make the sun dance in the sky". Journos and science professors can have wacky beliefs, too - a common Rationalist tenet, in fact!
I read Scott's original essay and I think it's clear this is a nothingburger. You have given a good explanation as to why mass testimony is worth very little, but really why do smart rationalists need to be reminded that post-event memory editing is a thing? I can't help but think of Acts 17 and the weirdo Christian craze sweeping silicon valley (though I admit maybe that's unfair).
The biggest problem is that Scott seems to forget the difference between claims and direct evidence, and what priming and social psychology before, during and after are when he discusses this event, to the point that he starts sounding like a Christian apologist saying "500 people saw Jesus post-mortem and how can you explain that with mass hallucinations, so it really happened" (I'm not going to explain what's wrong with this argument, but if your first default thought is I'm making the hume 'miracles are impossible' case then you're already lost), but its basically the same error at Fatima.
First off, he gave an unnecessary bad naturalistic alternative. Scott's naturalistic explanation for Fatima in his big essay runs as follows: there's some previously unknown optical illusion that makes the sun appear to spin and change colors, and this illusion is modulated by cloud cover and social priming. Then, through memory conformity, expectation effects, and selective reporting, we get the more elaborate details—the consistent color sequences, the cross visions, the Virgin's face. This explanation has some virtues in that there are some weak extra reasons to postulate this specific illustion, but it also has a fatal flaw: Scott needs memory conformity, social contagion, and selective reporting to be strong enough to add angels and crosses to the base phenomenon, yet he treats them as insufficient to explain the spinning and falling sun itself. Why posit an unknown optical illusion when the same social mechanisms he's already invoking can just explain the entire story? Supposedly because it's "too consistent", but we'll get to that.
Here's the simpler story: people stare at a cloud-filtered sun and see ordinary entoptic phenomena—afterimages, color shifts from retinal bleaching, apparent motion from microsaccades, brightness pulses as the sun peeks through clouds. These are known effects that even solo sungazers report occasionally. Now add maximal social priming (a crowd of seventy thousand who traveled through rain to witness a prophecied miracle at a specific time), immediate social reinforcement ("Look!" "Do you see it?" "Yes!"), and post-event memory consolidation as people compare notes and converge on a standard narrative. You get dramatic, apparently consistent reports of the sun spinning, changing specific colors in sequence, and plunging toward earth. We don't even need all these to be in place by the end of day, most of the dramatic reports were collected way later when witness contamination should have majorly set in.
The mechanisms Scott admits are powerful enough to add the Virgin Mary to the story are more than powerful enough to elaborate "I saw colors and shimmering" into "the sun danced and fell three times." The gap is smaller, not larger, and yet Scott invents a new entity to bridge it while using the same social priming tools for everything else.
And when Scott appeals to the supposed consistency of reports to justify his unknown illusion (or implicitly - maybe there is a boundless necessary being who is his own goodness and exists as a trinity who decided to fuck with people in portugal for no reason), he's committing a basic methodological error: he's treating attestations as facts rather than as evidence to be interpreted. Again, he SAYS he's not doing this but just goes ahead and does it anyway just in a more subtle way.
I'm going to pick on only ONE example and drill down on it.
Take his claim that if the phenomenon took time to appear, witnesses would have mentioned it, so its not consistent with ordinary entoptic effects:
"It's still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked."
But what does "immediately" even mean in retrospective accounts from a highly primed crowd? And yes, even if its a journalist writing a newspaper account a couple of days later, that's still highly retropsective.
Picture it: you're staring at the sun because someone yelled to look, you're in a state of intense anticipation, and see dancing lights around the sun. Thirty seconds of staring before you notice anything just registers as "I looked and then I saw it." Then everyone else says "I saw it right away" in the hours later. Even if a journalist interviews you that same evening, that's more than enough time for this kind of minor detail to get smoothed over by memory conformity, especially when everyone around you is saying "it happened right away!"
And did everyone even get asked 'did it appear immediately?' - no? This is not a fact to be explained, it is a point about how the indirect testimony is written. The fact that this was reported weeks, months or years later or not contradicted is what needs explaining, not "that sun dancing was seen by 70k people at once".
I can't stress enough that THIS APPLIES TO EVERY SINGLE DETAIL Scott cites: the timing, the number of times the sun "fell," the color sequences etc etc. The testimonies aren't even that consistent when you read them closely, as Scott himself admits, but whenever this threatens his theory he finds a reason to explain it away and moves on.
Okay so what about consistency? This is Scott's "90%+ saw it" statistic from data collectors. Those percentages look high, but consider the filtering chain. If it was 90% of people in a random sample interviewed by well trained police detectives an hour later then we're (kind of) talking. But we don't have that.
Okay, suppose it was totally mundane entoptic effects plus social psychology, and a police detective interviewed witnesses that very evening and wrote it all down: you'd already have contamination from social contagion during the event, immediate discussion afterward, and maximal priming from the prophecy. That might get you to half reporting the described patterns with the rest being weird variations.
Then add the actual data collection, not our idealized kind: institutions gathering testimony weeks, months, or years later, after the narrative crystallized and Fátima became a pilgrimage site. Scott claims the Catholic Church and miracle-hunters used "proper methodology" because they "asked for negative witnesses": I think this is pretty weak.
Then, we add on post-hoc filtering of who came forward, additional memory conformity from the story being public knowledge, sampling bias in who reported, and outright lies from motivated believers. In my opinion, this can easily bridge the gap from 50% to 90%. Once you know the stages we go through and we don't need to explain why 90% described that exact sequence in a court deposition that very evening we don't need the extra consistency of a unique ultra-rare optical effect meaning the sun did look like it danced, that just got added on as a basic element of the memory-conformed story.
To sum up, this whole exercise is totally bogus. If you want me to take the distant witnesses or the dramatic consistency seriously, show me one contemporaneous diary entry from THAT VERY DAY, from someone who didn't know about the prophecy, written before they heard any reports that just described it neutrally, someone who recorded "strange solar phenomenon today at noon" without contamination.
The least contaminated source we have is the newspaper report from 2 days later (still mega-contaminated) which describes people seeing the sun dance and being terrified, but lacks the elaborate, consistent details about three distinct descents, specific color sequences, and other dramatic elements that characterize testimonies collected weeks to years later.
Meta point: I think this overexcitement about religion and miracle claims in the rationalist/SV/SSC community is a bad thing and we need to remember some basic traditional rationality tenets about how we evaluate surprising claims. Perfect boundless beings of pure actuality that are their own goodness and are the reason anything exists may or may not exist (that's above my pay grade quite frankly) but they don't play pranks on villagers in Portugal.
Belief in the supernatural and miracles =/= gullibility, unless by circular logic you decree that belief in the supernatural and miracles is automatic proof of gullibility.
e.g. Rod Dreher talks about miracles all the time, but he doesn't blindly accept them. He regularly expresses skepticism towards specific claims of the supernatural on his blog.
Like many other religious people, he evaluates the nature of supposed miracles based on personal experience, or the credibility of the witnesses - the same way reasonable people evaluate any observed phenomenon.
Even assuming that most of the crowd was illiterate peasants, would "social pressure" explain the degree to which all their stories line up? That to me was the thrust of Scott's original article. Like with the stabbing analogy, imagine a crowd of 50 saw it, 20 of them said that they saw you stab the guy in the right kidney, 5 or so say they saw you stab him on the left, but basically everyone agrees there was some kind of stabbing around the waist area. That's the important part that needs to be explained.
We overwhelmingly cave to submit to social pressure, though. There’s a number of experiments where one test subject will be in a small group that claims a circle is a triangle. Not only does the test subject usually agree at the time, they also privately report they saw a triangle on a written questionnaire. We are a sociable and suggestible species!
25% nonconformity is quite notable! (Also, the participants generally admit that they knew the answer they were giving was wrong). But anyway, even if it was only 5% it's not really what I'm talking about. It's not just about conformity, but consistency in the conformity. Like if some people "saw" the triangle move left and right and some "saw" it move up and down, but there was at least widespread agreement that the triangles did move, that could point to something else going on that needs more investigation.
Points for looking up my claim. :) I still think this points to extremely high suggestibility, though. In these experiments, a group of people you don’t know say something you would have zero trouble saying was false if you were alone. Then move to “all of my friends and family” and it’s something more ambiguous.
Or to take another example: sports refs. Tens of thousands of fans will sincerely agree that a ref made a bad call when it’s against their team. They’re highly motivated and immediately create consensus on what they believe they saw.
Neither Sam Harris nor Rod Dreher are “educated professionals”. They’re not working professionals the way doctors, lawyers, etc. are. They’re just dilettantes.
I find it very strange you don’t take suggestibility more seriously. ‘I saw something weird’ very easily becomes ‘I saw what everyone else says they saw’. I think if you had been there at Fatima you would have seen the sun peeking out from behind some clouds and maybe a few weird retinal effects.
But, based on your article, what we have instead is a crowd of 50 people, and one of them saw a man stab another man to death, another saw him shoot him with a gun, a third saw him hug the man, a fourth saw them shaking hands, and so on. If 50 people catch a disease where the only shared symptom is “something weird happens to your leg”, everybody recognized this as a social contagion.
If large numbers of supposed testimonials add credence to miraculous claims than L Ron Hubbard’s “Have You Lived Before This Life?” Must also be investigated thoroughly. He makes all kinds of claims about the universe and has dozens of case studies and testimonials. Please write a 12,000 word substack investigating it.
When you talk about anticlerical climate, it can cover both the disillusionment with the church and the widespread act of disbelief. The second case, people becoming atheists en masse, is much harder to prove (personal beliefs tend not to be written up quite as much as a scathing column on a corrupt institution). Finally, atheists at the time did not become rationalists, they still likely had a bunch of wacky beliefs (theosophist, world spirit, etc) and might still be primed to accept magical events. I would discount the "skeptic score" of the witnesses accordingly.
And (as someone with family and friends scattered across the Spanish-Portugese countryside), there is still today an approach to religion there that is mystical, superstitious (calling on saints, talismans, etc) coupled with bone deep faith, all of it acquired during childhood. I can only imagine how it was at Fatima. I would thus likewise up the "contaminability and belief virulence scores" of attendees.
It seems possible that a large-scale optical illusion occurred, after which people converged onto a collective consensus about what, exactly, they saw. Assuming ordinary levels of suggestibility and credulity, I think it's quite likely that the most sensational embellishments became fixed details via social contagion in short order.
This wouldn't take very long when you think about network effects and could've been ongoing during The Event.
If that's correct, you'd expect to see discrepancies between reports of the sort that emerge when two criminals are interrogated separately after having mutually agreed to repeat the same false story. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems to check out.
I'm inclined to fortify Hanania's argument by noting that attempts to replicate the Asch conformity studies have found that secular/skeptical personality traits only provide a mild protective effect against social pressure (dropping from something like 35% to 25%, IIRC)—that's conformity for a given set; conforming to social pressure at least once throughout the trial was much more likely (75%?)
Overall, your article on Fatima seems more even-handed to me than Richard is making it out to be. But there are a few moments where you seem to drift into uncharacteristically uncritical territory(?)
> "I would have expected that having dozens of videos of the sun miracle would finally clarify things. Instead, they’ve only gotten more confusing. The part that should be most easily captured even on blurry cell phone footage - the sun changing color and staining everything around different colors - is totally absent. Yet it seems like something must be happening to impress all of these crowds, and that the camera is able to capture some of it."
You include the testimony of a Redditor claiming to be a photographer who themselves expresses uncertainty. As a professional illustrator, I'd like to suggest that visual experts are often profoundly wrong when analyzing images. The video footage of these supposed miracles seems prima facie unimpressive to me, and I don't really understand why it should confuse rather than clarify.
When discussing the delusion/hallucination hypothesis, you emphasize that this would be an unprecedented scale/magnitude. But so what? *Some* mass hallucination has to be the biggest and most coincidental one out there—why not Fatima?
I like your materialist proposal to explain the event, but even supposing we take all of the evidence seriously—a big ask unto itself—it implies doing a small update towards that explanation OR towards the delusion/hallucination hypothesis, and no update whatsoever towards a supernatural explanation.
Jaki presented the religious politics as tamping down on the reporting by everyone despite this being a huge, months long event. Consider Cohelo’s measured reports which has him attacked by both sides. Atheists/Secularists didn't want to publicize it and the Church didn't endorse it formally until 1930 to avoid being discredited. In the interim Portugal had a coup which led to a brief Catholic friendly president, a flu pandemic, a WW, and then another coup followed by an extremely anti-clerical regime. Considering all this, I think there is probably a bias against negative or equivocal reports either out of apathy, or other concerns like dead children or malnutrition and social/financial prohibitions because in the interim before Church recognition the Fatima shrine was already well established.
- People vary in how much pain they feel when looking at a bright light
- People vary in how much eye damage they sustain from staring at the sun
- Some people can stare at the sun *for minutes at a time* without any ill effects (lucky bastards)
- Staring at a bright light in the right mindset, and then meditating on the swirling colors and afterimages, can induce experiences that match what people claim to have seen during Fatima
- There are several schools of meditation that focus on these experiences, including Kasina fire meditation and Tibetan Buddhism
- Not everyone lives in a part of the world where sometimes the weather conditions are just right, and the cloud cover is just thin enough, to allow me to occasionally see the sun as a clear, pearly white disk in the sky that doesn't hurt to stare at
Oh, and most important of all:
- Educated nerds on Substack live in a bubble and have no idea how superstitious rural people can be!
It boggles my mind that Ethan Muse fixated on the idea that thin cloud cover can't make the sun look like a pearly white disk that isn't painful to stare at. He spent so many words arguing that that can't happen because of optical physics. (Meanwhile, a bunch of physicists helpfully came out of the woodwork to explain why his calculations were wrong.)
And I was sitting there, reading the back and forth, smh because I've seen the sun do exactly that, many times. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic US. I still live here. It certainly doesn't happen *all the time* - but it happens maybe once every year or two. Weather conditions have to be just right. Other commenters said it happened a lot more often in the Mountain West (Utah, Colorado) because the required clouds form much more often.
This thread made me realize that not everyone lives in an area where the weather does this. Which, ok, fair. Different worlds, etc.
But Ethan was absolutely incredulous about this. He insisted that we were mistaken, that we were misremembering details from childhood, that we were falling for Scott's suggestive wording in his informal discord poll, that every photo of the sun looking like that in fog/thin cloud cover was a digital artefact - and on, and on. It's just... so puzzling. Why was *that* the detail that he fixated on and defended to death?
First, in the comments, I was defending the claim was that you can't have the conjunction of these three effects: (i) high solar elevation, (ii) crisp, well-defined solar disc, (iii) comfortable fixation because of cloud attenuation. I agknowledge that people have seen the conjunction of (ii) and (iii). However, I question the memory of people that were claiming to have seen this at high solar elevations (and only about the precise elevation which is not a detail that I expect people to be good at remembering).
Second, I have a hypothesis about when you can get the conjunction of (ii) and (iii) from thin clouds as the attenuating medium: when the vertical optical depth is low, but the slant optical depth is high (which can only happen at lower solar elevations). Then a thin cloud (VOD = ~2-3) can attenuate the direct beam by 10^5 (the standard for eclipse glasses) without isotropizing the diffuse component of the illumination. This seems to be consistent with radiative transfer simulations, but I haven't tested it rigorously enough to be confident that I'm right about it.
Third, I'm not "absolutely incredulous" - I'm curious. I take there to be four possibilities: (i) I'm right, (ii) I have a conceptual misunderstanding about atmospheric physics (quite plausible, but then I want to fix my misunderstanding), (iii) there is something wrong with radiative transfer models (least plausible, but big if true!), or (iv) there is a mundane cloud geometry that violates one or more my simplifying assumptions (quite plausible, but then I want to fix my ignorance).
Fourth, "every photo of the sun looking like that in fog/thin cloud cover was a digital artifact." I pointed out that there is a difference between visual glare and camera glare (visual tolerance is 1-2 OOMs lower than cameras), so camera photographs aren't all that helpful. Either way, I can't remember anybody finding a photograph where they confirmed the conjunction of (i), (ii), and no camera glare.
Evidentially speaking, I dont think this matters for the debate about authenticity. I'm not emotionally invested in the discussion, but nobody forwarded a valid objection to the physical reasoning. And, suspiciously enough, all the most credible testimony about the effect happened at lower solar elevations (for instance, there was a guy that made a painting of what he saw on the day it happened - and when we check the time, it implied a solar elevation of about 10 degrees).
I was born in Alabama and most of my family were themselves raised in the rural countryside.
Generally, they interpret everything that happens through a religious worldview. Their accounts of supernatural events are very underwhelming and don’t match my own experience of them. For example it would be common during a church service to be overcome with religious emotion and speak in tongues.
This never happened to me even one time. I’ve been to church hundreds of times and never had that type of emotional reaction to the service. Imagine their reaction if they were in a crowd that large in the context of Fatima? They would almost certainly report seeing something interesting, whereas I again would have likely not.
Whats more likely is that religiosity is a quality of a person, with some being susceptible to that way of thinking and some being impervious to it.
Moon Khomeini gives it away. The old Richard Dawkins argument that everyone is an atheist with respect to 99% of gods is undefeated. Everyone has a story for why their favorite reported miracle has special characteristics that set it apart from all other reported miracles. In the end we all fall back onto cultural familiarity. Quite telling that the “God exists, and he’s Catholic,” prior is so privileged over the “God exists, and he’s Shia,” prior.
I've read a whole book (I think it was a PhD thesis) on this subject a looong time ago and there isn't any believable and coherent description of what happened. Basically what would be surprising is that thousands of people baking for hours in the scorching sun of Portugal in mass hysteria would NOT have hallucinations. Particularly, that repeatedly looking at the Sun without any protection whatever, they wouldn't see blotches, moving lights, coloured blobs etc.
The closest I've been to such a moment of mass hysteria was on Sienna's Piazza del campo watching horses racing around us during il Palio, among a crowd of thousands packed like sardines. I can tell you that even if you don't give a frigging damn about horses and races and the competition between Sienna's neighbourhoods, you're just as mad as anybody else, hollering at the top of your lungs and feeling incredibly excited and literally high as a flaming kite on cocaine when the winning horse passes the line.
I've heard it described as the Emperor of China fallacy. Take E.T. Jaynes in Probability Theory, page 258 in my edition:
The classical example showing the error of uncritical reasoning here is the old fable about the height of the Emperor of China. Supposing that each person in China surely knows the height of the Emperor to an accuracy of at least +/- 1 meter; if there are N = 1,000,000,000 inhabitants, then it seems that we could determine his height to an accuracy of at least as good as 1/SQRT 1,000,000,000 = 0.03mm, merely by asking each person's opinion and averaging the results.
The absurdity of the conclusion tells us rather forcefully that the SQRT N rule is not always valid, even when the separate data values are causally independent; it is essential that they be *logically* independent. In this case, we know that the vast majority of the inhabitants of China have never seen the Emperor; yet they have been discussing the Emperor among themselves, and some kind of mental image of him has evolved as folklore. Then, knowledge of the answer given by one does tell us something about the answer likely to be given another, so they are not logically independent. Indeed, folklore has almost surely generated a systematic error, which survives the averaging; thus the above estimate would tell us something about the folklore, but almost nothing about the Emperor. [...] As Henri Poincare put it: 'The physicist is persuaded that one good measurement is worth many bad ones.'
Side point, but @CosmicSkeptic did an interview with a scholar who, in part, speculated on what Jesus looked like. He pointed out that it’s extremely difficult to imagine a short savior.
> The fact that so many people showed up expecting a miracle, based on nothing more than the words of a ten-year old girl who claimed to speak with an imaginary being and her cousins, is itself pretty discrediting for that community.
This is a great point, along with being beautifully written. I do suspect there is some critical mass for events like this, wherein once 1,000 people indicate they're going, lots of other people join in since it's "something to do" or "such and such local person with status thinks it's worth going to" or "that girl I really like is going" and so on, similar to how lots of people go to festivals because they're friends are going. If some child seers were claiming that a major miracle would take place near where I live, and several thousand people were intending to go, I might also join in - assuming I had nothing else to do - just to see what those people are like.
One point Scott makes - which you didn't really address - is the consistency of the stories told by the witnesses. When you poll Americans who they're voting for, there's really only two answers you expect to hear. When you ask people to explain what the miracle they claim to have seen looked like, you should expect get a much wider range of responses, so it should be surprising when the stories sound consistent with each other; spinning sun, looked like it was falling and going to crush everyone. If the responses *are* consistent, then that needs explaining.
If you only have a small group of people who see the miracle, one explanation for this consistency might be that they spoke to each other after the event and made their stores 'fit' together more neatly. I think something like this happens in many social settings, such as in the aftermath of an argument. But this seems less likely to be the case when you're working with a larger group - those 60 people are less likely to have spoken to each other. Worth remembering too that there is a bias in the sampling *in favour* of people who saw something different from the standard story - see this quote from Scott's original piece "The diocese apparently didn’t trust the parish, and launched their own investigation five years later, including a call from the bishop specifically asking for people who had seen something different from the parish investigation’s story or even nothing at all".
> People often tell stories from their lives in ways that make them sound more interesting. Saying I was always a believer is a much less compelling narrative than having been skeptical at first and then becoming convinced.
This bit I'm less sure about. Is it more common that people alter their memories to show them updating from one position to another in order to make themselves more interesting than it is for people to claim they believed the 'right' thing all along? These aren't Bay Area rationalists who get social credit for 'updating'. My point being that if somebody from 1910s Portuguese society was a skeptic and then witnessed a miracle, they would be more likely to play down their previous skepticism than to exaggerate it.
Yes I think the consistency of the stories can be explained quite easily once you take into account social pressures I outlined here.
As for the point about how people would remember, I think you would in a large crowd expect some people to say they believed all along and others to emphasize previous skepticism. If you were known as less pious than your neighbors, it may not even be credible to pretend to have been the most faithful person there. And if you want to be interesting, when everyone else is saying that they believed all along, saying you were a skeptic is a way to stand out.
Maybe I'm slightly more sceptical of social pressure working on a large enough scale to cause that kind of post-hoc shift in thinking.
I can see strong social pressure causing people to think they are witnessing a miracle and feel emotions of excitement - everyone around you is gasping and pointing at the sun and saying 'Milagre! Milagre!' - to such an extent that you sort of hallucinate, but I'm less convinced it would cause people who thought they experienced one kind of miracle to then align what they think they experienced with some broader narrative *after the fact*.
For example, if you believe you saw the face of Christ in the sun, do you then drop this after some time and start to believe "No, I didn't see the face of Christ, I actually saw the sun spinning and falling to the ground and thought it would crush me" because lots of people claim they say the sun falling? Maybe you just forget that you ever believed the whole bit about Christ and adopt the spinning+falling narrative.
Maybe I am underestimating how conformist they are (i.e. lying at the dinner table to avoid social awkwardness; "Oh yeah I totally saw the sun spinning and crashing to the ground").
It doesn’t seem to me strange they would all converge on a similar story. Most probably were on a state of shock as it was happening and convergence could have happened quickly. Maybe someone yells “oh my God it’s spinning” and then if you were inclined to see Jesus’ face you would see that instead. Then later on there are even more opportunities for your memories to play tricks on you.
Christian hagiography emphasises conversion from faithlessness. Augustine spends dozens of pages trying to prove what a terrible person he was before his 'conversion' (he was already a Christian), when he seems to have just been an ordinary guy.
Good article. If you live in Israel and associate with religious people you become completely inured to miracle stories. If you put in the effort, you can see what's wrong with them, but you quickly lose the will to do even that.
1. As a German Catholic, I shrug at Fatima, Lourdes and what not (much rarer and smaller miracles north of the Alps, near zero in Protestant countries - how come?). Also never heard about the specifics of the sun-miracle before Scott's text. It is not relevant for 21st century Catholicism, and was not in the XX..
2. As I wrote on ACX comments: there are people in those "miracle videos" (Africa/Croatia) who are completely unimpressed, guiding their tourist group, selling refreshments, or just standing around bored. Explanation?
3. I agree with Hanania. Portugal at that time was a peasant country, very little industry, very low literacy. Sure, there were some wild intellectuals in the capital. But none of them attended.
4. Doctors/Teachers embedded in such a society are not beacons of rationality. As a Nigerian wrote: "In fact, the majority of the educated elite in Nigeria rejects, explicitly or implicitly, the scientific worldview from which modern education emerged. " https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/guest-post-the-global-iq-debate-a
"This brother of mine is academically brilliant and is currently a tenured faculty at a top 3 university in the UK. He attained this feat before he clocked 33 years. However, and here's the tragedy: with all these scholarly accomplishments and exposure to the very peak of cultural refinement, he is extremely religious. This brother of mine is so thoroughly oriented to process reality almost exclusively through the lens of his Christian faith that it has become absolutely impossible for both of us to communicate through that mental divide. And the worst part of this is that his religious sentiments are not even of the refined type (the type you'd often find expressed by say a Dostoyevskian character), but more or less in agreement with what you're likely to encounter almost everywhere among average Nigerians. For instance, my dad recently had a health challenge with prostate enlargement and my brother's first go-to explanation was that it must be a spiritual attack."
> Also never heard about the specifics of the sun-miracle before Scott's text. It is not relevant for 21st century Catholicism, and was not in the XX..
Oh, but it was. And even German Catholicism had its Resl von Konnersreuth and the exorcism of Anneliese Michel.
Shrug. Kolping and Edith Stein or Prof. Ratzinger are relevant for Catholicm. As a North German in the Diaspora, I never heard of Resl and the other poor soul. Fringe.
I live in India, so I see this shit fairly regularly, moreso among the older folk. My Dad talks about having supernatural experiences all the time. Like, when he was younger and he and our aunt was looking for an arranged marriage for my older cousin and they were really worried because she was getting rejected by all the guys. Then my dad had a dream one night where "Sai Baba", an obscure Indian mystic from the 20th century who some Hindus believe to be a real God, appeared in his dreams and told him "everything will be fine" and according to my dad, the very next day my cousin got a marriage proposal from a rich guy in the US. I'm not even sure if this actually happened the very next day or if it's just my dad just adding his own embellishments to the story. I'm inclined to believe it's the latter because he's quite the story teller 😂
Another story, I remember being around 12 or 13 at the time, 3 people died in a span of just a few months. Now, most of them were old people who died of old age, but there was one particularly tragic case of a 12 year old girl who died in a fire accident. So people started to argue that all of this was because a part of compound wall of the building had collapsed a few months prior and that was a bad omen in "Vaastu", which is just the Hindu version of Feng Shui.
People in the west really don't understand how a lot of these rural, religious folk think. Quite literally everything gets filtered through an extremely religious lens. Science or rationality has no place in this.
There is a still better reason to doubt those who claimed to witnessed miracles involving heavenly bodies: such stories are impossible. There is truly a conflict between a religion which claims that God, through an act of divine will, can alter the normal physical laws which govern creation, and the science which holds that God, if such a being exists, has created a universe which operates through rules which are immutable and inexorable. If we are to believe that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis in a regular way, then were the earth to depart from this motion suddenly, we would be exposed to immense and terrible forces which most likely would destroy the planet altogether. Some alteration of the sun’s position would be the least concern of any who might survive such a cataclysm. The dependency of Christianity upon “miracles” is an abiding weakness in its theology.
I only read about half of his Fatima article because the most logical explanation to me seems self-evident without needing hardly any investigation. I didn't care about his digging into eyewitness accounts and was more interested in speculation about what the phenomenon might be.
1. Weird atmospheric phenomenon can and do happen. I feel like there is some news article every week saying something like "Super rare green dog moon tonight! You won't see this again for 30 years!" or "Once in a lifetime meteor shower tonight!"
I myself say the last total eclipse of the sun here and it is a very surreal experience even when you know exactly what's happening. It does indeed get dark as late twilight or early night in the middle of the day, crickets start singing, birds start roosting, etc.
2. Yes, peasants are gullible. They often think the rare green dog moon is a sign from God.
Some actually unusual (but entirely natural) thing could very well have happened. This doesn't mean it was a miracle.
It's also possible it was a case of collective delusion. Such episodes have also been documented.
No, it's not. Most people are not logical because evolution does not reward pure logic. It rewards gene replication. Humans are optimized for tribal integration and status games because shunned monkeys don't breed and often die. Most of us have terrible mental models of how human reasoning works. Most people engage in rationalization, not reason. It takes consistent, often exhausting efforts to constantly fight back your own lizard brain.
We are obviously dependent on witnesses from the past because they are often the only source of information we have at all. This doesn't make them de facto reliable. The most logical expectation is they are a bunch of de facto humans and will behave like de facto humans. De facto humans rationalize.
Hence, why I just took it for granted that it's entirely possible they did see something weird that day. They don't even need to convince me of witness credibility for me to believe this was a possibility. But that doesn't actually explain much. Cool, you saw something weird. And?
*Edit*
An anecdotal example. I once had a conversation with a guy about whether God existed and he presented me with a picture on his phone of his mangled wrecked car which looked like it had been fed through some kind of industrial shredder. He challenged me to answer how he could have gotten out of there alive? It seemed highly improbable.
I asked him to explain the equally weird probability that my dad's 4-year-old son from his first marriage was randomly killed by a swing set that fell over on him.
> One reason I don’t put much stock in the testimony of early twentieth century Portuguese peasants is that my mom’s side of the family are poor rural people from the third world. They often report on supernatural events in their lives.
> According to one source I found, about two-thirds of Portuguese children were illiterate in 1920, and it was probably higher among adults, and even higher still in Fatima.
For what it’s worth, I’m Portuguese, coming from a relatively poor family and that definitely matches my experience.
On my father’s side, I knew two great-grandparents (both born in the 1920s). My great-grandfather taught himself to read, but my great-grandmother was illiterate.
On my mother’s side, the oldest person I’ve known is my grandfather (born in the 1930s). He didn’t go to school but, if I recall correctly, was taught how to read by a friend.
My great-grandparents and grandparents are/were all quite religious and have/had all kinds of superstitious beliefs and habits.
And even among my cousins and aunts/uncles, you’d be shocked at the amount of mystical and supernatural experiences they (the women more than the men, to be fair) claim to have witnessed (the White Lady is a classic one) and even superpowers (talking to the dead, etc) they claim to hold. All with a straight face. It’s nuts. And fun fact: when trying to persuade me of it, they actually go the “I used to be a skeptic too” route, which I know is a lie.
So I can only imagine how superstitious and untrustworthy adult Portuguese peasants of the 1910s and 1920s were.
I grew up in a traditionalist Catholic church, where (as is usual) the Fatima apparitions were fairly popular. Some people there claimed to have experienced miracles. One woman for instance had seen a ghost and was cured miraculously, although she was mentally unstable.
And almost everyone believes in farcical hagiographies, private revelations and many nonsensical miracle stories that had been written for the edification of readers and were believed without question.
I agree with Hanania, but would like to add some points:
1) How were these stories put to the test? From my experience, most likely not at all. Church investigations are suspect: a) In hagiographies, heroic visionaries often must persist against the doubts of church authorities or if they are younger, endure punishing beatings by their parents. In this way, critics can be used to enhance the story. b) A priest will not assess a claimed miracle with scientific criteria, but look at its authenticity in the context of church teachings as he understands them. This makes him very susceptible to confirmation bias, and gullible in the face of charismatic individuals or merely those who understand what he wants to hear.
2) Many Catholic miracles are like literary tropes, understood and even looked for by believers. A sun miracle may have simply been expected based on religious images and pious legends the Fatima children were exposed to. Skeptics usually do not know this!
They therefore use scientific phenomena like optical illusions or come up with psychological explanations for specific visions. As it turned out, there were many reported sun miracles after Fatima, which was itself inspired by Marian apparitions that had become very popular in the 19th century.
3) "[...] it can just as easily be argued that the politicized nature of overt religiosity contributed to the community coalescing around a story that could serve as a rallying cry against a hated regime and put their little village in the middle of nowhere at the center of the cosmos. I’m no historian of Portuguese politics [...]" <- This is exactly what secular historians believe, and of course the political significance of Fatima greatly increased after the Russian Revolution as the Virgin Mary became a weapon against Communism.
I'm continually surprised to discover how wide the gap in experience is between us WEIRDOs and folk who are more anthropologically "normies". Have you read happened to read Daniel Everett's "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes"? The whole book is worthwhile for a bunch of reasons, but he opens with the most relevant part for this conversation. While living with the Pirahas, a tribe in the Amazon, he and his daughter are called to the river, where many of the other villagers are pointing to a "god" who is standing on the other side. He writes:
"Even I could tell that there was nothing on that white, sandy beach no more than one hundred yards away. And yet as certain as I was about this, the Pirahas were equally certain that there was something there. Maybe there had been something there that I missed seeing, but they insisted that what they were seeing, Xigagai, was still there."
His young daughter came out to have a look, and like her father, saw nothing. Everett continues:
What had I just witnessed? Over the more than two decades since that summer morning, I have tried to come to grips with the significance of how two cultures, my European-based culture and the Pirahas culture, could see reality so differently. I could never have proved to the Pirahas that the beach was empty. Nor could they have convinced me that there was anything, much less a spirit, on it.As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another’s views more readily. But as I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally."
(Note: I'm quoting some of the interim text from Rod Dreher, who blogged about this, but it is a faithful quote from the book as I remember it, though I've misplaced my copy at the moment.)
Very interesting.
We've still got to consider the possibility that we're the ones who aren't seeing what's really there, and the natives/peasants/illiterates are. I think it's much less likely (which I suppose I would), but the parts of this that concern me are:
1. We invest far more resources into ensuring we socialise people to see reality "correctly."* I don't mean woeness in education, I mean math, science etc in education. Primitive cultures presumably do this more haphazardly as it comes up. I'd expect our worldview to get this wrong.
2. We assign social status heavily on only seeing things that are "really there." At the extreme end we medicate/detain people who hallucinate too much, but you should never underestimate how many ostensibly educated people will have some kind of ghost story experience that they avoid talking about due to embarrassment. If I looked at the sun and saw it dancing around the sky and no-one else reacted, there's a decent chance I wouldn't tell anyone.
3. We have a worldview that admits a very discrete set of things as capable of actually happening or existing, and rules out a lot of things as "impossible." If saw one of the chairs in my dining room levitate off the ground, do a 360 degree spin and then land precisely where it was, I'd immediately write it off as something I didn't really see/a hallucination. A primitive person could call it a miracle, a poltergeist, maybe sometimes chairs do that etc. I'm fairly confident I don't keep "hallucinating" vividly and then forgetting about it (other than dreams), but it's plausible that a lot of sensory edge cases resolve into the worldview-approved version.
4. We explicitly teach children that their imaginary friends aren't real, but as children a lot claim they can really see/interact with them (apparently - I've never encountered the imaginary friend thing in real life).
I think all of this is massively outweighed by the fact that we're just objectively better at using our worldview to achieve engineering results, so saying we're wrong is limited. I'm less sceptical of the idea that raw sense data is a total mess of noise that we selectively filter into something useable that reflects reality, and WEIRD filter more out due to having a more robust worldview, but I've no idea if that's really right.
*All the scare quotes are for things that seem obviously genuine to me but which could be up for debate if the WEIRD people are wrong.
Ooh, excellent devil's advocating! I think each of those points have strength, but (like you) I wonder if the opposite of some of them have even more.
For example, I agree that we hold a rigid worldview, teach kids to conform, and give social status to those who do... but my sense is that we do that less than most other historical societies. (I have relatives, for example, who talk to aliens, so crystal healings... and they're beloved members of their community!)
Your point about engineering is excellent, and reminds me of that xkcd that suggests that a lot of paranormal beliefs, if true, should be able to make bank: https://xkcd.com/808/
Sorry, what are WEIRDOs?
WEIRD is an acronym referring to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, i.e. the sorts of people in this comments section, as opposed to medieval peasants, hunter-gatherers, military aristocrats, junta looters, etc.
My bad! Chastity's answer is precisely right (and delightfully tart). The acronym comes from the anthropologist Joseph Henrich, who introduced the term in 2010 as part of a paper that's caused a minor apocalypse in the social sciences, pointing out that the typical subject of most psychology experiments is ludicrously ATYPICAL of the average human being (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20550733/). A useful tool for one's cognitive utility belt!
I think this proves too much.
Suppose fifty eyewitnesses say they saw you stab a man in broad daylight. I might conclude: "If there were only one eyewitness, we wouldn't really be sure if he were lying or not. But caring about it being fifty rather than one is the sample size compensation fallacy. So there's no strong reason to believe you stabbed the man."
I think the answer here is - if it were only one eyewitness, we might dismiss him as unusual in some way - a liar, or someone with an axe to grind against you, or feeble-minded and easily manipulated.
Once we have fifty, we know those things are probably not true. So we can't explain this away by appealing to unusual characteristics of the eyewitness. We need to accept that an average ordinary person, in the same situation, would also say he saw you stab the man.
This is a weaker statement than "you definitely stabbed the man". It could be that your identical twin stabbed the man. Increasing the sample size from 50 -> 50,000 doesn't do much to rule this out. (I do think it maybe does a little to rule it out, because you might expect that in a crowd of 50,000, at least one person is some kind of freakish super-recognizer skilled at telling twins apart, and that person might speak up - but I'm not really attached to this).
So I think there are two steps:
- Going from 1 -> 50 is genuinely useful in eliminating negative outliers and getting you to average
- Going from 50 -> 50,000 has limited use beyond that, as you describe
I disagree with the rest of the post on a more factual level.
First, as we discussed, many of the witnesses were not peasants. We don't have enough negative witnesses to really calculate with good sample size whether peasants were more likely to see the event than others, but the very small n we have says not really. One of the advantages of large sample sizes is that you do get the occasional journalist or science professor, and these people seem to have seen the same as everyone else. If you want to say nobody in Portugal was trustworthy by aspect of Portuguese culture, there were some foreigners too.
Second, although we can't 100% rule out strong selection pressure to find positive witnesses and silence negative ones, the evidence we have seems to push against it. The Diocesan inquiry specifically asked negative witnesses to come forward. There was another inquiry that specifically looked for educated professionals to make sure they saw the same thing as everyone else. John Haffert writes that of his ~200 interviews, 198 were positive and 2 were negative. I brought up the anti-clerical climate of the time to argue that if there had been negative witnesses, many of them would have had incentives to come forward, and many newspapers would have had incentives to publish them.
I think the most likely conclusion is that 90%+ of the people at Fatima, including the well-educated people and the foreigners, saw the effect. I think given the large sample size of the crowd, we can conclude that for any given random person, had they been at Fatima, there's a 90%+ chance they would have seen the effect.
I agree with you that this cannot help us conclude between "there was a real miracle" and "there is some very strong illusion that causes lots of people to see a spinning sun under the right circumstances", and that adding more people (100,000! 1,000,000!) would not further change the balance between these two effects. I thought of my post as an attempt to investigate the claim that there's a strong illusion which would cause 90%+ of people to see a spinning sun under the right circumstances, which is a priori pretty strange (most sungazers don't see it, and if you try to look at the sun you'll notice it's not spinning or changing color), but does have some weak evidence in support (the occasional sungazer who does see it, fire kasina, etc).
"One of the advantages of large sample sizes is that you do get the occasional journalist or science professor, and these people seem to have seen the same as everyone else..There was another inquiry that specifically looked for educated professionals to make sure they saw the same thing as everyone else. John Haffert writes that of his ~200 interviews, 198 were positive and 2 were negative."
The thing is that "educated professional" covers a lot of ground. Sam Harris is an educated professional, so is Rod Dreher. It matters which kind we're talking about. That's why I put so much stress on finding people who had a record of skepticism before the event. Harkness-Murphy noted that one astronomer cited as an educated professional was highly religious. I think you might underestimate how much conformity traditional cultures have, even among the relatively educated. I've seen polls of the developing world where 99% or 100% of the population believes in God.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/05/06/god-spirits-and-the-natural-world/
Many people in the developing world are of course doctors and lawyers and such, but they don't think like elites in Western nations do. Again, this undersells it, because almost no country today has a 30% literacy rate like Portugal did at the time.
Same applies to the foreigners who were there. Who were they? The kind of person who would make the trip on the world of a ten year old child might be quite biased.
"I brought up the anti-clerical climate of the time to argue that if there had been negative witnesses, many of them would have had incentives to come forward, and many newspapers would have had incentives to publish them."
Again, this depends on some skeptics actually having been in attendance, which we are unable to find evidence for except for one case. I agree if the crowd was 70,000 we might expect a few. But I don't know, if you're in a crowd and 99% of people are religiously inclined and a huge portion of them are 100% convinced they saw something miraculous, you may come to doubt your own senses. I feel this would be much less likely to happen with a Christopher Hitchens type, or an intellectual with a solid worldview and contempt for the peasants. But again, we only appear to have one case of an actual skeptical intellectual there.
Precisely this. Scott says: "One of the advantages of large sample sizes is that you do get the occasional journalist or science professor" missing here the relevant continuation "...who likely thought it reasonably plausible that God was about to make the sun dance in the sky". Journos and science professors can have wacky beliefs, too - a common Rationalist tenet, in fact!
I read Scott's original essay and I think it's clear this is a nothingburger. You have given a good explanation as to why mass testimony is worth very little, but really why do smart rationalists need to be reminded that post-event memory editing is a thing? I can't help but think of Acts 17 and the weirdo Christian craze sweeping silicon valley (though I admit maybe that's unfair).
The biggest problem is that Scott seems to forget the difference between claims and direct evidence, and what priming and social psychology before, during and after are when he discusses this event, to the point that he starts sounding like a Christian apologist saying "500 people saw Jesus post-mortem and how can you explain that with mass hallucinations, so it really happened" (I'm not going to explain what's wrong with this argument, but if your first default thought is I'm making the hume 'miracles are impossible' case then you're already lost), but its basically the same error at Fatima.
First off, he gave an unnecessary bad naturalistic alternative. Scott's naturalistic explanation for Fatima in his big essay runs as follows: there's some previously unknown optical illusion that makes the sun appear to spin and change colors, and this illusion is modulated by cloud cover and social priming. Then, through memory conformity, expectation effects, and selective reporting, we get the more elaborate details—the consistent color sequences, the cross visions, the Virgin's face. This explanation has some virtues in that there are some weak extra reasons to postulate this specific illustion, but it also has a fatal flaw: Scott needs memory conformity, social contagion, and selective reporting to be strong enough to add angels and crosses to the base phenomenon, yet he treats them as insufficient to explain the spinning and falling sun itself. Why posit an unknown optical illusion when the same social mechanisms he's already invoking can just explain the entire story? Supposedly because it's "too consistent", but we'll get to that.
Here's the simpler story: people stare at a cloud-filtered sun and see ordinary entoptic phenomena—afterimages, color shifts from retinal bleaching, apparent motion from microsaccades, brightness pulses as the sun peeks through clouds. These are known effects that even solo sungazers report occasionally. Now add maximal social priming (a crowd of seventy thousand who traveled through rain to witness a prophecied miracle at a specific time), immediate social reinforcement ("Look!" "Do you see it?" "Yes!"), and post-event memory consolidation as people compare notes and converge on a standard narrative. You get dramatic, apparently consistent reports of the sun spinning, changing specific colors in sequence, and plunging toward earth. We don't even need all these to be in place by the end of day, most of the dramatic reports were collected way later when witness contamination should have majorly set in.
The mechanisms Scott admits are powerful enough to add the Virgin Mary to the story are more than powerful enough to elaborate "I saw colors and shimmering" into "the sun danced and fell three times." The gap is smaller, not larger, and yet Scott invents a new entity to bridge it while using the same social priming tools for everything else.
And when Scott appeals to the supposed consistency of reports to justify his unknown illusion (or implicitly - maybe there is a boundless necessary being who is his own goodness and exists as a trinity who decided to fuck with people in portugal for no reason), he's committing a basic methodological error: he's treating attestations as facts rather than as evidence to be interpreted. Again, he SAYS he's not doing this but just goes ahead and does it anyway just in a more subtle way.
I'm going to pick on only ONE example and drill down on it.
Take his claim that if the phenomenon took time to appear, witnesses would have mentioned it, so its not consistent with ordinary entoptic effects:
"It's still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked."
But what does "immediately" even mean in retrospective accounts from a highly primed crowd? And yes, even if its a journalist writing a newspaper account a couple of days later, that's still highly retropsective.
Picture it: you're staring at the sun because someone yelled to look, you're in a state of intense anticipation, and see dancing lights around the sun. Thirty seconds of staring before you notice anything just registers as "I looked and then I saw it." Then everyone else says "I saw it right away" in the hours later. Even if a journalist interviews you that same evening, that's more than enough time for this kind of minor detail to get smoothed over by memory conformity, especially when everyone around you is saying "it happened right away!"
And did everyone even get asked 'did it appear immediately?' - no? This is not a fact to be explained, it is a point about how the indirect testimony is written. The fact that this was reported weeks, months or years later or not contradicted is what needs explaining, not "that sun dancing was seen by 70k people at once".
I can't stress enough that THIS APPLIES TO EVERY SINGLE DETAIL Scott cites: the timing, the number of times the sun "fell," the color sequences etc etc. The testimonies aren't even that consistent when you read them closely, as Scott himself admits, but whenever this threatens his theory he finds a reason to explain it away and moves on.
Okay so what about consistency? This is Scott's "90%+ saw it" statistic from data collectors. Those percentages look high, but consider the filtering chain. If it was 90% of people in a random sample interviewed by well trained police detectives an hour later then we're (kind of) talking. But we don't have that.
Okay, suppose it was totally mundane entoptic effects plus social psychology, and a police detective interviewed witnesses that very evening and wrote it all down: you'd already have contamination from social contagion during the event, immediate discussion afterward, and maximal priming from the prophecy. That might get you to half reporting the described patterns with the rest being weird variations.
Then add the actual data collection, not our idealized kind: institutions gathering testimony weeks, months, or years later, after the narrative crystallized and Fátima became a pilgrimage site. Scott claims the Catholic Church and miracle-hunters used "proper methodology" because they "asked for negative witnesses": I think this is pretty weak.
Then, we add on post-hoc filtering of who came forward, additional memory conformity from the story being public knowledge, sampling bias in who reported, and outright lies from motivated believers. In my opinion, this can easily bridge the gap from 50% to 90%. Once you know the stages we go through and we don't need to explain why 90% described that exact sequence in a court deposition that very evening we don't need the extra consistency of a unique ultra-rare optical effect meaning the sun did look like it danced, that just got added on as a basic element of the memory-conformed story.
To sum up, this whole exercise is totally bogus. If you want me to take the distant witnesses or the dramatic consistency seriously, show me one contemporaneous diary entry from THAT VERY DAY, from someone who didn't know about the prophecy, written before they heard any reports that just described it neutrally, someone who recorded "strange solar phenomenon today at noon" without contamination.
The least contaminated source we have is the newspaper report from 2 days later (still mega-contaminated) which describes people seeing the sun dance and being terrified, but lacks the elaborate, consistent details about three distinct descents, specific color sequences, and other dramatic elements that characterize testimonies collected weeks to years later.
Meta point: I think this overexcitement about religion and miracle claims in the rationalist/SV/SSC community is a bad thing and we need to remember some basic traditional rationality tenets about how we evaluate surprising claims. Perfect boundless beings of pure actuality that are their own goodness and are the reason anything exists may or may not exist (that's above my pay grade quite frankly) but they don't play pranks on villagers in Portugal.
The likes of Peter Thiel and fat Conehead Andreesen will have a long-term destructive effect on Silicon Valley.
Belief in the supernatural and miracles =/= gullibility, unless by circular logic you decree that belief in the supernatural and miracles is automatic proof of gullibility.
e.g. Rod Dreher talks about miracles all the time, but he doesn't blindly accept them. He regularly expresses skepticism towards specific claims of the supernatural on his blog.
Like many other religious people, he evaluates the nature of supposed miracles based on personal experience, or the credibility of the witnesses - the same way reasonable people evaluate any observed phenomenon.
A whole lot of literate-sounding words in defense of nonsense.
Even assuming that most of the crowd was illiterate peasants, would "social pressure" explain the degree to which all their stories line up? That to me was the thrust of Scott's original article. Like with the stabbing analogy, imagine a crowd of 50 saw it, 20 of them said that they saw you stab the guy in the right kidney, 5 or so say they saw you stab him on the left, but basically everyone agrees there was some kind of stabbing around the waist area. That's the important part that needs to be explained.
We overwhelmingly cave to submit to social pressure, though. There’s a number of experiments where one test subject will be in a small group that claims a circle is a triangle. Not only does the test subject usually agree at the time, they also privately report they saw a triangle on a written questionnaire. We are a sociable and suggestible species!
I tried looking this up, and both Google and chatgpt pointed me towards the "Asch conformity expirements" which doesn't really seem comparable.
>"Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed."
https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
25% nonconformity is quite notable! (Also, the participants generally admit that they knew the answer they were giving was wrong). But anyway, even if it was only 5% it's not really what I'm talking about. It's not just about conformity, but consistency in the conformity. Like if some people "saw" the triangle move left and right and some "saw" it move up and down, but there was at least widespread agreement that the triangles did move, that could point to something else going on that needs more investigation.
Points for looking up my claim. :) I still think this points to extremely high suggestibility, though. In these experiments, a group of people you don’t know say something you would have zero trouble saying was false if you were alone. Then move to “all of my friends and family” and it’s something more ambiguous.
Or to take another example: sports refs. Tens of thousands of fans will sincerely agree that a ref made a bad call when it’s against their team. They’re highly motivated and immediately create consensus on what they believe they saw.
Neither Sam Harris nor Rod Dreher are “educated professionals”. They’re not working professionals the way doctors, lawyers, etc. are. They’re just dilettantes.
I find it very strange you don’t take suggestibility more seriously. ‘I saw something weird’ very easily becomes ‘I saw what everyone else says they saw’. I think if you had been there at Fatima you would have seen the sun peeking out from behind some clouds and maybe a few weird retinal effects.
But, based on your article, what we have instead is a crowd of 50 people, and one of them saw a man stab another man to death, another saw him shoot him with a gun, a third saw him hug the man, a fourth saw them shaking hands, and so on. If 50 people catch a disease where the only shared symptom is “something weird happens to your leg”, everybody recognized this as a social contagion.
If large numbers of supposed testimonials add credence to miraculous claims than L Ron Hubbard’s “Have You Lived Before This Life?” Must also be investigated thoroughly. He makes all kinds of claims about the universe and has dozens of case studies and testimonials. Please write a 12,000 word substack investigating it.
When you talk about anticlerical climate, it can cover both the disillusionment with the church and the widespread act of disbelief. The second case, people becoming atheists en masse, is much harder to prove (personal beliefs tend not to be written up quite as much as a scathing column on a corrupt institution). Finally, atheists at the time did not become rationalists, they still likely had a bunch of wacky beliefs (theosophist, world spirit, etc) and might still be primed to accept magical events. I would discount the "skeptic score" of the witnesses accordingly.
And (as someone with family and friends scattered across the Spanish-Portugese countryside), there is still today an approach to religion there that is mystical, superstitious (calling on saints, talismans, etc) coupled with bone deep faith, all of it acquired during childhood. I can only imagine how it was at Fatima. I would thus likewise up the "contaminability and belief virulence scores" of attendees.
It seems possible that a large-scale optical illusion occurred, after which people converged onto a collective consensus about what, exactly, they saw. Assuming ordinary levels of suggestibility and credulity, I think it's quite likely that the most sensational embellishments became fixed details via social contagion in short order.
This wouldn't take very long when you think about network effects and could've been ongoing during The Event.
If that's correct, you'd expect to see discrepancies between reports of the sort that emerge when two criminals are interrogated separately after having mutually agreed to repeat the same false story. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems to check out.
I'm inclined to fortify Hanania's argument by noting that attempts to replicate the Asch conformity studies have found that secular/skeptical personality traits only provide a mild protective effect against social pressure (dropping from something like 35% to 25%, IIRC)—that's conformity for a given set; conforming to social pressure at least once throughout the trial was much more likely (75%?)
Overall, your article on Fatima seems more even-handed to me than Richard is making it out to be. But there are a few moments where you seem to drift into uncharacteristically uncritical territory(?)
> "I would have expected that having dozens of videos of the sun miracle would finally clarify things. Instead, they’ve only gotten more confusing. The part that should be most easily captured even on blurry cell phone footage - the sun changing color and staining everything around different colors - is totally absent. Yet it seems like something must be happening to impress all of these crowds, and that the camera is able to capture some of it."
You include the testimony of a Redditor claiming to be a photographer who themselves expresses uncertainty. As a professional illustrator, I'd like to suggest that visual experts are often profoundly wrong when analyzing images. The video footage of these supposed miracles seems prima facie unimpressive to me, and I don't really understand why it should confuse rather than clarify.
When discussing the delusion/hallucination hypothesis, you emphasize that this would be an unprecedented scale/magnitude. But so what? *Some* mass hallucination has to be the biggest and most coincidental one out there—why not Fatima?
I like your materialist proposal to explain the event, but even supposing we take all of the evidence seriously—a big ask unto itself—it implies doing a small update towards that explanation OR towards the delusion/hallucination hypothesis, and no update whatsoever towards a supernatural explanation.
Might've missed something, though.
Jaki presented the religious politics as tamping down on the reporting by everyone despite this being a huge, months long event. Consider Cohelo’s measured reports which has him attacked by both sides. Atheists/Secularists didn't want to publicize it and the Church didn't endorse it formally until 1930 to avoid being discredited. In the interim Portugal had a coup which led to a brief Catholic friendly president, a flu pandemic, a WW, and then another coup followed by an extremely anti-clerical regime. Considering all this, I think there is probably a bias against negative or equivocal reports either out of apathy, or other concerns like dead children or malnutrition and social/financial prohibitions because in the interim before Church recognition the Fatima shrine was already well established.
Things I've learned from the Fatima Discourse:
- People vary in how much pain they feel when looking at a bright light
- People vary in how much eye damage they sustain from staring at the sun
- Some people can stare at the sun *for minutes at a time* without any ill effects (lucky bastards)
- Staring at a bright light in the right mindset, and then meditating on the swirling colors and afterimages, can induce experiences that match what people claim to have seen during Fatima
- There are several schools of meditation that focus on these experiences, including Kasina fire meditation and Tibetan Buddhism
- Not everyone lives in a part of the world where sometimes the weather conditions are just right, and the cloud cover is just thin enough, to allow me to occasionally see the sun as a clear, pearly white disk in the sky that doesn't hurt to stare at
Oh, and most important of all:
- Educated nerds on Substack live in a bubble and have no idea how superstitious rural people can be!
Edit: Alright, I turned this into its own, longer, post: https://lettersfrombethlehem.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-from-the-fatima
It boggles my mind that Ethan Muse fixated on the idea that thin cloud cover can't make the sun look like a pearly white disk that isn't painful to stare at. He spent so many words arguing that that can't happen because of optical physics. (Meanwhile, a bunch of physicists helpfully came out of the woodwork to explain why his calculations were wrong.)
And I was sitting there, reading the back and forth, smh because I've seen the sun do exactly that, many times. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic US. I still live here. It certainly doesn't happen *all the time* - but it happens maybe once every year or two. Weather conditions have to be just right. Other commenters said it happened a lot more often in the Mountain West (Utah, Colorado) because the required clouds form much more often.
This thread made me realize that not everyone lives in an area where the weather does this. Which, ok, fair. Different worlds, etc.
But Ethan was absolutely incredulous about this. He insisted that we were mistaken, that we were misremembering details from childhood, that we were falling for Scott's suggestive wording in his informal discord poll, that every photo of the sun looking like that in fog/thin cloud cover was a digital artefact - and on, and on. It's just... so puzzling. Why was *that* the detail that he fixated on and defended to death?
like a parody of the pompous atheist sceptic who values theoretical calculations over observable evidence
I dont think you've represented me fairly at all.
First, in the comments, I was defending the claim was that you can't have the conjunction of these three effects: (i) high solar elevation, (ii) crisp, well-defined solar disc, (iii) comfortable fixation because of cloud attenuation. I agknowledge that people have seen the conjunction of (ii) and (iii). However, I question the memory of people that were claiming to have seen this at high solar elevations (and only about the precise elevation which is not a detail that I expect people to be good at remembering).
Second, I have a hypothesis about when you can get the conjunction of (ii) and (iii) from thin clouds as the attenuating medium: when the vertical optical depth is low, but the slant optical depth is high (which can only happen at lower solar elevations). Then a thin cloud (VOD = ~2-3) can attenuate the direct beam by 10^5 (the standard for eclipse glasses) without isotropizing the diffuse component of the illumination. This seems to be consistent with radiative transfer simulations, but I haven't tested it rigorously enough to be confident that I'm right about it.
Third, I'm not "absolutely incredulous" - I'm curious. I take there to be four possibilities: (i) I'm right, (ii) I have a conceptual misunderstanding about atmospheric physics (quite plausible, but then I want to fix my misunderstanding), (iii) there is something wrong with radiative transfer models (least plausible, but big if true!), or (iv) there is a mundane cloud geometry that violates one or more my simplifying assumptions (quite plausible, but then I want to fix my ignorance).
Fourth, "every photo of the sun looking like that in fog/thin cloud cover was a digital artifact." I pointed out that there is a difference between visual glare and camera glare (visual tolerance is 1-2 OOMs lower than cameras), so camera photographs aren't all that helpful. Either way, I can't remember anybody finding a photograph where they confirmed the conjunction of (i), (ii), and no camera glare.
Evidentially speaking, I dont think this matters for the debate about authenticity. I'm not emotionally invested in the discussion, but nobody forwarded a valid objection to the physical reasoning. And, suspiciously enough, all the most credible testimony about the effect happened at lower solar elevations (for instance, there was a guy that made a painting of what he saw on the day it happened - and when we check the time, it implied a solar elevation of about 10 degrees).
I was born in Alabama and most of my family were themselves raised in the rural countryside.
Generally, they interpret everything that happens through a religious worldview. Their accounts of supernatural events are very underwhelming and don’t match my own experience of them. For example it would be common during a church service to be overcome with religious emotion and speak in tongues.
This never happened to me even one time. I’ve been to church hundreds of times and never had that type of emotional reaction to the service. Imagine their reaction if they were in a crowd that large in the context of Fatima? They would almost certainly report seeing something interesting, whereas I again would have likely not.
Whats more likely is that religiosity is a quality of a person, with some being susceptible to that way of thinking and some being impervious to it.
Moon Khomeini gives it away. The old Richard Dawkins argument that everyone is an atheist with respect to 99% of gods is undefeated. Everyone has a story for why their favorite reported miracle has special characteristics that set it apart from all other reported miracles. In the end we all fall back onto cultural familiarity. Quite telling that the “God exists, and he’s Catholic,” prior is so privileged over the “God exists, and he’s Shia,” prior.
I've read a whole book (I think it was a PhD thesis) on this subject a looong time ago and there isn't any believable and coherent description of what happened. Basically what would be surprising is that thousands of people baking for hours in the scorching sun of Portugal in mass hysteria would NOT have hallucinations. Particularly, that repeatedly looking at the Sun without any protection whatever, they wouldn't see blotches, moving lights, coloured blobs etc.
The closest I've been to such a moment of mass hysteria was on Sienna's Piazza del campo watching horses racing around us during il Palio, among a crowd of thousands packed like sardines. I can tell you that even if you don't give a frigging damn about horses and races and the competition between Sienna's neighbourhoods, you're just as mad as anybody else, hollering at the top of your lungs and feeling incredibly excited and literally high as a flaming kite on cocaine when the winning horse passes the line.
I've heard it described as the Emperor of China fallacy. Take E.T. Jaynes in Probability Theory, page 258 in my edition:
The classical example showing the error of uncritical reasoning here is the old fable about the height of the Emperor of China. Supposing that each person in China surely knows the height of the Emperor to an accuracy of at least +/- 1 meter; if there are N = 1,000,000,000 inhabitants, then it seems that we could determine his height to an accuracy of at least as good as 1/SQRT 1,000,000,000 = 0.03mm, merely by asking each person's opinion and averaging the results.
The absurdity of the conclusion tells us rather forcefully that the SQRT N rule is not always valid, even when the separate data values are causally independent; it is essential that they be *logically* independent. In this case, we know that the vast majority of the inhabitants of China have never seen the Emperor; yet they have been discussing the Emperor among themselves, and some kind of mental image of him has evolved as folklore. Then, knowledge of the answer given by one does tell us something about the answer likely to be given another, so they are not logically independent. Indeed, folklore has almost surely generated a systematic error, which survives the averaging; thus the above estimate would tell us something about the folklore, but almost nothing about the Emperor. [...] As Henri Poincare put it: 'The physicist is persuaded that one good measurement is worth many bad ones.'
Side point, but @CosmicSkeptic did an interview with a scholar who, in part, speculated on what Jesus looked like. He pointed out that it’s extremely difficult to imagine a short savior.
> The fact that so many people showed up expecting a miracle, based on nothing more than the words of a ten-year old girl who claimed to speak with an imaginary being and her cousins, is itself pretty discrediting for that community.
This is a great point, along with being beautifully written. I do suspect there is some critical mass for events like this, wherein once 1,000 people indicate they're going, lots of other people join in since it's "something to do" or "such and such local person with status thinks it's worth going to" or "that girl I really like is going" and so on, similar to how lots of people go to festivals because they're friends are going. If some child seers were claiming that a major miracle would take place near where I live, and several thousand people were intending to go, I might also join in - assuming I had nothing else to do - just to see what those people are like.
One point Scott makes - which you didn't really address - is the consistency of the stories told by the witnesses. When you poll Americans who they're voting for, there's really only two answers you expect to hear. When you ask people to explain what the miracle they claim to have seen looked like, you should expect get a much wider range of responses, so it should be surprising when the stories sound consistent with each other; spinning sun, looked like it was falling and going to crush everyone. If the responses *are* consistent, then that needs explaining.
If you only have a small group of people who see the miracle, one explanation for this consistency might be that they spoke to each other after the event and made their stores 'fit' together more neatly. I think something like this happens in many social settings, such as in the aftermath of an argument. But this seems less likely to be the case when you're working with a larger group - those 60 people are less likely to have spoken to each other. Worth remembering too that there is a bias in the sampling *in favour* of people who saw something different from the standard story - see this quote from Scott's original piece "The diocese apparently didn’t trust the parish, and launched their own investigation five years later, including a call from the bishop specifically asking for people who had seen something different from the parish investigation’s story or even nothing at all".
> People often tell stories from their lives in ways that make them sound more interesting. Saying I was always a believer is a much less compelling narrative than having been skeptical at first and then becoming convinced.
This bit I'm less sure about. Is it more common that people alter their memories to show them updating from one position to another in order to make themselves more interesting than it is for people to claim they believed the 'right' thing all along? These aren't Bay Area rationalists who get social credit for 'updating'. My point being that if somebody from 1910s Portuguese society was a skeptic and then witnessed a miracle, they would be more likely to play down their previous skepticism than to exaggerate it.
Yes I think the consistency of the stories can be explained quite easily once you take into account social pressures I outlined here.
As for the point about how people would remember, I think you would in a large crowd expect some people to say they believed all along and others to emphasize previous skepticism. If you were known as less pious than your neighbors, it may not even be credible to pretend to have been the most faithful person there. And if you want to be interesting, when everyone else is saying that they believed all along, saying you were a skeptic is a way to stand out.
Maybe I'm slightly more sceptical of social pressure working on a large enough scale to cause that kind of post-hoc shift in thinking.
I can see strong social pressure causing people to think they are witnessing a miracle and feel emotions of excitement - everyone around you is gasping and pointing at the sun and saying 'Milagre! Milagre!' - to such an extent that you sort of hallucinate, but I'm less convinced it would cause people who thought they experienced one kind of miracle to then align what they think they experienced with some broader narrative *after the fact*.
For example, if you believe you saw the face of Christ in the sun, do you then drop this after some time and start to believe "No, I didn't see the face of Christ, I actually saw the sun spinning and falling to the ground and thought it would crush me" because lots of people claim they say the sun falling? Maybe you just forget that you ever believed the whole bit about Christ and adopt the spinning+falling narrative.
Maybe I am underestimating how conformist they are (i.e. lying at the dinner table to avoid social awkwardness; "Oh yeah I totally saw the sun spinning and crashing to the ground").
It doesn’t seem to me strange they would all converge on a similar story. Most probably were on a state of shock as it was happening and convergence could have happened quickly. Maybe someone yells “oh my God it’s spinning” and then if you were inclined to see Jesus’ face you would see that instead. Then later on there are even more opportunities for your memories to play tricks on you.
after the fact, everyone's standing around asking each other 'wtf did we just see?', a consensus emerges
Christian hagiography emphasises conversion from faithlessness. Augustine spends dozens of pages trying to prove what a terrible person he was before his 'conversion' (he was already a Christian), when he seems to have just been an ordinary guy.
Exactly my thoughts: the arc from skeptic to believer is a classic part of religious appeals.
e.g. Roman centurion crying out that Jesus really was the son of god after crucifixion, Paul going from persecutor to key apostle
Good article. If you live in Israel and associate with religious people you become completely inured to miracle stories. If you put in the effort, you can see what's wrong with them, but you quickly lose the will to do even that.
1. As a German Catholic, I shrug at Fatima, Lourdes and what not (much rarer and smaller miracles north of the Alps, near zero in Protestant countries - how come?). Also never heard about the specifics of the sun-miracle before Scott's text. It is not relevant for 21st century Catholicism, and was not in the XX..
2. As I wrote on ACX comments: there are people in those "miracle videos" (Africa/Croatia) who are completely unimpressed, guiding their tourist group, selling refreshments, or just standing around bored. Explanation?
3. I agree with Hanania. Portugal at that time was a peasant country, very little industry, very low literacy. Sure, there were some wild intellectuals in the capital. But none of them attended.
4. Doctors/Teachers embedded in such a society are not beacons of rationality. As a Nigerian wrote: "In fact, the majority of the educated elite in Nigeria rejects, explicitly or implicitly, the scientific worldview from which modern education emerged. " https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/guest-post-the-global-iq-debate-a
"This brother of mine is academically brilliant and is currently a tenured faculty at a top 3 university in the UK. He attained this feat before he clocked 33 years. However, and here's the tragedy: with all these scholarly accomplishments and exposure to the very peak of cultural refinement, he is extremely religious. This brother of mine is so thoroughly oriented to process reality almost exclusively through the lens of his Christian faith that it has become absolutely impossible for both of us to communicate through that mental divide. And the worst part of this is that his religious sentiments are not even of the refined type (the type you'd often find expressed by say a Dostoyevskian character), but more or less in agreement with what you're likely to encounter almost everywhere among average Nigerians. For instance, my dad recently had a health challenge with prostate enlargement and my brother's first go-to explanation was that it must be a spiritual attack."
> Also never heard about the specifics of the sun-miracle before Scott's text. It is not relevant for 21st century Catholicism, and was not in the XX..
Oh, but it was. And even German Catholicism had its Resl von Konnersreuth and the exorcism of Anneliese Michel.
Shrug. Kolping and Edith Stein or Prof. Ratzinger are relevant for Catholicm. As a North German in the Diaspora, I never heard of Resl and the other poor soul. Fringe.
I live in India, so I see this shit fairly regularly, moreso among the older folk. My Dad talks about having supernatural experiences all the time. Like, when he was younger and he and our aunt was looking for an arranged marriage for my older cousin and they were really worried because she was getting rejected by all the guys. Then my dad had a dream one night where "Sai Baba", an obscure Indian mystic from the 20th century who some Hindus believe to be a real God, appeared in his dreams and told him "everything will be fine" and according to my dad, the very next day my cousin got a marriage proposal from a rich guy in the US. I'm not even sure if this actually happened the very next day or if it's just my dad just adding his own embellishments to the story. I'm inclined to believe it's the latter because he's quite the story teller 😂
Another story, I remember being around 12 or 13 at the time, 3 people died in a span of just a few months. Now, most of them were old people who died of old age, but there was one particularly tragic case of a 12 year old girl who died in a fire accident. So people started to argue that all of this was because a part of compound wall of the building had collapsed a few months prior and that was a bad omen in "Vaastu", which is just the Hindu version of Feng Shui.
People in the west really don't understand how a lot of these rural, religious folk think. Quite literally everything gets filtered through an extremely religious lens. Science or rationality has no place in this.
There is a still better reason to doubt those who claimed to witnessed miracles involving heavenly bodies: such stories are impossible. There is truly a conflict between a religion which claims that God, through an act of divine will, can alter the normal physical laws which govern creation, and the science which holds that God, if such a being exists, has created a universe which operates through rules which are immutable and inexorable. If we are to believe that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis in a regular way, then were the earth to depart from this motion suddenly, we would be exposed to immense and terrible forces which most likely would destroy the planet altogether. Some alteration of the sun’s position would be the least concern of any who might survive such a cataclysm. The dependency of Christianity upon “miracles” is an abiding weakness in its theology.
Scott's post was ridiculous.
I only read about half of his Fatima article because the most logical explanation to me seems self-evident without needing hardly any investigation. I didn't care about his digging into eyewitness accounts and was more interested in speculation about what the phenomenon might be.
1. Weird atmospheric phenomenon can and do happen. I feel like there is some news article every week saying something like "Super rare green dog moon tonight! You won't see this again for 30 years!" or "Once in a lifetime meteor shower tonight!"
I myself say the last total eclipse of the sun here and it is a very surreal experience even when you know exactly what's happening. It does indeed get dark as late twilight or early night in the middle of the day, crickets start singing, birds start roosting, etc.
2. Yes, peasants are gullible. They often think the rare green dog moon is a sign from God.
Some actually unusual (but entirely natural) thing could very well have happened. This doesn't mean it was a miracle.
It's also possible it was a case of collective delusion. Such episodes have also been documented.
> I didn't care about his digging into eyewitness accounts
Yet this was by far the most important and possibly convincing evidentiary reason that it did or did not happen.
No, it's not. Most people are not logical because evolution does not reward pure logic. It rewards gene replication. Humans are optimized for tribal integration and status games because shunned monkeys don't breed and often die. Most of us have terrible mental models of how human reasoning works. Most people engage in rationalization, not reason. It takes consistent, often exhausting efforts to constantly fight back your own lizard brain.
We are obviously dependent on witnesses from the past because they are often the only source of information we have at all. This doesn't make them de facto reliable. The most logical expectation is they are a bunch of de facto humans and will behave like de facto humans. De facto humans rationalize.
Hence, why I just took it for granted that it's entirely possible they did see something weird that day. They don't even need to convince me of witness credibility for me to believe this was a possibility. But that doesn't actually explain much. Cool, you saw something weird. And?
*Edit*
An anecdotal example. I once had a conversation with a guy about whether God existed and he presented me with a picture on his phone of his mangled wrecked car which looked like it had been fed through some kind of industrial shredder. He challenged me to answer how he could have gotten out of there alive? It seemed highly improbable.
I asked him to explain the equally weird probability that my dad's 4-year-old son from his first marriage was randomly killed by a swing set that fell over on him.
He had no answer.
> One reason I don’t put much stock in the testimony of early twentieth century Portuguese peasants is that my mom’s side of the family are poor rural people from the third world. They often report on supernatural events in their lives.
> According to one source I found, about two-thirds of Portuguese children were illiterate in 1920, and it was probably higher among adults, and even higher still in Fatima.
For what it’s worth, I’m Portuguese, coming from a relatively poor family and that definitely matches my experience.
On my father’s side, I knew two great-grandparents (both born in the 1920s). My great-grandfather taught himself to read, but my great-grandmother was illiterate.
On my mother’s side, the oldest person I’ve known is my grandfather (born in the 1930s). He didn’t go to school but, if I recall correctly, was taught how to read by a friend.
My great-grandparents and grandparents are/were all quite religious and have/had all kinds of superstitious beliefs and habits.
And even among my cousins and aunts/uncles, you’d be shocked at the amount of mystical and supernatural experiences they (the women more than the men, to be fair) claim to have witnessed (the White Lady is a classic one) and even superpowers (talking to the dead, etc) they claim to hold. All with a straight face. It’s nuts. And fun fact: when trying to persuade me of it, they actually go the “I used to be a skeptic too” route, which I know is a lie.
So I can only imagine how superstitious and untrustworthy adult Portuguese peasants of the 1910s and 1920s were.
I grew up in a traditionalist Catholic church, where (as is usual) the Fatima apparitions were fairly popular. Some people there claimed to have experienced miracles. One woman for instance had seen a ghost and was cured miraculously, although she was mentally unstable.
And almost everyone believes in farcical hagiographies, private revelations and many nonsensical miracle stories that had been written for the edification of readers and were believed without question.
I agree with Hanania, but would like to add some points:
1) How were these stories put to the test? From my experience, most likely not at all. Church investigations are suspect: a) In hagiographies, heroic visionaries often must persist against the doubts of church authorities or if they are younger, endure punishing beatings by their parents. In this way, critics can be used to enhance the story. b) A priest will not assess a claimed miracle with scientific criteria, but look at its authenticity in the context of church teachings as he understands them. This makes him very susceptible to confirmation bias, and gullible in the face of charismatic individuals or merely those who understand what he wants to hear.
2) Many Catholic miracles are like literary tropes, understood and even looked for by believers. A sun miracle may have simply been expected based on religious images and pious legends the Fatima children were exposed to. Skeptics usually do not know this!
They therefore use scientific phenomena like optical illusions or come up with psychological explanations for specific visions. As it turned out, there were many reported sun miracles after Fatima, which was itself inspired by Marian apparitions that had become very popular in the 19th century.
3) "[...] it can just as easily be argued that the politicized nature of overt religiosity contributed to the community coalescing around a story that could serve as a rallying cry against a hated regime and put their little village in the middle of nowhere at the center of the cosmos. I’m no historian of Portuguese politics [...]" <- This is exactly what secular historians believe, and of course the political significance of Fatima greatly increased after the Russian Revolution as the Virgin Mary became a weapon against Communism.