Let me begin with a confession: I honestly don’t know what to make of the “miracle of the sun” that occurred in Fatima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917, and that was witnessed by a crowd of 70,000 people (although a few people in the crowd saw nothing) and also by people who were more than 10 kilometers away from Fatima at the time, as well as by sailors on a British ship off the coast of Portugal. On the other hand, no astronomical observatory recorded anything unusual at the time.
Rather than endorsing a particular point of view, I have decided to lay the facts before my readers, and let them draw their own conclusions.
Here are some good links, to get you started.
Neutral accounts of the visions and the “solar miracle” at Fatima:
Our Lady of Fatima (Wikipedia article: describes the visions leading up to the solar miracle). Generally balanced.
Miracle of the Sun (Wikipedia article). Discusses critical explanations of the miracle, and points out that people both in Fatima and the nearby town of Alburitel were expecting some kind of solar phenomenon to occur on October 13, 1917: some had even brought along special viewing glasses. Also, the solar miracle on October 13 was preceded by some bizarre celestial phenomena witnessed by bystanders at the preceding vision on September 13, including “a dimming of the sun to the point where the stars could be seen, and a rain resembling iridescent petals or snowflakes that disappeared before touching the ground.” In short: the “solar miracle” of October 13, 1917 didn’t come entirely as a bolt from the blue.
The Fatima Prophecies by Stephen Wagner, Paranormal Phenomena Expert. Updated April 10, 2016.
Catholic, pro-miracle accounts:
Meet the Witnesses of the Miracle of the Sun by John Haffert. Spring Grove, Pennsylvania: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, 1961. John M. Haffert is a co-founder of the Blue Army of Fatima. He interviewed dozens of witnesses of the solar miracle at Fatima, and carefully records their testimonies in his book.
The True Story of Fatima by Fr. John de Marchi. St. Paul, Minnesota: Catechetical Guild Educational Society, 1956. Fr. de Marchi is an acknowledged expert on Fatima, whose account is based on the testimony of the seers, members of their families, and other acquaintances.
The Sixth Apparition of Our Lady. A short article containing eyewitness recollections, from the EWTN Website Celebrating 100 years of Fatima. (Very well-produced and easy to navigate.)
The Apparitions at Fatima. A short account of the visions and the solar miracle.
Catholic attempts to rebut skeptical debunkings of the solar miracle at Fatima:
Debunking the Sun Miracle Skeptics by Mark Mallett, a Canadian Catholic evangelist and former TV reporter. The author’s tone is irenic, and he evaluates the evidence fairly. His blog is well worth having a look at.
Ten Greatest (And Hilarious) Scientific Explanations for Miracle at Fatima by Matthew Archbold. National Catholic Register. Blog article. March 27, 2011. Rather polemical and sarcastic in tone.
Why the solar miracle couldn’t have been a hallucination:
Richard Dawkins And The Miracle Of Sun by Donal Anthony Foley. The Wanderer, Saturday, November 5, 2016. Makes the telling point that it was seen by sailors on a passing ship, who knew nothing about the visions.
A Catholic account by a scientist-priest who thinks that the “miracle” was a natural meteorological phenomenon, but that the coincidence between the timing of this natural event and the vision can only have a supernatural explanation:
Miracle of the Sun and an Air Lens (Theory of Father Jaki) by Dr. Taylor Marshall. Blog article. “Fr Jaki suggests that an ‘air lens’ of ice crystals formed above the Cova in Portugual. This lens would explain how the sun ‘danced’ at Fatima, but not over the whole earth. Thus, it was a local phenomenon that was seen at the Cova, and by others who were not present with the three children of Fatima within a 40 mile radius.” An air lens would also explain how the muddy and wet ground at the site of the apparitions suddenly dried up, after the miracle.
God and the Sun at Fatima by Fr. Stanley Jaki. Real View Books, 1999. Reviewed by Martin Kottmeyer. See also the attached footnote by Joaquim Fernandes, Center for Transdisciplinary Study on Consciousness, University Fernando Pessoa, Porto, Portugal, who argues that on the contrary, it was a UFO.
A Catholic, “anti-miracle” account by a scientist who thinks it was an optical illusion:
Apparitions and Miracles of the Sun by Professor Auguste Meessen, Institute of Physics, Catholic Univeristy of Louvain, Belgium. Paper given at the International Forum in Porto, “Science, Religion and Conscience,” October 23-25, 2003. Excerpt:
“So-called “miracles of the sun” were observed, for instance, in Tilly-sur-Seuilles (France, 1901), Fatima (Portugal, 1917), Onkerzeele (Belgium, 1933), Bonate (Italy, 1944), Espis (France, 1946), Acquaviva Platani (Italy, 1950), Heroldsbach (Germany, 1949), Fehrbach (Germany, 1950), Kerezinen (France, 1953), San Damiano (Italy, 1965), Tre Fontane (Italy, 1982) and Kibeho (Rwanda, 1983). They have been described by many witnesses and from their reports we can extract the following characteristic features, appearing successively.
“· A grey disc seems to be placed between the sun and the observer, but a brilliant rim of the solar disc is still apparent…
· Beautiful colours appear after a few minutes on the whole surface of the solar disc, at its rim and in the surrounding sky. These colours are different, however, and they change in the course of time…
· The sun begins to ‘dance’. First, the solar disk rotates about its centre at a uniform and rather high velocity (about 1 turn/s). Then the rotation stops and starts again, but now it is opposite to the initial one. Suddenly, the solar disk seems to detach itself from the sky. It comes rapidly closer, with increasing size and brilliancy. This causes great panic, since people think that the end of the world has come, but the sun retreats. It moves backwards until it has again its initial appearance…
· Finally, after 10 or 15 minutes, the sun is ‘normal’ again: its luminosity is too strong to continue gazing at it. But after about another quarter of an hour, the prodigy can be repeated in the same way…
“…It is shown that the hypothesis of an extraterrestrial intervention is not sufficient to explain all observed facts, while this is possible in terms of natural, but very peculiar physiological processes. The proof results from personal experiments and reasoning, based on relevant scientific literature.
“…Dr. J.B. Walz, a university professor of theology, collected over 70 eye-witness reports of the ‘miracle of the sun’ that occurred in Heroldsbach [an ecclesiastically condemned apparition – VJT] on December 8, 1949. These documents disclose some individual differences in perception, including the fact that one person saw the sun approaching and receding three times, while most witnesses saw this only two times! The ‘coloured spheres’ that were usually perceived after the breathtaking ‘dance of the sun’ are simply after-images, but they were not recognized as such, since the context of these observations suggested a prodigious interpretation.
“…The general conclusion is that apparitions and miracles of the sun cannot be taken at face value. There are natural mechanisms that can explain them, but they are so unusual that we were not aware of them. Miracles of the sun result from neurophysiological processes in our eyes and visual cortex, while apparitions involve more complex processes in our mind’s brain. The seers are honest, but unconsciously, they put themselves in an altered state of consciousness. This is possible, since our brain allows for ‘dissociation’ and for ‘switching’ from one type of behaviour to another.”
Meessen’s own explanation of the miracle as an optical illusion is based on experiments which he performed on himself, while looking at the sun under carefully controlled conditions (so as not to damage his eyes). However, I should point out that Meessen’s exposure to the sun’s optical effects was fairly short in duration (30 seconds), whereas the solar miracle at Fatima lasted far longer (over 10 minutes) and didn’t damage any of the spectators’ eyes.
Catholic blogger Mark Mallett also points out: “Professor Meesen’s logic further falls apart by stating that the dancing effects of the sun were merely the result of retinal after-images. If that were the case, then the miracle of the sun witnessed at Fatima should be easily duplicated in your own backyard.”
However, Meessen does a good job of debunking the “UFO hypothesis”: he points out that had it been a UFO covering the sun, it could not have been seen 40 kilometers away. Also, at least some witnesses would have reported seeing a “partial eclipse,” but none ever did.
A paranormal explanation of the solar miracle at Fatima:
The First Alien Contact And UFO Sighting Of The 20th Century by Tob Williams. Blog article. April 10, 2011. Updated June 18, 2016.
The Fatima UFO hypothesis by Lon Strickler. February 11, 2012.
https://www.paranormalnews.com/article.aspx?id=1562
“Live Science” debunking of the solar miracle:
The Lady of Fátima & the Miracle of the Sun by Benjamin Radford. May 2, 2013. Ascribes the miracle to “an optical illusion caused by thousands of people looking up at the sky, hoping, expecting, and even praying for some sign from God,” which, “if you do it long enough, can give the illusion of the sun moving as the eye muscles tire.” Also suggests that mass hysteria and pareidolia can explain some features of the visions.
Skeptic Benjamin Radford on the Fátima Miracle by Dr. Stacy Trasancos. A response to Radford’s debunking. Points out that plenty of dispassionate observers at Fatima also reported seeing the sun move. Promotes Fr. Stanley L. Jaki’s carefully researched book on Fatima. Acknowledges that there may be a scientific explanation for what happened with the sun that day, but argues that this doesn’t explain the timing of the event, and why it coincided with the visions.
Virulently anti-Fatima accounts:
Solar Miracle of Fatima and
Fraud at Fatima. The author places too much reliance on discredited sources, such as Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fatima Incident by Portuguese UFOlogist Joachim Fernandes (critically reviewed here by Edmund Grant). The author also tries to argue, unconvincingly, that only half the people at Fatima actually witnessed the miracle, whereas in fact there were only a few people who saw nothing. See Jaki, Stanley L. (1999). God and the Sun at Fátima, Real View Books, pp. 170–171, 232, 272. The author is right in pointing out, however, that Lucia’s own published account of her visions at Fatima is highly retrospective (being written over 20 years after the event) and contains a lot of added material. Also, the seers didn’t all see the same thing: Lucia, for instance, saw Our Lady’s lips move while she was speaking, while Francisco (who saw Our Lady but never heard her speak), didn’t see Our Lady’s lips moving – a point acknowledged by Fr. de Marchi (see above). Finally, some of the prophecies associated with Fatima turned out to be false.
My own take:
Given the evidence that the solar miracle was witnessed by passing sailors and also seen at several different locations within a 40-kilometer radius of Fatima, I cannot simply dismiss it as a hallucination. Professor Meessen’s arguments (discussed above) appear to rule out the possibility that it was a UFO. The theory that it was an optical illusion founders on the fact that nobody reported any damage to their eyes, subsequent to the miracle. The hypothesis that it was a natural, local meteorological phenomenon sounds promising, but the fortuitous timing of the “miracle” (which coincided with the seers’ visions) would still point to supernatural intervention of some sort. Finally, if it was really a miracle, then one has to ask: what, exactly, was the miracle? After all, no law of Nature was broken: no-one seriously suggests that the Sun actually hurtled towards the Earth, as witnesses reported. The notion of God messing with people’s senses sounds pretty strange, too: why would He do that? On the other hand, the testimony of 70,000 witnesses is very impressive, and the event clearly meant something … but what? Beats me.
Over to you.
One wonders why the part of the brain that controls the hands gets larger when you learn to play the violin if the knowledge of how to play the violin is unrelated to physical processes.
I Grant have repeated myself.
It’s necessary when folks respond like Pedant did by asserting (again) that certainty is necessary for knowledge. Or When you post a totally erroneous analogy that shows that you don’t understand what I’m talking about.
Do you have any evidence of “pointing it out” that actually address the point?
peace
You are confusing the brain with the mind.
You can program a robot to play the violin and it does not know anything.
peace
My challenge to him is to support his claim.
That’s not a reason because he is not “aware” that what he claims can justify knowledge actually can justify knowledge. That is (part of) what he has failed to support in any way.
I think it would be both accurate and civil if you said because I presuppose revelation by a being which is omnipotent,omniscient, truthful and chooses to reveal but is not necessarily God
You have admitted that you, a flawed human, could think that one of your beliefs is a revelation from your god when in fact it is not. Further, you recognize that this applies to every single belief you have that you think is a revelation from your god. You could be wrong about all of them.
Since you have no means of justifying your beliefs aside from revelation and since you can be wrong about a belief being revelation, it is not possible for even an omnipotent god to provide you with a revelation such that you know (that is, are justified in believing) that it is a true revelation. That would be a contradiction.
Time for you to drop that childhood indoctrination and look into other ways of justifying your beliefs. There’s this thing called the scientific method that others have found useful….
I drop a rock on my toe. My toe hurts.
I drop a rock on my toe again. My toe hurts again.
After a few repetitions I am justified in stating that dropping this particular rock on this particular toe causes the toe to hurt. No gods necessary.
Because it is observed to work.
From the TSZ Dictionary:
pre·sup·po·si·tion
ˌprēˌsəpəˈziSH(ə)n/
noun
A claim about reality that fifthmonarchyman refuses to support with either evidence or reason.
It has the information necessary to play the violin, which is one definition of know.
How do you know that observation is the way to know things?
again the repetition would not be necessary if you would get it the first time 😉
peace
I think fifth would say without any reasons or evidence that your presuppositions deem acceptable.
Too bad revelation has not provided the knowledge to how make your point clearer to people. Revelation seems a bit random in the knowledge that it imparts
By that definition a high school math text book knows algebra and that is simply absurd.
peace
The repetition would not be necessary if you would park your priors at the door and consider that you might be mistaken, as per the site guidelines. At the very least you could start supporting your claims.
To directly answer your question, I will defer to Prof. Dawkins:
There is general revelation and there is special revelation. General revelation only has the power to remove your excuses.
It takes special revelation to open your mind
peace
To which I would reply by simply pointing to the usual meaning of those words. He really hasn’t provided any evidence or reasoning at all for his claims in all the time he’s been here.
Mass starvation “works” to solve the problem of overpopulation
Rape “works” to solve the problem of limited sexual partners
Leg amputation “works” to solve the problem of skinned knees
It can be said of all these things that “they work” but I would not recommend them.
Why is observation different?
peace
usual according to whom?
Are you claiming to be the Grand decider again?
peace
And there you have hit on the difference between thinking and all other human processes. It is nonsense to speak of digesting about digesting or of breathing about breathing. But the one thing we can do is think about thinking. This is a very significant fact.
Now you’re just flailing.
Science as a process demonstrably leads to increased knowledge. This is demonstrated by what can be done with that knowledge in reality, observable by everyone.
Your gods are not required.
It’s comments like this that make you my favorite 😉
peace
I am simply continuing to point out that you have not supported any of your claims with evidence or reason. Your behavior is not aligned with the goals of this site. I hope you choose to change that.
Again
How do you know that?
Peace
See walto this is why the repetition is necessary 😉
I have made no claims. When I do so I’ll be sure to let you know
peace
Observation of reality, corroborated by other observations and observations made by other people.
This conversation would be easier in a bar where I could just reach over and break your nose. That tends to demonstrate the power of personal observation to even the most indoctrinated.
If you’re just going to retreat to nihilism or solipsism, do it now and save some pixels.
You have claimed that a god exists.
You have claimed that the god you claim exists is the Christian god.
You have claimed that a god is required for knowledge to be possible.
You have claimed that everyone else knows that a god exists.
That’s just off the top of my head. What you have not done is support any of those claims with evidence or reason.
The repetition would not be necessary if you would park your priors at the door and consider that you might be mistaken, as per the site guidelines.At the very least you could start supporting your claims.
To directly answer your question, I will defer to Prof. Dawkins:
All the above activities have their basis in human thinking. You can call it science but this is just an abstraction. What do you mean when you say that “science” achieves these things? Can only professional scientists claim to be achieving these things through “science”? Surely this capability is open to any thinking person.
How do you know that this is the way to know things?
Is violence the way you would normally choose to deal with frustration?
peace
PS walto, Do you now see why the repetition happens?
These are not claims they different aspects of the one presupposition that God exists. It’s an Axiom if you will.
I assume that because as far as I know I must assume it in order to justify knowledge (among other reasons).
If you disagree that God’s revelation is necessary for knowledge tell me how you know stuff with out God.
It should not be hard to do. But you seem to be having a little trouble. Hence the need to repeat myself
peace
You make claims with every post, so, as you seem not to realize this, you are obviously not in a position to let anybody know when you are doing so. On the contrary, WE need to tell YOU when you are doing so. So I’ll do so now: FMM, you are making claims with every post.
PS: you also make arguments with about 4/5 of your posts. As previously indicated, most of them are bad arguments.
Of course he makes claims. These denials are among the sillier things he posts. And that’s no mean feat.
I think I know why repetition is necessary for you. You apparently think that there’s some magic number that is such that if you say this stuff that many times, they’ll become true.
Apparently it worked for him.
Glen Davidson
how do you know this?
😉
I have repeatedly said that is not the case
Are you assuming that I’m not posting in good faith?
Isn’t there some sort of rule against that? 😉
peace
Questions are not generally thought of as true or false, though they can perhaps be a tool for arriving at the truth.
peace
No. I think you don’t understand what “claim” means. “Argument” either. (That’s a charitable interpretation, but I’m nice that way–especially during this holiest and seasonable-est of seasons.)
Or for avoiding the truth.
Glen Davidson
Charity is nice.
I think we should all try and treat others better.
I hope you don’t think that is a claim because I don’t have a lot of evidence to support it 😉
peace
Yes tools are neutral that way.
That is why questions (and presuppositions) are not the same as claims.
peace
Already asked and answered. It works.
I’m not frustrated, I’m pointing out one way to make your nonsense clear. It’s very hard to keep asking “How do you know observations lead to knowledge?” when someone can just ask you how you know your nose is bleeding.
They are clearly claims. Calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t mean the dog has five legs. As already noted, when you call your claims “presuppositions” you are not saying anything about your claims, you’re simply indicating that you refuse to support them with evidence or reason.
Look there! Another claim! You should stop making new ones until you’ve supported the old ones.
Does making untestable claims, as the alleged theory of evolution does, lead to knowledge?
Again not to repeat myself but how do you know “it works” is the way to know stuff?
Please be specific and try to think deeply It might help you to avoid repetition
The answer of course is revelation. That is the only way that I’m aware of to know stuff.
peace
Because “it works” is the justification for the belief, hence knowledge.
Stop standing on your head in shallow water and thinking you’re deep.
You are the only one who can avoid repetition. I don’t expect you to because it would require the integrity to support your claims — something that you have not demonstrated yet on this site.
Lets try this from another angle.
Here is the definition of presupposition
Presupposition–a thing tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action.
and here is the definition of claim
Claim—an assertion of the truth of something, typically one that is disputed or in doubt.
Do you see the difference?
How would you go about demonstrating that I am claiming something rather than assuming it?
peace
Does not inspire confidence.
Glen Davidson
If you were simply constructing a thought experiment and trying out different assumptions, that would be a valid use of presuppositions. That’s not what you’re doing. You make claims about the real world. In that situation your use of the term “presupposition” merely indicates your refusal to support those claims.
If you want to tell me what I think, you need more support than just assuming your conclusions.
geeze
Here we go again,
How do you know this?
Are you really unable to understand the question???
I’m afraid that communication with you will not be possible if you can’t comprehend what is being asked.
Peace
Do you honestly think that presuppositions are only used in thought experiments?
Do you understand the role of axioms in mathematics?
Do you really think that everyone has the same assumptions as you when it comes to reality?
peace