Subject of Miracles (for Pon de Replay)

[GBoldwater]

Firstly, lets discuss something historically recent. Fatima, Portugal in 1917.

Three shepherd children suddenly say a beautiful woman appeared and talked to them. Incarcerating and separating the children by agnostics did not work to show they were lying.

Everyone knew months beforehand that the children said there would be a miracle.

To the very day and hour there was a spectacular, unprecedented phenomenon in the annals of humanity witness right there.

Scientists refuse to be amazed and determined to keep silence.

[Mono no aware]

Peace be with you, GBoldwater.  Fatima is a good starting point.  You are a new member and may not be aware of this, but over the years there have been many contentious threads on this forum with arguments between believers in Fatima and other traditional Catholics who are skeptical of Fatima, or who claim that it is either a hoax or a demonic deception.  Just as a sampling, here are but two of the threads: Fatima is demonic and More Problems with Fatima accounts (Remnant article).  The latter runs to seventy-one pages, but you will get the idea.

So we can begin with one of the primary problems outlined by Hume in his essay: the problem that miracle claims are partisan.  As the Pharisees hollered at Christ, "it is only by Beelzebul that you work your miracles!"  Fatima is no exception here.  For the moment, we can remove the scientific doubters from the equation entirely, and we are still left with the problem of not knowing who wrought the miracle, heaven or the devil.  All we can do is choose a side. 

An added problem is that even if we plump for heaven, the precise message itself which the miracle was supposed to affirm remains controversial.  Some say that the miracle only affirmed the original messages the children provided, and that Sister's Lucia's later eschatological pronouncements (which are somewhat scattershot and contain inaccurate or difficult-to-reconcile prophecies) are too weird to accept.  So there are partisans for "Fatima 1" (just the original few years) and partisans for "Fatima 2" (the original years and everything after).  There is even a fringe view that the revelations at Fatima and its third secret were an unveiling of a sacred mystery: that "Our Lady is God, the Lord of the bible is Satan, and this is the secret of the saints."

How do we establish the legitimacy of this miracle?  Given all these problems, would you at least be sympathetic to someone plumping for a naturalistic explanation?  I am not offering this with any certainty, but merely as a hypothesis.

1.  A miracle was promised.  The religiosity of this portion of Portugal being what it was in 1917, most of the assembled would have been believing Catholics.  Therefore they would have come to Cova da Iria already accepting that a) miracles do occur and b) the Blessed Virgin Mary had been appearing to peasant children and performing miracles in the years beforehand (Lourdes, La Salette, &c).

2.  The exhortation was "look at the sun!"  But even as small children, we are warned that it is deleterious to stare at the sun.  It can mess with your vision.

3.  The testimonies as to what the sun precisely did vary and contradict.  Some reported nothing.  And most of the testimonies, if literally and physically true, would have been witnessed all over the hemisphere.  So the miracle was not that the sun itself did anything (this was not on the level of the sun standing still over Gibeon), but that many of the people who were present had visions of the sun doing strange things and having strange effects (for which, we might refer back to no. 2).

[GBoldwater]

Peace be with you, GBoldwater.  Fatima is a good starting point.  You are a new member and may not be aware of this, but over the years there have been many contentious threads on this forum with arguments between believers in Fatima and other traditional Catholics who are skeptical of Fatima, or who claim that it is either a hoax or a demonic deception.  Just as a sampling, here are but two of the threads: Fatima is demonic and More Problems with Fatima accounts (Remnant article).  The latter runs to seventy-one pages, but you will get the idea.

So we can begin with one of the primary problems outlined by Hume in his essay: the problem that miracle claims are partisan.  As the Pharisees hollered at Christ, "it is only by Beelzebul that you work your miracles!"  Fatima is no exception here.  For the moment, we can remove the scientific doubters from the equation entirely, and we are still left with the problem of not knowing who wrought the miracle, heaven or the devil.  All we can do is choose a side. 

An added problem is that even if we plump for heaven, the precise message itself which the miracle was supposed to affirm remains controversial.  Some say that the miracle only affirmed the original messages the children provided, and that Sister's Lucia's later eschatological pronouncements (which are somewhat scattershot and contain inaccurate or difficult-to-reconcile prophecies) are too weird to accept.  So there are partisans for "Fatima 1" (just the original few years) and partisans for "Fatima 2" (the original years and everything after).  There is even a fringe view that the revelations at Fatima and its third secret were an unveiling of a sacred mystery: that "Our Lady is God, the Lord of the bible is Satan, and this is the secret of the saints."

How do we establish the legitimacy of this miracle?  Given all these problems, would you at least be sympathetic to someone plumping for a naturalistic explanation?  I am not offering this with any certainty, but merely as a hypothesis.

1.  A miracle was promised.  The religiosity of this portion of Portugal being what it was in 1917, most of the assembled would have been believing Catholics.  Therefore they would have come to Cova da Iria already accepting that a) miracles do occur and b) the Blessed Virgin Mary had been appearing to peasant children and performing miracles in the years beforehand (Lourdes, La Salette, &c).

2.  The exhortation was "look at the sun!"  But even as small children, we are warned that it is deleterious to stare at the sun.  It can mess with your vision.

3.  The testimonies as to what the sun precisely did vary and contradict.  Some reported nothing.  And most of the testimonies, if literally and physically true, would have been witnessed all over the hemisphere.  So the miracle was not that the sun itself did anything (this was not on the level of the sun standing still over Gibeon), but that many of the people who were present had visions of the sun doing strange things and having strange effects (for which, we might refer back to no. 2).

I am not interested in any other threads here, nor Hume. I am discussing this with you. Please don't refer to anyone else.

#1  What you wrote doesn't matter one bit, because many atheists came and saw the same thing. It was reported in the anti-Catholic newspaper of the day.

#2  There was no harm to people's eyes. In fact, over 70,000 people. Only a small portion saw Lucia point up, and she did NOT say "sun". And the ground that was previously saturated with water, and muddy, became perfectly dry in about 10 minutes.

#3  If one atheist, and one believer on the other side of the field, saw the exact same thing, that is enough of witnesses. Always has been in courts. The sun was involved. You have NO IDEA at all what may even have naturally moved in the air between the earth and sun. Could have been an unprecedented cloud of transparent swirling gasses unknown to man that refracted the light and distorted the placement of the sun. That is why it was seen nowhere else that a localized area. That is why people, who were all standing in different places, saw something different. But it is well established that it happened....and that something UNPRECEDENTED in the annals of human history, was predicted to the very day and hour three months beforehand....and termed a "miracle".

[Mono no aware]

I am not interested in any other threads here, nor Hume. I am discussing this with you. Please don't refer to anyone else.

There will be no further references to Hume, then.  I will, however, require recourse to those who claim Fatima is a demonic deception.  The partisanship of any miracle is important.  Presumably we are talking about Fatima because you believe it redounds to the favor of God and Roman Catholicism.  Otherwise we could just accept every single miracle claim of every single religion; a miracle would have no meaning or ultimate significance unless it pointed to something beyond itself.  Everyone would simply shrug and classify miracles as extraordinary or unexplained phenomena, devoid of any theological implications.

What you wrote doesn't matter one bit, because many atheists came and saw the same thing.

I've always wondered about this.  First, how many atheists did Portugal have in 1917, and second, how many atheists out of that small segment of the population were motivated on a wet Saturday to go to a muddy field in order to scoff at Catholics awaiting a miracle?  I have to question whether it was "many." 

Granted, I do think we should give a certain credence to non-partisans, as they come with a negative bias and will not be so easily swayed.  But everyone has their own human flaws and motivations.  There is always the motivation of the non-partisan who switches sides: he or she suddenly becomes special in the eyes of their new party.  There has long been a cottage industry in politics and religion of people who write profitable books about their conversion experiences: ex-Marxists turned Republican, ex-atheists turned Christian, &c. and vice versa. 

And consider how many atheists even today are of the sort who get derided as "incel neckbeard losers living in their parents' basement."  If the lonely Portuguese equivalent in 1917 showed up at Cova da Iria and saw the thousands of people around him begin exclaiming about a miracle, some of whom must've been pretty girls, he could easily be motivated (whether consciously or subconsciously) to offer a false or embellished testimony, and to reap some level of praise and acceptance as a prodigal son returned home, having given his new party the gift of a weighted confirmation of their miracle.  The testimony of a few atheists in a crowd of Catholics is not nothing, but neither is it terribly conclusive.  Whereas if even a mere 200 atheists gathered at a Richard Dawkins conference collectively claimed to have seen an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they all subsequently converted to Catholicism, then that would be truly extraordinary.

It was reported in the anti-Catholic newspaper of the day.

But that very report is called into question by Catholics who consider Fatima to be a Judaeo-Masonic-Luciferian hoax or psy-op.  For them, the Masonic newspaper was playing its part in creating a diversion, by getting Catholics to go down a rabbit hole, chasing gooey miracles and wild prophecies.  I do not cotton to this theory myself, but it has to be refuted if we are to determine whether this miracle was wrought by heaven or is a trick of the devil and his minions.

There was no harm to people's eyes. In fact, over 70,000 people. Only a small portion saw Lucia point up, and she did NOT say "sun".

I don't see how we can know that there was no temporary harm to, or effect upon, people's eyes.  It seems quite possible that there was, given the bizarreness of the reports.  I take your point that in a crowd of that size, only a small portion would've been able to see Lucia pointing up.  Which is why somebody surely said, "look at the sun!" if Lucia was pointing up.

Which brings me to an uncomfortable mention.  I do not wish to be impolite in saying this.  But something has to be remarked of what we might call the "Southern European" or "Mediterranean" character—that of the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Italians.  The common temperament of these southern races is usually one of passion, emotion, and expressiveness, at least in comparison to the generally more reserved and sober temperament of the northern peoples (the British, the Germans, and the Scandinavians).  Perhaps this is just my northern bias speaking, but the Spanish-Argentine writer J.L. Borges noted it himself.  And I daresay that the Mediterranean mentality is slightly more prone to superstition.  I will put it this way: I am far less surprised that the folk religion cult of the mummified monkey-boy saint exists in Catholic Peru than I would be if it had taken hold in Lutheran Sweden.

With this in mind, we need only to wonder at the kind of religious energy that might've swept through the crowd on that day.  In my mind's eye, I can see little Lucia pointing up.  And then I can see a "pious old lady," the kind of widowed granny who still dresses in black a decade after her husband's death, and she squeezes the hand of her bachelor son.  She gasps out hoarsely, "the sun!"  And so her son hollers, "Mama says to look at the sun!"  A peasant-girl seer, some pious old ladies, a crowd of Portuguese Catholics, and the sun emerging from the clouds on an overcast day.  Is it so wrong to have a reasonable doubt about whether a bona fide miracle occurred?

[Arvinger]

How do we establish the legitimacy of this miracle?

How do we establish that the battle of Rocroi actually happened? Why is the same method not sufficient for establishing whether Miracle of the Sun and Christ's miracles happened?

The main problem is that behind such a question, which is in itself legitimate (miracle claims must be examined) an implicit double-standard is being created for assessment of natural and super-natural events, with the latter ones being held to a higher standard, which begs the question in favor of naturalism. Carl Sagan's principle "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is one of the most fallacious ever formulated, as it commits begging the question fallacy in terms of what is "extraordinary". Why are miracles "extraordinary", who decided that? If we live in a world created by God then miracles are an integral part of it, just like the sun rising and snow falling in winter. To claim that miracles require extraordinary evidence and the authenticity of historic miracles cannot be established the same way truth of other historical events is established is to fallaciously assume naturalism a priori, on a basis of a preconceived worldview biased against the supernatural.   

[GBoldwater]

PdR, talk about fantasizing! Your posts are also getting too lengthy.

Let's get back to basics:
1. Three months beforehand the 3 children said a woman told them that there would be a miracle.
2. About 70,000 people showed.
3. The crowd included many who came only to ridicule, expecting nothing to happen.
4. An unprecedented event in the annals of history celestial even occurred exactly at the time foretold.
5. People on one side of the crowd described the same thing as some people on the other side.

Please take the first number you don't agree with, stop at it, and let's discuss that alone.

[Mono no aware]

How do we establish that the battle of Rocroi actually happened? Why is the same method not sufficient for establishing whether Miracle of the Sun and Christ's miracles happened?

The main problem is that behind such a question, which is in itself legitimate (miracle claims must be examined) an implicit double-standard is being created for assessment of natural and super-natural events, with the latter ones being held to a higher standard, which begs the question in favor of naturalism. Carl Sagan's principle "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is one of the most fallacious ever formulated, as it commits begging the question fallacy in terms of what is "extraordinary". Why are miracles "extraordinary", who decided that? If we live in a world created by God then miracles are an integral part of it, just like the sun rising and snow falling in winter. To claim that miracles require extraordinary evidence and the authenticity of historic miracles cannot be established the same way truth of other historical events is established is to fallaciously assume naturalism a priori, on a basis of a preconceived worldview biased against the supernatural.

This is absolutely fair enough, Arvinger, but surely I have to assign some level of a priori weight to naturalism.  If not, I would end up believing in all manner of different miracle claims and paranormal occurences.  I think we have a sufficient understanding of crowd psychology, groupthink, and confirmation bias to be at least baseline skeptical of eyewitness accounts of extraordinary events.  Otherwise I would have to give credence to things like the Ganesha drinking milk miracle or various alien abductions.  It would be especially difficult to refute the Travis Walton abduction since there were multiple eyewitnesses, all but one of whom passed polygraph tests.  I would be lurching all over the mystico-religious-supernatural map with every new eyewitness story of some levitating guru or UFO goo-goo, and my head would be filled with the contents of the Fortean Times.

[Mono no aware]

PdR, talk about fantasizing! Your posts are also getting too lengthy.

I'm sorry for that.  I was trying to be thorough with my objections.  I consider there to be some plausible alternatives here, and I wanted to explain a few of them.  You did say you wanted a discussion.  I'll aim for brevity in the future.

Please take the first number you don't agree with, stop at it, and let's discuss that alone.

Hopefully this will not irritate you overmuch, but I would like to take two of your points: numbers four and five.  I think I can be brief.  First, I'm not sure why you're describing it as a "celestial event" since you seemed to concede my point earlier that the sun itself did not literally and physically move in the ways described by the witnesses at Fatima.  Everywhere else in the hemisphere, the sun appears to have behaved in its normal stoical fashion.  So rather than this being a celestial event, it was a localized event.  What happened was that many (some, but not all) of the people in the field had individual visions of the sun doing spectacular things.

Second, I'm not sure what it proves if "people on one side of the crowd described the same thing as some people on the other side."  What does that say about the people in the crowd who saw completely different things, or nothing exceptional at all?  And how accurate are the reports?  Seventy thousand people is a massive number to interview for however many newspaper reporters were there (a dozen?  Perhaps two dozen?  I don't know).  Surely we are basing these accounts on a smaller sample size than the entire crowd.  So we would have to give it a generous margin of error, considering the known flaws of people when they are being interviewed.  Political pollsters have to deal this problem in one way, in that people will tend to hold back on certain views if they think they're not socially acceptable.  This is believed to have accounted in part for the inability to accurately forecast the election of Donald Trump.  But it also works in the reverse, in that people are prone to getting excited and creative if they are being interviewed about something spectacular.  Comedians have long had a field day in ridiculing the wild stories told to TV reporters by people giving accounts of hurricanes, twisters, shootings, UFOs, &c.  I have a difficult time believing that this aspect of human fallibility would have disappeared on a day when people were told to expect a miracle and, really, when you're in a wide open field and nothing is happening, what else is there but the sun?

[gsas]

The third secret were an unveiling of a sacred mystery: that "Our Lady is God, the Lord of the bible is Satan, and this is the secret of the saints."?  This is convergent to the Cathar heresy of the Old Testament god to be an evil demurrage or satan.  Now how can this problem come up invariantly in two independent ways, once in form of a movement, then in form of a miracle?  Your take?

[St.Justin]

The third secret were an unveiling of a sacred mystery: that "Our Lady is God, the Lord of the bible is Satan, and this is the secret of the saints."?  This is convergent to the Cathar heresy of the Old Testament god to be an evil demurrage or satan.  Now how can this problem come up invariantly in two independent ways, once in form of a movement, then in form of a miracle?  Your take?

What on earth are you talking about??????

[GBoldwater]

PdR, talk about fantasizing! Your posts are also getting too lengthy.

I'm sorry for that.  I was trying to be thorough with my objections.  I consider there to be some plausible alternatives here, and I wanted to explain a few of them.  You did say you wanted a discussion.  I'll aim for brevity in the future.

Please take the first number you don't agree with, stop at it, and let's discuss that alone.

Hopefully this will not irritate you overmuch, but I would like to take two of your points: numbers four and five.  I think I can be brief.  First, I'm not sure why you're describing it as a "celestial event" since you seemed to concede my point earlier that the sun itself did not literally and physically move in the ways described by the witnesses at Fatima.  Everywhere else in the hemisphere, the sun appears to have behaved in its normal stoical fashion.  So rather than this being a celestial event, it was a localized event.  What happened was that many (some, but not all) of the people in the field had individual visions of the sun doing spectacular things.

Second, I'm not sure what it proves if "people on one side of the crowd described the same thing as some people on the other side."  What does that say about the people in the crowd who saw completely different things, or nothing exceptional at all?  And how accurate are the reports?  Seventy thousand people is a massive number to interview for however many newspaper reporters were there (a dozen?  Perhaps two dozen?  I don't know).  Surely we are basing these accounts on a smaller sample size than the entire crowd.  So we would have to give it a generous margin of error, considering the known flaws of people when they are being interviewed.  Political pollsters have to deal this problem in one way, in that people will tend to hold back on certain views if they think they're not socially acceptable.  This is believed to have accounted in part for the inability to accurately forecast the election of Donald Trump.  But it also works in the reverse, in that people are prone to getting excited and creative if they are being interviewed about something spectacular.  Comedians have long had a field day in ridiculing the wild stories told to TV reporters by people giving accounts of hurricanes, twisters, shootings, UFOs, &c.  I have a difficult time believing that this aspect of human fallibility would have disappeared on a day when people were told to expect a miracle and, really, when you're in a wide open field and nothing is happening, what else is there but the sun?

I asked you to take the first one you disagreed with, and discuss it.

[Non Nobis]

The third secret were an unveiling of a sacred mystery: that "Our Lady is God, the Lord of the bible is Satan, and this is the secret of the saints."?  This is convergent to the Cathar heresy of the Old Testament god to be an evil demurrage or satan.  Now how can this problem come up invariantly in two independent ways, once in form of a movement, then in form of a miracle?  Your take?

Thumbs down, gsas. The website and movement saying Our Lady is God and the rest of it is nothing but Satan's total subversion of what is good. Why do you focus on Satan's subversions?   Just reject them, period. Satan can start with ANY good thing or miracle and TWIST it.  It proves only that SATAN is evil.

[Non Nobis]

The third secret were an unveiling of a sacred mystery: that "Our Lady is God, the Lord of the bible is Satan, and this is the secret of the saints."?  This is convergent to the Cathar heresy of the Old Testament god to be an evil demurrage or satan.  Now how can this problem come up invariantly in two independent ways, once in form of a movement, then in form of a miracle?  Your take?

What on earth are you talking about??????

Pon de Replay mentioned some fringe Satanic view in an earlier post; there's a website ourladyisgod.com which shows more. Almost too gruesome to repeat.

[Mono no aware]

I asked you to take the first one you disagreed with, and discuss it.

In that case, I refer you to my first paragraph, and if it pleases you, you may omit the second.  I had found your point no. 5 to be ancillary to your point no 4., so I took them both.  But you are a stickler for your own rules, Boldwater, and I admire that in a person.  So I will discuss (solely) point no.4, in which you aver a "celestial event" occurred:

I'm not sure why you're describing it as a "celestial event" since you seemed to concede my point earlier that the sun itself did not literally and physically move in the ways described by the witnesses at Fatima.  Everywhere else in the hemisphere, the sun appears to have behaved in its normal stoical fashion.  So rather than this being a celestial event, it was a localized event.  What happened was that many (some, but not all) of the people in the field had individual visions of the sun doing spectacular things.

[GBoldwater]

I asked you to take the first one you disagreed with, and discuss it.

In that case, I refer you to my first paragraph, and if it pleases you, you may omit the second.  I had found your point no. 5 to be ancillary to your point no 4., so I took them both.  But you are a stickler for your own rules, Boldwater, and I admire that in a person.  So I will discuss (solely) point no.4, in which you aver a "celestial event" occurred:

I'm not sure why you're describing it as a "celestial event" since you seemed to concede my point earlier that the sun itself did not literally and physically move in the ways described by the witnesses at Fatima.  Everywhere else in the hemisphere, the sun appears to have behaved in its normal stoical fashion.  So rather than this being a celestial event, it was a localized event.  What happened was that many (some, but not all) of the people in the field had individual visions of the sun doing spectacular things.

Just to be clear, which do you want to discuss now?  And, know that whichever you do, the previous numbers you agree with.