A Clash of Titans: The Ethan Muse Dustin Crummett Fatima Debate

Two of the smartest people I know got together to have a two and a half hour debate about the Fatima miracle. Here's what happened.

1 The preceding events

Ethan Muse is the smartest person I’ve ever met and among the best philosophers. Dustin Crummett is the best philosopher I’ve ever met and among the smartest people. Dustin’s a sort of liberal, effective altruism aligned Anglican. Ethan’s a recently converted hardcore infernalist turbo-Catholic—talking to him about Catholicism is guaranteed to scare the hell out of (into?) you. Dustin has described Catholicism as provably false; Ethan thinks it’s provably true.

I have witnessed Ethan and Dustin seriously debate a number of people. I have never witnessed them lose or even be stumped (for example, here is Dustin demolishing Catholic apologist Trent Horn in an abortion debate. That’s an impressive feat; Trent is a very good debater.) A bit after Scott released his bombshell Fatima investigation, I got Ethan and Dustin together to debate the Fatima sun miracle. The debate was long-anticipated by a number of people, and it is finally open to the public.

It was the most epic debate I have ever witnessed. Very large amounts of new, interesting, and non-obvious ground was covered. Pretty much every important point on both sides of the Fatima dispute was discussed.

Ethan’s debate prep consisted of machine-translating hundreds of pages of Portuguese documents, carrying out a bunch of his own independent calculations, memorizing all the relevant facts, including being able to quote witness statements almost verbatim, looking up Portuguese census data, and then for good measure learning about which nearby cities you’d be able to see a localized emitter from in Portugal.

Dustin’s consisted of spending about ten hours reading on the internet.

For this reason, Ethan was clearly better prepared. He probably spent dozens of times longer reading about the subject. So on points where Ethan had some complex technical argument that Dustin didn’t have a response to, I didn’t update much in Ethan’s direction.

Because of Ethan’s greater preparation, Dustin wasn’t really able to respond to various technical points. For example, at one point Ethan mentioned the Dalleur argument about the angle of the light source. Dustin’s response was basically to shrug and say he hadn’t looked into it. Many such cases. Nonetheless, Dustin held his own extremely well (friend of the blog Amos Wollen declared Dustin’s holding his own despite less preparation an “aura win,” though some scholars dispute this). They both scored a number of strong blows against the other’s case.

This will be a very opinionated review. I’ll first impartially lay out what they both said. Then, I’ll describe what I think about their claims after spending many hours investigating them. Though be warned: investigating Fatima takes you down some weird rabbit holes about fairies, child psychology, the Mormon witnesses, and penis-stealing witches. By digging into Fatima, one learns lessons that are important for pretty much any miracle investigation.

2 The core views on Fatima

There is a lot of nitpicking about a bunch of different points. So I thought it would be worth first describing the basic facts and laying out the core views on offer—how Ethan sees the miracle vs how Dustin sees it.

2.1 The uncontroversial facts

Three children, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto claimed to have appearances of the Virgin Mary. Lucia and Jacinta saw and heard her. Francisco just saw her. These appearances occurred at regular intervals. A bunch of eyewitnesses saw Lucia and her cousins talking as if Mary was there. The children were asked to recant, and threatened with torture. They didn’t recant.

The children predicted that on October 13th, there would be a big miracle done so that “everyone may believe.” On October 13th, a bunch of people gathered in a field. Basically everyone, including the skeptics in attendance, said that they saw the sun do crazy things. These include: spinning, changing color, coming close to Earth, being less bright so you could see it without hurting your eyes, and bathing the surrounding landscape in all sorts of weird colors. This is contrary to its usual behavior.

Ethan’s theory is that God did a miracle to create a secondary light source in the sky. This is, he claims, how the miracle was pulled off. He doesn’t think God gave the people a vision; he thinks God made a big sky light.

2.2 The Ethan view

Here’s roughly how Ethan sees things.

Lucia and her two cousins are effectively unimpeachable witnesses. They displayed bizarre psychological phenomena utterly unprecedented in cases of delusion. There are no other examples of non-psychotic children entering delusive trances for extended periods of time of the kind entered by all three of them. And we know they were sincere from their behavior—among other things, they did not recant even when threatened with torture, and acted how you’d expect if they believed it. So skeptics will already have to take an enormous probability hit in positing some kind of massive, unprecedented psychological phenomenon of a type never seen before.

Then, Lucia predicts that there will be a huge miracle seen by everyone on October 13th, 1917. Amazingly, there is such a miracle: nearly everyone at Fatima agrees that the sun moved, changed color, changed the color of the landscape, dried people’s clothes, and did all sorts of other craziness. If this is an illusion, it is a very big coincidence that a giant powerful illusion occurred right at the time Lucia predicted.

Then, amazingly, we have independent evidence for the veracity of this giant colossal miracle. Ethan claims that by analyzing photographs, we can see naturally inexplicable drying patterns. And by analyzing the light beams from the photographs, we can see that there was a second light source, apart from the sun. Additionally, there are distant witnesses who attest to the light source. And if people were staring at the sun, glare would have forced them to turn away and hurt their eyes.

So overall, we have:

• Unimpeachable witnesses.

• A very improbable prediction of a giant colossal miracle.

• That miracle is confirmed by everyone, including skeptics hoping to debunk it.

• We have a bunch of physical evidence left behind that confirms the miracle.

So the Ethan story is: giant colossal miracle + all the other evidence independently supports the miracle=a proof of Catholicism.

2.3 The Dustin story

The Dustin story goes as follows: Lucia managed to get her cousins to think they were seeing the Virgin Mary. The famed “miracle of the sun” involved people looking at the sun and seeing weird stuff that is similar to what people see when they look at the sun in suggestible conditions. Decades later, Lucia made up that she’d received secrets from Mary, which is where all the important theology was drawn. So even if the miracle was a real miracle, given that the secrets are obviously bogus, it wouldn’t confirm Catholicism.

3 The children

How trustworthy is Lucia? That was the first main point of dispute. If you don’t care about this at all, and just want to hear about the spinning of the sun, feel free to skip to section 4. Though be warned: this was a big and very substantive part of the disagreement. It also matters for whether the miracle would vindicate Catholicism specifically vs merely vindicating the supernatural.

3.1 Making things up later

The miracle of the sun took place in 1917. Lucia’s memoirs written in 1942 revealed that Mary had entrusted Lucia with three secrets in 1917. The first two secrets revealed in that memoir were:

• A terrifying vision of hell.

• A message saying that God wants to establish the immaculate heart of Mary in the world, that Mary would come to ask for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart, that if her requests were heeded, Russia would be converted and there would be peace; if not, Russia would spread her errors throughout the world, promoting wars and persecutions of the Church, and that in Portugal the dogmas of the faith would always be preserved.

Then the third secret was a vision, published by the Vatican in 2000, of a Bishop in white making his way through a ruined city. This one is the weirdest but the least discussed in the debate.

Then, she says, in 1929, Mary told her that the time had come for Russia to be consecrated to her immaculate heart. To “consecrate” Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means to formally dedicate the nation to Mary’s maternal care and protection through an official act by the Pope. Mary says that if this was done, then there would be peace and mass conversions in Russia.

Dustin: This is extremely suspicious. Why is it that we only hear about Lucia predicting the war after it happens? Why is it that we only learn about Mary being concerned about geopolitical events after Lucia becomes an older Catholic who is concerned about geopolitical events? Lucia “predicted” the Soviet Union spreading huge errors and communism after it happened and she “predicted” world war two after it happened. Why can’t she predict anything before it happens?

This is suspicious in a way characteristic of frauds. Often fraudulent ancient documents that claim to have been written earlier make “predictions,” correctly about the past—and we can correctly date them by seeing when their predictions stop being accurate. It is surprising given authenticity that Lucia has a judicious record of what happened up until the time the secrets were revealed, and then her predictions become sketchy and inaccurate.

Ethan: It’s true that the secret was only made public long after the sun miracle, but that’s because Lucia only was given the right to reveal the secrets in 1927. We know by 1927 the secrets had been written down and shown to five independent people.

And we have other evidence that they were revealed earlier. Jacinta, on her death bed, talked about a coming war. At one point, when a skeptic criticized Lucia’s claim to have received the secrets earlier, she wrote back telling of a list of people she’d told, and suggested the skeptic ask them.

In fact, the Bishop of Leiria wrote a letter in 1937 to Pope Pius XI confirming that persecution in Russia would end if Russia was consecrated and that war was imminent. So we know Lucia knew ahead of time about this, and yet she wasn’t banging on the Pope’s door.

Dustin: It’s not so obvious that if the story was changed, the eyewitnesses would reveal it. The miracle of the holy fire is a farce, and yet many bishops, over a very long time period, have not revealed this. Fatima is probably similar.

Ethan: Sure, I guess it’s possible that Lucia changed the story and we never heard from any of the eyewitnesses except the ones who seem to confirm the earlier story. But you are the one raising this as an evidential challenge to the miracle. You’re the one who says that this undercuts Lucia’s credibility.

My verdict: a point for Dustin. Ethan misstated the contents of the letter: the letter to the Pope only reveals that consecrating Russia to Mary’s immaculate heart would “end the persecution in Russia.” It says nothing about stopping war. I discuss in an Appendix the situation in more detail, but my guess is that the details in the secrets were filled in later. Lucia also claims in her 1941 memoirs that Mary revealed Jacinta and Francisco would die soon, but she’d stick around for longer, yet conveniently we don’t hear about that till after it happened. It seems like Francisco and Jacinta might have mentioned their imminent predicted death!

3.2 Why didn’t Lucia stop Hitler and Stalin?

Dustin: By Lucia’s account, she was, for an extended period of time, sitting on information about how world war two could have been prevented. But if so, why wasn’t she banging on the Pope’s door and demanding he consecrate Russia?

Ethan: The letter sent from the Bishop of Leiria indicates that she did, before the war, try to get the Pope to consecrate Russia to stop the war (though remember, the letter doesn’t actually say that).

Dustin: If she could prevent world war two from killing millions of people, she should do more than get the bishop to send a letter to the Pope in 1937! Especially because God just did a giant miracle vindicating her.

Ethan: But we know she at least believed it by 1937, and yet she didn’t do the thing that you think she should do.

My verdict: a point for Dustin, in light of the fact that the letter doesn’t say what he claimed. Lucia’s behavior just seems sort of suspicious. This isn’t hugely evidentially relevant, though, because we know that Lucia believed consecrating Russia would stop war at an earlier time and this didn’t impact her behavior.

3.3 Peace post consecration

Dustin: Lucia predicted that after the consecration occurred, there’d be peace and mass conversions in Russia. There has not been peace and mass conversions in Russia. This is despite a number of attempted consecrations:

• 1942: Pope Pius XII consecrated the Church and the human race to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on October 31, 1942, and on July 7, 1952, consecrated the Russians specifically.

• 1982: Pope John Paul II consecrated the world at Fatima on May 13, 1982.

• 1984: Pope John Paul II performed another consecration on March 25, 1984.

• 2022: Pope Francis consecrated Russia and Ukraine by name on March 25, 2022.

In fact, Lucia thought that the consecration done by John Paul II was a successful consecration. So the obvious question: why wasn’t there peace?

Ethan: It’s not at all clear that the consecration was successful or even that Lucia thought it was successful. The original consecration, for example, involved consecrating the world. If you ask me to pray for you, and I pray for the world, I haven’t really met your request.

Dustin: Sure, you can have gripes with the exact wording. But it would be pretty surprising if both Mary and the Pope thought that the consecration had been successful, but really Mary wanted some hyper-specific linguistic formula before she’d be willing to stop the widespread butchering. Why hasn’t Mary tried to clear it up or been clearer on the needed wording?

Under the Francis one, he consecrated Russia and Ukraine. This is like praying for you and your enemy, which definitely counts as a valid act of praying for you.

Funny bit from the debate (31:10):

Ethan “I think it’s pretty clear” [that the consecration was unsuccessful].

Dustin “Apparently it’s not clear to the fucking Pope, man. It’s not clear to Lucia.”

Ethan: I think there’s providence behind the Popes screwing it up. The people refraining from honoring Mary’s intention are sinning and wanting to be ecumenists.

Dustin: And we never heard this from Lucia? It seems totally bizarre that Mary would need some hyper specific set of words to be said, but that wouldn’t be super clear, and it wouldn’t even be clear to Lucia.

Ethan: You can pose similar questions for conditional prophecies in the Bible and for why God choose to fulfill his will through Christ. It’s hard to predict in advance how God will behave. Certainly I wouldn’t have guessed most of God’s behavior in the Bible.

My verdict: A point for Dustin again. It does seem like deeply bizarre behavior from Mary to require some specific linguistic formula, bring about peace in Russia if that formula is said, but to be so ambiguous about it that the failure of the consecration is highly non-obvious. The fact that on Ethan’s worldview other Biblical prophecies if taken literally worked that way doesn’t make the problem better (and they seem disanalogous in various respects)! I think generally you should think if you’re a Christian that Biblical errors are a byproduct of error on behalf of human authors, but that is very different from how things worked at Fatima, where Mary was simply directly dictating the prophecy to Lucia.

3.4 Focus on Russia

Dustin: In explaining who caused the war, Lucia blames Russia primarily. She describes that another war would break out which could be prevented by Russia being consecrated.¹

It’s weird to focus exclusively on Russia when discussing the evils of world war two. This leaves out one of the main culprits: the Axis powers! However, Lucia was a conservative Catholic in an authoritarian right-wing country. Blaming the Soviet Union is what one would expect at the time. So the weird, disproportionate focus on Russia is much more likely if the contents came from the mind of Lucia than the mind of Mary.

Ethan: One reason for Mary to focus on the Soviet Union is that the worst thing that happened was the Soviet Union! Given the gargantuan sacriligious mass murder carried out by the Soviets, it isn’t terribly surprising that Mary would focus on them disproportionately.

Dustin: Obviously the Soviets were bad, but some of the blame has to go to the Axis powers!

Ethan: It doesn’t seem like Mary would exhaustively list every bad political regime that would arise. If the central struggle of the 20th century was against Soviet communism, then it is not very surprising that Mary would focus on that.

Dustin: The secret describes the problem with the war as being Russia spreading her errors throughout the world. This is a very odd way to frame what world war two is about.

My verdict: I thought this was a pretty decisive point for Dustin. Sure, Mary doesn’t have to list out every bad political regime. But it’s weird to describe the central conflict of world war two as Russia spreading her errors throughout the world, without mentioning Hitler, for example!

3.5 The war ends today!

Dustin: Lucia declared the war will end today after the final apparition. It didn’t!

Ethan: The prophecy was a conditional prophecy that Lucia misremembered. In fact, this whole affair corroborates Lucia for the following reasons:

1. Jacinta when questioned said that the war would end if the people did penance. Lucia, writing in 1922, confirmed that she (Lucia) had heard the unconditional version, while Jacinta had heard the conditional version: that the war would end if people repented. So it seems that Lucia later misremembered the contents of the prophecy.

2. When Doctor Formigao questioned Lucia, she said she didn’t remember if Mary had said the war ends the day that Mary reached heaven. What she was clearest on was that the phrase “the war ends today,” had been present, but couldn’t remember the immediate context.

3. Dr. Mendes who held Lucia in his arms after the final apparition recalls her saying, “Do penance! Do penance! Our Lady wants you to do penance! If you do penance, the war will end!”

4. When Lucia was questioned by Formigao, Formigao asked her why the war wasn’t ending as she’d predicted. She said that she wasn’t sure, but had accurately reported what Mary said. Formigao throws her a bone: “Some people claim that they heard you say that Our Lady had declared that the war would soon end.” Lucia replies “I said what our lady said.” So if anything, this is evidence for the low suggestibility of Lucia.

Dustin: This incident suggests that she can make pretty bad mistakes about what she was told. “The war will end,” is very different from “the war will end if you do penance.” This is a bit like relaying the message “the patient will recover IF THEY STOP SMOKING,” as “the patient will recover.”

Ethan: What it really shows is a nice connection between Lucia’s confidence and her memory. What she’s really clear on remembering is that it was said “the war ends today,” though she admits to not remembering the surrounding context.

Dustin: Another problem for Lucia’s credibility is that it’s not at all plausible that the war would have ended if the people had done penance. The war was nowhere close to being over. It doesn’t seem like a bunch of people doing penance in Portugal would have triggered a dramatic divine intervention. These giant divine interventions have never happened in recorded history!

Ethan: In the Bible God claims he did this! Catholicism assumes the veracity of the Bible, so this isn’t independent evidence against Catholicism. This is part of a long standing Biblical pattern: God makes conditional prophecies for symbolic reasons (e.g. in the book of Jonah) that he knows won’t be fulfilled.

My verdict: Another point for Dustin. I agree with Ethan that if you take Catholicism seriously, this is, in some sense, already priced in for the Catholic. But it seems very surprising that God would make the end of world war one conditional on people doing adequate penance in a field on Portugal! What? I admit, I don’t know exactly what to say about the problem of evil, but whatever you should say, it shouldn’t imply that God is one good Portuguese pasture’s penance away from stopping a giant world war! If there are no times in recorded history when God did a giant divine intervention to end a war, then we should have a strong prior against God forming the intention to do it.

I also investigated Ethan’s broader claims about the prophecy being conditional and thought they didn’t really hold up. As Dustin rightly notes, for Lucia to change “the war ends today if you do penance,” into “the war ends today, the troops will be home soon,” requires a pretty serious botching. That undermines her credibility, and it is also evidence that the first version of the prophecy wasn’t conditional.

What about Ethan’s contrary evidence?

I disagree that there’s good evidence that Mendes reported Lucia declared that the war would end if people did penance. In fact, in 1917, Mendes wrote the following in his letter to his brother (p.61).

At the end I also took in my arms the eldest child, the seer; and how different her attitude was from that of 13 September!!... Now she seemed to me the messenger of some news, because in my arms she gesticulated and cried out, saying to everyone that they should do penance, because thus the Lady wished...

It is true that she also said that the Lady had assured her that the war would end that day and it is still going on, but for me the extraordinary thing in all that I saw is the coincidence of the atmospheric signs with the warning of the child, and then that immense mass of people with the best and greatest order, with the deepest reverence and without the slightest invitation.

It was many years later, relayed in a book written in 1948, that he declared (p.90) Lucia had said:

“Do penance!... Do penance!... Our Lady wants you to do penance. If you do penance, the war will end...”

Ethan cites this document which described the quote from Mendes but, as best I can tell, it never says when he gave the quote, so my guess is it’s from the 1948 interview. Ethan’s source also quotes Avelino de Almeida, who was present at this scene, describing Lucia announcing that the war will end. Mendes in 1928 quotes Lucia saying (p.84):

“Do penance, for the Lady wants you to do penance. Do penance, for the war will end. Do penance.”

This version is more debatable, but it’s not very evidentially significant because it was written a decade later. It also seems like Lucia there is suggesting that the war will end, rather than that it will end only if they do penance.

Similarly, in Document 18, on October 19th, we hear Lucia relays Mary words as “The war ends today; wait here for your soldiers very soon.” So if Lucia misremembered, she’d have to misremember very soon after the events in question.

As for Jacinta corroborating the conditional prophecy, here’s what she said in Ethan’s source, Document 18, on October 19, when questioned by Formigao:

“He said: I come here to tell you not to offend Our Lord anymore, that He was very offended, that if the people reformed, the war would end, if they didn't reform, the world would end.”

But the world didn’t end (SOURCE???)! So even if we go by Jacinta’s telling, the prediction was wrong! This was also after the war didn’t end, so there could be post hoc misremembering. In addition, in Jacinta’s interview on the 13th, she said that Mary “said that we were to say the Rosary every day and that the war would end today.” So seems that earlier vision got morphed into the later one.

Other important sources:

• Father Manuel Pereira da Silva (letter written the evening of Oct 13, 1917, Doc 11). He was there when the miracle happened and wrote that same night that the children said “today, or soon, the flag of peace would be raised” and “that they should pray the rosary and that soon our troops would be here.”

• Doc 22 relays Jacinta on November 2 saying Mary “told us to expect the soldiers here very soon, and that the war would end that day.” It seems unlikely that Mary would tell them to expect the soldiers soon unless the war was ending soon.

• Doc 80 relays Manuel Pedro Marto saying of Lucia “she also declared that Our Lady had told everyone to pray the rosary and that the war would soon be over.”

• Doc 65 quotes Mary saying to Lucia, “When I get to heaven, the war ends today.”

• The author of the newspaper O Seculo wrote on the fifteenth, just two days after the miracle “Lucia, who speaks with the Virgin, announces, with flowing hand gestures while being carried in the arms of a man who transports her from group to group, that the war will end and that our soldiers would be returning.”

The Doc that Ethan cites for the connection between Lucia’s confidence and the strength of her evidence is Document 22, Formigao’s interrogation on November 2. Lucia says Jesus relayed “The war ends today and wait here for your soldiers very soon.” Lucia’s asked, “Didn’t he say that the war would end as soon as he reached Heaven?” She answers “I don’t remember if I said it was as soon as I got to Heaven.” This passage doesn’t strike me as great evidence for her accuracy. It just seems like she doesn’t remember if Jesus directly described that it would end when he returns to heaven.

3.6 Unprecedented visions

Ethan: The children’s behavior is very surprising. We don’t have other examples of three people repeatedly, simultaneously, and predictably entering into delusive trances, like the children, where they can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, before coordinating together on a single telling of events. That’s not how confabulation works!

Dustin: Probably what happened to Lucia and her cousins was similar to whatever was happening to the Mormon witnesses. Probably they were imagining things and thought they were seeing things. This can happen to large groups of adults, so it can probably happen to groups of children.

Interlude: What’s the deal with the book of Mormon witnesses?

There are two witness statements at the beginning of the Book of Mormon:

The Testimony of Three Witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Martin Harris): They declared that an angel of God showed them the golden plates and the engravings on them, and that the voice of God confirmed the translation was correct. They testified they saw the plates and the engravings.

The Testimony of Eight Witnesses (Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith Sr., Hyrum Smith, Samuel H. Smith): They stated that Joseph Smith showed them the plates, that they handled them physically, and saw the engravings on them. Their testimony is more matter-of-fact and grounded in physical experience, without the angelic or divine elements of the Three Witnesses’ account.

Reasons people are skeptical of the eight witnesses:

• Martin Harris says that he saw the plates with his spiritual eyes rather than physical eyes (though he was a bit inconsistent about this).

• All the people who saw the plates were suspiciously close to Joseph Smith (though some had a falling out later).

• If Joseph Smith wasn’t really translating from the plates, as non-Mormons think (for very good reason), then it would be weird if he had plates with engravings on them.

• Joseph Smith had the plates under a cloth and didn’t let people see them.

• Reports of the plates don’t match up.

Okay, interlude over

Ethan: With the Mormon witnesses, we can’t verify what they saw or what their behavior was during the event. All we have is their later testimony. In contrast, at Fatima, we have eyewitnesses reporting the three seers entering trance-like states. In fact, we have them averting their gaze, as if dazzled by blinding light. There are no other examples of similar behavior.

Dustin: Presumably in some visionary sense she thought she was being dazzled by brightness. The Book of Mormon witnesses also describe seeing things in very physical terms.

Ethan: The eight just say they saw plates, and I believe them.

Dustin: I don’t think the eight saw plates. Martin Harris years later said they didn’t see plates with their physical eyes.

Ethan: The three witnesses could be liars or display retrospective memory effects. We have no comparable evidence that they entered similar trance-like states where they were perceptually blinded.

Dustin: If the Mormon witnesses had covered their eyes and said “the light is blinding,” when allegedly seeing the plates, that wouldn’t affect my evaluation much…

Ethan: If the people are behaving as if they’re seeing something, then it can no longer be memory backfilling. So then the remaining possibilities are: they’re lying (which isn’t plausible at Fatima), they’re hallucinating in a way indicative of being psychologically unbalanced, or they’re seeing something demonic.

Dustin: It seems the best explanation is that they’re “seeing with their spiritual eyes,” AKA imagining things.

Ethan: Another major evidential point is the complexity of the dialogue, combined with the sophisticated phenomenology, without narrative drift or conflation of a kind we’d expect from children. If the children are hallucinating, I would expect there to be some kind of positive evidence from their narratives being unreliable. There just aren’t other examples of this kind of behavior, and this makes the prior super low.

Dustin: I haven’t looked through the documentary evidence carefully. I agree the prior is somewhat low, but the prior of a miracle is pretty low too.

Ethan: I don’t actually think Marian apparitions are that rare. And again, we just have no precedent of this kind of strange psychological phenomena.

Dustin: Maybe it only arises in a religious setting?

Ethan: And not for fairies or ghosts?

My verdict: I think this is a moderate point for Ethan. The psychology of the children would have to be extremely bizarre! While it maybe isn’t that different from the book of Mormon witnesses, if as Ethan suggests, there aren’t other comparable episodes, then that is pretty weird. Skeptics will have to admit that something pretty weird happened regarding the children’s psychologies. On the other hand, miracles are also pretty rare, so it’s not clear exactly how much evidence this is. But it certainly means there’s some weirdness for the skeptic beyond the miracle of the sun.

However, a lot of weird things in the world happen. This doesn’t strike me as anywhere near weird enough to require a miracle.

3.7 Conclusion

Overall, I found Dustin a lot more convincing in this section. A lot of the stuff Dustin said was a bit handwavey, while the stuff Ethan said was more concrete and specific. But I found Dustin’s higher-level handwaving more convincing generally. There’s a passage from Scott Alexander that I kept thinking about during the debate:

Imagine a debate about UFOs. Imaginary-Saar says “UFOs can’t be real, because it doesn’t make sense for aliens to come to Earth, circle around a few fields in Kansas, then leave without providing any other evidence of their existence.” Imaginary-Peter says “John Smith of Topeka saw a UFO at 4:52 PM on 6/12/2010, and everyone agrees he’s an honorable person who wouldn’t lie, so what’s your explanation of that?” Saar says “I don’t know, maybe he was drunk or something?” Peter says “Ha, I’ve hacked his cell phone records and geolocated him to coordinates XYZ, which is a mosque. My analysis finds that he’s there on 99.5% of Islamic holy days, which proves he’s a very religious Muslim. And religious Muslims don’t drink! Your argument is invalid!” On the one hand, imaginary-Peter is very impressive and sure did shoot down Saar’s point. On the other, imaginary-Saar never really claimed to have a great explanation for this particular UFO sighting, and his argument doesn’t depend on it. Instead of debating whether Smith could or couldn’t have been drunk, we need to zoom out and realize that the aliens explanation makes no sense.

At various points, I felt like Ethan was like imaginary Peter and Dustin was like imaginary Saar. I’m just generally more convinced by claims like “it seems weird for God to end the war conditional on a few people praying in Portugal,” than specific claims about psychology that I don’t know how to investigate. Similarly, I’m more moved by “huh, it’s sure weird that Lucia keeps publicly predicting stuff after it happens,” than in the weeds analysis of letters sent at different times (especially because when I looked into this, I didn’t agree with Ethan’s claims).

There’s also the fact that Ethan has spent exactly 1 trillion hours reading about the topic and Dustin has not. Ethan is very smart, but my sense of his presentation of the facts is that it’s a bit one-sided. So my guess is that if I looked into things more, I would agree with Ethan less and less. Methodologically, I’m a lot more moved by higher-order evidence than Ethan, and also a lot more moved by more general evidence than the kind of in-the-weeds nitty gritty analysis that seems to me to be subject to a lot of error.

4 The sun

We’re now 5,000ish words in and have yet to discuss the surprising incident where tens of thousands of people saw the sun move, not be painful to stare at, appear to crash down to Earth, etc. That’s where the debate goes next (at about the one hour 16 minute mark).

4.1 Seeing the light

Ethan: The first line of evidence for the miracle of the sun is the photogrammetric evidence. Dalleur’s analysis proves that the shadows in the photo indicate the existence of a second light source distinct from the sun.

Dustin: I don’t really have much to say about this. It seems like that has to be wrong though based on the Scott Alexander point that if there was a genuine physical light source, it would have been seen by a lot more people than actually saw it.

Ethan: I have a long piece responding to Scott on this. In the surrounding area, there would have been about 40,000 people. A number of things limit the expected number of distant witnesses:

1. A big fraction of them would have had terrible sightlines to the source.

2. Another big fraction would be in attendance at the place the miracle took place.

3. It was also raining, and this limited visibility.

4. The source was low on the horizon, which would have further limited visibility.

Then we just have a bunch of other unexpected distant witnesses which Scott’s theory doesn’t predict.

My verdict: I haven’t looked into this or done any of the calculations but I read Scott and Ethan’s back and forth and found Scott more convincing. As Scott notes, in a lot of cases “we have one or two secondhand testimonies from entire towns that supposedly witnessed a dramatic miracle.” So on this point, I’d give Ethan the clear debating win, but I probably find his side less plausible. Mark Grant has also looked into some of Ethan’s further eyewitnesses, and thinks that they don’t hold up physically—that we wouldn’t expect, from the distance they were at, for people to see the miracle.²

It doesn’t seem that surprising that after a giant miracle, a few people would misremember having seen it. After all, we know people can think:

• They heard a booming voice from heaven when there was no such voice, as in the case of the Mormon witnesses.

• Witches stole their penis (this belief was apparently a historical universal).

• They saw Khomeini’s face in the moon (this was extremely widely reported by people all throughout Iran).

• Their neighbors are witches (as in Salem). In some cases, people would admit to witchcraft and others would go into socially-contagious inexplicable fits involving screaming and throwing things.

• They can, as Ethan admits, see things they think are miracles when looking at the sun.

• They saw a spirit. The Piraha reportedly claim to routinely see spirits, and they describe this in very physical-seeming ways.

• They saw leprechauns.

• They saw fairies, including in groups (my old Ojibwe teacher at one point matter of factly described that he’d seen a ghost. He explained that he was previously skeptical of ghosts existing and only believes in the things he can see. So now he thinks that there must be at least one ghost, but is not sure if there are more).

In the writings of Lucian, we read he makes up a story about how he saw a vulture ascend from the flames and saw a simultaneous earthquake. Back at Olympia, Lucian overheard an old man with a long beard and dignified appearance claiming to have witnessed the tale that he fabricated. So it seems that people can pretty easily falsely believe they saw a miracle that they heard about.

4.2 You said my smile was brighter than the sun, but I just have one question, was I the only one

Dustin: As Scott relates in his Fatima article, there are a bunch of other apparent sun miracles where people stand around and claim to see the sun do Fatima-like things. Do you think those are real?

Ethan: There were only two miracles of the sun which were significantly parallel beyond simply involving the sun: Ghiaie and Benin city. I think those were genuine miracles. Benin city is on video, but I think that one was a subjective miracle designated, on the anniversary of Fatima, as a limited recapitulation of Fatima. It isn’t that suspicious that the miracles were done in different ways, given that on the Catholic worldview, that’s how a lot of miracles are done—e.g. eucharistic miracles often share commonalities but have some differences.

Dustin: Isn’t it a bit weird that God does his giant vindicatory sun miracle in a way that resembles fake sun miracles and what people see via sungazing—which they then post on Reddit about? If the miracle was not miraculous, it resembling other sungazing phenomena is guaranteed. If it was, such a thing is vanishingly unlikely.

Ethan: There are important differences. The Lubbock miracle, for example, is obviously not credible and skeptics in attendance didn’t see it. The Reddit sungazers just show you can basically see anything by looking at the sun, so pointing to their phenomenology isn’t really convincing.

We also have reports from the witnesses of the miraculous drying which isn’t present in other cases. Then we also have wet-dry contrast patterns on the clothes. In these contrast patterns, we can see that the area that remains wet is the area that would have been covered up—in other words, the contrast patterns are impossible to explain naturalistically and precisely what you’d expect if the drying occurred as told by the eyewitnesses.

Dustin: Maybe there are some subtle differences. But at a high-level: it’s just really surprising that the way Mary vindicates Catholicism to the world is by doing a sun miracle that resembles in all sorts of ways other things people see when they stare at the sun! I admit that I don’t have a super exact theory of how it works, but there’s lots of stuff in the world that I don’t understand (e.g. there was a guy who got struck by lightning seven times—what’s up with that?). The Fatima miracle doesn’t seem so mysterious that it’s worth positing a miracle.

It’s also weird that if Mary does a big miracle to vindicate Catholicism the miracle is that people see weird stuff when they look at the sun. That’s not related to Catholicism in any way, nor does it have obvious connection with Mary.

My verdict: I don’t know quite what to say about the angle of the light source or the shadows. Mark Grant has looked into this a lot and doesn’t think it’s that credible. He’s planning to write up his new criticisms at some point, but he summarized his view as “the vanishing point estimation method Dalleur applies is extremely unreliable under certain plausibly present meteorological conditions, and in particular the lighting model is inapplicable.” He made a toy model in which he claims Dalleur’s methods produced wrong results (see the footnote for more details).³ A physicist I asked also didn’t think the angular light source argument held up, though he didn’t investigate much. So I don’t place too much stock on it.

I pretty much agree with Dustin’s diagnosis. Sure, I don’t know how to account for every little detail of Fatima. But I feel pretty happy with the story “people looked at the sun in suggestible conditions of charged religious significance and saw stuff that mirrors what happens in other contexts when people look at the sun in conditions of charged religious significance.” It would be really weird if the way that Mary would vindicate herself to the world would bear intense parallels to naturally-explicable sun illusions.

I think Ethan is wrong to say that the other sun vision phenomena don’t parallel Fatima. From one of the Fatima witnesses, we have the quote “Until now, no one saw the sun’s sparkling rotations, and now everyone sees them many days and many times.”

Joaquim Inacio Vicente reports on August 13:

This hour was a moment of terror for all who were there. Some lost their senses, others believed it to be the last day of their lives and their day of Judgment, and for some, afterwards, it was a wonder to see the admirable colors that successively took on the clouds that obscured the sun’s rays—colors from bright red to pink and from there to blue—the color of anise, as several people declared to me minutes later in my home.

We read from Gilberto Fernandes dos Santos:

I must inform you that I went to Fátima on [June 13, 1920]… at that very moment, the people were kneeling on the ground, shouting, praying loudly, weeping, begging forgiveness with their hands raised, because they were witnessing a solar phenomenon similar to that of October 13, 1917.

From the Heroldbach Germany apparition:

If one now considers the testimony in detail, one encounters a surprisingly small agreement of the observations made. One witness has seen a red sun, the other a yellow, an orange or pink with blue and green, or a whitish sun. A silver one was also observed or all the colors mentioned in colorful change. One wants to have observed an oversized, the other a first small or normal, but then rapidly enlarging and rushing towards the viewer in a frightening way. Most of the witnesses noticed that the solar disk rotated very quickly in two or three phases of rotation for about a quarter of an hour.

Or this one in Necedah:

It was about noon when Van Hoof came out of the house and a woman screamed, “By God, it’s really true,” and fell to her knees.

Then it happened that the Rapids woman and so many in the crowd saw the sun, covered with a dark, greenish gray disk, spinning down toward the earth. And she testified, “I thought the end of the earth was coming and fell to my knees.”

A Pittsville woman also described the sun spinning closer to the earth. “I and many other people, fell to our knees in awe.”

The Daily Tribune visited the Oct. 7, 1950, event — a 25-minute “last” message from the Mediatrix to the “throng” of 50,000. Responding to this seventh vision, gasps were heard from women who again saw the sun behaving oddly. A Catholic priest told reporters he saw the sun whirl clockwise and jump.

These seem…pretty similar.

4.3 Takeaways from the miracles

Ethan: God confirms Catholicism in the Fatima message. He demands the consecration of Russia and Mary grants Lucia’s requests to convert certain people. It would be weird to convert people to Catholicism if Catholicism is false and wrongly claims that you go to hell if you’re outside of it!

Dustin: I don’t think the Russia stuff was present in the beginning. And I think it makes sense to convert people because it’s probably better to be a Catholic than an atheist. Zeitoun also caused people to convert—in that case to Oriental Orthodoxy.

Brief note on Zeitoun: Zeitoun was a miracle where a bunch of people in Egypt saw a vision of Mary above a Coptic Church in Egypt between 1968 and 1971. Ethan thinks it’s a genuine miracle, Dustin thinks it might be.

Ethan: Mary’s aim with Zeitoun was to trigger mass conversions in Egypt. Zeitoun didn’t involve affirming any Oriental Orthodox theological distinctives: Mary said nothing at Zeitoun. She never offered to convert people directly or to perform a miracle so that “all may believe.”

Dustin: God works through flawed human institutions. It doesn’t seem that unlikely that he’d let people convert to Catholicism, just as he tries to get people to convert to Christianity, even though this often involves converting to flawed denominations.

Ethan: The problem isn’t working through a flawed institution! The problem is doing a giant miracle with the express purpose of converting people to a religion believed to be false! If the secrets existed in 1917—which Lucia said they did at the time—it would be very bizarre if Mary allowed the secrets to be mangled, so that the ones revealed to the world were inaccurate.

Dustin: That doesn’t seem obvious. Mary allowed Lucia to mangle the imminent end of the war, whether the consecration under Pope John Paul was valid, and whether the Pope fulfilled the request. You’ve also repeatedly appealed, correctly, to the trickiness of divine psychology. But then we can’t be confident that the secrets wouldn’t have been allowed to be mangled.

Ethan: Once you buy the authenticity of the earlier Fatima apparitions, it would be very strange if Lucia hallucinated the later ones. We shouldn’t expect her to go from a genuine conduit of divine revelation to a schizophrenic.

My verdict: I generally found Ethan more persuasive here. If the first Fatima apparitions were genuine, it would be surprising if the later ones were made up. If you’re a Protestant who accepts the miracle of the sun, my guess is you should think Lucia was hallucinating the contents of all the miracles, but everyone being let down after being promised a giant miracle would have crushed their faith, so God did a vindicatory miracle. You can think that Lucia was genuine with the first round of secrets but not the second, though that is pretty weird and surprising.

On the other hand, for the reasons already discussed, I’m pretty confident that the secrets were made up later and that Lucia isn’t very credible. So sure, if you accept the sun miracle and aren’t Catholic, you’ll have to think some weird stuff happened, but it strikes me as less weird than what you’d have to think happened if you are Catholic (e.g. Mary conditioning stopping world war one on people in Portugal doing adequate penance.)

5 Conclusion

This was an awesome debate—there were a number of times when I would have been stumped if I was either debater, but where they both had some clever and cogent response. Here’s how I see the lay of the land:

1. Lucia and cousins seemed to enter weird trances in a way that’s pretty unprecedented. Maybe it bears some similarities to the Mormon witnesses, but it’s not so clear. Something strange was happening psychologically.

2. It is suspicious that Lucia on a few different occasions “predicted” world events but only after they happened. There is a somewhat uncertain and hazy reference trail for the secret about world war two, but it’s not very convincing. Overall, I think this is some evidence against her credibility.

3. Lucia behaved strangely in not banging on the Pope’s door, trying to get him to clearly and unambiguously consecrate Russia. This is only mild evidence though, because she didn’t do this even after 1941, when she wrote down the secrets in her memoirs.

4. The pro-Fatima story is odd: it requires that Mary would convert Russia and produce peace if the Pope consecrated Russia. However, the right consecration is dependent on a highly subtle linguistic formula that has been screwed up four times! This despite the Pope having thought it was a proper consecration and Lucia also having thought it was a proper consecration.

5. Mary’s condemnations focus disproportionately on Russia. This isn’t totally shocking because Soviet Russia was really bad. But it is more strongly predicted if Mary’s “visions” were really Lucia’s imagination filling in for her. We should positively expect this sort of behavior from Lucia, because the Soviet Union was the big boogeyman at the time. But it would be weird for Mary to get involved in geopolitics and world war two, only to leave out Hitler and co! Glossing world war two as being about Russia spreading her errors just seems so bizarre from Mary and a lot less bizarre from Lucia.

6. Lucia, after the final apparition, declared “the war ends today.” Ethan thinks this was a conditional prophecy. I disagree. I thus think this was a pretty clear failed prophecy from Lucia. It is also suspicious and credibility undermining that Lucia butchered Mary’s statements so badly. Then, lastly, it is, as the kids say, highly sus that Mary was prepared to end world war one if a bunch of people in Portugal did adequate penance.

7. On the sun miracle, there are a number of technical points that I don’t have the skills to adjudicate about the distant witnesses, photographs, and light source. I think Ethan thinks these are the best evidence against the skeptical hypothesis, but I don’t give them a ton of weight.

8. The sun miracle is a bit weird, but it doesn’t seem impossible to me. Just seems like in the right conditions, people can see weird stuff a lot like what happened at Fatima when they stare at the sun.

9. If the sun miracle happened, that’s strong evidence for the secrets being genuine. If the secrets were genuine, that’s strong evidence for the later secrets being genuine and for Catholicism. It’s not dispositive—I wouldn’t be a Catholic even if I thought the miracle had occurred—but it would move me in that direction. However, this evidence is outweighed by the earlier lines of evidence for the secrets having been made up later.

The rest of my takeaways are non-debate specific, but just other things I came to think after reading through a number of the relevant documents:

10. I found myself disbelieving the secrets more and more the more I read about it. I’d just find increasingly large numbers of weird details. For example (Doc 17):

When Lucia asked if she, Jacinta, and Francisco would also go to Heaven, Our Lady replied that she and Jacinta would go, and that Francisco would go too, but he would have to pray the rosary more often. Since then, the little boy has sometimes prayed ten rosaries a day!

Put aside the suspicious fact that it was the two people who could apparently hear the lady who were guaranteed heaven, and the one who couldn’t had to pray the rosary more. It just seems wicked and diabolical to terrify a little child into fearing that he’d go to hell unless he obsessively says the Rosary.

11. I also find the way hell is described in Lucia’s memoirs to undermine their veracity:

Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, Iike transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to Heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.

It’s a bit suspicious that it was just glimpsed for a single second (that seems likelier to be hallucination). It seems hard, if the vision lasted an instant, to see how they could have seen such a vivid description. The vision of hell also seems more like something out of the terrified imagination of a child in 1917 Portugal than something that God would bring about.

12. In her memoirs Lucia also testifies that she, Jacinta, and Francisco saw apparitions in 1916 in which Mary identified herself as the angel of peace. But we have no other records of this until Lucia’s 1941 memoirs! Pretty weird! Lucia also, in the earlier part of her 1917 memoir, describes the first 1917 apparition as “The First Apparition,” which is at least some evidence that she didn’t, at that time, believe in earlier 1916 apparitions.

13. Lucia’s memoirs also depict that she, Jacinta, and Francisco would often hurt themselves intentionally. They tied a rope around their waists causing them pain. From Lucia’s memoirs:

“Look, this hurts!” I said to my cousins. “We could tie it round our waists and offer this sacrifice to God.” The poor children promptly fell in with my suggestion. We then set about dividing it between the three of us, by placing it across a stone and striking it with the sharp edge of another one that served as a knife. Either because of the thickness or roughness of the rope, or because we sometimes tied it too tightly, this instrument of penance often caused us terrible suffering. Now and then, Jacinta could not keep back her tears, so great was the discomfort this caused her. Whenever I urged her to remove it, she replied: “No! I want to offer this sacrifice to Our Lord in reparation, and for the conversion of sinners.”

Another day we were playing, picking little plants off the walls and pressing them in our hands to hear them crack. While Jacinta was plucking these plants, she happened to catch hold of some nettles and stung herself. She no sooner felt the pain than she squeezed them more tightly in her hands, and said to us: “Look! Look! Here is something else with which we can mortify ourselves!” From that time on, we used to hit our legs occasionally with nettles, so as to offer to God yet another sacrifice.

She later quotes Mary saying, “God is pleased with your sacrifices, but He does not want you to sleep with the rope on; only wear it during the day.” This seems kind of psychotic! Mary was apparently encouraging young children to inflict physical pain on themselves for no gain with a rope. This even extended to Jacinta making serious sacrifices that potentially hurt her health while in the throes of illness. That’s horrible!

14. Lucia similarly says in her memoirs “Our Lady pointed out to us which kind of sins offend God most. They say that Jacinta, when in Lisbon, mentioned sins of the flesh.” Just as a theological matter, even conditional on Christianity, that strikes me as implausible. Quoting C.S. Lewis:

The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

15. I also find the way that the children are reported as talking more typical of Lucia later filling in the details than earnest statements from children. They make all sorts of subtle theological points ill-befitting of young children:

“Francisco, which do you like better – to console Our Lord, or to convert sinners, so that no more souls will go to hell?”

“I would rather console Our Lord. Didn’t you notice how sad Our Lady was that last month, when she said that people must not offend Our Lord any more, for He is already much offended? I would like to console Our Lord, and after that convert sinners so that they won’t offend Him any more.”

It doesn’t seem plausible that God would be sad or would appear sad to a small child. Similarly, Jacinta says:

“Don’t cry. Surely, these are the sacrifices which the Angel said that God was going to send us. That’s why you are suffering, so that you can make reparation to Him and convert sinners.”

Can you imagine a small child saying that? When I read Lucia’s memoirs, they don’t strike me as plausibly accurate accounts (I cannot remember any highly-specific things my cousins said when they were ten, much less a great number of extremely specific anecdotes).

16. Lucia describes on September 8th she “thought, therefore, that [her] last hour had come.” But she also says in her third memoir that during the June 13th apparition Mary says “I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon [to heaven]. But you are to stay here some time longer. Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved.” Now, it’s possible here that when she thought her last hour had come, she wasn’t thinking about the memoir or was being hyperbolic. But still, this seems to be some evidence for the pattern of Lucia embellishing things as the memoirs go on. In addition, in Lucia’s earlier memoir, Jacinta doesn’t talk as if she knows that death is imminent from Mary.

17. This is a consistent pattern; the first memoir is pretty understated, the second is more dramatic, then in the third one we learn about secrets! In the fourth Memoir she added an entire sentence to one of the secrets “In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc.” In the second memoir, on September 13th, Mary is depicted only as saying “God is pleased with your sacrifices, but He does not want you to sleep with the rope on; only wear it during the day.” And yet in the fourth dialogue, on that same day, Mary is depicted as saying “"Continue to pray the Rosary in order to obtain the end of the war. In October Our Lord will come, as well as Our Lady of Dolours and Our Lady of Carmel. Saint Joseph will appear with the Child Jesus to bless the world. God is pleased with your sacrifices. He does not want you to sleep with the rope on, but only to wear it during the daytime.” Seems the tale grows over time.

18. Generally I would expect optimal apparitions to be extremely random. Actions tend to have enormous unpredictable second-order effects, so the apparitions that would be for the best would probably seem totally random—maybe the things with the best effects would involve Mary giving some sort of strange cryptic poetry combined with random bird sounds. For this reason, I think some strong evidence against their veracity is how normal and within the Overton window they were. Out of the infinite range of possible messages, it would be totally shocking if the optimal ones were roughly in accordance with the cultural norms of Catholics in Portugal. Note: this doesn’t assume consequentialism, only that one has strong moral reasons to create value. It is very likely that the Fatima message is causally responsible for almost everyone on Earth being born instead of other people. That is roughly 100% of its total impact, and it is very unlikely that a message like the one provided would be optimal when one takes into account that effect.⁴

Overall, I’m quite happy at how judiciously Fatima was investigated and analyzed—by Scott, by Mark Grant, and by Dustin. I find Fatima interesting and puzzling, but I think it was not a miracle. Even if I was Catholic, I’d have some major questions about its veracity.

I leave this process a bit more skeptical of miracles, though I still think they probably do. Some just seem like such slam dunks (e.g. Barbara Snyder and Calanda). Improbable-seeming miracles happen frequently enough that it’s hard to believe they’re all fake (to give an analogy from Aron Wall: if you hear a story on the news about someone saying they saw a coelacanth, when scientists are skeptical that they exist, you should think they probably didn’t see it. But if three of your friends say they saw one, you should think they probably did, or at least saw something else that looks like one). I also am a theist on independent grounds—but conditional on theism, I think miracles become pretty likely.

But I come away more skeptical because it seems like people are bizarrely able to hallucinate things that didn’t happen. If people can hallucinate that the sun moved, that witches stole their penis, that they saw spirits, and that they heard a booming voice from heaven declaring Joseph Smith’s revelation true, then that calls into question a lot of the evidence for miracles.

When I first heard about Fatima, it seemed remarkably compelling. But as I looked more, I felt like the case sort of disintegrated. If that’s true of Fatima, it becomes more likely to be true of other miracles. So while I think the argument from miracles for theism still has reasonable force, it no longer seems like as much of a decisive deathblow for atheism as it once did.

Appendix about whether the secrets were known about ahead of time?

The first public record of the secrets is in 1941, in Lucia’s memoirs.

Is there good evidence for the secrets having been present earlier? Or did she make the secrets up later? Here’s my skeptical story: in 1917, Lucia claimed to get some secret. Over time, she misremembered the contents of the secret. Around 1929, she had another vision, of a similar kind to the first, where she came to believe that Russia should be consecrated so as to stop their godless communism. Then, at some time after war was imminent, with varying degrees of detail between 1936 and 1940, she claimed that the vision had also included something about a second war breaking out and the consecration stopping that war.

Does this hold up? First, let’s review the evidence in favor.

1. The 1936 letter conspicuously leaves out mentioning the allegedly predicted impending global war. Seems surprising that that is left out of the letter, but then mentioned later, after the global war starts.

2. It is suspicious that our first public records of war comes from when the war was imminent. It is suspicious that our first public record of Russia being a big deal comes from after Russia was a big deal.

Let’s review Ethan’s evidence against.

A first bit of evidence: it is claimed that Jacinta made statements on her deathbed indicating the existence of the secrets. It is well-attested that Jacinta expressed horror about hell. I found it hard to track down when Jacinta said what, but in any case, the stuff she said about war is “Our Lady said that there are many wars and discords in the world. Wars are only punishments for the sins of the world.” That is very different from the contents of the secrets. I also couldn’t find them saying anything about Russia, which is a bit surprising if Russia is the big boogeyman whose consecration could stop wars and lead to mass conversion. Here’s Claude’s assessment of the evidence attesting to Jacinta’s claims (which comes from Mother Godhino):

Key weaknesses and caveats:

• Dating of Mother Godinho’s records is uncertain. Sources say she “carefully took down” or “wrote down” Jacinta’s words, but when exactly she committed them to paper is not specified in the sources I found. Frère Michel says “we have documents written shortly after the death of Jacinta,” but the earliest securely dated document from Mother Godinho that I could find is a 1954 letter to Pope Pius XII — which is 34 years after the fact. If her records were only formalized decades later, the dating advantage largely evaporates.

• Mother Godinho’s reliability is contested. Even Frère Michel (in Volume II) reportedly treats a later message from Mother Godinho as potentially “apocryphal.” Her unfulfilled ambition to found a religious order, and her attempt in 1954 to present her proposed order to Pius XII as “the express wish of the Blessed Virgin Mary” (tailoring Jacinta’s message to fit her own goals), raises questions about how accurately she recorded versus embellished Jacinta’s words.

• The content is general rather than specific. Wars, hell, penance, fashions offending God, sins of the flesh — these are themes that would be familiar to any devoutly Catholic child in 1920 Portugal. They overlap with the secret but don’t contain the specific predictive content (Pius XI, a second worse war, Russia by name) that would be most probative.

So if anything, given the omissions of Russia and wars, this seems like evidence against earlier revelation of the secrets! On the skeptical story, we would expect to maybe hear about hell, but we wouldn’t expect to hear about Russia which wasn’t yet a big deal. By 1929, Soviet Russia was already the Catholic Church's primary existential enemy, so it’s not surprising we hear about it then. This is, in fact, what we observe.

Second, it is well-documented that in 1929, Lucia claimed to receive another vision. It is clear that fairly soon after, this mentioned consecration from various letters. For example, this is from a 1930 letter.

The good Lord promises to end the persecution in Russia, if the Holy Father will himself make a solemn act of reparation and consecration of Russia to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, as well as ordering all the bishops of the Catholic world to do the same. The Holy Father must then promise that upon the ending of this persecution he will approve and recommend the practice of the reparatory devotion already described.»

Suspiciously, this telling of the merits of consecration leaves out anything about war.

Third, in 1936 Lucia is documented as sending a letter to Father Goncalves containing the following:

«At this time Our Lord informed me that the moment had come when He willed for me to make known to the Holy Church His desire for the consecration of Russia and His promise to convert it... The communication took place in this way:

…

«Later on, by means of an interior communication, Our Lord said to me, complaining: “ They did not want to heed My request!... Like the King of France they will repent and do it, but it will be late. Russia will have already spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church: the Holy Father will have much to suffer.”»

This, I grant, is some evidence for the earlier secret. This was written in May of 1936, and copied in April 1941. The Spanish civil war, after which point it would have been obvious that Russia was “provoking wars and persecutions against the Church,” hadn’t started yet (though was a few months away). But I don’t think this is very much evidence for a few reasons:

1. In 1936, the war was already brewing. So it isn’t that surprising that Lucia might have described Russia as provoking wars and persecutions. By 1936, while the Soviet state wasn't directly provoking interstate wars, the Comintern existed precisely to export revolution worldwide, and this was no secret. Heck, the Russia had already fought an aggressive war with Poland in 1919.

2. There’s no mention of another world war which is suspicious.

3. It’s possible that it was added later, after 1936 but before 1941, by Lucia.

4. We don’t have a copy of the 1936 letter but only of the 1941 copy. It is possible that extra details were added or that the original creation of the copy was misremembered.

Fourth, in 1946 Lucia was interviewed and confronted with the accusation by a Jesuit priest that she had made the secrets up later. She suggested “That Jesuit priest could write my confessors and ask them what I communicated to them around 1927. They were Fathers José da Silva Aparicio and José Bernardo Goncalves.” She also said that before the war she revealed the secrets “To the Provincial Superior, to the Bishop of Leiria, and to Canon Galamba.” But I couldn’t actually find anyone contacting them! It also doesn’t seem that unlikely that if the secrets slowly grew in size over time, their memory would be contaminated by the later secrets. It’s easy to imagine the slow creep:

Consecration prevents oppression of the Church—>Consecration prevents oppression of the Church and wars—>Consecration prevents oppression of the Church and a future global war.

Fifth, Lucia allegedly wrote letters to her bishop in 1938-1939 saying the war predicted in the secret was imminent—the 1939 one said that Portugal would be spared. My theory has her already predicting a war by then, and it isn’t that hard to guess that war was going to break out in Europe. So this isn’t much evidence. It also isn’t clear when this letter was really sent (the paper trail is a bit murky).

The only surprising thing is the correct prediction that Portugal would be spared. And this is a bit weird, but Lucia also said Portugal would be spared because of the consecration. That is very strange. Would world war two really have gone differently absent the consecration? Also, Portugal was out of the way, friendly with Britain, and friendly with the Axis powers, so them being spared wasn’t that surprising.

Overall, then, there are some factors pointing in favor of the secrets being earlier. But these aren’t that different from what I’d expect by chance. It remains pretty surprising that Lucia repeatedly made public Mary foretelling events—but only after they occurred.

1. Secret two reads:

The [First World] war is going to end; if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the communion of reparation on the first Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.

2. Here’s what he says about Ethan’s further eyewitnesses:

Assume the anomalous light-emitting object lay 3km due south of the Cova (itself about 350 meters above sea level), and assume Dalleur’s estimate of 28˚ apparent angle of elevation from there. If the object were a sphere the size of the sun (so that people could be tricked into thinking it in fact was the sun), basic trigonometry then implies its radius would be about 15.7 meters and its altitude about 1945 meters above sea level.

At sea level from Santo Amaro de Oeiras, about 116km away from the proposed location of the object, similar trigonometry implies the object would appear a bit less than one degree above the horizon, with an apparent angular diameter of about 0.0155˚. This is about the apparent size of Jupiter to the naked eye on a clear night’s sky. Looking instead from the shore of Praia da Granja about 159km away, the angular diameter becomes 0.0113˚; and as for elevation, the object would perhaps lie a tenth to a third of a degree above the horizon depending on atmospheric refraction.

If you were at the beach and suddenly observed a bizarre, reddish dot the size of Jupiter (or a speck of dust ten centimeters away), hovering a fraction of a degree above the horizon, it’s exceedingly implausible you would spontaneously identify it with the sun, as opposed to some other spooky light. Still less would it be plausible that you could make out the object’s rotation or “turning.” Yet the distant witnesses reported second-hand from those two Portuguese beaches have one or both of these features - and both have the additional shared feature that neither account mentioned surprise that the sun suddenly shrank to near-indiscernibility and began to appear in a totally illogical location in the sky, or surprise that it must have discontinuously jumped back to its normal size and location a few minutes later (since Dalleur’s miraculous sun-like object eventually disappeared).

3. Mark tried to apply to apply Dalleur’s methods to the following toy scenarios.

He described them thusly:

Two photos of a scene minimalistically mimicking Dalleur’s photo D115. The “sun” is at an elevation/relative azimuth of 42˚/70˚, respectively, in both, and the camera parameters are 62˚ FOV and ~5˚ downward pitch in both. In the first one, no clouds are present, just a single directional light source. In the second, a uniformly illuminated floating square is also present, crudely representing a layer of clouds covering the sun and most of the sky; but it is also partly diaphanous, so that the directional light from the sun still casts shadows, although they’re highly attenuated. Applying Dalleur’s method to the cast shadows in the first, cloudless photo yields a roughly correct solar elevation. Applying it naively (i.e., with the intuitive-looking hat shadow boundary) to the second yields a mistaken estimate by 15-20˚.

He also has a bunch of other objections!

4. You might object that this is a general objection to miracles. And it is, to some degree. But I think the Fatima miracle has particular features that make it harder to get around. Here are some things that the miracle defender can say about this objection and why I don’t think those responses work for Fatima.

1. “God has a reason to adopt a general policy of non-intervention so the miracles have to be small things that aren’t designed to steer the world too much.” The problem is that you can’t hold this with Fatima, because it was a big miracle, and apparently God was prepared to intervene to stop world war two.

2. “The miracles are generally done by powerful beings that aren’t God, like angels, who aren’t omniscient.” The problem is that Jesus was supposed to have been directly present during some of the apparitions.