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| C.S. Lewis |
In two previous posts in this blog I have mentioned the miracle of Fatima: What does science say about miracles and Abduction and the no-miracles argument. In the first post I proposed a trilemma (similar to that by C.S. Lewis) that can be applied, in general, to all miracles, considered as historical facts:
1. Either that fact actually happened, i.e. the witnesses told the truth.
2. Or the fact did not occur, and the witnesses deliberately lied.
3. Or the fact did not occur, but the witnesses did not lie, they were simply wrong, or had been the prey of a collective hallucination, or some equivalent explanation.
Consider the
miracle of Fatima, which took place on October 13, 1917, just over 100 years
ago. According to calculations made at the time, between 30,000 and 50,000 persons
witnessed the miracle (according to some, 70,000). With such a number, the
second option must be excluded, because it is impossible for so many people to
agree to a falsehood. So we are reduced to the first and the third option:
skeptics say that the miracle was a collective hallucination, or an optical
effect due to the contemplation of the sun. Believers prefer the first option.
In the comments
to the Spanish version of another
post, someone raised an interesting question: Do collective hallucinations exist? How many have been
scientifically documented and how?
To try to answer
the question, I looked for information on the Internet and came to the
conclusion that there is no clear and conclusive evidence that collective
hallucinations exist. Wikipedia does not know this concept, neither in the
Spanish nor in the English version. In both cases there is a page on hallucinations,
but it refers to individual hallucinations and does not mention collective. The
same applies to Encyclopedia Britannica.
Outside Wikipedia,
the term collective
hallucination appears several
times in Internet, but usually as a metaphor. Sometimes there is talk of
collective hallucinations in the strict sense, and the miracle of Fatima is
offered as the only verifiable historical example. It turns out, therefore,
that skeptics use the concept of collective hallucination to
"explain" the miracle of Fatima, and they use the miracle of Fatima
to justify the existence of collective hallucinations, in a clear example of
circular reasoning.
In a recent
article by Philippe Dalleur published in the magazine Scientia et Fides (9(1)/2021,
9–45), entitled Fatima Pictures and Testimonials: in-depth analysis, the miracle of Fatima is analyzed in great detail
and the two favorite explanations of the skeptics (collective hallucination, or
optical effect due to the contemplation of the sun) are shown to be impossible.
The following arguments are offered:
a)
The Fatima miracle
was not observed only by the thousands of people gathered in Cova de Iria.
There were well-documented witnesses who were not there. One of them was
Alfonso Lopes Vieira, a Portuguese poet, who observed the miracle with his
family from his house, 34 km away (as the crow flies) west-northwest of Fatima.
The second case is Ghilhermina da Silva, who saw it, along with two workers,
from Leiria, 16 km northwest of Fatima. The third testimony is that of Albano
Barros, who was shepherding sheep south of Fatima when suddenly, in the direction
of Fatima, I saw the sun falling from the sky. The fourth testimony is that of the inhabitants of the town of
Alburitel, on a hill 13 km east of Cova de Iria. They all agree with the
thousands of local witnesses in describing what they saw, and all claim that
they saw it in the direction of Fatima. It is obvious that the concept of
collective hallucination, if it really exists, cannot be applied to people
widely separated from each other.
b)
The second
argument is curious: analyzing the photos of the people who were contemplating
the miracle, Dalleur comes to the conclusion that they are not looking in the
direction of the sun, which at that time was at a height greater than 42º above
the horizon, but at a height 10º to 17º lower. His conclusion is that the Fatima
event did not affect the sun, but consisted in the apparition of a less
luminous object, which would explain why none of the witnesses suffered damage
to their sight. Furthermore, this agrees with the fact that distant witnesses
always saw it in the direction of Fatima, which in all four cases was different,
and in the case of Albano Barros was the opposite direction to the sun.
This is the
conclusion of the article:
…these testimonies invalidate any attempt at “coherent” explanations made so far: meteorological, physiological and psychological phenomena, mass suggestions or “collective” hallucinations. Dutch psychologist van den Aardweg (1988, 22–30) believes that subjective and psychological explanations are insufficient and that the phenomenon in Fatima was real, objective, and produced measurable effects.
In a footnote,
Dalleur explains: According to Lucia, Virgin Mary never named the sun but merely
invited the children to follow her hands pointing to the light “suddenly visible”
in the celestial azure. Lucia declared in good faith: “Look at the sun!” Many
then spoke of the sun, but some witnesses said it was not...
Thematic Thread on Science and Religion: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
Happy summer holidays. See you by end August.
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