SO, A married couple of Californian atheists go in search of a miracle. In particular, they want to see the sun spin and possibly zoom around the sky as it changes colour. This was first reported at Fatima in 1917, when the Virgin Mary appeared to three peasant girls; but there it was not repeated. In Medjugorje, in Bosnia, however, people have seen it regularly since 1981, when the Virgin appeared to a group of children there, too.
Dr Scott Alexander, though, is no ordinary atheist debunker. A psychiatrist of apparently inexhaustible curiosity and limitless energy, when he sits at the keyboard, he looks for things that he cannot explain, in the spirit of a man who wants to be surprised. “I was shocked never to have heard about this before,” he writes on his Substack (astrolcodexten.com). “There’s a place you can just go, and have a decent chance of seeing a real miracle? People take vacations to the Bahamas for the beaches, when they could go instead to Medjugorje and see the natural law of the universe get violated in real time? Seems crazy!”
His wife is prepared to accompany him: “It was only later that she started getting worried. ‘If you see the miracle, you’re not going to convert to Catholicism, are you?’
“What?’ I said. ‘Of course you’ve got to convert if you see a miracle!’
“No you don’t!’ said my wife, just as vocally, and proceeded to list the usual atheist concerns with Catholicism. . .
“I agreed these were all strong concerns, which was why I wasn’t currently a Catholic — but come on, if you see a miracle then all that goes out the window. Not, like, if after fasting and purging and otherwise working yourself up into a weird state you manage to spot some slightly trippy hallucinations in the sky. But if, on a totally normal day, you see the sun unambiguously change colors and whirl around like a top, of course you’ve got to convert, right?”
At this point, I should make it clear that I lack Dr Alexander’s willingness to follow experience wherever it leads. When I went to Medjugorje, in 1993, I saw nothing out of the ordinary except for the nightly flashes of shellfire where the Catholics were shelling the Muslims in besieged Mostar, ten miles away across the hills. I am more like his wife, who spent so much time sent to bed early as a child “with nothing better to do than experiment with the exact contour of her thoughts” — meditating, in other words — that no story of a miracle can really impress her.
“She long ago realized that everyone in California who talks about meditation either joins a cult or starts one, and she responded by ascribing no seriousness at all to any of her experiences and refusing to discuss them except with her husband and a few close friends.”
It is inevitably his wife who sees the miracle as they wait for it one evening outside the church: “At 6:33, my wife grabbed me by the shoulder, pointed at the sun, and said ‘LOOK! THERE IT IS! THE MIRACLE!’
“I knew my wife really well, and I didn’t think she could lie to me successfully. And she didn’t look like someone who was lying. She was staring straight at the evening sun, as intensely as I’d ever seen her do anything. ‘Do you see it?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t bright anymore! It just looks like a disc! It’s stopped being painful to stare at!’
“There was no contagion, no suggestion effect. The sun looked totally normal to me. It was too bright to look at directly for more than a few seconds, even though my wife was doing exactly that.
“‘It’s changing color!’ said my wife. ‘And sort of pulsing, or strobing, or . . . something! Wow! You’re not seeing this?’”
The experience lasted about 30 seconds. Then, her eyes teared up, and she was left with a frightening afterimage for a few minutes, such as you’d expect if you stared at the setting sun.
The rest of his blog post is taken up with physicalist explanations of what people see, and where and when. You need the right sort of clouds in front of the sun, so that it is unusually dim, but the surrounding clouds are unusually bright. Someone primed for a miracle will see that the sun looks dim or pale by comparison, and keep staring.
Since the sun is still, in fact, extremely bright, it will generate an afterimage which cycles through various colours, as the sun itself will appear to do. The constant, minute, and unconscious movements of our eyeballs will produce a halo of sun afterimages, all offset a little from the sun itself.
“Afterimages aren’t stable. As the photoreceptors recover at different rates, they pulsate, writhe, and change color before finally disappearing. Since each part of the sun’s ‘halo’ will be an afterimage from a different time (separated by milliseconds to seconds from each other), they will move heterogeneously.”
And there you have it. People — even practically minded atheists — really do see the sun spinning and changing colour. They just don’t see the real sun doing so.