The undeniable miracle at Fatima

[Mister Agenda]

Imagine this scenario. A psychic comes up to me and says "Three days from now your cousin who lives in Alabama and who's name starts with a letter B will be struck by lightening at 3pm." And exactly 3 days later I hear that my cousin Bob from Alabama got stuck by lightening at 3pm. There are 2 possibilities: this was some sort of insane coincidence, or the person who gave me this info is exactly what they claim to be. I don't believe in psychics, but if that happened to me, I think it would be more likely that this person actually does have some sort of supernatural ability to see into the future, than for something like that to have been a complete coincidence.  

This works the same way for me. I find it more unlikely that this sun thing was all a string of lucky coincidences and multiple crazy chance events that lined up perfectly, than for it to have been a supernatural phenomenon.

If you wanted your analogy to be good, you should have gone with a much less unlikely prediction; like someone claiming to be a psychic tells you that something unusual will happen to one of your relatives sometime around noon in three days. That would be a lot closer to the predictive element of the Fatima scenario.    

The fact that you broke down and separated literally every sentence I wrote, kind of defeats the whole point I'm making. The whole point is that all those things are applied together. It's the combination of all of those factors that would have made this a crazy, far fetched, freak of nature, impossible coincidence... if it was merely a coincidence.

If you don't want the individual points of your posts addressed individually, try not making so many in one post in the first place.

Thousands of people gathered to see if a miracle would occur, having no idea what it would be or that it would have anything to do with the sun.

So really, not like your analogy at all, where your psychic was ultra-specific.

The miracle was predicted to the hour, months in advance. To me, it sounds like a huge coincidence that on the same day, at the same time which was predicted months before, tens of thousands of people saw the sun moving, and had their clothes dried in seconds.

You had a bunch of people show up looking for a miracle and they found one in a common atmospheric optical phenomenon they ordinarily wouldn't have paid much attention to. Or maybe it was a vision sent by God; but what you haven't established is that what the people experienced was unlikely to be natural under those circumstances.

As an isolated incident where a few people out of nowhere said they saw the sun moving, I would believe the sundog theory.

Why? What is there about a few people seeing it that makes it less of a coincidence? Sun dogs and sun haloes are visible phenomena, fifty million people could see them if they're actually there and they look at the sun. And fifty million people who don't know anything about the phenomenon could be confused about the nature of what they were seeing.

Or that those people were just tired. Or that they just happened to have the same hallucination at the same time. But it's not an isolated incident. It was predicted to the hour. There were thousands of witnesses. Soaking clothes and puddles dried up in seconds.

Come on, even pabsta only claimed they dried in minutes.

You can say these were all a string of coincidences, if that sounds more likely to you. To me, that sounds more unlikely than the claim itself.

Again, in the only study I'm familiar with, sun dogs and sun haloes were visible from San Francisco 21 days in March in 2015. Why do you think it's so unlikely that those or some other atmospheric optical effect would be visible from that location on that day in 1917?

And collective hallucinations aren't a coincidence, they're more like a mental infection rapidly spread through the power of suggestion. Any competent stage mentalist can work a crowd and get them to believe they saw things that didn't actually happen or vice versa. There was a famous experiment where the subjects were asked to watch a film of a basketball game and track the score, and most of them didn't notice the person in a gorilla suit walking onto the court, just because they were focused on something else. Criminal evidence classes routinely stage events and have the class try to reconstruct events afterwards to illustrate the limited usefulness of eye witnesses; and such demonstrations also afford an opportunity to see the propensity of groups of people to arrive at a consensus about what they saw...and there's a good chance it will be incorrect. The best thing to do is separate them and question them individually and do NOT let them discuss what they saw, and see what is consistent between them. Give them an hour to talk about it and their stories will be much more similar, but the human tendency to exaggerate and embellish and fill in gaps with imagination will have started to take effect.