Atheism, Evidence and the God-of-the-Gaps

[Jenny A]

If god's qualities include the ability to suspend or defy physics, then sure, he could part the sea with a stiff wind that somehow doesn't blast the humans passing through the dry portion into dust particles.  Or he can make the sun appear to stand still in the sky without wiping out all life on the planet when it suddenly stops rotating.  Or choose to have life evolve and not have anyone know about it until we discovered it on our own.  But that may be the biggest gap of all: what if god's primary attribute is that we can't rule out any of his attributes?  I can apply that to lots of gods, but that doesn't get me any closer to one that might actually be real.

Why not? He did it at Fatima in 1917. There are photographs of the event online.

Fatima and other sun miracles are a great example of why eyewitness testimony of miracles is insufficient.  Let's take a critical look at the "miracle."

The people had gathered because three young shepherd children had predicted that at high noon the lady who had appeared to them several times would perform a great miracle in a field near Fátima called Cova da Iria. According to many witnesses, after a period of rain, the dark clouds broke and "the sun" appeared as an opaque, spinning disc in the sky.[4] It was said to be significantly duller than normal, and to cast multicolored lights across the landscape, the people, and the surrounding clouds. The sun was then reported to have careened towards the earth in a zigzag pattern,[4] frightening those who thought it a sign of the end of the world.[5] Witnesses reported that their previously wet clothes became "suddenly and completely dry, as well as the wet and muddy ground that had been previously soaked because of the rain that had been falling".[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

Sounds pretty damned impressive don't it?

Pio Scatizzi, Society of Jesus, described the events of that day on Fátima, and he concluded:

   The ... solar phenomena were not observed in any observatory. Impossible that they should escape notice of so many astronomers and indeed the other inhabitants of the hemisphere... there is no question of an astronomical or meteorological event phenomenon... Either all the observers in Fátima were collectively deceived and erred in their testimony, or we must suppose an extra-natural intervention.[30]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

But actually, that's not true.  Not all the witnesses saw any such thing:

Despite these assertions, not all witnesses reported seeing the sun "dance". Some people only saw the radiant colors. Others, including some believers, saw nothing at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun[emphasis added]

Hmm, why would it be that some people saw this miracle and others did not?  

Auguste Meessen, following the work done before him by the Belgian skeptic Marc Hallet,[24] has stated sun miracles cannot be taken at face value and that the reported observations were optical effects caused by prolonged staring at the sun. Meessen contends that retinal after-images produced after brief periods of sun gazing are a likely cause of the observed dancing effects. Similarly Meessen states that the color changes witnessed were most likely caused by the bleaching of photosensitive retinal cells.[25] Meessen observes that Sun Miracles have been witnessed in many places where religiously charged pilgrims have been encouraged to stare at the sun. He cites the apparitions at Heroldsbach, Germany (1949) as an example, where many people within a crowd of over 10,000 testified to witnessing similar observations as at Fátima.[25]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

Similar "miracles" has happened elsewhere under similar conditions.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, sun miracles have been reported at other Marian sites—at Lubbock, Texas, in 1989; Mother Cabrini Shrine near Denver, Colorado, in 1992; Conyers, Georgia, in the early to mid-1990s; and elsewhere, including Thiruvananthapuram, India, in 2008. Tragically, at the Colorado and India sites, many people suffered eye damage (solar retinopathy)—in some instances, possibly permanent damage (Nickell 1993, 196—200; Sebastian 2008).

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/real_secrets_of_fatima/  [emphasis added]

Protect your eyes from retinal damage and the miracle goes away:

At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/real_secrets_of_fatima/

So, what you have is thousands of people telling the truth about what they experienced, and yet being just as wrong as they can be about what it is they actually saw.