Fr. Dwight Longenecker wrote, “Fatima and the Atheists,” Crux Now, May 8, 2017 AD.
Succinctly stated, the issue is the “Miracle of the Sun” which reportedly took place in Fatima on October 13, 1917 AD:
We have documentary, eyewitness, and photographic evidence that 70,000 people ‘saw’ the sun spin, felt it was yanked from the sky and that it plunged to earth. Everyone said they saw the same thing. Everyone was so frightened they screamed and ran for their lives. Clearly something happened, what was it?
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins wrote:
It is not easy to explain how seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination. But it is even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the world, outside Fatima, seeing it too – and not just seeing it, but feeling it as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system, including acceleration forces sufficient to hurl everybody into space. Obviously the sun did not dance and plunge to the earth. We know the sun is billions of times bigger than the earth. If the sun plunged to the earth there would be no earth. Clearly there was no miracle of the sun at Fatima.
Longenecker states:
We see with our eyes, but what do we see? Whatever we see is transferred to the brain and the brain interprets what we see. It is well known that if we do not have the mental capacity to “see” certain things they are invisible to us…
Does this mean “It was only in their mind?” Or that “They had merely imagined it”? How did they all imagine the same thing? Was that the miracle? Did the event manipulate their minds and powers of perception in some way? Was it therefore a very unusual kind of mass hallucination?
We are told:
Marian researcher Donal Foley…tells the story of a young boy, Inacio Lourenco, who was a schoolchild of nine when he saw the miracle at a village about 12 miles from Fatima…“When the people realized that the danger was now over there was an explosion of joy and everyone joined in thanksgiving and praise of our Lady.”
Now, this has all been meant to get to the bottom line as this is of most interest to me and that is Longenecker’s conclusion:
Believers will ask, “Why not accept the most obvious explanation: A power greater than nature interrupted the natural order. The term for a power greater than nature is God, and the term for such an interruption is ‘miracle’.”
His is a well articulated article with, however, the exception of the conclusion as believers in the Bible will ask, “Why not accept the most obvious explanation: A power greater than nature interrupted the natural order. The term for a power greater than nature when the result is praise of anyone besides God, such as ‘our Lady,’ is Satan, and the term for such an interruption witin the Bible is ‘lying sign and wonder’”( 2 Thessalonians 2:9).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby. If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help. Here is my donate/paypal page.
Due to robo-spaming, I had to close the comment sections. However, you can comment on my Facebook page and/or on my Google+ page. You can also use the “Share / Save” button below this post.