Reply #7: Experience and explanations of experience

[Stunster]

any phenomenon that occurred at Fatima was a phenomenon of perception, not of external reality

Agreed.

Or do you claim that the sun itself actually shook and moved that day?

No, of course not. I said that what is practically indisputable is that many people had an experience, and that the phenomenological nature of the experience concerned the sun (as well as other things like colors, etc).

Now... we have a few hundred people staring at the sun. Some, perhaps many, suffered retinal damage, or the movement of their eyes trying to AVOID damage caused a perception that the sun was "shaking" or moving.

The evidence does not bear that interpretation. Nobody's eyes were damaged. Indeed, the most common feature of the experience was that they could look directly at the sun without any discomfort.

We also know that people can be easily convinced to believe something that didn't happen.
How easy is it to convince 70,000 people that the sun is spinning and making violent movements---and make other people who were miles away experience the same thing?

What I'm saying is that a fair and open-minded reading of the evidence is that many people had an experience which they truthfully related.

The next question is what caused them to have the experience. One can put forward various hypotheses. The supernatural one makes perfect sense of the experience. The naturalistic ones are terribly strained, and simply don't account for all the phenomena experienced---e.g. the instantaneous drying of rainsoaked clothes, the remarkable color phenomena, etc.