I’m dubious, and the scientific method is designed to find and eliminate subjective bias. A scientist’s reputation would suffer irretrievably if they were found to be including subjective bias in their work. (edit: my apologies I meant to say results, not work)
Of course none of this alters the fact that there is no objective evidence for miracles. They’re an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, you have only to read the definition of miracle.
I’m not quite sure how much of the scientific method you understand or not. State of the art results are not being voted for in scientific assemblies, but stand on their own, based on their explanatory power and usefulness alone. Or wrong theories or results can be falsified, and tossed in the scientific rubbish bin. Progress is driven forward by new theories improving old theories, and new experiments improving the results of older experiments. And new+better theories/results replacing older theories/results. The scientific method is essentially a way of gradually improving and expanding knowledge, and discarding old knowledge where appropriate. “Good reason” is not good enough to make such decisions, only hard, repeatable, and falsifiable evidence is. In contrast to how decisions are being made in a religious context, i.e. based on unevidenced assertions and static dogma that does not change, even for “good reason”.
In other words, you’re saying that everyone can choose freely whether to believe such stories or not, i.e. throwing the dice each and every time. Or in other words, experiences about supernatural experiences are worthless as evidence.
You’ve had your answers. You are promoting a “no conclusion is possible” explanation. Which is false.
So far, their methodology has assumed axiomatically that supernatural phenomena exist and is possible. And they use this unevidenced assumption of the existence of miracles to set demarcation criteria for what is and what is not miracles. Which makes each and every decision they make unevidenced, or even circular reasoning. In other words, it has nothing to do with the actual, real, physical world.
It’s a good thing that you remain skeptical. You might benefit from reading about the science philosophy of Karl Popper, a highly influential philosopher. Basically, his ideas center around the powerful and useful concept of falsifiability as a demarcation criteria for what is scientific and what is not. The Popperian view on scientific theories is that they cannot be confirmed (as in proven true), only strengthened by experiments. Or they can be falsified, shown to be wrong or in error. Although a basic, simple, and powerful idea, it doesn’t reflect very well how science is actually done (or even can be done), but can be a nice idealistic guideline.
Personal anecdotes are problematic in historical research, as they are obviously biased, and their factual correctness can be hard to verify. Although they do give insight into personal affairs, and opinions. The primary sources for historians
But sources are always, as far as possible, checked against each other to see if they tell the same story, and all must be weighted by how much confidence you can assign to them.
The short version of what do I think about this? Hilarious nonsense.
The long version? Here’s just some of the problems with this.
Item one. This event was alleged to have taken place in 1917 in Portugal. Apparently no one other than members of a mythology-addled gathering, primed in advance to expect anything even remotely unusual to be the product of their cartoon magic man, observed any of the celestial shenanigans alleged to have happened. Among the people who didn’t notice anything unusual, were tens of thousands of astronomers, who would have been the first to publish records of such an event if it had genuinely occurred.
Likewise, the first successful roll film camera was invented by Kodak back in 1888, and enough of these devices would have been in circulation, including in the hands of various professionals, to have been deployed for the occasion. The first working movie camera was invented by Thomas Edison in 1892, though Eadwaerd Muybrige was shooting movies as far back as 1877, using arrays of still cameras for his pioneering work on animal locomotion.
As a corollary, working devices capable of capturing both still and moving images would have been available, even if only in limited numbers, by 1917. At least some of these devices would have been in the hands of scientific professionals of one sort or another, including astronomers and physicists. Who would have been the first to point these devices at the sky and shoot footage of any weird movements of the Sun. That this didn’t happen should be telling you something important, as should the fact that such an event would have been headline news around the world, but wasn’t.
But there’s an even more lethal objection to this, which comes from the fact that for the Sun to appear to move about the sky in the manner asserted, then either the Sun or the Earth would need to have travelled at speeds far in excess of the speed of light. A certain Mr A. Einstein had much to say on that matter.
If the Sun had been travelling at such speeds, then the bizarre light effects arising from such motion would have been immediately and conspicuously manifest to everyone on Earth. The transverse relativistic Doppler effect alone would have produced instantly memorable pyrotechnics.
The same would have been true if the Earth had suddenly started moving through space at speed far in excess of light, in order to reproduce the requisite visual spectacle. This brings with it a further problem, namely, that none of us would have survived such motion. Everything that wasn’t nailed down on the rearward side of the Earth would have found itself suddenly suspended in the vacuum of space, as the planet launched forward with an acceleration of several trillion g’s. Anything on the forward side of the planet as this happened, would have been turned into squashed ravioli an atom thick by the same enormous acceleration.
Even if one assumes by hypothesis, that via some miraculous means, either the Sun or the Earth was enclosed in a giant Alcubierre warp bubble for the duration, so that the massive tidal forces would not affect either body, the visual effects would have been, once again, globally conspicuous. Those on the night time side of the planet would observe all manner of weird spectroscopic effects while looking up at the stars, with relativistic Doppler shifting entering frankly insane realms.
There is simply so much physical unreality attached to this “vision”, that no one who paid attention in a properly constituted science class can take it seriously.
Like so much else emanating from the world of mythology fanboyism, this is risible nonsense from start to finish.
Just because one can place an object into the “it may exist”, that does not move it into the “thus is may exist” category. A more stringent bar for acceptance is probabilities. Is it possible invisible fireproof worms burrow within the fabric of our sun? Is it possible an unknown unidentified entity that has no use or reason floats around in the sky and desires people worship it, as long as the keep their genitals in order?
Thanks for your perspective! I agree that it is ridiculous to believe that the sun/earth actually deviated from their standard motion. That seems to be the general consensus.
I have heard apologists suggest it was a supernatural mass hallucination or manifestation that seem real to some (but not all) on-site witness? Of course that would mean one must believe that supernatural events can happen. I expect that is not a wide held belief among the members of this forum. 
I find it fascinating (and a bit convenient) that the story says that it was raining hard until just before the miricals occured. I don’t recall how long the sun was to have danced and spun, so I don’t know if wittnes would have had time to get out cameras or not.
One of the members in this group stated that the only people to document interviews of witnesses were members of the Catholic Church. I have not heard heard that before; but, often wondered why I had not heard about this until I started listening to Catholic radio a few years ago.
Here are some old threads on the subject:
We also have the thread I posted in here, which contains practically every piece of weapons grade tard from a mythology fanboy you could wish for. Those with the requisite comic tastes will enjoy this thread from the old version of the forums, others will simply find the content from the mythology fanboy irritating …