The La-la Land Side of Shroud of Turin Research
In my opinion, nothing hurts the credibility of legitimate scientific and historical Shroud of Turin research than linking it with talk about UFOs, crop circles, etc. I’ve criticized Andrew Silverman for past radio interviews. It really doesn’t matter what he says when he gets on shows like, "Thresholds Into Other Realms: All aspects of the paranormal realm, UFO’s & extraterrestrial life”
Here is the billing for the show on October 9, 2011
On tonight’s show we finish up our Chicago Ghost Conference interviews. Then we have a truly amazing in-depth discussion about The Shroud Of Turin with Dr Andrew Silverman. We discussed the Shroud with Dr. Silverman before, but this time we dig deep into facts…..and what we find is amazing!
Listen to the show on their website; better yet, download the mp3 file so you can listen to it on a better player with useful timer controls (e.g. Windows Media Player, iTunes, a portable MP3 player, etc.). You need to move forward to about 59 minutes into the show for the telephone interview with Silverman.
Some of it is good. The explanation of the reweaving repair that messed up the carbon dating is excellent. Some of it is really weird; in my opinion la-la land. It is pseudoscience. And for some who care, it is theologically strange. But all of that is my opinion. You need to listen, yourself.
Hopefully most people did not hear the show and it is unlikely that all that many people will listen now (except that I am asking you to do so). But do so with the understanding that the association to the show, to all things paranormal, to UFOs and such, is damaging.
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
in defense of silverman you should note that real face of jesus, the best shroud of turin documentary ever made, appeared on the history channel which is famous for crazy ufo and alien crap