Joe Nickell, Children’s Author
In her blog, [a] homeschooling, freethinking mom dreaming of learning to live off the land, during short breaks from teaching times tables and cleaning up poop,” who tells us, “I’m trying to figure this whole secular parenting thing out while raising my kids in the heart of Jesus Land, and it’s not always pretty,” writes in a posting:
Teaching my kids to think skeptically as they are bombarded with information and various worldviews is of great importance to me. I’ve said it before, but as a homeschooling mom, my goal is to teach my children how to think and not what to think. Of course we learn math facts, grammar rules, and history, but more important than filling their heads with particular knowledge now, is teaching them to love learning and to continue schooling themselves for their entire lives. To this end, here are three great books for teaching kids to approach life skeptically!
1. Bonnie loved reading The Magic Detectives
[Joe Nickell, Prometheus 1989]. The book features thirty short real-life mysteries, from Bigfoot to the Shroud of Turin to UFO sightings. After studying each case, the reader can think it over before flipping the page to read the solution to the mystery. Bonnie flew through it, then we adapted one of the suggested assignments in the back of the book. She wrote a small essay on the ethical difference between tricks used by phony "psychics" and stage magicians.
In the book, Nickell argues from the d’Arcis memorandum, the wrap around distortion problems, the discovery of paint particles, on how easy it is to make a negative (it is not, of course) and the use of carbon dating.
It makes you think about homeschooling. I doubt that even the most secular, freethinking school districts, far away from “Jesus Land,” would use a book like this even “for teaching kids to approach life skeptically.” Being skeptical is fine. Freethinking, fine. But, mom, check out the factual content of this book as it pertains to the shroud. That was 1989. One of the things I wanted my kids to learn was the value of fact checking. Much has happened since 1989.
The mom concludes:
Have you found any other good books for little skeptics? Especially for younger readers?
Mom, go to Amazon.com. Click on Children’s Books. In the search box enter the word Skeptic for 6 books, Atheist for 16 books, etc.
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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
Joe Nickell is an ethical, honest and dedicated researcher.