Cognitive Dissonance for Skeptics: More from David B. Marshall
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avid B Marshall has posted the third installment of his review: Shroud III: Cognitive Dissonance for Skeptics. He writes:
At the beginning of Part IV, Seeing Through the Shroud, DW tells us about the distress he felt upon realizing, as a secular person, that the Shroud seemed to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus. His account reads like a classic conversion tale:
One hot, bright morning in the early summer of 2004 I ambled out into the orchard behind my house in Cambridge, lay down on the grass and immersed myself in The Turin Shroud by Ian Wilson. Overhead, white blossoms clustered along the sparse branches of the apple tree in whose shade I settled . . .
As an agnostic . . . I was extremely uncomfortable with the with the idea that the Shroud might be an authentic marvel . . . I couldn’t avoid the conclusion: from a purely historical point of view, the death and burial of Jesus seemed to be the best explanation for the Shroud.
For a skeptical agnostic, this was a suffocating thought . . . It was as if the Shroud, backed by the vast weight of Christian tradition, was pressing down on me, threatening to stifle my secular worldview. Instead of enjoying a quiet lull in the summer sun, I found myself battling with a fierce metaphysical adversary, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. (192)
And then there is this gem:
A philosopher might remind DW that valid reasoning and true premises are two different things: belief in miracles might be an error, but not bad reasoning per se. A Christian might find it a strange definition of "rationality" that excludes the likes of Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, C. S. Lewis, or Alvin Plantinga, simply because they doubt the universe is a closed system.
Read all of it at Christ the Tao: Shroud III: Cognitive Dissonance for Skeptics
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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
Yup. That’s pretty much how I felt after I read Fanti’s Corona Discharge article (even though I don’t hold to the theory any more).