Who knows what nonsense lurks in the hearts of Valencia? The Shadow knows.
A reader writes:
It occurs to me that Nathan Wilson’s famous “Shadow” satisfies all but one of the image characteristics of the The Valencia Shroud Enigma Challenge. That one shortcoming is easy to remedy.
The “Shadow” is certainly a molecular change confined to the outermost few hundred nanometers of the fiber, well within the primary cell wall. The “Shadow” is not visible when viewed with transmitted light. Image intensity does correlate to imagined cloth-to-body distances. There is no side-of-body imaging. Image resolution matches that of the Turin cloth. And as with the Turin cloth there are no outlines. Nor is there any notion of directionality. Of course, the “Shadow” is very much a photographic-like negative.
There is only the matter of there being no proof of no image below a bloodstain to make the “shadow” fully compliant with the challenge. It is a problem only because no blood was used on the original “Shadow”. That can be corrected and a new image can be prepared in a week’s time.
Please provide the UPS mailing address of the judging panel. To whom should I send wire transfer instructions.
Maybe the Shadow Shroud really does meet all of the criteria. Nathan can have fun with this and Dawkins may end up having the last laugh.
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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
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