Believe It or Not: A meeting of the British Society for the Turin Shroud
David Rolfe writes:
The B.S.T.S. is having a renaissance and its first meeting for quite a few years. It will be held on Sunday 21st October at 14:00 in Beaconsfield. Further details are here: http://www.shroud-enigma.com/BSTS/bsts-uk-homepage.html#
Oh, what the heck. This is what you will see if you click into the page. But click in anyways. There is more to see at The Home Page for the British Society for the Turin Shroud
A BSTS meeting. October 21st 2012 at 14:00 – 18:00 in Beaconsfield, Bucks. (30 minutes from Marylebone Station – Venue is 5 minutes walk from station.)
- Thomas De Wesselow, author of "The Sign", will talk about the artistic problems attributing the Shroud to the Middle Ages.
- Denis Mannix, chemist, has been revisiting the material published on the Maillard reaction theory and will reveal the results of his investigation so far.
- David Rolfe will provide an update on the Dawkins Challenge and the Shroud-Enigma educational project.
This seems worth flying across the pond to attend. Hmm.
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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
Is it open to anyone?