What science has or has not been able to confirm about the Shroud is instructive
About 10 days ago, Myra Adams, whose columns have appeared on PJ Media, The Daily Caller and as a co-writer on The Daily Beast, has an interesting article, The Shroud of Turin: The Mystery that Science and Technology Will Someday Solve:
Why is one of the most enduring mysteries of mankind still unresolved?
With all the 21st century technology available to scientists, why does the faded image of a tortured man on a blood-stained cloth allegedly dating back 2000 years still baffle the scientific community?
Of course the mystery I am alluding to is the Shroud of Turin – an artifact that millions of Christians believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus.
For about 20 years I have been interested in the Shroud of Turin. Then in 2010, when it went on public displayfor only 44 days in Turin, Italy, I was fortunate to be among the two million people who saw it in person.
My two decades of reading about the Shroud culminated in a first-hand look and led me to believe that this is the physical evidence proving that Jesus Christ was in fact resurrected from the dead.
So why should you care about the Shroud of Turin, especially if you practice a faith that does not include Jesus or have no faith at all?
There are two answers: First, just plain intellectual curiosity about the world’s most studied and mysterious relic. Second, sometime in the not-so-distant future, technology will enable scientists to prove that this was the burial cloth of the resurrected Christ. So get ready.
In the meantime, what science has or has not been able to confirm about the Shroud is also instructive.
Read on The Shroud of Turin: The Mystery that Science and Technology Will Someday Solve. Or, and I think it is likely, science will never prove that the shroud is authentic or not.
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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
I checked out Myra’s web-site, and over 10-11 days, her posting has accumulated a great number of topics, most of them ill-informed, recycled blah, and nutters of all shades of opinion, most of them dabblers and hence ignorant. One or two commentators made a few really intelligent comments. Oddly enough one of them was called Tinsmith, and for some reason I immediately thought of Colin, but it certainly wasn’t him. I thought about dropping a comment to enlighten the masses, but then thought – No – as the Good Book says, I need to take good care of where I leave my pearls.
Error: I meant that the last 10-11 days, her posting has accumulated a great number of comments! Remainder stent.
What really sticks out to me from reading many of the comments is; how misinformed SO MANY are! I can understand when it is coming from non-believers, but even pro-authenticity commentors seem so ill-informed! You’d think with what this Shroud may mean too all of mankind, they would put more effort into educating themselves on it’s details and evidence…another GO FIGURE ;-)
R