Refutable Irrefutable or is it Irrefutable Refutable
Mark Knox nicely writes in The Shroud of Turin: New Developments in his blog Notes from the Crossroads:
When I was a child, my first exposure to the Shroud of Turin was on an episode of “In Search Of…”, a weekly television program that featured a number of various popular mysteries including Bigfoot, the Amelia Earhart disappearance and the Bermuda Triangle, among others. For this episode I sat enthralled as the show’s host, Leonard Nimoy, described how the shroud bore an image of the crucified Christ and that the image was undoubtedly caused by a huge transfer of energy at the moment of the Resurrection. I remember hurrying off to excitedly tell anyone who would listen all about the irrefutable facts presented by the program. Of course, what I eventually came to realize, after several increasingly disappointing conversations, was that “In Search Of” presented “irrefutable facts” (or omitted the refutable ones) in support of every mystery they featured; it was, of course, their bread and butter. Sadly, such childhood epiphanies are often the lynch-pin for of a life of skepticism; reaffirming the fact that truth is so important, and so elusive, in any argument or discourse.
So it was with my hard-earned skepticism that I sat down to watch The History Channel’s presentation of “The Real Face of Jesus” . . .
Knox concludes:
Like many other ancient mysteries, science will probably never have the capacity to prove exactly what the shroud is, but many modern scientists will easily tell you what it is not- it isn’t, in any scientifically explainable sense, a work of art created as an elaborate hoax.
And, if it isn’t a hoax, the thought of what it might be sends shivers down my spine.
Old TV shows can be fun to watch.
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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
Thanks Dan- You found it!! I haven’t seen that in probably 20 years! Thanks for the kind comments also. I appreciate it!