Slim Chances that the Shroud of Turin Images are Miraculous?

In recent years, some scientists have tried to link the enigma of the Shroud's images to a resurrection event. In the wake of a miraculous occurrence, they reason, some energetic stimulus brought forth a visible chemical change at the surface of the cloth?

To many people this is utter read-no-further nuttiness. Indeed that may be the case. But it must be considered because such thinking articulates certain qualities of the images. Both the frontal and dorsal images, for instance, seem to be a vertically collimated representation of a body. And they do seem to be terrain graphs that can be plotted as 3D isometric objects. Miraculous causation must also be considered because it is so widely discussed in numerous texts, on websites, and in the media.

The quasi-scientific conjecture that allows some to surmise a supernatural image drawing process depends on an some energetic radiation emitting from the body as the body dematerializes or becomes mechanically transparent. It presumes much about how a resurrection event might have occurred.  Perhaps it presumes too much. Could we not, with just as much validity, envision that Jesus simply awakened, stood up, and walked out of the tomb?

John A. T. Robinson, famous for creatively challenging conventional wisdom about New Testament interpretations and provenance, very much doubted that the Shroud was the work of a forger. In contemplating the notion that the author of the fourth gospel may have meant for us to interpret that Jesus passed through his burial cloths, he addressed dematerialization:

Dematerialization is I suspect a modern way of envisaging the relationship between flesh and spirit, matter and energy, of being 'changed' or 'clothed upon' with a body of 'glory'. How a first-century Jew would naturally have envisaged resurrection (though this does not of course mean that this is how it actually happened) would surely have been as a corpse waking up from sleep, like Tabitha in Acts (9:40), as indeed Jesus predicts of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then like Lazarus walking out of the tomb. The difference in the case of Jesus was that the grave-clothes did not need to be taken off him nor the stones removed: he did it himself. For, unlike Lazarus, he was not simply being restored to the weakness of a flesh-body. In the power of the Spirit he broke the bonds of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Far from being viewed as helpless and naked, he would probably have been envisaged in robes of light like the angels at the tomb, as in the vision of the risen Christ in the Apocalypse (cf. especially Matt. 28:3 with Rev. 1:14).

Jesus simply arising, like getting out of bed, is not satisfying for those who suppose the image was drawn on the cloth by the Resurrection. Nor will a non-corporeal, spiritual-only resurrection do. No, these researchers imagine, as no medieval forger would have imagined, elementary particles or radiation emitted from a dissolving body. It might be something like a "Beam me up, Scotty" scene from Star Trek with sparkling energy.

Is it possible to think that Jesus' body, at the moment of resurrection, became mechanically transparent thus enabling a cloth to fall through it (or the body to pass through the cloth). This idea might be comfortable for some biblical exegetes who identify with passages in John's Gospel. Historian and biblical scholar N. T. Wright in The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003) illustrates this thinking:

The beloved disciple came to his new belief, the text wants us to understand: not simply on the basis of the emptiness of the tomb (which had been explained by Mary in verse 2 in terms of the removal of the body to an unknown location), but on the basis of what he deduced both from the fact that the grave-clothes had been left behind and from the position in which they were lying. He, like Thomas at the end of the chapter, saw something which elicited faith. The fact that the grave-clothes were left behind showed that the body had not been carried off, whether by foes, friends or indeed a gardener (verse 15). Their positioning, carefully described in verse 7, suggest that they had not been unwrapped, but that the body had somehow passed through them, much as, later on, it would appear and disappear through locked doors (verse 19).

This is speculation. Yet it resonates with the collimated appearance of the images and the topographical spatial information that can be plotted as three-dimensional images. It is also consistent with something that forensic experts tell us. The body images show no visible signs of decomposition and the linen fabric is not damaged by any bodily decomposition products. It is also consistent with a baffling observation about the bloodstains. Dried blood, in acting like weak glue between body and cloth, should have cracked and broken apart if the body was unwrapped by convention physical means. Small fibers of blood-soaked linen should have pulled apart. Yet this not observed in the bloodstains.

A highly imaginative suggestion of how mechanical transparency might work is that somehow, no method known to science, the strong nuclear force that holds together the subatomic particles of the nucleus was turned off while electromagnetism and gravity remained in effect. When that happened the images were impressed on the cloth as it passed through the body, perhaps by the impact of elementary particles let loose in the process.

Nowheresville

Is this a flight of imagination by a few mad scientists? Physicist Thaddeus Trenn, of the University of Toronto, explains it this way:

[When] you do the calculation back and you find there is only one way—and that is for the units of matter that we ordinarily call nucleons of matter—decouple. And the only way to get that is to overcome the strong force. Incredible, as it seems, we can back out into this Nowheresville—it's an impossible situation. But, that's what you're left with.

The conservative and brilliant philosopher-scholar Russell Kirk, a late-in-life convert to Catholic Christianity and a strong believer in the Shroud's authenticity described it in somewhat more simplistic but very lucid terms:

But the Resurrection in the flesh—which some now hint was bound up with nuclear disintegration and reintegration, our solid flesh being known now to consist of innumerable electrical particles held in coherence by means of which we know nothing—proved that Jesus the son had transcended matter and was divine.

Do we simply dismiss this as too weird? Perhaps! If we are ardent skeptics we cannot help but do so.

When Trenn says, "that's what you're left with," he is expressing a principle that is near sacred in the philosophy of science, a principle shared by cosmologists and theoretical physicists: A strange hypothesis can be proposed on the basis of observation alone. Aristotle concluded that the earth was round by observing the shape of the earth's shadow cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse. That was strange in his time. Edwin Hubble recognized that the red shift in light from distant galaxies implied an expanding universe, one that started with a big bang. That too was strange even only a few years ago. It contravened the widely accepted view of a static universe. And now we must consider negative gravity, black holes, dark matter, imaginary numbers and time running backwards.

It is interesting to note how dematerialization has been characterized. Mark Antonacci, author of The Resurrection of the Shroud, suggests that Jesus might have passed through a traversable Lorentzian wormhole in spacetime and that the Shroud's image may have been produced by loose particles resulting from the process. It is a baseless hypothesis. It is pure science fiction. Tulane University theoretical physicist and mathematician Frank Tipler, armed with elegant mathematical algorithms, suggests that the process of resurrection might have been dematerialization in the form of electroweak quantum tunneling and the images on the Shroud a consequence of a Sphaleron field. That it might be mathematically possible certainly doesn't make it so. Are we to wonder, is heaven on the other side of wormholes or quantum tunnels? Is this how God performs his miracles?

Ray Rogers objects. The only way that such an idea can be understood within the known laws of nature is as matter converting to energy. This is expressed by Einstein's celebrated e=mc² equation of equivalence. And understood that way, conversion of the matter in a human body to energy (what else) would produce energy equivalent to a nuclear explosion several thousand times as great as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

But, is surmising that this is impossible or recognizing how explosive such an event might be a valid objection? If we are imagining how a miracle might have happened, then no. If by the divine action of God (how else) a human body can dematerialize, can we not imagine that God is privileged to suspend the laws of conservation and any other laws of nature?

We are well beyond the realm of science. For another principle in the philosophy of science is that science, being severely restricted to the laws of nature, cannot hypothesize a process that depends on non-natural causes. It cannot be tested. It cannot be proven. It gives license to explain away any anomaly or unsolved problem by simply saying, "It's a miracle."

We must understand that what is being proposed is that the images were created as a byproduct of a miracle and not directly by a miracle. The distinction is important. The strange hypothesis principle allows us to think that maybe a miracle, as a first cause, left something in its wake that allowed a perfectly natural process to occur. In other words the first cause being a miracle is allowable in our thinking, but only in our thinking. What is left presumably in the wake of the miracle should be testable. If scientist could prove, for instance, that the images were created by the bombardment of protons, it would strongly strengthen the argument of a miracle. But there is serious reason to doubt this. According Ray Rogers:

Some type of carbohydrate dehydration reaction seems most probable as an explanation for the image color; however, the color appears only on the surface of individual fibers. The color of the image does not involve the cellulose. Energetic radiation absolutely cannot be used to explain the properties of the image. (Italics are mine)

It is well known how medieval theologians debated how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But did they? This is a malformed perspective. The false idea seems to have originated with Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848), the father of the great British Prime Minister Benjamin D'Israeli. Isaac took great pleasure in lampooning the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas had wondered if an angel, in moving from one place to another, passes through the in- between. The myth of the dancing-on-a-pin question it seems was nothing more than D'Israeli's comical restatement of Aquinas' puzzle. A profound "scientific" question of his day was maligned by a pundit. It is such a tale that makes "dark ages" of the Middle Ages.

Aquinas really asked a profound question when we understand the angels metaphorically: Does a divinely caused change of state involve a process (something that takes time and for which there is evolutionary development or change in location)? Would the "angel's" movement take time and affect the in-between? Would the angel's movement leave a turbulent wake such that, if we were to apply modern chaos theory, the weather on the other side of the world would be altered.  Ludicrous thinking? Well, the Resurrection leave a turbulent wake of radiation to initiate a process of image formation? Did God leave lying about little elementary particles, all in the right place, all at the right time, all with the right spin and velocity, to encounter and paint the image.

A God who can resurrect—and that term is far from well defined—a human being to new life can also suspend the law of conservation. But then too why in the world does he need a turbulence to draw his picture on linen? Was the picture intended, and if so why not simply make it happen. Why not simply, without process, cause the chemical result needed for human eyes to see the picture (though not discernable until the invention of photographic negatives). Or was the picture simply an accidental byproduct, one that God did not intend? Does God act this way?

Does God need scientifically plausible mechanisms? Are miracles definable? A God of astounding exceptions to the laws of nature of one sort cannot be presumed to be bound otherwise by his laws. If the images are miraculous it is unlikely that science can offer much support. But then, too, science cannot say they are not miraculous. 

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Home Page & Introduction: The Shroud of Turin Story - A Guide to the Facts 2005

© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York