For the Christian, the Resurrection is a fact, a gracious act of God. According to Wesselow, the early Christian community mistakenly interpreted a natural process (i.e., the “photogenic” imprint of the corpse on the shroud) as an act of God’s revelation. He excludes a priori any theological explanation. I am not sure if such exclusion is more “scientific”. But as a believer, I find it easier to conceive that God showed us a new way of life in raising Jesus from the dead and assuring humanity of a similar end. This belief does not depend on the historical validity of the shroud, but on the testimony of the first generation of believers who “saw” Jesus himself, and its resonance in our personal life. This explains more convincingly the power of the faith in Resurrection than a mere darshan of a shroud with a faint image, even if it was seen by a few hundred persons, as Wesselow thinks it was.
I believe that Wesselow has been referring to himself as agnostic, not atheist.