Has there been any news? Here is the challenge letter dated March 29, 2012:
An open letter to Richard Dawkins
29th March 2012
Dear Richard Dawkins
It is really not sufficient to dismiss the Shroud, as you do, on the basis of a C14 test from a single and badly selected sample area. Are you really saying that C14 has never made a mistake? Archaeologists frequently go back to retest something when other data conflicts. That has been impossible with the Shroud.
In your Shroud blog you argue, rightly in my view, that it is not enough for Christian apologists to weigh faith heavier than facts. After all, Christianity is based on a historical figure. The Shroud of Turin is a much-studied tangible object and it is a very significant fact that its unique image – so far – remains unfathomable. But that could be about to change if you, with the weight of your formidable foundation behind you, choose to accept this challenge.
When Professor Hall, Head of the Oxford Radio Carbon Unit announced the C14 result he was asked for his explanation for the Shroud. He said: “Someone just got a bit of linen, faked it up and flogged it”. This sounded a bit glib at the time and now, over twenty years on, it is beginning to sound a little hollow. No one has yet been able to show how it might have been “faked up”.
Accepting this challenge would appear to be consistent with your foundation’s mission. Does it not represent a wonderful educational opportunity to investigate what some have suggested could only have been the work of a Leonardo Da Vinci? To make the decision easier for you we will donate the £20,000 to your foundation if you simply accept the challenge and follow it through to some kind of conclusion. The public can make up their own minds about the result.*
The challenge then, if you choose to accept it, is to explain how the Shroud and its image might have come into existence. You will find a list of the most significant image characteristics here. If you cannot pin it down then, in all conscience, you should, at least, give it the appropriate respect as an enigma. If you can explain it then this site’s title becomes a misnomer and you will have solved a great mystery. Everyone would like to see this matter resolved. Could you be the one to do it?
With all good wishes
David Rolfe
Publisher
Shroud-enigma.com* This £20,000 donation is not made possible because championing the possible authenticity of the Shroud is well funded or lucrative operation – far from it – but because your acceptance would trigger a commission for a documentary along the lines of our 2008 BBC2 film with Rageh Omaar. If you wish, you could nominate an executive producer.
So, he’s thrown down the gauntlet and now the plot thickens…will Dawkins ever get the money? I guess we’ll have to stay tuned…
:) I’m enjoying your site by the way.
Isn’t Dawkins a biologist – i can’t see why he might be interested- why not try a top physics/chemical lab.which would need to be given unrestricted access to the Shroud ,of course.Can you arrange this- you can hardly expect a lab to accept the challenge if you can’t, as researchers would have to work through a number of hypotheses testing them on the actual substances on the Shroud? No scientist could work from a list (what SCiENTIFIC validity has that list got?)as each one item would need to be checked and rechecked with the actual substances from the Shroud.
But why should anyone outside the Shroud world be interested? The letter/challenge seems to assume that the fact that the image on the Shroud is not understood makes it somehow unique. Yet there are hundreds of other scientific issues that we still don’t understand e.g. why some people get cancer and others dont’ . There are several other cases of ancient objects only being understood through advances in scientific understanding in the last few years and we must assume such advances will continue. All we can say as that AS YET we don’t understand how the image was made.
The only interesting outcome so far as the Shroud is concerned would be if someone could PROVE it was a supernatural event – why not put your £20,000 there? If it cannot be proved a supernatural event, then are you left with nothing else than it is a natural event caused by a process as yet unknown, alongside, of course, many hundreds of other similar scientific mysteries we have not yet got to the bottom of.
“But why should anyone outside the Shroud world be interested? The letter/challenge seems to assume that the fact that the image on the Shroud is not understood makes it somehow unique. Yet there are hundreds of other scientific issues that we still don’t understand e.g. why some people get cancer and others dont.”
Menedemus, skeptics outside the “Shroud world” ARE INTERESTED, but they are generally interested in proclaiming the Shroud a fake. These skeptics, if they’re serious about science, should explain why their preferred conclusion is valid science in the face of all currently available evidence.
Steve. I disagree- there was once a burial shroud wrapping the body of the historical Jesus. Belief in Christ has nothing to do with that as the Protestant reformers noted five centuries ago. if the biblical evidence is correct, there is also presumably the stone which blocked the tomb, the Crown of Thorns, the Cross, the Lance, bread left over from the last Supper, etc, etc,.So what? Please explain.True Christians are not going to be interested in that lot, non-Christians hardly either. I think you believe that there is a community out there which cares about these physical objects. Faith is about something very different. Some people seem to think the Shroud is more important than Jesus himself!
If you really want to present a challenge, you have got to get a proper scientific TEAM working on the Shroud and it must include an expert on linen and the way it reacts with various substances and it must work in laboratory conditions. You can hardly expect a serious scientist taking up the challenge working from someone’s else’s’ list of attributes as you provide here. They would need to be retested and in many cases more sophisticated procedures would modify the findings on the list anyway.
Menedemus, you note, “Isn’t Dawkins a biologist – i can’t see why he might be interested” What you are arguing is it is naïve to expect Dawkins to extend himself beyond his area of expertise. Yet this very same Richard Dawkins, Dawkins the evolutionary scientist, evangelizes about how accepting the divinity of Christ is a “delusion” and he goes so far as to advise atheists (last March) to publically mock and ridicule his followers.
I leave it to you to explain why this biology expert should be interested in advising atheists to ridicule Christians. The fact is, Dawkins tends to be keenly interested in expounding upon matters far beyond his own area of expertise.
What intrigues me about Richard Dawkins mental habits and your explanation for his ostensive lack of interest in the Shroud is the how whimsically arbitrary both are. The Shroud is an artifact, not a religious creed, and yet it seems to suggest something ultimately religious in nature about Christianity’s founder, who happens to be a real person.
Even without the connotations to Christianity’s founder, what should interest Dawkins about this artifact, as the Shroud should interest any thinking person, is that the Shroud almost perfectly encapsulates the frailties and pitfalls of empirical inquiry: the more we know empirically about the Shroud, the more new questions arise about it and about our scientific methods. Thomas Aquinas said we should affirm the goodness of empirical science even as we acknowledge this inherent problem with it. This is the real reason why Richard Dawkins doesn’t talk about the Shroud and this is also why he says he doesn’t have much use for Aquinas. Hearing selectively, he is a Pharisee for the contemporary age.
Steve. I just happen to think that there are many scientific issues which are directly concerned with the well-being of humanity which deserve the £20,000 more than the Turin Shroud. Can you not find an issue that ‘encapsulates the frailties and pitfalls of empirical enquiry’ more than the Shroud does- it seems an odd choice to select it in this way.
Jesus Christ existed, he was crucified, he was buried in a burial shroud having been subject to horrific tortures before this. These physical objects, Cross, whips, Crown of thorns, shrouds, the stone blocking up the tomb, once existed but for many, in the Protestant tradition at least, they have nothing to do with the Christian faith. Some may still exist -one cannot rule it out- however unlikely it is that a piece of cloth has survived two thousand years- let’s keep the question of the authenticity of the Shroud open, the Crown of Thorns might yet be found and the stone that blocked the tomb is probably still around in Jerusalem.
Unless one can PROVE a supernatural explanation for the Shroud, which may add to the faith of some for whom belief in Jesus and his Resurrection did not exist before, I am not sure what the point of this exercise is.
I wish someone could explain why the issue of not knowing how the Shroud was created is such a big one. It is only very recently with advances in X_ray technology that we have begun to understand how the first century BC Antekythera mechanism worked (see Wikipedia). The ingenuity of the mechanism has amazed experts who could not believe that the Greeks were so advanced. The Horses of St. Mark’s in Venice were thought to be undatable but finally analysis on the gilding ( largely undertaken in the British Museum) cracked the problem and dates them to the second /third century AD. There are apparently ( I have only read about this in a review) big advances in understanding fourteenth century painting techniques. This sort of progress is going on all the time. The pro- Shroud community write as if science stays still and so the means by which the image was created will remain forever unknown. This is unlikely if the Shroud is allowed to be properly examined and the latest techniques of analysis applied to it.
Dawkins can be challenged for his views on religious belief on many different levels. If you want specifically to challenge him on the authenticity of the Shroud, you have got to arrange proper conditions for a scientific examination of the Shroud by a team specialising in ancient textiles. The ‘list ‘is nowhere to start as any scientist would want to check it through, retest some of the results and probably think up a lot more tests to do to test the hypotheses about the making of the image which a team of bright experts would undoubtedly dream up. and if, at this stage in our scientific understanding , we do or do not understand how the image on the Shroud was created, what then? Do tell me.
Resources shouldn’t be allocated to Shroud inquiries until urgent humanitarian concerns are thoroughly addressed? When a woman bought expensive oil and wiped Jesus’ feet with it, Judas advised that the woman wasted her money and she should have given it to the poor instead. How nearly right was he?
You allocate your own mental resources to thinking about the Shroud. Perhaps you can explain why you’re still interested despite pressing humanitarian problems.
We need to address your quandary: “I wish someone could explain why the issue of not knowing how the Shroud was created is such a big one.” It is not an especially big issue for everyone, although it clearly is a big issue for Richard Dawkins (and you, apparently). Dawkins does not want to think or talk about the Shroud precisely because he can’t explain it. Instead, he prefers to be lazy and say “science” has already refuted this artifact’s authenticity.
The truth is, the more science is applied to the Shroud, the more difficult it becomes to explain it away. A less ham-handed mind, a mind endowed with at least some humility, would acknowledge this simple fact. The fact that he does not should serve as a warning to his followers because being selective about the truth is a costly business.
Incidentally, much bigger problems than the Shroud’s inexplicable reality are the clumsy application of words like “PROOF” and fundamentalist science. Science might provide illumination of certain circumstantial evidence lending to the inferential conclusion of the Shroud’s authenticity, but it is ridiculous to expect science to “prove” the Shroud belongs to Jesus of Nazareth, who rose from the dead. Fundamentalist science is the unexamined belief that anything not subject to science does not exist, and should therefore be dismissed and probably ridiculed in the name of science.
Excellent comment Steve.
R
Sorry, but you can’t say that.
What STRP team did was a progress, and real science. They rejected easy explanations, but described for the first time the shroud properties in scientific terms.
Rogers applied science, and he widened the breach to image formation explanation.
Thibauld Heimburger applied science and he may have explained the homogeneous spread of reactive amines on the shroud.
“Gaseous diffusion hypothesis”, though misleading as I explained in this post, has never been properly discarded. When STRP did, it was because they ruled out a diffusion of the reactive trough the cloth. But Rogers explained superficiallity of the image, and a backside image has been found on the cloth.
Science is a step by step process. A science enigma is “dark matter”, current science is puzzled, but the shroud needs more science. Fick’s laws ? 19th century, which article ruled out diffusion laws, had the shroud covered a body (point 3 of the “challenge”) ?
Steve ,
1) For me ,the question of how the Shroud image was created is not a important one. The fact we do not yet know simply places the Shroud among many thousands of other similar historical enigmas- I don’t see it as standing out as something different.
2)The question of how it was made tells us nothing about its authenticity. Science continually progresses ,as the ‘discovery ‘ of the Higgs Boson shows. We may yet discover a method by which the Shroud was made that dates it to medieval times, or we may find one that dates it to the first century AD. A lot of commentators ,not myself, appear to believe that if the image is as yet inexplicable, then somehow that is more likely to make it authentically the burial cloth of Christ. I don’t follow that argument unless you are arguing that the image can only be explained as a supernatural phenomenon in which case it is, by definition, beyond the normal laws of science .
3) The examination of the Shroud has in scientific terms been a mess. There seems to be no overall coordination by anyone expert in the analysis of ancient cloths, samples are floating about all over the place,there is no proper consensus about what has and has not been found on the cloth. It may be too late to repair the damage but there is no structure in place for a proper scientific examination which would include a radio-14 retesting as well as retesting ,using more sophisticated techniques that are now available, much of the work done twenty or thirty years ago. We urgently need confirmation,for instance, if the blood group is AB as, if it is, it makes it almost certain that the image is medieval.