A reader writes:
Colin Berry has amply demonstrated that John Jackson, Eric Jumper, Don Lynn, et al. erred in thinking that the VP8 results showed that varying image luminance represents a cloth-to-body spatial distribution. There may be no real 3D encoding, whatsoever. However, Dr. Berry’s attempt to show that the image is a thermal imprint or scorch is inadequate. It may be another way to get 3D images but it doesn’t produce superficial color. Nonetheless his investigation of thermal imprinting makes for good smoke in a wind tunnel.
This could lead to productive discussions with others. Unfortunately, Dr. Berry does everything he can to thwart this with his verbal strutting and abusive argumentum ad hominem attacks. How can he possibly think that in writing, “There are some folk who need to learn – re-learn- a bit of elementary physics. Regrettably (or should that be astonishingly?) that includes some miracle-invoking physicists and engineers who inexcusably compromise the objectivity of science with their particular variant of Christian theology,” that discourse is possible?
Has Colin amply demonstrated this? Over at Colin’s blog, read Could this be clinching evidence that the Shroud image is a contact scorch?. Be sure to read the comment by Thibault Heimburger, as well.
“There are some folk who need to learn – re-learn- a bit of elementary physics.”
Yes, Colin Berry should start with heat equation in wikipedia.
There is a new peer-reviewed article, published in Theology and Science, by Kelly Pearse : “Icons, Science, and Faith: Comparative Examination of the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo”.
Abstract : “The Shroud of Turin is a well-studied linen cloth bearing the image of a naked man that has been beaten, scourged, and crucified. A lesser-known, smaller cloth exists, the Sudarium of Oviedo, which contains bloodstains corresponding to the head wounds, both front and back, found on the Shroud. The Sudarium bears no facial imprint and has been proposed to represent the face-cloth (napkin) mentioned in the gospel of John (20:6–7). Here, the markings on the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo are reviewed, and the possible relationship between the two cloths and their impact on faith is discussed.”
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14746700.2013.750962
Typo: the author is Kelly P. Kearse.
Intelligence is usually a measure of how fast or slow it takes someone to grasp a theory or insight. In the case of religion, however, there is so much anxiety that people are inhibited from thinking intelligently. They have blinds spots. Saying that someone you disagree with is stupid is not abusive or ad hominem because it may be true.
What a beautiful simplistic world the skeptic lives in. Stupid is a judgment. Some circumstances it may be called for: “The Grand Canyon is an artifact of Noah’s flood.” That’s stupid. In others, not so much. How about there was a man named Jesus who was crucified by Pontius Pilate, buried, and before the third day his body disappeared from his tomb. Stupid is refusing to admit the possibility let alone historical probability of that statement.
There exists a linen cloth that bears evidence of just such a scenario. Stupid is claiming that fact is false and that the person believing it is stupid. You may disagree, but it is not stupid to believe that. In fact it is in accord with scientific evidence – a quarter of a million hours or so of research.
Stupidity is blindness. You can dispute any fact you want. But before you call somebody “stupid” you better have your facts straight. Colin Berry’s unproven speculations may not, or may be, correct. However, it is not stupid to refuse to accept them as facts.
The fact is, that neither Colin nor any other skeptic has come within a country mile of explaining, much less duplicating, the image on the Shroud. Is there blood on the Shroud?Yes, that’s a scientific fact. Was the man on the Shroud in a state of rigor mortis? Most, if not all, the forensic pathologist who have reviewed the evidence believe that is true. Is there any evidence of putrefication of the body? Again, the overwhelming consensus is that there is none.
Maybe you disagree with these scientifically reported facts because they challenge your core belief hat there is no God and there was no Jesus. Okay, but it isn’t stupid to reach a contrary result. It is stupid to call those who disagree with you, stupid.
I have invented an intelligence test for religion: What are four solutions to the mind-body problem and four answers to the question of what caused the universe to begin 13 billion years ago? I give myself an IQ of 100. I give myself 20 points for understanding the mind-body problem and 10 points each for the eight answers.
The four solutions to the mind-body problem are the following: 1) Cartesian dualism, 2) materialism, 3) idealism, and 4) it is a mystery. Number 4 means that humans are embodied spirits and is the solution with the most evidence. There is more evidence for idealism than for dualism and materialism because we can’t imagine that we don’t exist. But we can imagine that our bodies are illusions.
The four answers to what caused the big bang are 1) God did it. 2) An angel did it. 3) The universe is not intelligible. 4) The scientific method will eventually give us an answer. There is no evidence for # 1, but more for # 2 since an angel would have a motive for doing such a thing. The answer judged to be true by rational people is # 4.
LOL!…So no.2 is more probable then no.1??? …That seems quite illogical to this mind, almost to the point of laughable. Furthermore, no. 3 seems more probable then no.4, as science so far has been unable in hundreds of years of thought, to even explain how the Pyramids were created, let alone the universe. A ratonal athiest would most likely conclude that no.3 was the more probable answer, as opposed to no.4, …logically, anyways.
R
Metaphysics leads logically to the existence of an infinite being, called God in Western religions, which created the universe of finite beings. What motivated God to create finite beings was self-love. God loves Himself as giving. But God could just as easily love HImself without giving. Hence, the existence of finite beings is a mystery. In other words, the existence of an infinite being doesn’t even explain the existence of finite beings, let alone the phenomena of the Big Bang. The Big Bang, however, is evidence that God inspired the human authors of the Bible because the Bible says God created the universe from nothing.
Atheism is a neurotic response to religion. There is no such thing as a rational atheist. This is evidence that there is life after death.
David,
Excuse me if I am puzzled by your position and frankly have little time for it and will move on. Your critique initially seemed to espouse an agnostic/atheist position and blind reliance on science. Now you demure from being an atheist. I don’t get it and don’t have time for it.
We know God exists because we have free will and because the universe is intelligible. The evidence that the universe is intelligible is the success of science. The Big Bang is evidence that God does not exist because it is something coming into existence without a cause.
Atheists are irrational about the meaning of life, ignorant of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, and unintelligent about the mind-body problem.
Creatio ex nihilo is not explicit in Genesis.
It is explicit in John: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God…” The word was the concept of the universe in God’s mind.
David,
If you lay-off the name calling, you are really pretty good. I am beginning to define God as the primordial consciousness. Teilhard describes the process of evolution and marks the emergence of humanity as that point when our species acquired the power of reflection or self-consciousness.
We are oon a journey from the Alpha to the Omega – and back.
Sorry, David. John was referring to the Incarnation when he wrote “and the word was made flesh” and not to the creation of the universe. It is spirit (God) entering matter (universe). This is only acceptable in Christianity and Hinduism.
David R. and I agree, but I certainly am curious about whether you are reading an expurgated version of he Gospel of John.
My Confraternity Edition of the New Testament, that the good Brothers at CBA made me pay a buck for in 1950, begins the Gospel of St. John as follows:
1 “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God;
and the Word was God.
2 “He was in the beginning with God.
3 “All things were made through him,
and without him was made
nothing that was made.”
I do believe that it makes perfectly clear at least from John’s perspective that Word is involved in the creation of the Universe. The Incarnation of the Word as a human came later. Except perhaps for Psalm of course: “Before the Day star I begot thee.” Ancients probably read that as the Sun. I read it as the Big Bang.
It is not until the 14th verse of John, after a digression on John the Baptist, that we read “and the Word was made flesh.”
I want to emphasize that quantum mechanics is knocking on the door of this mystery. Scientists now write of a quantum fluctuation creating by (or being) a singularity that began the Universe and the resultant the laws of physics that govern “our” universe and empowered the evolution of life. It was a close thing and the Universe at its creation was at the Big Bang was in fact finely tuned to support its existence and to ultimately evolve life and ultimately evolve consciousness.
This is not an argument for Intelligent Design as advanced by some fundamentalists. It grander than that.
DR: “The four answers to what caused the big bang are 1) God did it. 2) An angel did it. 3) The universe is not intelligible. 4) The scientific method will eventually give us an answer.”
Stephen Hawking asserts that he has proved that the “Big Bang” necessarly occurred as it was an inherent property of space. But under an induction from Quantum Mechanics, space does not necessarily exist if there is nothing finite to observe it. But space did necessarily exist as the Big Bang did occur. Ergo Contradiction! We need to probe further. How did the space come to be? Will the scientific method eventually give an aswer to that question? Why does the space of our universe have three perceptible linear dimensions and one perceptible time dimension? Are there more dimensions than those directly perceptible but “curled up” as some seriously speculate? Are there other universes with different perceptible dimensions and different physical constants than our universe? Why does our universe have “Goldilocks” properties? The so-called “Anthropic Principle” is not a satisfactory answer! Or is the answer “3) The universe is not intelligible.” ?
daveb:
I don’t think Stephen Hawking said such a thing. There is a quote from him about the Big Bang on my video “The Truth About Evolution and Religion” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKaF8vX6HXQ)
Sample blogger’s query from Physics StackExchange site:
“In an episode of Discovery’s Curiosity with host Stephen Hawking, he claims the Big Bang event can be explained from physics alone, and does not require the intervention of a creator.”
“1) His argument is based on that, in the beginning, the universe is an equivalent of a black hole behaving as a quantum mechanical particle that can simply “appear” like a Helium particle in alpha radiation. For a large gravitational field like the black hole in question, time did not exist, and therefore there could not exist a being to create the Big-Bang, since time did not exist.”
“2) During the Big-Bang, positive energy appeared and negative energy was stored in space, and the net energy created is zero and therefore nothing was created.”
Look at Colin’s site.
I was glad to discuss with him and to provide him some photographs he does not have.
Unfortunately, Colin is not a gentleman.
Colin is definitively “out” for me. Sadly…
Thibault.
Thibault,
If Colin wasn’t out for you, I’d worry.
The Bible normally consulted is “The New Jerusalem Bible”, editor Henry Wansbrough, OSB. Unfortunately this part of John is controversial and some believe it to be an interpolation, a defence against fringe groups who were attacking what came to be known as orthodox Christianity. Therefore spirit and matter were united.
The good thing about Hawking is that he is, to a certain extent, open-minded and willing to change his views when there are advances in physics. The Big Bang was proposed by the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaitre, influenced by the Bible, some say. It is still not proven and it is said that there were “quantum fluctuations in a vacuum” before that event. So where do we start?
The theory of the big bang was proven in the 1960s with the discovery of the radiation emitted when hydrogen atoms were formed. This happened 500,000 years after the big bang.
Yes, the theory is said to be well established, however we can be sure there will be refinements because we simply cannot have any certainty about the real beginning.See the ending of #20
Well if we go beyond Colin’s rather childish behaviour, which doesn’t assist his credibility – he does make – I think – some good arguments re: the line across the chin
Hawking has been a prolific writer, and is an excellent popularizer of difficult scientific concepts. He is also amenable to modifying his views when that is where his science takes him. I have a copy of his “Brief History of Time”, published in 1996, but which I expect even now is somewhat dated. It is a beautifully illustrated book, with excellent graphics and is worthwhile even for its historic sections on the various pioneers in cosmology, as well as for presenting the various concepts. He has quite a lot to say about the “anthropic principle”, and poses several leading questions.
He deals with the discovery of the “background microwave radiation”, the clincher for the “Big Bang”. It was first identified in 1965 by Arno Penzias & Robert Wilson working with the Holmdel N.J. horn antenna. The radiation persisted even after cleaning the pigeon droppings out of the horn and excluding other effects, and was omni-directional. Meanwhile, at nearby Princeton U, Bob Dicke and Jim Peebles deduced from George Gamow’s model of the early universe, that there should be background microwave radiation. They were preparing to look for it when the work of Enzias & Wilson came to light. But it was Enzias & Wilson who received the 1978 Nobel prize, not Dicke & Peebles and not even Gamow.
The initial expansion was extremely rapid. Initially beginning at the point of singularity quantum effects make the laws of physics unknown. At 10^(-47) seconds, temperature is 10^32 deg K and commences the “Grand Unification Theory (GUT) epoch”. At 10^(-34) seconds, temperature is 10^27 deg and commences the quark-antiquark epoch. At 10^(-10) seconds, temperature is 10^15 deg and we have the formation of protons, neutrons and mesons, quarks are confined and anti-quarks disappear. At 1 second, temperature is 10^10 deg, protons and neutrons bind together as nuclei of hydrogen, helium, lithium and deuterium. At 3 minutes, temp is 10^9 deg, matter and radiation couple together. At 300,000 years, temp has fallen to 3000 deg, matter and radiation decouple as electrons bind together with nuclei. The universe then becomes transparent to the cosmic background radiation. At 1 billion years, clusters of matter form quasars, stars and protogalaxies. Stars burning primordial hydrogen and helium synthesize heavier nuclei. (Brief History of Time – pp 148-149.)