Tom Keane, a contributing columnist for the Boston Globe, has an interesting opinion piece out this morning: Our yearning for mystery and surprise:
OURS IS a time of science and surveillance, stripped of mystery by the ongoing march of human progress. And then there is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a curiously welcome comeuppance to all of our certainties, one that suggests some things remain beyond our reckoning, that the earth still has room to surprise and astonish. We long for the extraordinary even as it becomes ever harder to find.
[ . . . ]
When you don’t know the answer, the imagination can run rife. Anything can seem possible.
The Bermuda Triangle, loosely bounded by Miami, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, is a supernatural killer of those who cross its waters. “Nessie,” perhaps a descendent of the dinosaurs, lives in Scotland’s vast and deep Loch Ness. The human-like Big Foot or Sasquatch roams the Pacific Northwest. The US government hides the remains of aliens recovered in Roswell, N.M.
There are many other such unknowns: America’s lost tribe, the Shroud of Turin, the Overtoun Bridge, the “Wow!” signal, Stonehenge, the Voynich Manuscript. All intrigue us because they provide glimpses of a something beyond the quotidian, a sense that there are ineffable forces at work.
[ . . . ]
Indeed, even the few puzzles that remain are hardly unfathomable. Amelia Earhart’s flight likely was just a victim of poor navigation and spent fuel. There have been losses in the Bermuda Triangle, but many of the incidents have been exaggerated and those that occurred are better ascribed to meteorological phenomena. The famous photo of the Loch Ness monster was a fraud. Big Foot is an untenable myth, also bolstered by fakery. And the only thing that crashed in Roswell was a US Air Force surveillance balloon.
That’s not to say we know everything. There are still great mysteries: dark matter and dark energy, action at a distance by quantumly intertwined particles, multiverses, string theory. But this is esoteric stuff that seems to have very little to do with our daily lives.
But there is something particularly different about the shroud, something that makes the mystery seem enduringly unsolvable.
The mystery has been solved years ago by radiocarbon testing. If the Vatican really thinks that it’s real, they just have to ask scientists to perform another test, and they haven’t done so far for a very obvious reason.
PHPL is misinformed. Did the radiocarbon testing solve the mystery of how the image was formed? No! Did the radiocarbon dating explain the mystery of how pollens exclusive to the Dead Sea, Jerusalem and Anatolia areas were present on the Shroud? Did it explain the mystery of the presence of travertine arogonite limestone from Jerusalem on the feet, knees and nose images occurred? Did it explain the negative photographic or 3D imaging; did it explain the accuracy of blood-stains, blood flows, or why there was no image under the blood-stains, or why the imaging process did not affect the appearance of the blood-stains? Answers to all questions – NO!!!
Finally were the radiocarbon samples ever shown to be representative of the whole cloth, and were proper scientific sampling protocols followed in the choice of sample site? No prizes for a correct answer!
The “very obvious reason” why the Vatican hasn’t so far asked for retesting, is that with such a stuff-up first time round, what would encourage them to do so?
The reason Bishop Sánchez Sorondo gave me when I emailed him was: “since the institutions that carry out these tests are rather anticlerical, the PAS currently thinks that it would not be prudent to reopen the matter until other scientific identification systems are devised.”
PAS being the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and Bishop Sánchez its current Chancellor.
Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo is highly qualified and won a number of decorations and honours from several countries, including the Legion d’Honneur. He has learnt from Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero’s mistakes, and so we have two very intelligent Argentinians in the Vatican.
More is to come, it is not the end of the story, but we must remember that Professor François Bovon told Jacobovici that his Jesus-Mary Magdalene connection in the “Jesus family tomb” story was science fiction.
Bovon was actually referring to literary devices in antiquity, his interest was in the literary, not historical, Magdalene but some gnostic groups had ritual orgies,they simply could not accept a celibate Jesus. In our own days we have had the ex-nun Jane Schaberg wishing that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a good time in bed! It is the plain truth.