Contradictions involving the Shroud of Turin?

[undead_rat]

The Kangaroo Court of the British Museum

“Kangaroo Court” is a term for a judicial body that is not impartial and that seeks to render particular verdict regardless of the actual evidence. The British Museum has great influence in the academic world, and no scientist or researcher dares to contradict its proclamations without the risk of being subject to ridicule and, perhaps, unemployment.
So , when the Museum rendered its verdict on the Shroud, researchers, historians, scientists, and even Church officials were intimidated. We see this in Pope St. John Paul’s statement prior to 1988 where he refers to the Shroud as a “relic” and that of 1998 where he uses the word “icon.”

What is the Shroud of Turin? - Catholic Straight Answers

http://www.vatican.va/content/john-.../documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_24051998_sindone.html

 

[Hugh_Farey]

I fear we are wandering into incoherence again. First I am accused of not having a degree in science, which is untrue, and then, without a smidgeon of remorse, told that even having a degree does not make me a scientist. Says who? Now we learn that Pope John-Paul II was intimidated by the British Museum. We are drifting into fantasy. I predict the return of the Baha’i nonsense imminently. Prepare your tinfoil hats.

Well, never mind. My readers can judge my competence for themselves.

 

[thistle]

Sorry, but neither having a BA in “science” nor teaching high school science qualifies one as a “scientist.” That takes a PhD and some credible research work.

You really have a bad attitude problem.

 

[AlbMagno]

I would agree with undead_rat, in the modern sense of the word, to be a scientist is to do some kind of reaearch (formal or informal, maybe Hugh_Farey has done some research but hasn’t talked about it). In other words, to be a scientist you have to make science, or that is the point of view presented by undead_rat, I believe.

People with sciences degrees can also work in other fields like teaching and engineering, which doesn’t make one a scientist in the strict sense. Of course, these people would still (hopefully) be trained in the scientific method.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

There is a valid point worth exploring here, once we get past the sniping.

Broadly speaking, I agree with AlbMagno. Certainly not everybody with a degree in science is a scientist, but we must remember that that was Undead Rat’s criterion, not mine. It was only after learning that I fulfilled his criterion that he shifted the goalposts, and no doubt if I listed my research work (mostly published in the Newsletter of the British Society for the Turin Shroud and my three Academia papers) they would shift even further.

But what did John Paul II mean when he said that the Church “entrusted” (significant word) the continued investigation into the authenticity of the Shroud to “scientists”? Did he mean to exclude Art Historians, or Textile Historians, or Statisticians? Surely not. Coming to a concensus on a question of a historical artefact, and still more a historical event, must include historical studies among other researches. So what did he mean?

I think AlbMagno hits the nail on the head with his mention of ‘Scientific Method.’ This includes observation, experimentation, inference and conclusion. It is rarely definitive - words like ‘proof’ and ‘fact’ are treated with extreme caution - and conclusions are subject to refinement, alteration and even abandonment altogether if further research warrants it. It excludes revelation, inspiration, intuition, and “authority” per se.

Whether any particular proposition is a ‘scientific truth’ or not is usually a matter of general acceptance, rather than absolute fact, and this is particularly true of historical propositions. It is important to understand the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ here. It is surely true that the Shroud is either the burial cloth of Jesus or it is not. One of those propositions is a fact, and the other is false. However, at present, neither of the two is universally regarded as ‘true’. In some circles, even scientific circles, the evidence is sufficient for the Shroud’s authenticity to be considered established, but in others it isn’t. There is no general acceptance. The truth is uncertain - it lies somewhere on a spectrum between general acceptance and general rejection. Each of us has his own range of ‘truths’, but it is most unlikely all of them are ‘facts’. Different people own different ‘truths’, and sometimes individuals hold two conflicting truths which are logically incompatible.

I still claim to be a scientist, and as such, one of those to whom, according to Pope John Paul II, the Church has entrusted the continued investigation of the Shroud.

 

[Pattylt]

Good point! I also wonder and please answer if known…does anyone that is NOT religious claim it is real?

I’m sorry to say this but I really don’t trust someone that has an agenda and those I’ve seen defending it seem to all be Catholic or Christian of some stripe. Are there any others?

 

[Elf01]

I’m sorry to say this but I really don’t trust someone that has an agenda and those I’ve seen defending it seem to all be Catholic or Christian of some stripe. Are there any others?

If you weren’t Christian and were convinced the shroud was genuine, would you remain non Christian?

 

[Pattylt]

I would definitely reassess my beliefs and this would be a strong motivation to do so. And question…by certainty do you mean that it’s from a 1st century burial shroud or that it is Jesus’ shroud? How would anyone have certainty that it is specifically His? But, I do agree that it then would be a strong motivation to move my beliefs.

 

[Elf01]

How would anyone have certainty that it is specifically His?

Good point. I think, if it was proven to be from that time frame it would be the most likely, but you’re right that we still wouldn’t know for certain.

 

[Pattylt]

I, too, will admit that it seems to be more probable than not that it was His but certainty is pretty hard to obtain.

 

[irenaeuslyons]

irenaeuslyons:

The C-14 evidence is not indicative of a date

This is so disingenuous. If the C-14 dating placed the shroud at 33AD you of course would believe it. Yet C-14 dating places it EXACTLY when it appears in the historical record. If you were to pick a perfect date to disprove the shroud, the C-14 dating (3 separate laboratories) shows that exact date. It truly is unbelievable that people still refuse to accept it.

What is really disingenuous is attributing a quote to me I didn’t write. How about an apology

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Hi Jan, You will surely know by now that I am firmly convinced that the radiocarbon dating was correct, that it accurately determined the date of the Shroud, and that the Shroud is a medieval artefact.

However, no argument is strengthened by faulty facts, so I beg you to re-read the paper published in the journal Nature which tabulates the findings of the three laboratories. Oxford, for example, gave an overall date of 750BP +/- 30, while Arizona gave 646BP +/- 31. These dates do not correspond to 1260-1390, and they do not even overlap. The authors of the paper admit that “the spread of the measurements for sample 1 [the Shroud] is somewhat greater than would be expected from the errors quoted.” As I mentioned earlier, accounting for this anomaly has engendered several different lines of research. The authors attributed it to an underestimate of the errors. If, for example, the errors were +/- 60 instead of 30, then the values would overlap and the probability that they came from material of different dates much reduced.

Although few scientists may dispute the overall finding of the laboratories - that the proportion of radiocarbon in the samples is that of a late medieval provenance - there are certainly some who dispute that it correctly dates the Shroud. I think they’re wrong, and can explain why, but to deny they exist is unreasonable.

It is perfectly true that to distort a first century cloth to appear thirteenth century would require a huge proportion of more modern material. However, the contamination required to make a cloth from, say, 1260 appear to date to 1300 (or vice versa if the contamination is pitch) is very small.

does anyone that is NOT religious claim it is real?

I don’t know of any atheists who think the Shroud is authentic, but there are a number of Jews and Ahmadiyya Moslems who do, although the Jews, of course, do not accept the Resurrection and the Ahmadi think the image is that of a living man, as Jesus did not die on the cross.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

I’m not sure I’d say that earlier popes were more casual, but with the general increase of rational thinking compared to subservience to authority in the last few centuries, coupled to the hugely increased speed of dissemination of information, modern popes have become more circumspect in their pronouncements. Over the last fifty years, for example, there have been 20 or so Papal Encyclicals, while in the fifty years before that there were about 110, and in the 50 years before that about 130.

 

[irenaeuslyons]

Good point! I also wonder and please answer if known…does anyone that is NOT religious claim it is real?

I’m sorry to say this but I really don’t trust someone that has an agenda and those I’ve seen defending it seem to all be Catholic or Christian of some stripe. Are there any others?

Its a misleading point because I never said what he quoted me as saying.

 

[irenaeuslyons]

No scientists disputes the results.

Not true. And by the way, its difficult to dispute if you don’t have access to the actual material being tested. Raymond Rogers who was one of the lead scientists on the STURP team (that actually examined the cloth) came to the conclusion that the C14 result was indicative of the patch, but the patch was not representative of the whole cloth. The UV light photography confirms its anomalous nature. The Discovery Channel video I linked above documents this. Rogers confirmed the existence of cotton in a thread sample he still had of the cloth adjacent to that which was sent out for testing. There should be no cotton because they examined the main body of the cloth and found it to be linen. They also confirmed no dyes and no paints. Rogers was very angry about having egg on his face because for decades he dismissed the skeptics who said there was medieval cotton woven in to the samples. He referred to them as the “lunatic fringe” because they already examined the body of the cloth and found only linen. I think the extent of the cotton presence needs to be examined as another C14 is now impossible anyway. Rogers was disturbed enough by the cloth anomaly to publish a paper using an alternate method of dating which did show the cloth was much older than that indicated by the C14.

 

[Pattylt]

Will it ever be possible to obtain new samples from a hopefully inconspicuous but still relevant part of the shroud and have it correctly tested by valid and respected laboratories? I realize that the powers to be are very hesitant to remove more of the shroud but to get a definite and final answer would be in everyone’s best interest, no?

From my secular point of view, it looks like some don’t want a definitive answer to the dating.

 

[irenaeuslyons]

Will it ever be possible to obtain new samples from a hopefully inconspicuous but still relevant part of the shroud and have it correctly tested by valid and respected laboratories? I realize that the powers to be are very hesitant to remove more of the shroud but to get a definite and final answer would be in everyone’s best interest, no?
From my secular point of view, it looks like some don’t want a definitive answer to the dating.

I think the hesitance is not so much because they don’t want an answer, its more because C14 is destructive.

Another C14 of the cloth would be difficult because a plant based thymol derivative was used keep the reliquary bug free. This would alter the C14 dating.

 

[Pattylt]

Another C14 of the cloth would be difficult because a plant based thymol derivative was used keep the reliquary bug free. This would alter the C14 dating.

Interesting! Is there no other technology to determine age that would be unaffected by the treatment?

 

[JimG]

How did the Turin Shroud get its image? - BBC News

 

[Hugh_Farey]

We live in a Papacy famous above all for ambiguous and little explained statements both on aeroplanes and in encyclicals

It was rather more the “Church’s Authority” via encyclicals I was thinking of, but you’re certainly correct that Pope Francis seems to be ruffling a lot of feathers. I think the popular response to his unguarded remarks demonstrates how careful pontiffs have to be, and perhaps explains why there has been an 80% decrease in encyclicals recently.

Raymond Rogers who was one of the lead scientists on the STURP team

He was indeed, and respected as such by his peers. It is curious, then, that he conducted no published research on the Shroud for twenty-five years after the STuRP examination, his only contribution being co-authorship of a summary paper. In the 21st century his ‘Maillard reaction’ hypothesis contradicted many of the findings of the STuRP team, including some of his own paper. In this he was very much out on his own, and could not, in this research, be said to be acting as a ‘lead scientist’ of a team.

I do not think there is any evidence that for “decades he dismissed the skeptics who said there was medieval cotton woven in to the samples”. I don’t think there was any discussion of interpolated material before Benford and Marino’s 2000 presentation, and his responses, first dismissive and later confirmatory, emerged within a few years. By that time, and since, as I mentioned, there had been no research into the amount of cotton in the main body of the Shroud.

a plant based thymol derivative was used keep the reliquary bug free. This would alter the C14 dating.

Actually, experiments on thymol treated specimens have not shown that it affects the radiocarbon date at all. Besides which, there is a mass of material recovered from the Shroud during the 2002 restoration which has not been treated at all. There are no scientific reasons why the radiocarbon test cannot be repeated.