Please don’t turn this into another thread discussing the Shroud…there are plenty already in existence!
My apologies. I mentioned the Holy Shroud because the title of this thread is "God, Science, and Naturalism. Since the Shroud has been proven by science to be a miracle given to us by God, it seemed relevant to the thread. Here is a passage in that regard from
Verdict on the Shroud, Stevenson & Habermas, 1981, pg 162:
"Prior to the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, few scholars rejected belief in miracles.
However, doubts about miracles became widespread as the new rationalism spread in Europe.
The Enlightenment intellectuals taught that the true authority for religion was reason, not scriptures or church tradition. Thus, nothing in Christian belief could conflict with what reason said was true.
"To the rationalist, the laws of nature were an insurmountable obstacle to miracles. Man’s reason judged that miraculous events which would violate these laws would not occur. The rationalists will concede that there are strange events which may sometimes surpass human comprehension, but these events would always have a natural explanation. In short, The Enlightenment rationalists viewed miracles as needless intrusions into reality.
"The enlightenment efforts to dismiss the miraculous culminated in David Hume’s essay,
‘
Of Miracles.’ Hume defined a miracle as an event which violates the laws of nature through the volition of God or some other invisible agent. Hume’s major thesis was that the laws of nature are uniform and thus do not allow for miracles. These laws are inalterable because the experience of mankind backs these laws. Hume thought this observation proved that miraculous events could not occur. In short, the laws of nature as supported by man’s experience so not allow for miracles.
. . .
"For David Hume and other skeptic, miracles are virtually impossible because they violate the observed laws of nature. Even if God existed, He would not choose to reveal Himself in a way that offends man’s reason, meaning that He would not intervene in history with miraculous events.
. . .
“The Shroud of Turin may have an important bearing on the naturalism-supernaturalism debate. It has been stated by some that the research on the Shroud may initiate a very intense discussion of the evidence for God’s action in human history. This view asserts that the Shroud studies might mount a serious reassessment of the naturalism which has recently dominated Western thinking.”
As noted, this was written in 1981, before the Shroud’s carbon fourteen evidence was measured. The Shroud has a great deal more C-14 than would be expected of a cloth that is 2000 years old. The problem is that archeology has proven that the Shroud was available to iconographers and coin engravers in the sixth century, and the only way to explain this anomaly is to postulate that the Shroud has been subjected to a neutron flux which would have had the effect of creating more C-14 in its linen fibers.
