That’s like saying that if you want to read a large and complicated book, like ‘War and Peace’, you would only read the table of contents, the preface or the epilog, so you can just get the ‘gist’ of the story, without having to deal with all of those complicated plot twists that are way too hard to understand, right? Then, would you tell everyone that you read it and really understand what it was all about? Is that how you think people should read textbooks, too?
If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, which is written in plain English that even I can understand with my 10th grade education, then you have not really done your homework, and can’t possibly claim to have an informed opinion on the facts. These papers are not written by people that are “making up their own methods for dating or proving that something is supernatural”. They are experts using modern scientific methods.
Reading is not just ‘a way’, but it’s the most important way to acquire knowledge. As someone once said, “reading is fundamental” to learning anything.
They are not “supposed facts”. They are scientific facts from experts in their fields of study, that would not put their names on something if it wasn’t based on scientific analysis that they have given due diligence. You are the one that is drawing your own conclusions, without even considering any of the real facts from more current studies, because for some reason you choose to cling to the ones you want to believe, that were done over 30 years ago. Many of these scientists, for the most part, are not invested in proving anything one way or the other. They’re just making a scientific observation based on all of the information available to them.
Their results have been strongly questioned by many scientists, as to their accuracy, due to new facts being discovered and studies being done, since they were first published. Scientific analysis relevant to the subject has changed immensely since that time. That’s why they are not seen as being as convincing as they might have been back then. Hopefully, they will repeat the CD 14 testing on *new *samples, if only to refute the previous testing, once and for all.
Gut feelings are all well and good. I’ve been inclined to stick to my own ‘gut feeling’, which is the opposite of yours, since the early 70s. But, I’ve also been willing to study all of the facts, both pro and con, because I still tend to be a skeptical person by nature. So far, I’m certainly not convinced it’s a fake, because the new evidence is leaning more and more toward it being authentic. They’ll probably never be able to prove it 100%, but at this point, it seems to be leaning heavily toward the positive side, so I feel pretty good about it.
