The sampling for the carbon 14 dating
was botched. Clues that there were problems were known and
ignored. Now, new studies show how invalid the samples were
because of material intrusion of new thread from reweaving
repairs. The date range of 1260 to 1390 is nothing but an average
for a mixture of material. Ronald Hatfield, a scientist at Beta
Analytic, has concluded that it could be a mixture of 1st century
cloth and 16th century repair material in roughly equal
proportions.
The area of the Shroud from which
the samples were cut is chemically unlike the rest of the Shroud.
There are cotton fibers only in the sample area. The sample area
contains madder root dye, plant gum and hydrous aluminum oxide.
The dyestuff, probably used to make the repairs imperceptible, are not
found elsewhere on the Shroud. See:
Carbon 14 Dating of the Mended Corner
of the Shroud of Turin.
Another chemical difference is
vanillin content. There is no vanillin in the Shroud fibers just as there
is no vanillin in the linen wrappings of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
From that fact alone, we can estimate that the Shroud is at least
1300 years old. There is, however, an abundance of vanillin in the area
adjacent to the carbon 14 samples meaning that this area is newer
than the rest of the cloth.
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No one knows for sure
if the Shroud of Turin is real. But if we
focus only on what is published in peer-reviewed
scientific journals then we know certain facts. The
Shroud of Turin is at least 1300 years old.
It could be older. The images are unexplained. As
Philip Ball wrote in Nature, in
commenting on a 2005 article in
Thermochimica Acta
that showed that the 1988 carbon 14 dating was
invalid, "It is simply not known how the
ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made" If
we turn to a 2003 article in
Melanoidins
we find that the images on
the Shroud of Turin are a chemical
caramel-like darkening of an otherwise clear starch
and polysaccharide coating on some of the shroud’s
fibers It is definitely not paint.
There is the enigma
of the second face on the backside of the Shroud
as reported in 2004 in the Journal of Optics
published by the Institute of Physics. Other
peer-reviewed evidence is clear: The bloodstains are
human blood. The images have peculiar 3D
properties. The Shroud was bleached by
methods used in the first century and not later in
the medieval era.
Add in some
history, and given what is known scientifically, and
there is ample reason to infer that the Shroud of
Turin is genuine. Because the thoughtful skeptical
inquirers aims not to achieve this or that
conclusion, but rather their aim is the process of
honest skeptical inquiry, there is ample room for
the thoughtful skeptical inquirer in Shroud
of Turin research. But the articles that appear now
and then in the Skeptical Inquirer
magazine are preposterously polemic, filled with
arguments refuted by peer-reviewed scientific
observation and lack proper historical
investigation.
The American
Chemical Society website quotes a thoughtful
skeptical inquirer, the late Raymond Rogers, the Los
Alamos scientist who showed that the carbon 14
dating was invalid: "The observations do not prove
how the image was formed or the "authenticity" of
the Shroud. There could be a nearly infinite number
of alternate hypotheses, and the search for new
hypotheses should continue." |
NEW 2005 SHROUD OF TURIN BROUHAHA: SCIENCE vs PAPAL CUSTODIAN
Shroud of Turin Story
Guide to the Facts
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