NEW 2005 SHROUD OF TURIN BROUHAHA: SCIENCE vs PAPAL CUSTODIAN
Medieval Reweaving the Shroud of Turin
It was a brilliant bit of detective
work. Sue Benford and Joseph Marino consulted with several textile
experts. They examined the documenting photographs of the carbon
14 samples and other close up photographs of the Shroud. They
found clear indications of a discrete repairs to the Shroud.
The repair seems to have been what
modern tailors call invisible reweaving. This results in an
intermingling of new and older thread. Threads are even spliced
together. The newer thread is carefully dyed to match the older
material so as to make it almost invisible to the naked eye.
This was a common method by which
artisans repaired valuable tapestries during the middle ages.
Enough newer thread was identified
so that Ron Hatfield of the Beta Analytic, one of the world
largest carbon 14 dating firm, to estimate that had the cloth of
the Shroud been 1st century and the new cloth 16th century, the
results would have been what the carbon 14 tests had revealed.
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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 proved that previous 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 absolutely not paint.
There is the enigma
of the second face on the reverse side 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.
Throw in some
history, and given what is known scientifically, and
there is ample reason to infer that the Shroud of
Turin is genuine. The thoughtful skeptical
inquirers aims not to achieve this or that
conclusion. 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." |
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