Shroud of Turin: Science Group International Conference
From the Papers Page on the conference site:
Abstracts: Thirty-one abstracts are now available.
Publication: No later than December 31, 2008, papers will be published online on this conference website. Papers received before that date will be published as they become available.
Subject Matter: Subject matter included anything related to the scientific, historical or theological aspects of the Shroud of Turin. Preference was given to papers with new material, i.e., that has not been presented at a conference or published previously elsewhere.
Length: Papers were be 30 minutes maximum, except those designated as “Special Presentations,” which may have been 1-hour long.
Categories: News & Views
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
