Questions About Arizona’s Carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin
A reader writes:
The unintended consequence of Jull’s attempt to defend the 1988 work done by Arizona will be the opposite of what he hoped for. Yesterday’s questions become new again. Did the lab combine results as widely believed? Did the lab not report all of their measurements? Why hasn’t the lab, even after all these years, revealed all of the test results for each subsample?
What sample “split from one used” in 1988 are we talking about? How many other bits and pieces of shroud material does Arizona have tucked away? What really went on in Arizona?
This paper can do nothing but remind us of why the 1988 carbon dating of the shroud must be considered invalid. The evidence of cotton and dyestuff is overwhelming, Jull’s failure to find it not withstanding.
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.
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