Ridiculous Claim x 2820 = Fact
This sentence showed up yesterday, January 28, 2012, on a blog called Photos That Shook The World. Pia’s 1898 photograph, in fact, fits the theme of the site. Then I read:
Radiocarbon tests date it to the middle ages, however apologists for the shroud believe it is incorrupt – and carbon dating can only date things which decay.
Did I miss something? A victory for faith over science! End of argument. I must admit, however, I have never met an apologists who thinks this. Even so, according to Google, this exact sentence appears 2,820 times on various websites and blogs, some entries going back to 2007. Think the sentence has been repeatedly plagiarized? Some will note that it is permissible to copy exact text with attribution. And Photos That Shook The World does at least link to Wikipedia as an information source. But nowhere, not that I could find, is this claim ever expressed in Wikipedia.
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.
Oh yeah, that’s the internet culture all right. It happens every day on email. I ran a forum for a few years, and people were always posting stuff they got on email. I tried and tried and tried to get them to CHECK IT OUT on Snopes or Urban Legends FIRST, but there’s no way they would do it. It would come in on email, so they’d post it on our forum as a fact. And 100% of those crazy stories were hoaxes. But would they learn? NEVER.
I’m surprised that the mis-information only got copied 2800 times.