Shroud of Turin Blog

Richard Dawkins discusses the Shroud in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, (September 22, 2009). Obviously, he is being selective with evidence. Here is what he says:

[Carbon dating] has revolutionized archaeological dating. The most celebrated example is the Shroud of Turin. Since this notorious piece of cloth seems mysteriously to have imprinted on it the image of a bearded crucified man, many people hoped it might hail from the time of Jesus. It turns up in the historical record in the mid-fourteenth century in France, and nobody knows where it was before that. It has been housed in Turin since 1578, under the custody of the Vatican since 1983. When mass spectrometry made it possible to date a tine sample of the shroud, rather than the substantial swathes that would have been needed before, the Vatican allowed a small strip to be cut off. The strip was divided in three parts and sent to three leading laboratories specializing in carbon dating, in Oxford, Arizona and Zurich. Working under conditions of scrupulous independence—not comparing notes—the three laboratories reported their verdicts on the date when the flax from which the cloth had been woven died. Oxford said ad 1200, Arizona 1304 and Zurich 1274. These dates are all—within normal margins of error—compatible with each other and with the date in the 1350s at which the shroud is first mentioned in history. The dating of the shroud remains controversial, but not for reasons that cast doubt on the carbon-dating technique itself. For example, the carbon in the shroud might have been contaminated by a fire, which is known to have occurred in 1532. I won’t pursue the matter further, because the shroud is of historical, not evolutionary, interest. It is a nice example, however, to illustrate the method, and the fact that, unlike dendrochronology, it is not accurate to the nearest year, only to the nearest century or so.

It is a well written book, and for people who enjoy the subject of evolution, as I do, it is a good read. But, as with theology, he is careless with material he doesn’t understand. Too bad.

In 1988, Carbon-14 findings from three Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) Labs independently dated a sample removed from the Turin Shroud, a linen cloth believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth and unarguably the most widely-studied linen cloth in history. The dates reported ranged between 1260 – 1390 A.D.; thus, leading to the conclusion that the cloth originated in the Middle Ages (1). Since the dating, many hypotheses have been proffered attempting to explain the C-14 results (2), which appear contradictory to a plethora of data pointing to a more ancient origin (3-6). An acceptable hypothesis of why the Shroud dated between AD 1260-1390 must satisfactorily explain the precise, statistically-determined angular skewing of the dates corresponding with the individual laboratories, with reference to the location of the sub samples received. The hypotheses of generalized ionizing radiation, thermal effects, environmental carbon monoxide enrichment and bio plastic coating are incapable of meeting this latter requirement, as is the premise that the cloth itself, is, in toto, medieval (2). In 2005, the late Raymond N. Rogers authored a paper in Thermochimica Acta that reported the results of experimental tests evaluating the hypothesis that the radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud was invalid due to the intrusion of newer material in the sampling area (8). Based on data obtained from his analyses of samples from the area, Rogers concluded that the combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proved that the material from the radiocarbon area of the Shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth.

 One:

There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the shroud is older than the radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly needed. Only by doing this will people be able to arrive at a coherent history of the shroud which takes into account and explains all of the available scientific and historical information.

• Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit which participated in the 1988 Carbon 14 Dating of the Shroud. ( May 2008 )

Two:

[T]he [1988 carbon 14] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.

• Robert Villarreal, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist who headed a team of nine scientists who at LANL examined material from the carbon 14 sampling region. ( August 2008 )

For more information see: Shroud of Turin Fact Check

A true moralist, after years of study and thought, works out a rule of life and sticks to it. A false moralist expects everybody else to stick to it.

Source: Of course, I could be wrong…: madpriest’s thought for the day

A true moralist, after years of study and thought, works out a rule of life and sticks to it. A false moralist expects everybody else to stick to it.

Source: Of course, I could be wrong…: madpriest’s thought for the day