Even as a little kid, I can’t say I ever felt like a totally natural fit at Overlake. It seemed weird to me that you never sat next to the same people twice, I didn’t understand how it seemed that everybody knew the songs we were singing except me, particularly when all they projected were the words and no music? (This was also right towards the beginning of my boy alto period.) Why was all the music so incredibly different from what we had had at Grace Lutheran? Why was the music… well… stupid? Why was the sermon so long? Why couldn’t I leave to go to the bathroom? (Seriously. I got blocked at the doors by the ushers.) Who actually got to talk to Pastor Bob? Why did everything seem so centered around him? Why, if being saved was something that happened to us once, was a big point always made of saying the prayer to let Jesus into our hearts as personal savior at the end of every service?

Still, it was where we were going. Sometimes I went to the adult service with Mom, sometimes I went to the kids’ service. At the kids’ service, sometimes they showed things like the Christian anime Superbook (which went well with my love of Star Blazers), and a movie called “Music Box” that I’ve talked about before. I also remember them talking to us about evolution and AIDS, and sometimes in the adult service hearing them talk about abortion and how there were no Christians in Russia (keeping in mind that this was the mid-1980s).

Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, as I mentioned, had some interesting bits on various supernatural phenomena (including an article on demon possession that absolutely freaked me out). Among other things, there was a riveting, lengthy piece on the Shroud of Turin. I remember showing it to my mom, who said, “Well, most Christians don’t think it’s real.” In support of her answer, she gave me the book Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith by Josh McDowell, which had roughly a 30-page section debunking the Shroud. (Curiously, I discovered about ten years ago that newer editions of the book no longer have this section. I’ve not encountered any comment or explanation as to why; it just seems to have been quietly dropped. Perhaps McDowell changed his mind. If anybody knows anything about that, I’d love to hear more.)

On arrival in Coventry we explored the Cathedral and then sauntered down to the pedestrian free shopping precinct.

There we happened upon an older gentleman who was taking his rest on a bench.  He was sweet, kind and gentle.  His name was Mr. Shakespeare -  that’s the truth!

Eric and I, being good Plymouth Brethren gave witness to our faith.  It transpired that Mr. Shakespeare was a member of an evangelically minded Church of England parish in Coventry.  He invited us to attend a “house group” meeting that evening, and so we did.  Indeed we not only attended the house group, but were also given lodging for the night.

My memory is a bit imperfect but I think that the Vicar of the Church was our overnight host.  What I remember clearly is that this evangelical parson had a minor obsession with the so-called “Shroud of Turin”.  He believed it to be authentic.

Even then it seemed odd to me that an evangelical parson (evangelicals base their faith on the Bible alone) – should be an advocate for the authenticity of a Roman Catholic relic.

Even then I was sceptical about the “Shroud”, as I am to this day!

Pictured: The old Coventry Cathedral destroyed during bombing raids in 1940 and preserved as a garden of prayer and remembrance and the new cathedral built adjacent.

Here is an exchange from an interview with Buso by Marina Tantushyan:

[Tantushyan:]  What is your view of the ENEA tests results that in a way contradict your conclusions? Are you ready to insist on your point of view? If yes, what counter arguments are you going to use to prove your point?

[Buso:]  The fact that all theories related to the Shroud of Turin are to be proved invalid to some extent became obvious to me back in 1980s when a group of world renowned scientists who performed carbon dating test on a small piece of the cloth put the Shroud’s origin around 1280-1320. It so happened that even that theory designed by well known scientists who used technology and methods modern for that time collapsed. In my opinion, various theories will always try to deny the existence of the Shroud of Turin. As far as the results of the latest testing that contradict my observations, I can say only this: those who want to doubt my theory will also have to appeal the results of all my work to study hundreds of pictures painted between years 1300 and 2010. In all those I found hidden writing. There is a book about to come out in which I give a precise and detailed account of all examples of hidden writing I have encountered. What I don’t understand is this: what’s the point of denying my theory that proves that Giotto created the Shroud of Turin in 1315 if the existence of these hidden writings is obvious.

This is what you are looking for. It is a stylized “Giotto 15,” meaning of course 1315. And you can find it only by looking at the area just below the chin in an upside down photograph of the shroud, as shown above.

What’s the point of denying?

[Sciencebod is] actually extremely interested in not understanding. Between sciencebod, Bad Archeology, and the reader Dan mentioned who denied there was any image at all, I’m reminded of that story about Galileo’s scientific contemporaries who refused to look in the telescope, or did look and claimed to have seen nothing but smudges. When someone wants badly enough to not know something, their will can overcome their very senses.

Cartoon by Chris Madden. Used with permission.

Last week I wrote about three books I recommend for skeptical kids. Apparently Dan Porter didn’t particularly care for my inclusion of The Magic Detectives, because he believes it incorrectly portrays the mystery behind the Shroud of Turin. I think his blog speaks for itself, but I just want to address a few things he mentioned. Here’s one thing he said:

[The book was written in] 1989. One of the things I wanted my kids to learn was the value of fact checking. Much has happened since 1989.

First, I find it somewhat comical for a man whose faith is based on the Bible to criticize me for giving my kids a thirteen year old book. Much has happened in the past two thousand years, Mr. Porter.

I do pay attention to what has happened in those 2000 years. I’m not a biblical literalist. For one thing, I fully accept evolution (others here do not). When is comes to history, I fully realize that the Bible is not a very good history book, just as it is not a good science book.

And “Mom” wrote:

The burden of proof must always be with those asserting the claim, and not with those seeking to disprove it. Why is this often a difficult concept for people of faith to grasp?

Philosophically, I don’t have a problem with that. I tend to agree, mostly. From Socrates to Hume to Nietzsche, and more recently, very famously, Antony Flew (pictured above), this has been considered axiomatic. Atheist Flew, at frequent meetings of theist C. S. Lewis’ Socratic Club, regularly argued that the "onus of proof must lie upon the theist."

But should it? Why? For the claim that God exists? For every claim? Every historical object?

When it comes to the existence of God (by extension we can imagine this applying to miracles and the authenticity of the shroud), Paul Copan, president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and a member of the Catholic Philosophical Society, as argued, better than most, that that is presumptuous and unjustified. Interestingly, Atheist Jeffery Jay Lowder, best known for his websites The Secular Web and Internet Infidels (infidels.org), wrote an article entitled, “Is Atheism Presumptuous?" In it, he writes:

I agree [with Paul Copan] that anyone who claims, "God does not exist," must shoulder a burden of proof just as much as anyone who claims, "God exists."

Flew later wrote: There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007) with Roy Abraham Varghese (ISBN 978-0-06-133529-7). And he changed his mind about the burden of proof belonging to one asserting a religious claim.

A lot has happened since 1989. Why is this often a difficult concept for skeptics to grasp?

“This is intended as the briefest of summaries,” he writes in My new sandpit theory for how the Turin Shroud was produced – as a medieval hoax. I read it and prepared the following diagram to help you understand it.

ENEA calmed down. I expected a quieter month. But January 2012 was a surprise: 78,198 views. It wasn’t frontend loaded, suggesting spillover from December. It wasn’t because of all the comments caused by Sciencebod. A quick look at the logs suggests the growth came largely from an increase in people following the blog on Facebook and Twitter.

And finally, there’s a recent criticism of the page devoted to The Turin Shroud. Rather than comment, the person who disagrees with what I wrote, a blogger called Dan Porter, has written an entire blog post, Bad Archaeology at Bad Archaeology (how I wish I could have used that title!). In his comment on Bad Archaeology, he calls it a “comprehensive response”, but it’s far from comprehensive. It cherry picks elements of the page for specific criticisms, but I found that I had to delete only two errors of fact.

Only two errors of fact? I agree I should not have used the word comprehensive. Point well taken.

What Dan Porter has done has been to use the very dubious claims of Ray Rogers that the linen samples used for radiocarbon dating were contaminated, . . .

Is this how good archaeology is done, claiming something is dubious without the least bit of explanation? Dubious? Why? To the contrary, a mountain of evidence now exists in support of Rogers. It is indeed the carbon dating undertaken in 1988 that is dubious. Click on Read More below to see a comprehensive enough list of reasons to doubt the carbon dating.

. . . to press on with the silly notion that the image on the Shroud encodes three-dimensional data (an inexplicable miracle!) and generally disagree with what I wrote.

What his criticism did allow me to do was to test the claims about the encoding of three-dimensional data in images. I took a well known facial image and processed it with results that look fairly similar to those obtained from the Shroud. It even rendered unevennesses in the photographic print as three-dimensional! Another miracle!

It is painfully obvious that over at Bad Archaeology the concept of the three-dimensionality in the image is not any better understood than it is by our friend Sciencebod over at Science Buzz. It is painfully obvious because BA resorts to mockery. No one that I know of claims that the 3D data content or how it plots to an elevation is miraculous. Where did BA get that idea? Granted, some people think the image was recorded by the Resurrection. That part would be miraculous. Others do not. Rogers, for one did not. Plenty of people who participate in this blog don’t think so. For an introduction to the 3D encoding read Sciencebod’s 3D Problem.

The green picture of Einstein (copied over from BA) is supposed to explain what? Any picture will plot something even indented eyebrows. Is that understood at Bad Archaeology?

WHY THE CARBON DATING IS DUBIOUS

1. Thermochimica Acta (Volume 425 Issue 1-2, 2005, pages 189-194, by Raymond N. Rogers, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California) – The peer-reviewed article is available on Elsevier BV’s ScienceDirect® online information site. The abstract reads:

The combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud.

Ironically, Rogers was trying to prove that the “results are accurate and the samples came from the shroud.”

2. Microscopical Investigation of Selected Raes Threads from the Shroud of Turin by John L. Brown, retired Principal Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Energy and Materials Sciences Laboratory. This is a 2005 independent, by-different-means confirmation that the carbon 14 dating was flawed.

3. The 2008 work of Bob Villarreal and a team of nine scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory which confirmed that the carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin is wrong. According to Villarreal:

[T]he [1988] 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.

4. Chemistry Today (Volume 126, Number 4, pages 4-12, July-August 2008 by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino). Discrepancies in the radiocarbon dating area of the Turin shroud.

5. A 2009 paper, Cotton in Raes/Radiocarbon Threads: The Example of Raes #7, by Thibault Heimburger; published on the STERA site.

6. A 2010 paper, Carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin: Partially Labelled Regressors and the Design of Experiments, co-authored by Marco Riani, Anthony C. Atkinson, Giulio Fanti and Fabio Crosilla; recently published on the website of the London School of Economics. The abstract reads:

Due to the heterogeneity of the data and the evidence of a strong linear trend the twelve measurements of the age of the TS [=Turin Shroud] cannot be considered as repeated measurements of a single unknown quantity. The statement of Damon, Donahue, Gore, and eighteen others (1989) that “The results provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval” needs to be reconsidered in the light of the evidence produced by our use of robust statistical techniques.

But even in going back to 1988, we can’t help but notice warning signs that something was amiss that the testers, themselves, seemed to ignore. Perhaps that was a disservice to each other and the public at large.

• Giovanni Riggi, the person who actually cut the carbon 14 sample from the Shroud stated, “I was authorized to cut approximately 8 square centimetres of cloth from the Shroud…This was then reduced to about 7 cm because fibres of other origins had become mixed up with the original fabric …” (emphasis mine)
• Giorgio Tessiore, who documented the sampling, wrote: “…1 cm of the new sample had to be discarded because of the presence of different color threads.” (emphasis mine)
• Edward (Teddy) Hall, then head of the Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory, had noticed fibers that looked out of place. A laboratory in Derbyshire concluded that the rogue fibers were cotton of “a fine, dark yellow strand.” Derbyshire’s Peter South wrote: “It may have been used for repairs at some time in the past…”
• Gilbert Raes, when he later examined some of the carbon 14 samples, noticed that cotton fibers were contained inside the threads, which could help to explain differences in fiber diameter. This may also explain why the carbon 14 samples apparently weighed much more than was as expected.
• Alan Adler at Western Connecticut State University found large amounts of aluminum in yarn segments from the radiocarbon sample, up to 2%, by energy-dispersive x-ray analysis. Why aluminum? That was an important question because it is not found elsewhere on the Shroud.
• The radiocarbon lab at the University of Arizona conducted eight tests. But there was a wide variance in the computed dates and so the team in Arizona combined results to produce four results thus eliminating the more outlying dates (reportedly they did so at the request of the British Museum, which was overseeing the tests). Even then, according to Remi Van Haelst, a an industrial chemist in Belgium who reviewed the measurements, the results failed to meet minimum statistical standards (chi-squared tests). Why the wide variance in the dates? Was it because of testing errors? Or was it because the sample was not sufficiently homogeneous? The latter seems very likely now, and the statistical anomaly indicates something very suspicious about the samples.
• Bryan Walsh, a statistician, examined Van Haelst’s analysis and further studied the measurements. He concluded that the divided samples used in multiple tests contained different levels of the C14 isotope. The overall cut sample was non-homogeneous and thus of questionable validity. Walsh found a significant relationship between the measured age of various sub-samples and their distance from the edge of the cloth. Though Walsh did not suggest invisible reweaving, it is consistent with his findings.

Responding to criticism « Bad Archaeology

Paul Rudnick, playwright and humorist: It’s hard to pick the absolutely worst musical, because some shows were just painfully tedious or derivative or overblown. But, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this selection, “Into the Light,” from 1986, had the distinction of being both terrible and transcendently unlikely, because it was a musical about the Shroud of Turin. It would be hard to imagine a good musical about the Shroud of Turin. If memory serves, the show concerned a battle between faith and science, and it climaxed with a scene in some sort of laboratory. The scientists had proved that the Shroud, with its possible shadowy image of Jesus, wasn’t authentic. But then a laser show erupted, proving I’m not sure exactly what. Maybe that God is, in fact, a really chintzy special effect.

To believe that the Shroud of Turin was the burial cloth of Jesus, you must accept that no one knew of its existence until 1353. Before that time, there is simply no record of the Shroud existing. No talk of a miraculous linen bearing the image of Christ’s crucified body, no record of an archaeological excavation uncovering it. Nothing. It was either the best kept secret in history, or something very strange was going on.

Except, that is, for the many references to such items.

BTW: It seems impossible from this magazine to figure out the name of the author for an article. They list the names of contributing authors without pictures in one place and provide a photograph of the author at the beginning of each article. So the author, pictured here, after telling us that Benedict XVI called it an icon, which means by definition of the word that he implies it is a painting, the author states:

The linen cloth now known as the Shroud of Turin appeared out of nowhere in 1353, and was being used in a faith-healing scam by a church in Lirey. The testimony of two Bishops at the time convinced Clement VII that it was nothing more than the work of a clever artist, and should not be billed as the true burial sheet of Christ. Scientific examination of the Shroud backs this up by carbon dating it to exactly the same period of time as its appearance in history.

The authenticity of the Shroud of Turin is also called into question by comparing it with the gospel accounts of Christ’s burial and resurrection. They clearly do not match and, in fact, have major contradictions between them. For the Shroud to be real, you would have to believe that not only are the gospels wrong, but that traditionally respectful burial practices of Jews at the time were completely thrown out the window in the case of a man they called the son of God.

Nothing new that I can see: Cafeteria facts, inaccuracies, and the old argument that the shroud contradicts the Bible (as the author of the article interprets the text).