Shroud of Turin, Part Three: Innuendo of Wrongness!

So apparently, my response to the response of somebody's response of my review of some Shroud of Turin documentary on the BBC has elicited a response.

How insightful is this criticism of my position?

The Shroud of Turin was carbon dated in 1988. The conclusion of those tests was that the cloth originated between 1260 and 1390.

Color me shocked. The test they did to check the date of the shroud in 1988 found exactly what I say it found. The Shroud of Turin is a 14th century hoax. But, lets see why this clear and scientific evidence should be overturned.

However, tests recently conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory by a team of nine scientists under the direction of Robert Villarreal confirm what chemist Raymond Rogers found and published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005): The tested sample was not representative of the shroud’s cloth. Rogers’ findings had also been confirmed by Georgia Tech’s materials forensic chemist John L. Brown.

The idea generally is that some new carbon must have gotten into the samples and caused all the different carbon tests to register an incorrect date of about the same time. How does this happen? Generally speaking, it doesn't. They have claimed that there was bacteria on it or that it soaked in some new carbon during a fire. However, to make the Carbon tests properly register what looks like 1360ish to really be about the year 31, we need some about half the same to be contaminated with carbon from the year 2689. In reality, it's easy to explain how you could screw up a carbon-14 dating to have it far too old. But, to get it far too recent is quite hard to do.

So contamination, in general doesn't work without contamination of some carbon with greater than the rather steady ratio of atmospheric carbon-14. So rather than that they need to say that the entire set of samples taken from the Shroud itself are not taken from the shroud. How do they do this? Cue, invisible thieves of carbon dating!

In the 1500s, the shroud went on a tour of Europe, and security wasn't tight, Benford said. It's possible somebody removed a small piece of the shroud and patched it using "invisible weaving," a common technique at the time that would've left the alteration unnoticeable to the naked eye.

That's right. Carbon dating is discredited by suggestions of invisible shroud thieves who, stole some of the shroud, but more importantly secretly replaced the section they stole with 200 year old cloth. Why they would replace it rather than just grab it and run away, seems a bit odd, but nevertheless that's the claim.

Even the Christopher Ramsey of the Oxford Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, which participated in the original tests, has concluded the needs for new studies. Not Ssnot, he knows better than scientists.

Go ahead and carbon date it again. I'm not going to stop you. We can take a larger amount, from more places, with more labs and get more data. We can carbon date parts with picture on it if that makes you happy.

It isn't that the first study was flawed, rather that if you keep whining about the fact that it's a 14th century hoax, we'll be happy to debunk it again with some more data. I'd be fine to burn the entire thing up checking every thread for it's carbon-14 to carbon-12 ratio.

A scientist will acknowledge that we might not have all the answers. A fundamentalist ignores such caution.

This however is a major problem with the posters claims about the Shroud and myself. I am believing the science because that's what the science concludes. I am clearly on the side of science here.

I don't have all the answers, but on this topic I know where the evidence leads. We have a very good dating of the cloth to about the time the cloth was first seen. We have scientific data that allows us to conclude that it's 14th century. Suggesting that the carbon dating is wrong because of Jesus emitted a lot of alpha particles when he resurrected (actually suggested by Shroud folk) or because to spare the Shroud from the Romans time travelers retrieved the shroud and moved it 1400 years into the future (not actually suggested but just as plausible) is stupid, but I'll hear you out. If you want to to actually believe it, you need some actual evidence. You need something more than blanket suggestions of supposed reasons for inaccuracies in order to actually conclude anything.

You don't get to claim discreditation of the science with innuendo of wrongness. You don't get to say, maybe some elves stole some of the cloth and secretly wove some 14th century cloth into the shroud during the 16th century and therefore the carbon dating is wrong. No. You said it's from the 1st century. We carbon dated it: 14th century.

You need to prove that that carbon dating was wrong and that it's really from the 1st century. What we have instead is a claim that the carbon dating might be wrong if somehow the part that was carbon dated was really secretly replaced or repaired. You don't get to suggest with very vague language that it might be wrong and therefore it is wrong. No! No! No! That's not the way science works. You don't get to make your conclusion stick without actual evidence. Suggesting that the carbon dating is wrong is categorically different from showing that the carbon dating is wrong.

All of the supposed theories as to how the carbon-14 dates are all wrong, from alpha particle resurrection to secret thieves are all absolutely absurd. We could carbon date it again, but it was embarrassing enough the first time, however, even without this step the evidence is still firmly on the side of hoax because you don't get to suggest the test was flawed and use that to conclude the test was flawed. Suggestion != Evidence.

“I already knew that and found it utterly silly.” That is unquestionably fundamentalist talk; atheist fundamentalist talk — ignore the science.

No. I find it silly BECAUSE of the evidence. All of the proposed reasons why the tests were faulty take massive leaps to actually accept as true, unless one is clinging to the fundamentalism that the cloth must be accurate. It really wouldn't matter a jot to Christianity if it were a hoax. So the Shroud of Turin is fake, that doesn't change a damned thing. Piltdown man was fake, but human evolution still holds merit. Simply because somebody made a hoax to support something, doesn't mean that it must be wrong. Christianity is wrong because it's untrue, not because the Shroud of Turin is a hoax.

I've heard the "theories" as to why the carbon-14 tests were wrong. I've never seen a jot of evidence for these theories. So the scientific evidence is still heavily weighted on the side of "it's a damned hoax." This isn't fundamentalism, it's reasoned skepticism and following the evidence.

It takes considerably less of a leap of faith to conclude that the Shroud is a hoax than to conclude that the Shroud isn't a hoax.

The Shroud of Turin, Redux

A while back I mistakenly subjected myself to to some painful watching of nonsense by the BBC about the Shroud of Turin, in order to properly purge it from my system and do something slightly productive with it I decided to make a quick post on this blog about it.

Well, I was searching something or other involving my name and I managed to turn up a very interesting post, titled When Atheists Act Like Fundamentalists on Shroud of Turin Blog. Wow. I feel so special! Also, apparently Freepers got a copy of the shroud post. You know somebody must have tore the hell out of your post if the Free Republic batted it around. *smirk*

Most of his "corrections" were based on nonsense that I already knew but long since discounted. Some Shroud people in order to "come to terms" with the radiocarbon dating, discount the dating by suggesting it was taken from the wrong place. I already knew that and found it utterly silly. The sections were taken from varying parts of the shroud and simply saying "those parts don't count because they are later repairs to the shrouds" doesn't suffice as evidence that it's older. Other bits were information which I took directly from the BBC piece like the date on the Sudarium of Oviedo.

This was all. It missed the entire point of my post. The entire implied argument had no links to draw the argument. It insisted that because the hood was 5th century or some drawings were from the 1100s that the shroud was from that century; not one lick of that was established.

There are drawings of some shroud said to be burial shroud of Jesus. Therefore this shroud here *MUST* be that shroud. -- That doesn't follow at all. Further because the Bible says there was a burial shroud doesn't imply for a second that the Shroud of Turin is that shroud.

My post was intended to be largely flippant and expose the underlying flaws in the argument. "We have X therefore Y equals X." was the very typical line of argument used in the program. We have "references to some shroud" therefore "Shroud of Turin" equals "that shroud". At every step that was the argument given!

In the end all the evidence is very consistent with a 14th century hoax. Even the pollen dating and other things "Shroud scientists" have come up with remain consistent with that date. The strongest evidence suggests that the Shroud of Turin is a priceless 14th century artifact. However, out of what appears to be sheer desperation people cling to it like it's evidence for anything divine. Even if the evidence suggested it was a first century burial cloth it wouldn't prove anything.

In many ways it reminds me of the archeologists who suppose "10th century BCE finds" each time they make any archeological find in Israel, or how everything from the 1st century is repeatedly tried to be tied into the Gospel story. "This is Jesus' cave... well, actually maybe not... maybe it's Lazarus' cave then!"

Do these people have any idea what kinds of evidence is required to actually meet the requirements to actually be evidence? There's some crazy guy who pretends to find a bunch of great Bible stuff like chariot wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea (not actually even a chariot wheel). Ignoring the fact that even if it were a chariot wheel, there's no end to reasonable explanations how a chariot wheel could end up there without invoking Exodus.

So, I made a perfectly fine post underlying the problem with the BBC Shroud of Turin program in an attempt to underline the clear logical flaw behind the supposed strand running through all the information, but was nothing more than utter nonsense. And somebody on some blog says that I'm "acting like a fundamentalist"? How? Are fundamentalists known for their rants about how crap programs are? Are fundamentalists known for exposing logical flaws?

He disagreed with some of my "facts" that I simply lifted directly from the program itself and that's SOOOOO FUNDAMENTALIST!

"“I am utterly astounded at how many hoaxes people buy into lock stock and barrel.” — I agree. But it can cut both ways." -- Really, what hoax am I buying into? Pfft.

This tool makes a post about "When Atheists act like Fundamentalists" and mostly agrees with all the points I made, except he inserted some other arguments that I already knew and regard as complete crap too, but fail to fit the theme of why this program particularly sucked.


* In the initial version of the original post I did note that I used the wrong dates and rechecked the video. So my version reads "The Shroud of Turin carbon dates to the 1320s. The Shroud of Turin was first seen around the 1360s." whereas the linked version says 1360s and 1325 accordingly.

My second trollish response! WOOHOO!

I'm on a roll. I usually have to steal trolls from other sites and the dregs of the internet: obscure forums, creationist wikis, the Washington Post, or hidden in various nooks and crannies (filled with kooks and ninnies of course). But for the second time, I've managed to get a negative post on my blog. It brings tears to my eyes (not really).

Anonymous writes (in reply to my blog about Giuliani's debate response where he he accepts the bible to be figurative):

Yeah yeah yeah, like the frigging Democrats will do anything differently.

Different than equivocating about religion to suppose large amounts of the Bible are false without bothering to admit that it's all filled with lies? I didn't say the Democrats would do anything different, in fact, in this respect the Democrats do worse. They seem much less sincere with regards to religion, the reason they are getting my vote.

The leading candidates have already said they aren't getting out of Iraq.

True, they teeter about removing the last 5% after having removed all the major troops really early on. Frankly, yes I find that to be pathetic. However, I don't find the idea of a working surge or there forever to be at all amusing.

Thats why I believe the end is near, delivered by the nukes developed by atheistic scientists (Dawkins tells us most scientists are atheists.)

That doesn't follow. Simply because somebody says most scientists are atheists doesn't mean that most scientists are atheists, nor does it mean that the particular scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were atheists. That said, Dawkins is right as one can tell by surveys concerning religious faith within the NAS and Royal Society as well as general surveys to working scientists. Noting that the majority of top scientists 90% or so, are atheists doesn't preclude the idea that the Manhattan Project was staffed with atheists. That said, it was staffed pretty much with atheists, at least in this country. Due to lack of sharing and other secrets acts the atomic bomb has been reinvented a number of times.

The God Damn atheists are going to destroy the world.

How? With atomic bombs? By making atomic bombs and giving them to religionists? Because we have no morality? -- I guess I won't know. But, I can speak for myself. I I were running the country, I wouldn't use an atomic bomb even if atomic bombs were in route to destroy the country I was running. I would certainly claim I would, simply because the threat of retaliation is required for MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) to function, but even soon to be vaporized I wouldn't give the order due to moral restrictions against vaporizing folks. Secondly, why the hell would any atheist want to destroy the world? Really, this is the only life we get and it is precious.

I will die cursing them.

It's probably more likely that you won't. However you will die and be gone and that's it. Though the idea that not accepting the proposition that "God exists" is enough to warrant your curses. Personally I despise aSanta Clausists, they are neither Jolly and all they love is coal.