Scientists say Turin Shroud is supernatural

[jberryhill]

11. What are the oldest fabric samples available?

Last edited Wed Dec 21, 2011, 12:59 PM - Edit history (1)

What bothers me about conversations about the shroud are the accidental reinforcements of the perception that some have that science is dogmatic.

There is a lot archaeology, psychology, history, physics, art and chemistry wrapped up in the various musings about it. It is a fascinating and fun artifact, and a lot of folks find it inspirational. What's really weird to me is that nobody goes into the Sistine Chapel, looks at Michelangelo's Creation and says, "I don't think God really looks like that".

There's also a question of how one defines "objective". Let's say that, for some reason, the radiocarbon date is invalidated for some reason. You are in charge of appointing a new team to examine it (actually the Catholic Church has ruled out any further testing). In order to be "objective", do you care about the religious beliefs of the persons you appoint to that team, or simply whether they have no opinion on the "authenticity" of the artifact? Does it matter?

Of course, the question of whether it is a first or 14th century artifact doesn't really address the popular question of "Is this the burial shroud of a resurrected human possessed of divine power?" let alone "Is this the burial shroud of Jesus Christ?" Given the uniform absence of documented bodily resurrected humans, the popular question is pretty readily disposed of to a greater degree of confidence than any radiocarbon date. For example, and I'm just going from dim memory here, I can't recall whether the confidence ranges of the outside radiocarbon dates overlap, but we have centuries of experience with dead people not coming back to life.

So, you get your "objective" team together and through some battery of tests, they find that the artifact is of first century middle eastern origin, and further determine that it is the burial shroud of a resurrected human. One of your team is so taken by this, that he becomes a Christian. Does that team member remain "objective"? Because if you define objectivity as ruling out that the artifact is what some purport it to be, then it seems that any conclusion that the shroud is "authentic" (whatever that means) is perforce not "objective".

The best fit, to a high degree of confidence, of the available data is that the artifact is of medieval origin. But something strikes me as weird about attempting to find objective results in dealing with an artifact that, by definition, is of supposed "miraculous" origin. If it is a miracle of some kind, it is by definition an intractable question in the first place.

Science has two answers to any question: 1. "Best fit to a high degree of confidence of available data", and 2. "Don't know". Asking science "Is this a miracle?" isn't really a sensible question in the first place. If science ever did "confirm a miracle", then all bets are off and we can dispense with the entire scientific exercise in "how do we know stuff".

One of the other things that gets missed in the shroud stuff is that the Catholic Church doesn't take an official position on it anyway. Pope John Paul II, for example, said that the church "has no specific competence" to pronounce it authentic or not.