Shroud of Turin part 2

Shroud of Turin  part 2

 

Only Dr. Walter C. McCrone's book, Judgment Day for the Turin Shroud, Microscope Publications, 1997, goes straight to the point. It details how he discovered artist's pigment on the Shroud of Turin image areas and "blood" stains sufficient to account for all the image's intensity. His much earlier published papers giving all the technical wrinkles of his findings were later corroborated by radiocarbon dating of the Shroud.

 

Visit  http://www.mcri.org/home/section/63-64/the-shroud-of-turin .

 

This very old and reliable, fundamentally electronic technique proved, within a margin of a few years, that the Shroud originated in the 14th century, just as McCrone (RIP), the world's best light microscopist, had deduced. The light microscope had once more proven to be more accurate, immediate and precise than the best "black box" high-tech methods.

 

Anyway, radiocarbon dating certainly does not make the work of McCrone moot nor does it close the account on the Shroud. McCrone, by his book, establishes that Shroud reverence continues to stray into fraudulent unscientific story-telling and basement level bawdy myth. This is despite conclusive proof against the Shroud.

 

While the Shroud and STURP were still making news in 1978 and '79, only a sense for the sensational in synergy with a compelling need for the correct political posture explains the virtual abdication of the press' role as a skeptical investigator. To question the Shroud was to offend Catholics and to depreciate Christianity. In a case like this, good investigative reporting is not a part of the best formula to promote strong newspaper and periodical sales in heavily Christian western countries.

 

Jesus might never approve. The Islamic world just may differ slightly. Let's let Walter McCrone's book make Shroud news again, now, so he can finally set the STURP record straight.

 

STURP lied. STURP made pompously momentous deliberate false claims. STURP was a cruel farcical cap to a 640 year old joke.

 

That the chemical and physical methods used to study the Shroud were being hailed as the best modern technology has to offer is disturbing enough. STURP's preposterous final claim that there is no credible evidence against the Shroud adds to the deficit. That such garbage, unrecognized as it is as bad science, if not pseudoscience, argues so well in the media for the Shroud's authenticity and is believed by the ordinary man-on-the-street, is a monumental setback for science itself, at least for science in the West.

 

Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic scientists laughed their heads off, opining "What a goof troop those impostors must be!" when they saw STURP studies published in famous western journals. The judgement of God may never be known for sure, but it has never been moral or right to lie for Christ any more than it has ever been so to kill for Jesus, the Crusades notwithstanding.

 

When news arrived that STURP proceedings were being attended by a fundamentalist Catholic cult of "Jesus freaks" some observers were perturbed. But when some STURP members took to wearing large wooden crosses around their necks perturbation degenerated to consternation. It was clear that only one conclusion was possible from this evangelical canonization commission.

 

It's too bad there cannot be a church trial of the Shroud as is done to elevate a personage to sainthood.

 

STURP conducted no such trial, that's for sure. There was no devil's advocate. No one in the STURP group was allowed to effectively argue the case against authenticity. No one in STURP really critically evaluated the results that were being obtained in favor of the Shroud. The one man who might have exposed this intellectual crime against humanity had been sequestered, isolated, silenced and all but excommunicated.

 

It is all classical high balderdash. The manner in which this fraud was propagated is documented by McCrone and much earlier by Skeptical Inquirer authors. McCrone administers the coup de grace. A discussion here of the SI authors’ critical analysis and McCrone's own independent scientific investigation of the Shroud must wait. For now, let's just say that McCrone's microscopical examination of Shroud samples was the only fitting, apt and well calibrated instrumental technique that was ever performed by both a courageous and truly objective investigator.

 

In a way, this author wishes to congratulate Dr. Walter C. McCrone publicly for his devotion to Science with a capital "S".

 

For McCrone was really a true scientist. (He died in 2002.) He both acknowledged and compensated for his biases. His marshaling of massive evidence against Shroud authenticity should have been the only data that was deemed admissible by STURP. Instead, it was crassly thrown out, arrogantly dismissed, haughtily rejected and a crass attempt was made to entomb it forever.

 

The initial premise used by STURP was that the Shroud is genuine. The negation of the premise is that "the Shroud is not genuine, it is not the true burial cloth of Christ, it is the work of an artist". On the surface, this implies to some that if it isn't the result of a real miracle, virtually the only alternative is that it is a work of art.

This is the null hypothesis that STURP used to try and show Shroud authenticity and to convince skeptics of their devotion to the scientific method. By apparently disproving the null hypothesis, by arguing that the Shroud could not be the work of an artist, STURP scientists knew they would never actually have to enunciate that most incredible conclusion. That the Shroud contains a miraculous image of the crucified and resurrected Jesus is laid between the lines. But if taken at face value, this is an inevitable direct conclusion that could be drawn from the STURP report.

Yet, if this conclusion is left to the reader, it is a finding that would be based on false evidence, specious argument and selective admission of facts, to be sure. Still, advantages accrued for STURP. For when structured this way the report largely escaped ridicule and mostly preserved the personal reputations of STURP members: a very happy circumstance for them indeed. They thought they could get away with this kind of a cop-out and still retain the good graces of Shroud fans and the Catholic Church.

Shroud of Turin part 3

Part 3

 

And it seemed so scientific, so very rational and objective too. What a sting. A perfect set-up. We were all the intended marks in a worldwide scam, or else we were the victims of some cretinous bad joke.

 

There is only one word for the kind of imbecility that wraps up its moronic nakedness in the trappings of logic and science. Such twaddle is not properly to be called by any cheap, one syllable, derogatory four letter word, no no no. Perpetrated by scientists as only scientists themselves could possibly do it: it is indeed chemically pure, genuine, effervescent sparkling Pseudo science! With a capital P, it is of the highest order, fashioned by experts, sanctioned by professionals. With a nihil obstat from bishops of this day, all it lacks is an imprimatur from the Pope.

 

The most celebrated act in this paper charade is the image analysis done by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the Air Force Weapons Test Site in Los Alamos National Laboratory near Albuquerque New Mexico. Scientists there used high quality photographic negatives bearing the image of the Shroud. But this analysis does not in any way show a three dimensional likeness of Christ derived from the Shroud as claimed by STURP. It shows an image of the human model they used to trick the computer image analyzer into interpreting the fuzzy outlines of the "man" in the Shroud as if they came from a 3-D statuesque source. In other words, they implicitly assumed what they were purportedly trying to prove when they calibrated the image analyzer. You can't get a much smaller radius into a circular argument, except maybe by supercomputer.

 

STURP supposed that if the Shroud contained 3-D image information that could be used to regenerate a sort of cathode ray sculpture or electronic BAS-relief of a human form, then that would be proof that the image could not be the work of a minor artist. No such artist, the argument goes, would be able to supply the precise mathematical information "inherent" in the Shroud so as to produce such a striking effect, especially no artist who worked in 14th century ignorance.

 

This is a pronouncement of a well known art critic that had been domesticated by STURP and who had encouraged the project from the start. The reputations of more professional people than just the scientists involved with STURP are on the line here.

Even with the kind of computer enhancement that underlay the digital 3-D output from JPL's unique sophisticated technology, the likeness derived from the Shroud is crude at best. The late artist Walter Sanford has produced images strikingly similar to that on the Shroud by means of a conventional art technique. Belying STURP's claim that no artist could have done it, Mr. Sanford demonstrated to a packed Chicago audience in 1984 that the job is so simple that even a provincial ignoramus from the 14th century could easily have finished the creation in a matter of minutes. After all, the utterly impossible task that such a peasant artisan would have had to do to get the details almost right was to be able to read some version of a bootlegged Bible.

 

Painting rapidly, as an artist would have approached a fresco, Sanford swabbed a large piece of linen mounted like canvas on a frame. The broad strokes and large brush he used produced very distinct eyes, nose, hair and other facial features in exactly the same diffuse manner as the Shroud. This was largely due to his skill, of course, and to the fact that he used a "dry brush" that was only damp, not soaking wet, with the extremely dilute iron earth tempera that the Shroud artist would have had to use.

 

Due to the moisture on the linen, the painting remained manifestly perceptible to the audience and to the artist for many minutes. This was long enough for him to touch-up and add some minute detail. When it dried, the image had the same ethereal, almost invisible quality of the Shroud. The viewer had to stand back quite a distance to perceive it and he also had to avoid looking directly at the feature that he wanted to see. If there were edges in the image painted this way, they were extremely dispersed and impossible to exactly pinpoint by eye.

 

What the artist had to keep in mind while producing a Shroud image was that he was in essence making a sort of ersatz contact print or rubbing. Children try rubbings all the time when they press a green leaf from a pretty tree under a piece of paper then wipe a crayon sideways across the sheet. An image of the leaf appears where the raised veins cause the paper to catch the pigment. Only the raised parts contribute to the image. 

Art students sometimes do this with sculptures that can be spared. Graphite or charcoal is used to coat the piece and then paper is smoothed over it. An image gets transferred to the paper, roughly duplicating the intentions of the sculptor in two dimensions. But the product of a rubbing is not a mathematical projection of the sculpted form onto a 2-D plane as the Shroud image seems to be. A true rubbing necessarily rolls the paper around the object, producing an odd but distinctive cylindrical distortion when the paper in unrolled.

But a genuine projected effect is automatic when an artist naively attempts to simulate a rubbing by free hand painting using a dry brush and very dilute tempera. The idea was to mimic dirty, bloody sweat that was to have "rubbed off" on the Shroud while Christ's body was wrapped in it. Mr. Sanford was a good artist but all he did was attempt to manually replicate what children and art students do mechanically all the time.

By the way, all the other "unique" characteristics of the Shroud are reproduced by this method.

A major problem with the Jet Propulsion Lab team's image analysis effort was that they selected control images or comparison paintings that they knew before hand could not behave like the Shroud does when photographed. These were contrast enhanced photographic negative images, not positive prints. When the image analyzer was applied to the "controls" a Shroud-like smoothly varying simulated 3-D effect was not produced. The Shroud seemed to be unique; unique among the tightly limited standards of comparison that JPL scientists allowed, that is. This falsely reinforced the claim that it was not a painting.

STURP had faith but not felicity. Someday this miscarriage of science will be seen for the travesty that it is. STURP & The Shroud will be synonymous with Piltdown and Lysenko.