New Shroud Research
Protestants, particularly self-hating low-church Evangelicals like me, are not known to groove much on relics. (Okay, some far-right Charismatics kind of tiptoe in relic territory, but don’t distract me.) That doesn’t stop this new report on the Shroud of Turin from being interesting.
Italian scientists have discovered that the back of the Turin Shroud has the image of a man’s face - and possibly his hands - impressed upon it. Giulio Fanti and Roberto Maggiolio of Padova University used various image-processing techniques to enhance the faint features that can be seen in photographs of the Shroud (J. Opt. A6 491). This is the first time the reverse side of the controversial relic has ever been studied.…
Fanti and Maggiolo are now saying that the Shroud is unlikely to be a fraud because the image of the face is superficial on both sides of the cloth and only involves the topmost fibres of the material. “It is extremely difficult to make a fake with these features,” says Fanti.
The article describes such image enhancement techniques as “Gaussian filters and Fourier transforms” (the latter of which cannot enhance anything on its own), which tells you that even publications with names like PhysicsWeb are not immune from oversimplified accounts of the science behind a story. In defense of PhysicsWeb, the general-interest newswires are surely a hundred times worse. Science journalists must hate what their editors make them do to trim things down to 500 words. Or they should.
Like I said, I’ve never been one to worry about the shroud too much. It’s mildly apologetically useful if scientific scrutiny authenticates its anitiquity (which so far it has not) and indicates that it has a curious origin (which this report may), but certainly its falsification is nothing to think twice about. Still, it’s good to keep an eye on it. It certainly doesn’t want for attention.
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- Posted by Tim on Wednesday, April 14, 2004 at 12:14:24 pm PDT
- Category: Religion
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7 Responses to “New Shroud Research”
I have never understood the fascination of some of my acquaintances of the “cathodox” variety with regarding the authenticity of the shroud as an article of faith.
It’s simply not a big deal to me — if it’s real it’s real, if it’s fake it’s fake. But we have some mutual acquaintances who seem to take umbrage at the notion that someone could claim to have faith and yet not believe in it. One gets the distinct impression they’d prefer to believe in it even if it wasn’t real, than not to believe in it even if it wasn’t real.
Actually, I do kind of understand it — they confuse faith in the possibility of such things happening with credulity. (You know the type. Not all of them, just particular somes of them.) If I say, “I dunno, I’m not convinced the shroud is real and I don’t see what the big deal is anyway,” they hear, “I’m a Big Bad Calvinist and I don’t believe God ever did use physical objects in any supernatural way, except where it says so in the Bible, which I believe in more than I believe God, and even then I really believe that the physical object part is just pretend and the only the effect matters, and if I admitted the shroud was real I’d have to become Catholic.” So to fail to argue against my indifference is to endorse what they believe to be my Protestant cryptognosticism and skepticism. And in reaction, some of them decide that if they are going to believe that God uses physical objects in supernatural ways, they have to believe every report of such things that comes down the pike, else they are guilty of skepticism rather than faith. Hence faith = credulity; occasional skepticism or indifference = radical skepticism and overall indifference.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 14th, 2004 at 1:18 pm |And engaging such people at length will only increase the frequency of engagements between you, your hairdesser, and Miss Clairol, if you know what I mean. Your brown locks deserve better.
And yeah, I know the type. Not as well as you, but you could tell that by looking at my roots.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 14th, 2004 at 2:14 pm |Hey Tim, its Tim! Remember me from RYM forums and EFCA? What’s up? E-mail me!
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 14th, 2004 at 4:52 pm |Which is why I don’t, anymore.
Sadly, age and the advent of teenaged children is doing its own work.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 15th, 2004 at 10:03 am |Tim:
Hey! I will email soon.
Pentamom:
We won’t talk about my hair.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 19th, 2004 at 12:57 am |Why would that be, Tim? Because it provides less conversational fodder than it used to?
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 19th, 2004 at 10:15 am |“Less” being the operative word, yes.
Comment Permalink | Posted on April 19th, 2004 at 10:17 am |