Let Go of The Shroud (Part III)
It’s Just Bad Science!
In my first entry on this topic we saw why the Shroud is obviously a fake. In the second entry, we saw that the evidence both for and against the shroud supports the “fake” hypothesis; we even discovered how the Shroud was likely faked. Of course, this hasn’t stopped shroudies from believing and concocting excuses to save their beloved shroud from the evidence but, as we shall now see, such efforts hurt their case even more. These efforts simply reveal that belief in the shroud is shrouded in irrational, illogical. and unscientific thinking.
Shrouded in Pseudoscience
Defenses of the Shroud are textbook cases of pseudoscientific thinking.
First of all, there is no good scientific evidence in favor of its authenticity. Most research on the shroud has not been replicated because those in charge of the shroud limit access to it. Almost all the evidence “for” the shroud I found was done behind closed doors and, although multiple scientists have done work on the shroud, no one ever repeats or checks the work of any one scientist. In order to be reasonably believed, the results of any scientific test must be replicated.
Of course, the reason access is limited to the shroud is because it is viewed as sacred and the church doesn’t want it to be defaced; but the fact that you have an excuse to not let good research be done doesn’t mean that good research has been done. Good science demands transparency, replication and peer-review. If you don’t do such research, then you don’t have good science, regardless of whether you have an excuse for not having such research.
The only replicated scientific evidence done was the aforementioned carbon dating, which indicated that it was a forgery. But instead of admitting they were wrong, shroudies steeped themselves even further in pseudoscience by inventing ad hoc excuses to save their theory from the evidence.
In science, an ad hoc excuse is an untestable explanation that one invents to account for why their favored hypothesis got the wrong prediction. For example, suppose I claim that there are fairies dancing on my lawn. You then go and examine my lawn quite thoroughly and detect no fairies. If I can’t stand to give up my belief in fairies, I’m likely to change my hypothesis and insist that fairies are invisible. So then you use thermo detectors, ultra-sensitive sound detectors — all available means — and still detect nothing. So then I say “they always just run away when you are about to do your tests.” I am clearly being irrational, making up untestable excuses, to save my theory from falsification.
Ad hoc excuses are a prime example of bad reasoning. Yet shroudies did exactly this when the carbon dating tests didn’t show what they wanted. “The samples were contaminated; the tests were done wrong!” they insisted. There are actually multiple ways this makes shroudies pseudoscientists.
First, these are clearly ad-hoc excuses. Since the tests were already run on the samples in question, there was no way to go back and check whether those particular samples were contaminated or whether the tests were done wrong. So there is no way to test whether their excuse is true.
Second, they had no reason at all for either claim; great care was taken to ensure that the samples were not contaminated (e.g., they were cleaned) and that the tests were done correctly. It would be quite a coincidence indeed if all the samples, and all the tests, all separately just happened to have exactly the same flaws. The shroudies were just insisting that such mistakes must have been made because that was the only way they could maintain that the Shroud was legitimate; they simply weren’t willing to give up that belief.
Third, these excuses were often touted side by side — but which is it? Did they get the wrong result because they did a bad test on a clean sample, or because they did a good test on a contaminated sample?
Ask yourself, if the tests had confirmed what the shroudies wanted and dated the Shroud to the first century, what would shroudies have made of a skeptic’s claim that all the numerous independent tests were bad tests done on bad samples?
Doomed from the Start
In fact, as a scientific hypothesis, the whole thing was doomed from the start. The initial argument for the shroud is simply this: we can’t explain how the image got onto the Shroud, therefore it must have a divine explanation. Even if we didn’t already have an explanation, this would still be a bad argument.
To conclude that a lack of an explanation is evidence for a supernatural explanation commits, what I call, the “mystery therefore magic” fallacy — to conclude that something must be magic or divine simply because you can’t explain it. It’s a variety of the “appeal to ignorance” fallacy where a lack of proof that some claim is false is thought to be a reason to conclude that claim is true. In this case, a lack of proof that the shroud is not supernatural (in the form of a natural explanation) is taken as good evidence that it is supernatural. It decidedly is not.
The reason such reasoning is fallacious is this: To say that something has not been proven false merely indicates that it has not been ruled out — that it is possible. But the mere fact that something is possible does not mean that it is true, or that it is rational to believe it. No one has proven that unicorns don’t exist; no one has been able to look everywhere in the universe, or even everywhere on earth, and verify that no unicorn exists anywhere. Yet it is not reasonable to believe in unicorns. Lots of things are possible, far fewer things are true.
Such reasoning actually holds back scientific progress, and is sometimes called “the god of the gaps fallacy.” It has been quite common in religious history for the religious to invoke God as the explanation for whatever has yet to be explained. But of course, if we do that, we will not seek out the real explanation, and our understanding of the universe will be forever stymied. And if we do find the explanation, our reason for belief in God will be pulled out from under us. (This has happened many times with everything from weather and lightening to earthquakes and life.) So, not only is this move bad science, it is dangerous to religious belief.
It’s Just Bad Science
Of course, Shroudies are likely to point out that you can’t 100% prove that the Shroud isn’t the burial shroud of Christ. That’s true but, once again, the fact that you can’t prove something false is not a reason to think that it is true. That’s an appeal to ignorance.
But what I can prove is that belief that the Shroud is authentic is completely irrational. The divine explanation for the shroud is clearly not the best explanation — the one that is more rational to accept. When doing science you accept the explanation that is the most adequate — that is the most…
- Fruitful — that makes the most successful novel predictions
- Explanatory — that expands our understanding and doesn’t raise more questions than it answers
- Parsimonious — that requires the existence of the fewest additional unproven entities
- Conservative — that coheres with established knowledge.
The divine origin hypothesis fails on all accounts. It does not correctly predict the age of the cloth. It doesn’t expand our understanding, but instead invokes unexplained forces and methods (divine actions that we can’t explain) and raises more questions than answers: how do such forces work? Why didn’t it show up until the 14th century? I could go on. It invokes additional entities — like God and his powers — that are not already proven to exist. And it conflicts with established knowledge — like what Jesus would have really looked like, and the fact that — at best — the shroud would only have a blurry silhouette. It even conflicts with the biblical account of his burial.
The forgery hypothesis, however, succeeds on all accounts. It correctly predicts the age of the cloth. It explains exactly how the shroud was produced — a painting on glass left over a shroud in the sun — and raises no further questions. (We know why such a forgery would have been made: tourism money.) It invokes no additional unproven entities; we know that glass and paint exist, and did in the 14th century. (In addition, although the forger hypothesis is perfectly consistent with God’s existence, it doesn’t require it.) And it coheres with established knowledge, like the fact that religious relic forgeries were common in the 14th century.
Just Let it Go!
The Shroud is not biblical, indicative of a Jewish burial or a first century Palestinian man, is not consistent with basic physics, and couldn’t have been produced by radiation. It is not a negative, does not hold 3D information, and does not date to the ancient world. It is easily replicable, has no good supporting evidence, and defenses of it are steeped in faulty illogical reasoning and pseudoscience. Divine action is simply not the best explanation for the image on the Shroud of Turin.
Although it will upset some devotees, the Church should finally admit that the Shroud is a forgery. By appeasing people who simply won’t let it go, it is sacrificing its credibility — it’s wedding itself to irrationality and pseudoscience. (Take for example, “The Real Face of Jesus” a “documentary” about the Shroud that appeared on the same network as documentaries about Nazis having alien technology. Sadly, the science in “The Real Face of Jesus” was even worse.) Does anyone really need this silly thing to inspire their hearts?
Just let it go. It’s not worth it.
