Posted on 09/28/2008 8:19:34 AM PDT by dascallie
PRESS RELEASE: Los Alamos National Laboratory team of scientists prove carbon 14 dating of the Shroud of Turin wrong
COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15 — In his presentation today at The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed startling new findings proving that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of Turin, which categorized the cloth as a medieval fake, could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they examined from directly adjacent to the C-14 sampling area were “definitely not linen” and, instead, matched cotton. Villarreal pointed out that “the [1988] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.” Villarreal also revealed that, during testing, one of the threads came apart in the middle forming two separate pieces. A surface resin, that may have been holding the two pieces together, fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly, the two ends of the thread had different chemical compositions, lending credence to the theory that the threads were spliced together during a repair. LANL’s work confirms the research published in Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005) by the late Raymond Rogers, a chemist who had studied actual C-14 samples and concluded the sample was not part of the original cloth possibly due to the area having been repaired. This hypothesis was presented by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino in Orvieto, Italy in 2000. Benford and Marino proposed that a 16th Century patch of cotton/linen material was skillfully spliced into the 1st Century original Shroud cloth in the region ultimately used for dating. The intermixed threads combined to give the dates found by the labs ranging between 1260 and 1390 AD. Benford and Marino contend that this expert repair was necessary to disguise an unauthorized relic taken from the corner of the cloth. A paper presented today at the conference by Benford and Marino, and to be published in the July/August issue of the international journal Chemistry Today, provided additional corroborating evidence for the repair theory.
Let’s get this straight. You call someone a troll, and I’m the one engaging in ad hominem?
For the record, folks who write books about pyramids sharpening razor blades forfeit the expectation of being taken seriously. If this is ad hominem, so be it. The same applies to folks who claim the physical constants, such as gravity, change significantly over time.
If you have something equivalent to say about Nickell, say it.
I'd say that in an ocean of frauds and hoaxes, the claim that a particular religious relic is the exception to the rule is an extraordinary claim.
I've never heard that said, even by atheists.
What is unquestionably true is that most of what is said about God is either untrue or contradicted by someone claiming to believe something else.
Perhaps I'm hopeless, but I find that fighting about the authenticity of relics to be unseemly. It's particularly amusing to watch people argue the fundamental correctness of radiometric dating in one context, but deny in the context of geology.
Based on the evidence of the person's behaviour concerning their own posts, and their gleeful incitement to flamewars (note the admin mod's warning).
Based on the continual re-posting of lies, distortion, and repeated ad hominem towards PhDs and peer-reviewed literature.
Troll.
For the record, I never heard of the people writing books about pyramids sharpening razor blades, on any of the Shroud threads, until now. So I don't see how they are even relevant to the discussion.
The only way they could be relevant would be if their findings were the peg on which all hope of a 1st-century provenance of the Shroud were hung: and their work had not been duplicated independently.
And even thsn...
It would depend on if they had admitted mistakes about the pyramids, and eschewed it. Look up "polywater' sometime.
And yes, believing gravity changes is ad hominem since it does not affect any of the arguments or quoted sources on the Shroud.
Nickell is a troll -- read his article on the Shroud and it is full of Palin-Derangement-Syndrome type smears, lies, and distortions.
Cheers! If those folk
What is your single best argument against Joe Nickell?
Actually, I've now read several articles by Nickells and find them lucid and compelling. I find your assertion that he is a troll to be libelous. He has a number of books published by the University of Kentucky Press, and he is a frequent guest on national television shows devoted to forensics and fraud detection.
I'm going to ask you again to document some egregious error of Nickells', and provide some evidence that he is frequently or typically in error.
Meanwhile the shroud authenticity position is supported by pyramid power people, and both church history and modern science support a medieval origin of the shroud, I'd say the burden of proof is in the court of the authenticity crowd.
Your "facts" consisted of attacks on people whose studies disagreed with your opinion. I learned all I need to know about your command of "facts" when you stated that Padre Pio used "sulphuric" (lol) acid to create his stigmata. Better add some general chemistry books to your library before you tell people how smart you are.
Another example of attacking the messenger rather than the facts.
But he'll tell you that he can still kick the neighborhood nerd's butt in chess. I bet the guy can empty a room full of people in record time.
Since you asked..Whether my comments will be interesting is debatable (please, not a new thread), but they will certainly be civil at a minimum.
Such debates inevitably reduce themselves to dueling “experts” ad infininitum. The reason being is some things are impossible to “prove” to a point of certainty. And the doubters will always say there is not(or cannot) be enough proof no matter what while believers will believe the truth was out there and has come home.
As an example, suppose I say I have the cup Jesus drank from at the last supper. I can show my cup is old enough, that it is of a style common to the area, of the right material, and somewhat matches a cup found in a church that so forth and so on.
Does that “prove” it was The Cup? no, only that the things that would absolutely disqualify it are absent. And another cup may be as good a candidate.
But our cup may have strikes against it being The Cup. Perhaps the alloy was expensive at the time and not likely to used for common meals, but that can't be proved either in a particular case. Perhaps our cup was copied years later by the pious who wanted everyone to have their very own relic...for a price of course. But the existence of fakes doesn't prove OUR cup a fraud, but only cautions us.
And The Big Brains enter. One says the hammer marks on our cup are all wrong, it's a fake, absolutely without question. Then Learned Professor Smart says Big Brain only looked at photos so as a blacksmith what does he know and....Well I'm neither smart nor a big brain so where does this leave me? Do I pick my experts to believe in? Am I tossed from one opinion to the next? No. None of these.
First, I must ask if the keeping of relics was a practice Jesus asked or encouraged his followers to follow. Next,
Do the Scriptures show Christians collecting relics?
And could such relics become objects of worship in violation of God's Word?
And finally, We have God's Word, the Bible and can follow it's preservation through the years to the point that Christians see God's hand at work. His Word instructs us. But has God made it clear that He has wanted relics preserved over the years? No. Actually to the contrary.
There are numerous archaeological finds that confirm various Biblical accounts and their accuracy but I cannot think of a single item, shroud included, that can be shown to have been possessed by, used by, or even touched by Jesus or any of his apostles.
To conclude, The debating endlessly over relics that probably can never be authenticated and elevating them to the point of veneration is an unnecessary waste of time and may even lead one to violate God's Law.
And of course there's no purpose to debating with the arrogant and abusive. It was written of Jesus that he would wrangle in the street, a good example. (Matt. 12;19)
Good day.
correction; Jesus WOULDN’T WRANGLE........OOPS!
CORRECTION: Jesus WOULDN’T wrangle........OOPS! My highly paid typist is fired.
The facts are that church history supports a medieval fraud as the source of the shroud -- forgery admission supported by a pope. The facts are that a sample for carbon dating was provided by the Vatican, and efforts were made to avoid including anything other than the original material. The facts are that a world class expert on medieval fabrics saw no evidence of reweaving.
I find it significant when certifiable wack jobs are taken seriously as deep thinkers on problems like this. I mean, once you've claimed to have observed razor blades sharpened by a cardboard pyramid, what right do you have to the attention of rational people?
From this site:
POLLENS. It was reported that pollens on the shroud proved it came from Palestine, but the source for the pollens was a freelance criminologist, Max Frei, who once pronounced the forged "Hitler Diaries" genuine.
This seems to be to be ad hominem, unless you show two things:
1) The methodology used by Frei to identify the pollen samples on the Shroud is the same as the methodology used by him to analyze the Shroud of Turin
2) The lack of pollen on the tapes, or the distribution of the pollen, is a result of Frei's malfeasance or improper technique, and not a happenstance of the history of the Shroud (e.g. skeptics such as Schaeferman have suggested that most of the paint has been washed away by earlier boiling in oil, but somehow seems to omit that this could have affected pollen as well. This is special pleading par excellence).
(As a counterexample on the other side, McCrone's disputes over the ownership and the condition of the tape in his possession has resulted in many a pissing match. And McCrone apparently did not allow for the action which the adhesive on the tape would have on the optical properties of his sample. In addition, I have found a site where he admitted that he even withheld his tape from other members of his own lab until he could perform testing with an optical microscope on it.
Such criticisms of McCrone are *methodological* criticisms, not just rejecting his results because they are ideologically inconvenient.
By contrast, Nickell's page says "after Frei's tapes were examined following his death in 1983, they also had very few pollens--except for a particular one that bore a suspicious cluster on the "lead" (or end), rather than on the portion that had been applied to the shroud." merely alleging fraud does not invalidate a source, neither does ad hominem. Particularly in the light of observation 3) below.
3) The provenance of the Shroud: The identity of the pollen is of that of plants found in Israel; moreover, some of the pollen is of that of plants which only release pollen in April and May. This would most likely eliminate a medieval forger as the source of the pollen, leaving either fraud by Frei or accomplices, or a true 1st century provenance of the Shroud, as the most likely explanations remaining.
It is important to note that Frei is not the only source of analysis of the pollen on the Shroud. His tapes have been independently analyzed (see here for example). However the claim at the top of Nickell's page above reads:
New claims that pollen grains on the Shroud of Turin link it to pre-eighth-century Jerusalem were made August 2 by researchers at the International Botanical Congress in St. Louis. In fact, however, the claims are based on earlier, scientifically discredited data.
The only "scientifically discreditation" on this page, relating to pollens, is a link to the Skeptical Enquirer, which is not a peer review journal.
Further, the remark I just quoted looked like a knee-jerk reaction lest anything associated with the Shroud be given credence by new players. If you bother to track down the International Botanical Congress , you find the following quote: Botanist Avinoam Danin of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem determined the origin of the shroud based on a comprehensive analysis of pollen taken from the shroud and plant images associated with the shroud. The review of plant and pollen evidence is being published by the Missouri Botanical Garden Press as Flora of the shroud of turin by Danin, Alan Whanger, Mary Whanger , and Uri Baruch. The peer-reviewed publication will be available in late summer.
Get that? "Peer reviewed" beats "Skeptical Inquirer".
So the analysis of Frei's tapes has been performed by a peer-reviewed journal. If you dig a little further, in Science Daily, you find the following tidbit:
Analysis of the floral images by Danin and an analysis of the pollen grains by Uri Baruch identify a combination of certain species that could be found only in the months of March and April in the region of Jerusalem during that time. The analysis positively identifies a high density of pollen of the thistle Gundelia tournefortii which has bloomed in Israel between March and May for millennia.
and from the same source:
Another plant seen in a clear image on the Shroud is of the Zygophyllum dumosum species, according to the paper. This is a native plant with an unusual leaf morphology, displaying paired leaflets on the ends of leaf petiole of the current year during the beginning of winter. Gundelia tournefortii and Zygophyllum dumosum coexist in a limited area, according to Danin, a leading authority on plants of Israel. The area is bounded by lines linking Jerusalem and Hebron in Israel and Madaba and Karak in Jordan. The area is anchored toward the Jerusalem-Hebron zone with the addition of a third species, Cistus creticus, identified as being placed on the Shroud through an analysis of pollen and floral imaging.
Remember, as they say on the crevo threads, confidence comes from consilience.
And this is a peer-reviewed journal -- so merely dismissing it lightly, based on ad hominem against one person, and relying on a non-peer-reviewed source?
Bah.
(Incidentally, the burden of proof if alleging fraud by Frei, would be on those alleging the fraud, to make sure he had the proper pollen for the area. Reading further in the Science Daily summary, there are other corroborating details which could not have been faked by Frei.)
Moving on.
From this site:
JN: They had a number of experts: technical experts, forensic serologists - a very good team - art experts. They did take threads from blood-stained areas and had them tested, and they were analyzed by internationally known forensic serologists, and they failed every possible test - tests for blood group, or speciation, or microscopic identification of corpuscles - anything you could think of that could be used to test blood, they tried and failed. But they found traces that they thought were red paint.
Since from the context of the page, these tests were before STURP (although this page dates from 2000, after STURP), it is disingenous at best to pretend that *every* test for blood had been tested; and IIRC, even on this thread a detailed description of the tests has been given, in which it has been pointed out that the earlier blood tests failed even to get the material into solution, so that a negative test would be meaningless. And it has also been pointed out that the earlier blood researchers were using a test specific for crime scenes, with relatively fresh blood. The later tests included spectroscopic examination for breakdown products of old blood. The findings were consistent with old blood but NOT with pigment.
So for Nickell to rely on an older, less comprehensive set of tests, looks like bad faith.
And just below this:
JN: Many of these were good Catholics; they just did their jobs. And the secret commission work was fairly skeptical, and was not good news for the Shroud. And in 1978 another group (and this is what most people are aware of) is the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), a group of some 30 scientists from various disciplines who got permission to go to Turin and do more tests. Unfortunately, almost all of these were religious believers, most of them were Roman Catholics;
So he is falsely claiming that the findings of the STURP group were "pre-determined" by the religous faith of its members, which is openly and explicitly false -- e.g. Rogers set out to DEBUNK the Shroud, and changed his mind as the scientific tests were performed; Swortz is Jewish; and other members of STURP are atheists.
Besides this, his claim is essentially reduced to "atheists have no dog in the hunt whatsoever, but Christians are compelled to misinterpret or manufacture evidence".
The problem (as I have pointed out earlier in the thread) is that if the skeptics were consistent, they would agree that the Shroud need not be the burial cloth of Jesus. The *resemblance* of the image to a crucified man would be enough to ensure the Church kept it around, even if it were someone else's cloth. And if you agree that the Shroud need not be that of Jesus, there goes both the religious angle and the implicit assumption that the image is of necessity "miraculous".
Or from this article:
On the tape-lifted STURP samples (affixed to microscope slides), McCrone found a variety of substances (including mold spores and wax spatters). Major pigments were red ocher (in “body” areas) and vermilion (together with red ocher in the “blood” areas), contained in a collagen tempera binder. He also found the madder, [2] orpiment, azurite, and yellow ocher pigments, as well as paint fragments, including ultramarine and titanium white—together suggestive of the shroud’s origin in “an artist’s studio” (McCrone 1996, 85, 135)..
Astonishingly—and with serious implications to the spirit of peer review—Rogers omits any mention of McCrone’s findings from his report while insisting elsewhere, “let’s be honest about our science” (Rogers 2004).
Although Rogers is a research chemist, unlike McCrone he is not an internationally celebrated microanalyst with special expertise in examining questioned paintings. Working in his “home laboratory,” he did not, as far as his report informs, use a “blind” approach as McCrone did to mitigate against the subjectivity that has continually plagued the work of shroud advocates. Moreover, McCrone once referred to Rogers’ and his fellow STURP co-author’s “incompetence in light microscopy” and pointed out errors in the test procedures they relied on (McCrone 1996, 157, 158–171).
Let's first pick apart the sources.
McCrone 1996 is McCrone, Walter. 1996. Judgment Day for the Turin Shroud. Chicago: Microscope Publications.
This is NOT a peer-reviewed journal and yet is being given precedence over work in peer-reviewed journals (note that none of Rogers' peer-review work, nor any peer-review work arguing for the Shroud's authenticity, is mentioned on this page).
The Rogers quote of 2004 is from
Rogers, Raymond N. 2004. Shroud not hoax, not miracle. Letter to the editor, Skeptical Inquirer 28:4 (July/August), 69; with response by Joe Nickell.
Note that the phrase "let's be honest about our science" is not from a peer-review journal, so why in hell is Nickell claiming that this quote has "serious implications to the spirit of peer review".
In the same spirit, notice Nickell's comparison of Rogers and Nickell:Although Rogers is a research chemist, unlike McCrone he is not an internationally celebrated microanalyst with special expertise in examining questioned paintings.
Three problems here.
1) ad hominem. So what if you're an "internationally celebrated microanalyst"? As the late Dick Feynman said, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." The microscope, as used by McCrone is inherently subjective, unlike the chemical and physical instrumental testing performed by STURP.
2) The title of the article (written by Rogers) in Skeptical Inquirer:Shroud not hoax, not miracle.
This undercuts Nickell's claim in the *prior* website I quoted that the Rogers (as part of the STURP team) was motivated by religious belief: "not miracle".
3) Is there any mention that McCrone's work (even as a microscopist) has been independently duplicated and verified by other labs? The book McCrone is quoted from is by McCrone, and I see no other references on this page to other microscopic studies.
One other point about this page.
Here's a direct quote from a rebuttal of Nickell by Rogers himself, in the Skeptical Inquirer:
My latest paper [Rogers, R. N., "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin," Thermochimica Acta 425/1-2, 189-194 (2005)] is no exception. I accepted the radiocarbon results, and I believed that the "invisible reweave" claim was highly improbable. I used my samples to test it. One of the greatest embarrassments a scientist can face is to have to agree with the lunatic fringe. So, Joe, should I suppress the information, as Walter McCrone did the results from Mark Anderson, his own MOLE expert?
(I read Nickell's rebuttal to this letter, and still did not see him deal with the findings of Mark Anderson. Failing to answer direct questions, and not even saying "Gee, I don't know", is consistent with troll-dom.)
Now for one quote from a pro-authenticity site.
Immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests, as well as Rh and ABO typing of blood antigens, reveal that the stains are human blood. Many of the bloodstains have the distinctive forensic signature of clotting with red corpuscles about the edge of a clot with a clear yellowish halo of serum. The heme was converted into its parent porphyrin, and the spectra examined. This too, revealed the fact that bloodstains are blood. Microchemical tests for proteins were positive in blood areas. Much of this work is published in peer reviewed scientific journals including Archeological Chemistry: Organic, Inorganic, and Biochemical Analysis (American Chemical Society), Applied Optics and the Canadian Society of Forensic Sciences Journal.
Again, peer-reviewed journals, from independent researchers, using a variety of completely different methodologies.
"Confidence comes from consilience" -- but all Nickell can do is quote McCrone and Skeptical Inquirer; and cast asperisons on the motivations of those holding opposing views, instead of actually considering their evidence from peer-reviewed journals.
Smells like troll from here.
Cheers!
Given that the Scriptures are a kind of relic, you should not be so quick to brush the matter aside.
The possession of a relic from the life of Christ arises from the same impulse that led to the preservation of letters of Paul. Certainly there have been many false relics. There have also been many false “gospels”. Which is not to say that I know what the shroud of Turin, except what is naively apparent: an extraordinary item whose origins have not been explained, even by those who say it is a medieval forgery.
I am reminded of Zola, who after being shone at Lourdes plausible evidence of a miraculous cure, evidence which he could not refute, then sat down and wrote a book denouncing Lourdes.
I fear you do not understand what relics are or the purpose of Scripture. I do not brush the matter aside, I say there is no Scriptural justification for Christians to concern themselves with relics and much reason not to.
So how was the image on the Shroud produced?
Cordially,
I found them quite interesting. Thanks.
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