Stand Alone Pages on 'Musings of an Old Curmudgeon'

06 August 2019

Good Science Gets Its Boots On

When the Shroud of Turin was 'debunked', I lost some of my faith. Oh, not in the Shroud, but in so-called 'science'.

From The American Catholic


On the Shroud.
It has been pointed out for years that radiocarbon dating doesn’t work that way– it’s supposed to be for stuff that has been stored away, not stuff that we KNOW has been handled, soaked at least once, and for heaven’s sake had cloth added to it.
Well, turns out that they hadn’t actually let anybody see the results of those tests.
Until now!
“Three laboratories performed a radiocarbon analysis of the Turin Shroud,” according to Casabianca. “The results, which were centralized by the British Museum and published in Nature in 1989, provided ‘conclusive evidence’ of the medieval origin of the artefact. However, the raw data were never released by the institutions,” he wrote.
In 2017, Casabianca submitted a Freedom of Information request to the British Museum and was allowed to see the data.
“Our statistical analysis shows that the 1988 carbon 14 dating was unreliable: the tested samples are obviously heterogeneous, and there is no guarantee that all these samples, taken from one end of the sheet, are representative of the whole fabric. It is therefore impossible to conclude that the shroud of Turin dates from the Middle Ages,” Casabianca explained in an interview with a website called L’Homme Nouveau.
Oh, if you’d like to look at the Shroud, there’s a site for that.

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