In which I mostly talk about the Shroud of Turin. Murray only spends seven pages on the it, so my review is not comprehensive. Actually, never mind. That's what the top sections are for.
Your lead question reminded me of Pascal. He also believed that reason couldn't get you to faith. In fact, he went further, arguing that the philosophers' god could never be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
I've always found the Shroud to be one of the Church's most valid relics, mostly because it's one of the few relics the disciples would have access to and would also have been very likely to save.
As a former-Protestant-turned-atheist-turned-agnostic, I've never actually been among many pro-Shroud-sters, and I haven't even heard even my deeply miracle-seeing Catholic friends bring it up when I've asked for evidence (Fatima is what they point to), so you can guess my biases here!
But I'll say that the facts you listed, if true, would very much move me to be pro-Shroud. I'll read the book. For the moment, I'll list what I've heard that puts me on Team Doubt for this one:
1. It looks like a medieval drawing of Jesus.
2. When it first surfaced in the 1300s, it was denounced as a forgery; the local bishop allowed it to be shown publicly as something of an art piece, so long as there was no confusion as to its authenticity.
3. I'm told that the arms can't actually work — their position is impossible.
4. If I learned the resurrection happened, I wouldn't expect this to exist. If Jesus was resurrected, why would that shoot light, or whatever, out of his body? This feels natural with a folk-physics "life = energy" assumption, but I'm not sure it makes sense with what we now understand to be true of life.
Finally, there's one of the points cited that I've heard the opposite of: the weave of the fabric. I've heard it's a much better match for both the time and the local area. I think I heard that from either one of these Dan McClellan videos:
Five minutes of talking with ChatGPT seems to indicate that the weave issue is complicated. There's a join in the fabric that matches some stitching found at Masada. But as far as the bulk of the cloth. The Z-twist could have been done during both periods but it was rare. Still it was not unknown during the time of Jesus. Skeptics do point to a:
"A 3:1 herringbone twill linen fragment in the Victoria & Albert Museum that they say is the “only surviving parallel,” and it’s medieval."
The fact that there's only one data point does not exactly scream "much better match" But as I said this is just a cursory look.
I'll agree that I don't know my herringbone twills from my... actually, I'm so ignorant of this field, I don't even know how to end this sentence!
I'll only make the meta point that this might be the sort of topic on which ChatGPT — which draws claims from everywhere in writing — could be particularly bad. The internet (and books, actually) seem swamped with iffy claims about the Shroud.
If this seems like special pleading ("I don't trust AI when it disagrees with me"), I'll only say that I've seen something like this happen with young-Earth creationist claims (back in GPT-3), and that I'm very open to refutation here.
I'm one of those deeply miracle-seeing Catholics, who did not bring up the shroud because you specifically asked me not to clutter the table with miracles. You asked me to focus exclusively on Fatima and not bring up any other miracles. I have long been aware of all these arguments and I do not believe the counterarguments have much weight:
1) It's a photo negative. Impossible for medieval artists to draw - it's not even within the purview of modern techniques to recreate it.
2) The shroud has been attested since St. Helena and it was very plausibly brought to Europe after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, held by the Templars until the order was destroyed by order of the Pope in 1308 and entrusted to Godfrey de Charny.
3) The shoulder was dislocated. This argument has long been answered with medical precision regarding someone who was hanging on a cross for several hours
4) Since incarnate God doesn't rise from the dead on a regular basis, it's hard to say what we'd expect a real resurrection to look like.
5) The pollen tests point show pollens that have been extinct since antiquity. Medieval curators did repair the fabric from the fire. There's no chance it was created in the medieval period.
Hi, Georges! And sorry to have misremembered that. Ross, Georges and I are planning to dive deep into one particular evidence for the Shroud, and I'd like to give the choice to you. Of the evidences that Georges just wrote, is there one that, if it bears scrutiny, would most convince you that the Shroud is legit?
It's really hard to pick just one... So I'll offer up two and maybe whichever one you don't take I'll take.
1- The pollen: This definitely isn't covered by the "bleaching" methodology (mentioned in a previous comment if you didn't see it) and if it is as strong as is claimed it's pretty strong.
2- The "negative" aspect: This one is a little softer, but one (or maybe just me) hears that the Shroud was a minor relic not given all that much attention, sort of on the periphery until someone thought to take a picture of it, and then, when the photographer saw the negatives, suddenly the Shroud seemed much more impressive. Is this true? Was it a huge revelation to see the negative images of the shroud? Because if the most impressive way to view the Shroud is in a fashion no one thought of then that seems to strongly argue against the idea that it was a forgery.
I'd like to take up the pollen issue with Brandon, but I do insist that the photo negative issue should include the claims about the shroud image not penetrating the fibers, being no deeper than 200 nanometers, and containing no pigment, dye, or paint.
I know Brandon likes to focus on one topic only, but I'm going to have to throw in the Tilma of Guadalupe as a close cousin to this miracle which has equally befuddled the scientific community. The Knights of Columbus were kind enough to put together a fact vs fiction on claims about the Tilma of Guadalupe: https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/our-lady-of-guadalupe/truths/index.html
1) drawings of Jesus tend to be pretty consistent at least back to the patristic era, so weak evidence.
2) yes this is a strong mark against; one of the best in my opinion. Something as special as the shroud should have left a better historical trail in general too. Possibly there's some mentions of it in Constantinople, but not clearly. You should expect scads of excitement/records at every location where it was stored.
3) I have also heard this, but it seems wrong? I got this thru twitter that the arms are too long, but also multiple people took pics of themselves mimicking the position themselves at home and it seemed totally doable. (Cavet emperator: was thru twitter, so the anti-shroud claimant may have just been dumb and there is a better argument here.)
4) also fair. Flash of light could happen because divine miracle, but it needn't be necessarily true. In soft support of the pro-light stance: the Bible loves images of light as linked with divinity and divine work, so God using light in the resurrection miracle does track the general theme.
On 1 I've looked around a little bit, and it seems like the claim was "It's a forgery and I know who painted it" But clearly whatever else can be said about it, we can say that it wasn't painted using any conceivable method, so why should we believe the first half of the statement if the second half is obviously a lie. But I should emphasis the "little bit" part of my own investigations.
See, this is the kind of high-quality online engagement that makes me a supporter of Ross's substack! Thanks for classing this place up.
I don't have any firm answers for any of this, but just in the hopes that I can further contribute to this hive-mind thing we're building:
On (1): I'd agree that drawings of Jesus are pretty consistent at least (as you said) back to the patristic era, but two things. First, I think we have a pretty good sense that the picture of Jesus in the patristic period isn't particularly likely to be a passed-down image of Jesus from earlier periods. We have some earlier images, and they're quite different. Also (and weaker), there's a good-sounding argument that the bearded Jesus we all know was based on Zeus. At least, this is what I learned from a fun conversation between Hank Green and Dan McClellan: https://youtu.be/9nPLAlqsWgM
On (3): I appreciate this pushback. I re-watched those videos I linked to, and see that McClellan specifically says that it's not possible for a lying-down person to cross their hands over their groin while their elbows are on the ground. That last bit is important because, he says, because when we loosen our muscles, gravity pulls our elbows down (I have tried this, and can confirm!).
What I don't know is whether this is exactly what we see in the Shroud. I'll take any pointers here.
Very kind! I do my best. Always interested in what is true; and an honest debate is great fun.
1) interesting. I’d heard about this, and then that it’d been debunked by some Christian traditionalists. But I must admit I never looked into it closely, so perhaps the Christian defence was worse than I’d heard second hand. I’ll concede insufficient knowledge here.
3) hmm, so the shroud does seem to show that the body is posed like soccer-pose style, hand over hand on the groin. The point about the elbows on the ground at least makes sense of the criticism now. Ok so I guess two likely responses: a) he definitely would have been wrapped in more than just this cloth, so if they had him in other wrappings, maybe those held his arms up farther off the floor. B) the one I have heard more commonly, is that crucifixion dislocates the joints, which would have lengthened them enough for the hands to cross at that position.
Oh I will say tho (and this is possibly totally unfair and McClellan has better videos in more depth elsewhere), but in the linked videos, I feel that he’s much more dismissive than he should be. Like at the very least the shroud is super weird, and he gives off the vibe of “ah those dumb religious rubes, ofc the shroud is a forgery”. One of the reasons I find religious evidence debates so hard is that almost everyone is confirmation biasing to the max all the time on all the sides.
I agree that McClellan often (not always) gives off those vibes, and I think it's unfortunate! I put up with those from him only because he's a REALLY top-quality communicator of the academic literature. He lucidly explains whatever the scholarly consensus is on a topic, and when he has his own take, says so. When he gets details wrong, so far as I've followed him, he admits it and apologizes. And his insights into the biblical text are often INCREDIBLE.
I can empathize with anyone who doesn't like him — there are topics he talks about that make me frustrated, and I skip some of them — but I'm very happy I keep listening to him. I think that he'd be more effective if he took a slightly different tack.
Interesting. I'd be curious to see how this method does on the superficiality criteria.
"The image is bafflingly superficial; the color resides only on the top two or three fibers of a thread and never penetrates deeper than two microns (millionths of a meter)."
Beyond that it could potentially cover a lot of the points, but you still have the pollen, the limestone, the weave and the cellulose aging.
My initial reaction is that this method seemed pretty complicated to set up. And once you'd figured it out, it feels like the kind of thing you might do more than once...
Oh, good point. Had not considered that; good circumstantial evidence. It was Luther who said something like "there are enough pieces of the true cross of Jesus to make five crosses".
I'd be bold enough to say there are several hundred "true crosses." Even my parish here in Rochester MN has a chunk of the "true cross".
In Egypt there is a neighborhood called, "Saba'a Kana'is" it means "Seven Churches". Of which 3 churches are dedicated to St. George and have relics of St. George totaling more than one full human body. It could be that 3 different guys named George got martyred (plausible). It could mean we've got significant forgeries in walking distance from each other (likely).
There are tons of Veronica Veils. The consensus is that they are all forgeries.
My favorite is the stone containing a drop of the Virgin's breast milk. A somewhat salacious imagination cooked that one up and yet - AND YET - plenty of people believe it. I could gravel over my driveway with such stones.
But being in Egypt taught me that even though the Egyptian prejudice is true that many Americans are dim-witted and immoral - that fact doesn't prove that I am dim-witted and immoral, just because I am American. Likewise, the abundance of forgeries in the relic world does not prove that the Shroud is a forgery. It certainly should give us pause and cause us to weigh claims carefully.
As mentioned elsewhere in this post, the Catholic Church endorses the Shroud but does not stake a scientific claim that it actually is a miracle. It's worthy of credibility but it's not a sealed case.
Yes, this claims to be able to recreate the shroud - but please note that the author does not actually recreate the shroud. He's basically saying, "Oh yeah, it's easy as pie to recreate the shroud, so I'll leave it to you to do it for yourselves." None of this even comes close to standing up to scientific scrutiny. If an expert witness went into court and said, "This man is guilty of fraud, and I can reproduce the forgery." The defense attorney would immediately ask, "Show it to us." If the expert witness replied, "Well, I've never actually done it, but I'm sure anyone could." The judge would throw him out of court. I'm going to have to throw the whole article out for that same reason.
If you saw the same attributes on a secular piece of ancient art (e.g. negative image, no dye, shallow depth, etc.) how strong of evidence for supernatural phenomena would you consider it to be vs merely a case of unknown/novel methods of manufacture?
The word “secular” would seem to indicate that we have already decided it’s not supernatural…
Setting that aside. If another example came to light of something very similar to the Shroud I would update in the direction of the Shroud being a forgery. By how much would depend a lot on the details of this other example.
I have some supernatural priors, for example I think near death experiences and terminal lucidity point at something supernatural, completely separate from my religious beliefs. They're also representative of the broad category of "unexplained phenomenon". A shroud-like artifact in a world without the Shroud would definitely fall into the "unexplained phenomenon" category. (Though perhaps "underexplained" would be a better term. Lots of people think they have explanations for UFOs and the Nazca lines.)
Given my priors I am open to supernatural explanations. For example I favor the idea that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife, not evidence of some unexplained property of the brain. But that's also based on the fact that it fits into a larger system. If you are religious you might expect there to be NDEs.
Nevertheless I default to real world explanations, and try to use that as a starting point. So based on the details you've provided I guess I'd probably be somewhere in the 20% supernatural 80% unknown manufacturing technique.
The 20% would go higher if there was a supernatural connection. If it's the burial shroud of a saint for example.
Okay, I've read all the previous comments, and maybe I can make a contribution to the dialog. In 1978 I wrote the first-draft script, and helped produce, a very successful commercial documentary movie called "In Search of Historic Jesus". (Unfortunately the film had lots of really hokey re-enactment scenes, but I had no control over that.)
What I DID do was spend months of full-time research on many aspects of the life of Christ, including the Shroud. I filmed interviews with Ray Rogers and other scientists in the US and Europe who've studied the Shroud a LOT. One of them was a medical forensic specialist at Scotland Yard. He explained many physiological facts revealed in the image on the cloth that could NOT have been known by a 14th-century forger. Example: The hands show no thumbs. It was not until the late 1800's that a medical scientist named Destot discovered that a nail piercing the nerve in the wrist causes the thumb to jerk inward and remain in that position.
There are many more evidences that convince me TOTALLY that the Shroud is truly the cloth that covered the body of Jesus, and the "toasting" effect that made the image is (for me at least) proof positive of the resurrection of our Lord, being the result of a very brief but very intense burst of some sort of energy (needed to raise the dead?). I could go on and on, and I DID, in a 1985 "fireside" talk I gave to a group in the Los Angeles area. Here's a link to the video of that lecture:
The thing that holds me up about the shroud is that I don't see the point. It seems like it's a divine by-product, not an intentional intervention for a purpose, and my best understanding of God---at least the Christian Trinity---is a controlled, purposeful one.
But I need to leave a wide latitude for "I just don't understand".
In answer to the title here, 'no'. Why? Because if you could get to religion through reason then reasonable people would end up on the same religion...or at least somewhat adjacent to each other. (Here I'll dismiss the 'well Buddhism and Roman Catholicism and LDS are all the same if you look with a certain point of view take)
Regarding the Shroud, the 3d issue seems to be a real problem, not a benefit. The image on the shroud is the type of 2d image an artist would generate. Not what you'd get by wrapping a shroud over a body that then became stained by fluids or from some type of radiation discharge from the body. See the short video and article here: https://archaeologymag.com/2025/08/shroud-of-turin-image-came-from-sculpture/
On a more meta level, though, just how reasonable do you think your reading of him is? If this level of evidence was amounted for Vishnu coming to earth at some point in India thousands of years ago, would you be equally likely to go with "well that is pretty much proof Hinduism is onto something"?
You've said a lot of dumb things over the years, but the idea that reasonable people all converge on exactly the same opinion has to be one of the dumber ones...
The article is interesting, but I've yet to come across anything that's seems to be a silver bullet. But certainly this would be an update towards forgery.
The Vishnu counterfactual is hard to even model. But actually I've got a bit of the polytheist in me, I think I'd be pretty open to the evidence.
Well reasonable people do seem to converge quite often. Is there any disagreement about, say, geometry? I mean we can get into esoteric stuff about non-ecludian spaces and whether Plato was right about 'ideal forms' but builders of the pyramids and of a modern deck would be good with using a right triangle. Likewise with vehicles we see people tend to use wheels when there's a good road-like surface. Sure Italian car designers had their style difference with American ones but you don't really see much variation in the form of things like "no we're going to have cars that use tracks instead of wheels but unlike a tank we'll use 3 instead of 2".
Reason does converge on like answers when there's literal feedback on stuff that works and doesn't work. People diverge to different answers when there's little such feedback and 'success' is defined more on how it appeals to their subjective feelings. Hence clothing fashion never settles on much of anything and styles come and go but shirts have arms, pants have legs...there's usually a way to go to the bathroom in a reasonable amount of time etc. Clothing that doesn't usually has a specific purpose, like a monarch may have a very ornate uniform for a coronation
"But actually I've got a bit of the polytheist in me, I think I'd be pretty open to the evidence." This does leave open the chance the Shroud of Turin is exceptionally different but not at all what people want it to be. (i.e. gag played by space aliens, weird one time event caused by some cultists who wrapped a man they killed sometime around 1100 in a shroud etc).
But I come back to what if the Shroud actually had the distorted stretched out appearance you get if you made a 3d 'rubbing' of some sort on a 2d surface? The sort of thing that people who 'want' a relic would dismiss unless they had some other reason to hold onto it (such as an oral tradition that this was in fact the actual shroud) that only makes sense much later?
Note - the miracle here is that scientific analysis that it is impossible to reproduce this image - even with modern technology. All you would need to do to debunk this claim is to produce a photo negative image of Jesus that contains no dyes or pigments and is less than 2 nanometers deep. Repeatability is the key that would disprove this miracle.
"Note - the miracle here is that scientific analysis that it is impossible to reproduce this image - even with modern technology."
That's not a miracle or actually much of anything. There's a lot of things that are 'impossible' to recreate. For example, Damascus steel and Roman concrete. But wait you cry, we have figured out how to recreate Roman concrete! Yes literally about a year or two ago after many years a procedure was found that seems to either be what the Romans used or close enough that you can call it 'Roman concrete' for government work.
Now a lot of people would like to know how Roman Concrete was done and there's likely something of a market for it. That meant a lot of people worked on it and there's plenty of authentic Roman concrete out there one can get their hands on to test their results.
When you say "impossible to reproduce with modern technology" you mean a handful of dudes scratched their heads and couldn't figure out how to reproduce it. The Vatican isn't generous letting people trying to reproduce it have easy access to it in order to gauge their results. Likewise there isn't much of a market for holy relics anymore so the best minds for forgeries will find it more profitable to be faking paintings or well known signatures etc.
I am quite sure the possibility of a paintbrush was ruled out a long time ago.
Your faith in science is understandable, but it's still faith. "Some day, evolution will perfectly explain the God phenomenon, the near universal religious impulse, morality, the meaning of life (42), etc." Okay, but that is pure faith in science - based on what a person wants to believe and not reason.
Science is much more limited in scope. You are correct to seek 'repeatability' because that is what science does - it categorizes repeatable phenomenon. It does not and cannot explain psychology, sociology, economics, but rather proposes statistics about them - statistics which in our modern era don't even come close to solving the problems they are meant to solve. (I've heard this statement personally from one of the top statisticians in the DOD) Perhaps in the future, those statistics will get more useful, but there is no reason to believe they will be anywhere near as precise as what Asimov's Hari Seldon managed to do.
Ultimately, the line between science and science fiction gets crossed relentlessly in many of these debates.
The Catholic Church endorses the Shroud of Turin as worthy of faith but it will not proclaim it a miracle (i.e. a scientifically proven miracle) until the scientific debate surrounding it is settled. Every single saint that is canonized in the modern era has a miracle that is attested and documented by scientists and doctors as totally unexplainable by modern science.
Maybe that slips under the radar of more adamant Atheists, but the Church as an institution has learned to be more cautious about weighing in on scientific debates and does not officially proclaim anything a miracle lightly.
That said, all modern Popes have encouraged Catholics to 'venerate' (please note that 'venerate' is a technical term meaning "have a lot of respect for" which the Catholic Church uses to exclude concepts of worship or idolatry) the Shroud as "an icon of the Lord's love' that poses "a challenge to the intellect".
It's about as endorsed by the Catholic Church as it can be.
Even many religious people believe in evolution, they just cling on to their creator god by hiding in the gaps.
"It does not and cannot explain psychology, sociology, economics"
Ok, now you're really just making stuff up. Those are scientific fields and, particularly economics, do explain a lot about the world. A lot more than religion does, that's for sure.
I'll grant you the Catholic Church sure does pose a "challenge to the intellect."
"It's about as endorsed by the Catholic Church as it can be."
No, it's obviously not, since the church is hedging on it.
"I am quite sure the possibility of a paintbrush was ruled out a long time ago." Has it really?
This has the quality of assuming the Shroud back in the 1300s looked like it does today. Maybe if you could see it then you'd immediately say with modern eyes "yea that was done by people". What makes it 'hard' to explain today is nearly 1000 years of essentially fading of the original image and the patina accumulated from all types of environments and handling.
This is not unlike Greek and Roman statutes which we think of as simple white marble but in reality back then they were painted and might look a bit silly to our eyes used to the austere clean look of what we have today.
This is a pretty weak response to the evidence of coloration. You might need to go back and re-read the evidence. If you're going to take a stand that it's fake I think you're much better off planting your flag with the UV linen discoloration methodology. (See video link in earlier comment.)
Maybe I'm missing it but I'm not sure which video you're referencing. I went through a few youtube videos on the comments.
But let's back up a bit. Do we have a lot of linen from 1300 and from 32 or so? Do we have a good sample of how this type of linen ages over 700 versus 2000 years? Either with paint or simply sweat stains on it? Do we know what someone back in 1300 saw when they opened this up and viewed it? We really don't so this makes any argument that begins with "there's no way to fake this" start from a very different to prove point.
I mean what about shrouds that were simply used to contain dead bodies? I'm sure some people were put inside a cloth of some type back in 1300. Yet as helpful as it would be to compare those cloths today to The Shroud, I wouldn't be surprised if that set is zero or near zero.
It's very hard to fake something, like a Dutch Old Master or the Hitler diaries, but people do. Authenticators are usually concerned only with the type 1 error...rejecting incorrectly the assumption the object is fake. It is very interesting IMO to read how people fake stuff and how they get caught. Yet since authenticators are being paid by people who don't want to get ripped off, they rarely figure that part out. Still if you wanted to know how to fake something I'd bet more on getting an authenticator than a scientist. For example, the Hitler diaries were partially given away because a notebook binding had a polyester that hadn't been used until 1953. If only the faker had searched harder for a blank notebook produced in Germany ~1940 or so!
I go thru a variation on this when I argue with people about Shakespeare (I am inclined there to reject the orthodox view, I don't think the actor/investor from Stratford wrote the plays or poems). People demand I show who I think wrote them, but I really don't have to do that. A person insisting Shakespeare wrote it is under no less burden of proof than someone claiming Jonson or Marlowe or Bacon. But there's a lot more 'not Shakespeare' possibilities while 'just Shakespeare' is only one.
I would say the set of ways people could have been messing around with a shroud in 1300 is very large. There's probably some ways that produced a not very convincing 'The Shroud' (but convincing enough to a few people and maybe a few more who said "might as well hold onto it because what if?") that over 700 years or so could have aged into something that triggers the thought of photographic negatives to the modern eye is greater than zero. If it is greater than zero there's still a lot of paths between 1300 and today and finding an exact path that produces what we have today would likely be very hard to find.
Strong is obviously a relative term. What "level" would you ascribe to the evidence offered by STURP? Medium? Weak? Should any updating be done? Is any of the 16 items I mentioned relatively strong or particularly weak?
I'm open to reading the book excerpted by Shermer (though apparently it can't be had for less than $50 even on Kindle) would you be open to spending an equal amount of time on the STURP report?
Finally you lost me on the point about the LDS Church saying something formal about the Shroud. Is there some precedent or parallel I'm missing? Some formal statement they've made elsewhere that is analogous to one that might be made about the Shroud?
The LDS Church believes in a number of ancient artifacts. Most of them are not exactly available for examination, but it does believe in them.
Why does it not explicitly believe in the Shroud? Seems telling. (From my quick investigation, I couldn't find a General Authority opining either way.) Hell, it appears that the ***Catholic Church*** itself doesn't take a formal stance on the matter of its authenticity. That's a tell if you ask me, especially since they put a lot of effort into investigating saints and miracles.
The Shroud of Turin is not something upon which your testimony relies. There is no conceivable way a strange single artifact would change my priors to gain a testimony. You asked if there was a good rebuttal and that's the best one I could find, given that I think Shermer is a Reliable Source for such things for the opposing side.
Further, I would guess that if you did a Scott Alexander-style investigation you'd find--as he did with his sun miracles--that actually there are a ton of interesting relics that science just can't explain. Too many, really.
Yes, but all of the ancient artifacts the LDS church believes in are directly related to the LDS church and the testimony of Joseph Smith or attested to in scripture (for example we believe Noah's Ark existed, despite it not being unique to our faith). If the LDS Church had opined on a different extant artifact from a different denomination then I could see having an expectation that they should opine on the Shroud.
Perhaps you have a specific artifact in mind?
I hope I didn't give the impression that my testimony relies on the Shroud. As far as changing priors, a testimony is like a concrete conclusion. Bayesian reasoning is never going to get you to 100%. By priors I meant navigating the messy middle particularly if you were undecided between the two extremes.
No, I was agreeing that your testimony in no way relies on the Shroud of Turin. How could it? You just recently discovered it seems legit, or at least really interesting.
I'm just saying that it would be a little bit strange if this particular relic--which would be about as holy as it gets for a Christian--wouldn't be something of note for the LDS Church, were it believed to be genuine. But it doesn't even meet that bar for the Catholics! Which makes sense, because Europe was awash in all kinds of relics, and so purely by chance some of them would be strange objects with an unclear provenance.
My priors are tuned to something like: "No claimed miracle or relic will shift my priors any way but backwards, unless the Power of God can be reliably demonstrated in a repeatable manner." In other words, historical anecdotes and strange artifacts are right out.
Now, if someone produced, oh, say a magical compass that worked in a way totally unexplained by magnetism or GPS, or a device to translate written text automatically without known technology, then at a minimum I'd have to start believing in Ancient Technology and perhaps Aliens.
But an old piece of cloth with funny stains on it? Boring. Unless you can show it does like magical healing I guess. Was that in the book?
Your lead question reminded me of Pascal. He also believed that reason couldn't get you to faith. In fact, he went further, arguing that the philosophers' god could never be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
I've always found the Shroud to be one of the Church's most valid relics, mostly because it's one of the few relics the disciples would have access to and would also have been very likely to save.
As a former-Protestant-turned-atheist-turned-agnostic, I've never actually been among many pro-Shroud-sters, and I haven't even heard even my deeply miracle-seeing Catholic friends bring it up when I've asked for evidence (Fatima is what they point to), so you can guess my biases here!
But I'll say that the facts you listed, if true, would very much move me to be pro-Shroud. I'll read the book. For the moment, I'll list what I've heard that puts me on Team Doubt for this one:
1. It looks like a medieval drawing of Jesus.
2. When it first surfaced in the 1300s, it was denounced as a forgery; the local bishop allowed it to be shown publicly as something of an art piece, so long as there was no confusion as to its authenticity.
3. I'm told that the arms can't actually work — their position is impossible.
4. If I learned the resurrection happened, I wouldn't expect this to exist. If Jesus was resurrected, why would that shoot light, or whatever, out of his body? This feels natural with a folk-physics "life = energy" assumption, but I'm not sure it makes sense with what we now understand to be true of life.
Finally, there's one of the points cited that I've heard the opposite of: the weave of the fabric. I've heard it's a much better match for both the time and the local area. I think I heard that from either one of these Dan McClellan videos:
https://youtu.be/z416X_cmOHM
https://youtu.be/1BMiNvnPEL4
Obviously, I'm happy to change my beliefs on any of this! If the Shroud were real, it would be so WEIRD...
Five minutes of talking with ChatGPT seems to indicate that the weave issue is complicated. There's a join in the fabric that matches some stitching found at Masada. But as far as the bulk of the cloth. The Z-twist could have been done during both periods but it was rare. Still it was not unknown during the time of Jesus. Skeptics do point to a:
"A 3:1 herringbone twill linen fragment in the Victoria & Albert Museum that they say is the “only surviving parallel,” and it’s medieval."
The fact that there's only one data point does not exactly scream "much better match" But as I said this is just a cursory look.
I'll agree that I don't know my herringbone twills from my... actually, I'm so ignorant of this field, I don't even know how to end this sentence!
I'll only make the meta point that this might be the sort of topic on which ChatGPT — which draws claims from everywhere in writing — could be particularly bad. The internet (and books, actually) seem swamped with iffy claims about the Shroud.
If this seems like special pleading ("I don't trust AI when it disagrees with me"), I'll only say that I've seen something like this happen with young-Earth creationist claims (back in GPT-3), and that I'm very open to refutation here.
This wasn't GPT undirected this was GPT trying to confirm a claim already advanced by Murray. Still I take your point.
I'm one of those deeply miracle-seeing Catholics, who did not bring up the shroud because you specifically asked me not to clutter the table with miracles. You asked me to focus exclusively on Fatima and not bring up any other miracles. I have long been aware of all these arguments and I do not believe the counterarguments have much weight:
1) It's a photo negative. Impossible for medieval artists to draw - it's not even within the purview of modern techniques to recreate it.
2) The shroud has been attested since St. Helena and it was very plausibly brought to Europe after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, held by the Templars until the order was destroyed by order of the Pope in 1308 and entrusted to Godfrey de Charny.
3) The shoulder was dislocated. This argument has long been answered with medical precision regarding someone who was hanging on a cross for several hours
4) Since incarnate God doesn't rise from the dead on a regular basis, it's hard to say what we'd expect a real resurrection to look like.
5) The pollen tests point show pollens that have been extinct since antiquity. Medieval curators did repair the fabric from the fire. There's no chance it was created in the medieval period.
Hi, Georges! And sorry to have misremembered that. Ross, Georges and I are planning to dive deep into one particular evidence for the Shroud, and I'd like to give the choice to you. Of the evidences that Georges just wrote, is there one that, if it bears scrutiny, would most convince you that the Shroud is legit?
It's really hard to pick just one... So I'll offer up two and maybe whichever one you don't take I'll take.
1- The pollen: This definitely isn't covered by the "bleaching" methodology (mentioned in a previous comment if you didn't see it) and if it is as strong as is claimed it's pretty strong.
2- The "negative" aspect: This one is a little softer, but one (or maybe just me) hears that the Shroud was a minor relic not given all that much attention, sort of on the periphery until someone thought to take a picture of it, and then, when the photographer saw the negatives, suddenly the Shroud seemed much more impressive. Is this true? Was it a huge revelation to see the negative images of the shroud? Because if the most impressive way to view the Shroud is in a fashion no one thought of then that seems to strongly argue against the idea that it was a forgery.
Photographer Secundo Pia took the first photo of the shroud in 1898 in Turin. He was astounded to see a positve image on his photographic negative.
I'd like to take up the pollen issue with Brandon, but I do insist that the photo negative issue should include the claims about the shroud image not penetrating the fibers, being no deeper than 200 nanometers, and containing no pigment, dye, or paint.
I know Brandon likes to focus on one topic only, but I'm going to have to throw in the Tilma of Guadalupe as a close cousin to this miracle which has equally befuddled the scientific community. The Knights of Columbus were kind enough to put together a fact vs fiction on claims about the Tilma of Guadalupe: https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/our-lady-of-guadalupe/truths/index.html
On these points:
1) drawings of Jesus tend to be pretty consistent at least back to the patristic era, so weak evidence.
2) yes this is a strong mark against; one of the best in my opinion. Something as special as the shroud should have left a better historical trail in general too. Possibly there's some mentions of it in Constantinople, but not clearly. You should expect scads of excitement/records at every location where it was stored.
3) I have also heard this, but it seems wrong? I got this thru twitter that the arms are too long, but also multiple people took pics of themselves mimicking the position themselves at home and it seemed totally doable. (Cavet emperator: was thru twitter, so the anti-shroud claimant may have just been dumb and there is a better argument here.)
4) also fair. Flash of light could happen because divine miracle, but it needn't be necessarily true. In soft support of the pro-light stance: the Bible loves images of light as linked with divinity and divine work, so God using light in the resurrection miracle does track the general theme.
On 1 I've looked around a little bit, and it seems like the claim was "It's a forgery and I know who painted it" But clearly whatever else can be said about it, we can say that it wasn't painted using any conceivable method, so why should we believe the first half of the statement if the second half is obviously a lie. But I should emphasis the "little bit" part of my own investigations.
See, this is the kind of high-quality online engagement that makes me a supporter of Ross's substack! Thanks for classing this place up.
I don't have any firm answers for any of this, but just in the hopes that I can further contribute to this hive-mind thing we're building:
On (1): I'd agree that drawings of Jesus are pretty consistent at least (as you said) back to the patristic era, but two things. First, I think we have a pretty good sense that the picture of Jesus in the patristic period isn't particularly likely to be a passed-down image of Jesus from earlier periods. We have some earlier images, and they're quite different. Also (and weaker), there's a good-sounding argument that the bearded Jesus we all know was based on Zeus. At least, this is what I learned from a fun conversation between Hank Green and Dan McClellan: https://youtu.be/9nPLAlqsWgM
On (3): I appreciate this pushback. I re-watched those videos I linked to, and see that McClellan specifically says that it's not possible for a lying-down person to cross their hands over their groin while their elbows are on the ground. That last bit is important because, he says, because when we loosen our muscles, gravity pulls our elbows down (I have tried this, and can confirm!).
What I don't know is whether this is exactly what we see in the Shroud. I'll take any pointers here.
Very kind! I do my best. Always interested in what is true; and an honest debate is great fun.
1) interesting. I’d heard about this, and then that it’d been debunked by some Christian traditionalists. But I must admit I never looked into it closely, so perhaps the Christian defence was worse than I’d heard second hand. I’ll concede insufficient knowledge here.
3) hmm, so the shroud does seem to show that the body is posed like soccer-pose style, hand over hand on the groin. The point about the elbows on the ground at least makes sense of the criticism now. Ok so I guess two likely responses: a) he definitely would have been wrapped in more than just this cloth, so if they had him in other wrappings, maybe those held his arms up farther off the floor. B) the one I have heard more commonly, is that crucifixion dislocates the joints, which would have lengthened them enough for the hands to cross at that position.
Oh I will say tho (and this is possibly totally unfair and McClellan has better videos in more depth elsewhere), but in the linked videos, I feel that he’s much more dismissive than he should be. Like at the very least the shroud is super weird, and he gives off the vibe of “ah those dumb religious rubes, ofc the shroud is a forgery”. One of the reasons I find religious evidence debates so hard is that almost everyone is confirmation biasing to the max all the time on all the sides.
I agree that McClellan often (not always) gives off those vibes, and I think it's unfortunate! I put up with those from him only because he's a REALLY top-quality communicator of the academic literature. He lucidly explains whatever the scholarly consensus is on a topic, and when he has his own take, says so. When he gets details wrong, so far as I've followed him, he admits it and apologizes. And his insights into the biblical text are often INCREDIBLE.
I can empathize with anyone who doesn't like him — there are topics he talks about that make me frustrated, and I skip some of them — but I'm very happy I keep listening to him. I think that he'd be more effective if he took a slightly different tack.
I am generally a shroud supporter, however, this did give me something to chew on. Haven't had a chance to deep dive it yet to see if it holds up.
https://derp.substack.com/p/how-the-shroud-of-turin-was-made
Interesting. I'd be curious to see how this method does on the superficiality criteria.
"The image is bafflingly superficial; the color resides only on the top two or three fibers of a thread and never penetrates deeper than two microns (millionths of a meter)."
Beyond that it could potentially cover a lot of the points, but you still have the pollen, the limestone, the weave and the cellulose aging.
My initial reaction is that this method seemed pretty complicated to set up. And once you'd figured it out, it feels like the kind of thing you might do more than once...
Oh, good point. Had not considered that; good circumstantial evidence. It was Luther who said something like "there are enough pieces of the true cross of Jesus to make five crosses".
I'd be bold enough to say there are several hundred "true crosses." Even my parish here in Rochester MN has a chunk of the "true cross".
In Egypt there is a neighborhood called, "Saba'a Kana'is" it means "Seven Churches". Of which 3 churches are dedicated to St. George and have relics of St. George totaling more than one full human body. It could be that 3 different guys named George got martyred (plausible). It could mean we've got significant forgeries in walking distance from each other (likely).
There are tons of Veronica Veils. The consensus is that they are all forgeries.
My favorite is the stone containing a drop of the Virgin's breast milk. A somewhat salacious imagination cooked that one up and yet - AND YET - plenty of people believe it. I could gravel over my driveway with such stones.
But being in Egypt taught me that even though the Egyptian prejudice is true that many Americans are dim-witted and immoral - that fact doesn't prove that I am dim-witted and immoral, just because I am American. Likewise, the abundance of forgeries in the relic world does not prove that the Shroud is a forgery. It certainly should give us pause and cause us to weigh claims carefully.
As mentioned elsewhere in this post, the Catholic Church endorses the Shroud but does not stake a scientific claim that it actually is a miracle. It's worthy of credibility but it's not a sealed case.
Yes, this claims to be able to recreate the shroud - but please note that the author does not actually recreate the shroud. He's basically saying, "Oh yeah, it's easy as pie to recreate the shroud, so I'll leave it to you to do it for yourselves." None of this even comes close to standing up to scientific scrutiny. If an expert witness went into court and said, "This man is guilty of fraud, and I can reproduce the forgery." The defense attorney would immediately ask, "Show it to us." If the expert witness replied, "Well, I've never actually done it, but I'm sure anyone could." The judge would throw him out of court. I'm going to have to throw the whole article out for that same reason.
If you saw the same attributes on a secular piece of ancient art (e.g. negative image, no dye, shallow depth, etc.) how strong of evidence for supernatural phenomena would you consider it to be vs merely a case of unknown/novel methods of manufacture?
The word “secular” would seem to indicate that we have already decided it’s not supernatural…
Setting that aside. If another example came to light of something very similar to the Shroud I would update in the direction of the Shroud being a forgery. By how much would depend a lot on the details of this other example.
Sorry, I underspecified the question. More context:
In a world without the existing shroud but instead some random piece of ancient art with the properties I described.
By "secular" I merely meant "unrelated to religion".
I have some supernatural priors, for example I think near death experiences and terminal lucidity point at something supernatural, completely separate from my religious beliefs. They're also representative of the broad category of "unexplained phenomenon". A shroud-like artifact in a world without the Shroud would definitely fall into the "unexplained phenomenon" category. (Though perhaps "underexplained" would be a better term. Lots of people think they have explanations for UFOs and the Nazca lines.)
Given my priors I am open to supernatural explanations. For example I favor the idea that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife, not evidence of some unexplained property of the brain. But that's also based on the fact that it fits into a larger system. If you are religious you might expect there to be NDEs.
Nevertheless I default to real world explanations, and try to use that as a starting point. So based on the details you've provided I guess I'd probably be somewhere in the 20% supernatural 80% unknown manufacturing technique.
The 20% would go higher if there was a supernatural connection. If it's the burial shroud of a saint for example.
Religion is for practicing. Argument about about it is a category error.
Okay, I've read all the previous comments, and maybe I can make a contribution to the dialog. In 1978 I wrote the first-draft script, and helped produce, a very successful commercial documentary movie called "In Search of Historic Jesus". (Unfortunately the film had lots of really hokey re-enactment scenes, but I had no control over that.)
Wanna see it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do1iYodJmIk
What I DID do was spend months of full-time research on many aspects of the life of Christ, including the Shroud. I filmed interviews with Ray Rogers and other scientists in the US and Europe who've studied the Shroud a LOT. One of them was a medical forensic specialist at Scotland Yard. He explained many physiological facts revealed in the image on the cloth that could NOT have been known by a 14th-century forger. Example: The hands show no thumbs. It was not until the late 1800's that a medical scientist named Destot discovered that a nail piercing the nerve in the wrist causes the thumb to jerk inward and remain in that position.
There are many more evidences that convince me TOTALLY that the Shroud is truly the cloth that covered the body of Jesus, and the "toasting" effect that made the image is (for me at least) proof positive of the resurrection of our Lord, being the result of a very brief but very intense burst of some sort of energy (needed to raise the dead?). I could go on and on, and I DID, in a 1985 "fireside" talk I gave to a group in the Los Angeles area. Here's a link to the video of that lecture:
https://youtu.be/Vm3QcAu23P0 Questions? starlingrd -at- msn dot c0m
Thanks for the links to the videos. I'll check them out!
The thing that holds me up about the shroud is that I don't see the point. It seems like it's a divine by-product, not an intentional intervention for a purpose, and my best understanding of God---at least the Christian Trinity---is a controlled, purposeful one.
But I need to leave a wide latitude for "I just don't understand".
In answer to the title here, 'no'. Why? Because if you could get to religion through reason then reasonable people would end up on the same religion...or at least somewhat adjacent to each other. (Here I'll dismiss the 'well Buddhism and Roman Catholicism and LDS are all the same if you look with a certain point of view take)
Regarding the Shroud, the 3d issue seems to be a real problem, not a benefit. The image on the shroud is the type of 2d image an artist would generate. Not what you'd get by wrapping a shroud over a body that then became stained by fluids or from some type of radiation discharge from the body. See the short video and article here: https://archaeologymag.com/2025/08/shroud-of-turin-image-came-from-sculpture/
On a more meta level, though, just how reasonable do you think your reading of him is? If this level of evidence was amounted for Vishnu coming to earth at some point in India thousands of years ago, would you be equally likely to go with "well that is pretty much proof Hinduism is onto something"?
You've said a lot of dumb things over the years, but the idea that reasonable people all converge on exactly the same opinion has to be one of the dumber ones...
The article is interesting, but I've yet to come across anything that's seems to be a silver bullet. But certainly this would be an update towards forgery.
The Vishnu counterfactual is hard to even model. But actually I've got a bit of the polytheist in me, I think I'd be pretty open to the evidence.
Well reasonable people do seem to converge quite often. Is there any disagreement about, say, geometry? I mean we can get into esoteric stuff about non-ecludian spaces and whether Plato was right about 'ideal forms' but builders of the pyramids and of a modern deck would be good with using a right triangle. Likewise with vehicles we see people tend to use wheels when there's a good road-like surface. Sure Italian car designers had their style difference with American ones but you don't really see much variation in the form of things like "no we're going to have cars that use tracks instead of wheels but unlike a tank we'll use 3 instead of 2".
Reason does converge on like answers when there's literal feedback on stuff that works and doesn't work. People diverge to different answers when there's little such feedback and 'success' is defined more on how it appeals to their subjective feelings. Hence clothing fashion never settles on much of anything and styles come and go but shirts have arms, pants have legs...there's usually a way to go to the bathroom in a reasonable amount of time etc. Clothing that doesn't usually has a specific purpose, like a monarch may have a very ornate uniform for a coronation
"But actually I've got a bit of the polytheist in me, I think I'd be pretty open to the evidence." This does leave open the chance the Shroud of Turin is exceptionally different but not at all what people want it to be. (i.e. gag played by space aliens, weird one time event caused by some cultists who wrapped a man they killed sometime around 1100 in a shroud etc).
But I come back to what if the Shroud actually had the distorted stretched out appearance you get if you made a 3d 'rubbing' of some sort on a 2d surface? The sort of thing that people who 'want' a relic would dismiss unless they had some other reason to hold onto it (such as an oral tradition that this was in fact the actual shroud) that only makes sense much later?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/science/shroud-of-turin-oresme-philosopher
This whole thing strikes me as a more advanced version of Jesus on Toast.
Please provide strong evidence of actual miracles please. Repeatability would be nice.
Note - the miracle here is that scientific analysis that it is impossible to reproduce this image - even with modern technology. All you would need to do to debunk this claim is to produce a photo negative image of Jesus that contains no dyes or pigments and is less than 2 nanometers deep. Repeatability is the key that would disprove this miracle.
"Note - the miracle here is that scientific analysis that it is impossible to reproduce this image - even with modern technology."
That's not a miracle or actually much of anything. There's a lot of things that are 'impossible' to recreate. For example, Damascus steel and Roman concrete. But wait you cry, we have figured out how to recreate Roman concrete! Yes literally about a year or two ago after many years a procedure was found that seems to either be what the Romans used or close enough that you can call it 'Roman concrete' for government work.
Now a lot of people would like to know how Roman Concrete was done and there's likely something of a market for it. That meant a lot of people worked on it and there's plenty of authentic Roman concrete out there one can get their hands on to test their results.
When you say "impossible to reproduce with modern technology" you mean a handful of dudes scratched their heads and couldn't figure out how to reproduce it. The Vatican isn't generous letting people trying to reproduce it have easy access to it in order to gauge their results. Likewise there isn't much of a market for holy relics anymore so the best minds for forgeries will find it more profitable to be faking paintings or well known signatures etc.
I bet science could repeat it if we could go back a few hundred years with a paintbrush.
The “miracle” doesn’t need to be disproven. Even the Catholic Church doesn’t accept it.
Change their mind first.
I am quite sure the possibility of a paintbrush was ruled out a long time ago.
Your faith in science is understandable, but it's still faith. "Some day, evolution will perfectly explain the God phenomenon, the near universal religious impulse, morality, the meaning of life (42), etc." Okay, but that is pure faith in science - based on what a person wants to believe and not reason.
Science is much more limited in scope. You are correct to seek 'repeatability' because that is what science does - it categorizes repeatable phenomenon. It does not and cannot explain psychology, sociology, economics, but rather proposes statistics about them - statistics which in our modern era don't even come close to solving the problems they are meant to solve. (I've heard this statement personally from one of the top statisticians in the DOD) Perhaps in the future, those statistics will get more useful, but there is no reason to believe they will be anywhere near as precise as what Asimov's Hari Seldon managed to do.
Ultimately, the line between science and science fiction gets crossed relentlessly in many of these debates.
The Catholic Church endorses the Shroud of Turin as worthy of faith but it will not proclaim it a miracle (i.e. a scientifically proven miracle) until the scientific debate surrounding it is settled. Every single saint that is canonized in the modern era has a miracle that is attested and documented by scientists and doctors as totally unexplainable by modern science.
Maybe that slips under the radar of more adamant Atheists, but the Church as an institution has learned to be more cautious about weighing in on scientific debates and does not officially proclaim anything a miracle lightly.
That said, all modern Popes have encouraged Catholics to 'venerate' (please note that 'venerate' is a technical term meaning "have a lot of respect for" which the Catholic Church uses to exclude concepts of worship or idolatry) the Shroud as "an icon of the Lord's love' that poses "a challenge to the intellect".
It's about as endorsed by the Catholic Church as it can be.
No, secular faith is not the same thing as religious faith.
That's a common trope, but if falls down pretty quickly upon examination.
https://ftsoa.substack.com/p/why-atheists-need-no-faith
Even many religious people believe in evolution, they just cling on to their creator god by hiding in the gaps.
"It does not and cannot explain psychology, sociology, economics"
Ok, now you're really just making stuff up. Those are scientific fields and, particularly economics, do explain a lot about the world. A lot more than religion does, that's for sure.
I'll grant you the Catholic Church sure does pose a "challenge to the intellect."
"It's about as endorsed by the Catholic Church as it can be."
No, it's obviously not, since the church is hedging on it.
"I am quite sure the possibility of a paintbrush was ruled out a long time ago." Has it really?
This has the quality of assuming the Shroud back in the 1300s looked like it does today. Maybe if you could see it then you'd immediately say with modern eyes "yea that was done by people". What makes it 'hard' to explain today is nearly 1000 years of essentially fading of the original image and the patina accumulated from all types of environments and handling.
This is not unlike Greek and Roman statutes which we think of as simple white marble but in reality back then they were painted and might look a bit silly to our eyes used to the austere clean look of what we have today.
This is a pretty weak response to the evidence of coloration. You might need to go back and re-read the evidence. If you're going to take a stand that it's fake I think you're much better off planting your flag with the UV linen discoloration methodology. (See video link in earlier comment.)
Maybe I'm missing it but I'm not sure which video you're referencing. I went through a few youtube videos on the comments.
But let's back up a bit. Do we have a lot of linen from 1300 and from 32 or so? Do we have a good sample of how this type of linen ages over 700 versus 2000 years? Either with paint or simply sweat stains on it? Do we know what someone back in 1300 saw when they opened this up and viewed it? We really don't so this makes any argument that begins with "there's no way to fake this" start from a very different to prove point.
I mean what about shrouds that were simply used to contain dead bodies? I'm sure some people were put inside a cloth of some type back in 1300. Yet as helpful as it would be to compare those cloths today to The Shroud, I wouldn't be surprised if that set is zero or near zero.
It's very hard to fake something, like a Dutch Old Master or the Hitler diaries, but people do. Authenticators are usually concerned only with the type 1 error...rejecting incorrectly the assumption the object is fake. It is very interesting IMO to read how people fake stuff and how they get caught. Yet since authenticators are being paid by people who don't want to get ripped off, they rarely figure that part out. Still if you wanted to know how to fake something I'd bet more on getting an authenticator than a scientist. For example, the Hitler diaries were partially given away because a notebook binding had a polyester that hadn't been used until 1953. If only the faker had searched harder for a blank notebook produced in Germany ~1940 or so!
I go thru a variation on this when I argue with people about Shakespeare (I am inclined there to reject the orthodox view, I don't think the actor/investor from Stratford wrote the plays or poems). People demand I show who I think wrote them, but I really don't have to do that. A person insisting Shakespeare wrote it is under no less burden of proof than someone claiming Jonson or Marlowe or Bacon. But there's a lot more 'not Shakespeare' possibilities while 'just Shakespeare' is only one.
I would say the set of ways people could have been messing around with a shroud in 1300 is very large. There's probably some ways that produced a not very convincing 'The Shroud' (but convincing enough to a few people and maybe a few more who said "might as well hold onto it because what if?") that over 700 years or so could have aged into something that triggers the thought of photographic negatives to the modern eye is greater than zero. If it is greater than zero there's still a lot of paths between 1300 and today and finding an exact path that produces what we have today would likely be very hard to find.
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/the-shroud-of-turin
Plus, if it were real, wouldn't The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have something formal to say about it?
Strong is obviously a relative term. What "level" would you ascribe to the evidence offered by STURP? Medium? Weak? Should any updating be done? Is any of the 16 items I mentioned relatively strong or particularly weak?
I'm open to reading the book excerpted by Shermer (though apparently it can't be had for less than $50 even on Kindle) would you be open to spending an equal amount of time on the STURP report?
Finally you lost me on the point about the LDS Church saying something formal about the Shroud. Is there some precedent or parallel I'm missing? Some formal statement they've made elsewhere that is analogous to one that might be made about the Shroud?
The LDS Church believes in a number of ancient artifacts. Most of them are not exactly available for examination, but it does believe in them.
Why does it not explicitly believe in the Shroud? Seems telling. (From my quick investigation, I couldn't find a General Authority opining either way.) Hell, it appears that the ***Catholic Church*** itself doesn't take a formal stance on the matter of its authenticity. That's a tell if you ask me, especially since they put a lot of effort into investigating saints and miracles.
The Shroud of Turin is not something upon which your testimony relies. There is no conceivable way a strange single artifact would change my priors to gain a testimony. You asked if there was a good rebuttal and that's the best one I could find, given that I think Shermer is a Reliable Source for such things for the opposing side.
Further, I would guess that if you did a Scott Alexander-style investigation you'd find--as he did with his sun miracles--that actually there are a ton of interesting relics that science just can't explain. Too many, really.
Yes, but all of the ancient artifacts the LDS church believes in are directly related to the LDS church and the testimony of Joseph Smith or attested to in scripture (for example we believe Noah's Ark existed, despite it not being unique to our faith). If the LDS Church had opined on a different extant artifact from a different denomination then I could see having an expectation that they should opine on the Shroud.
Perhaps you have a specific artifact in mind?
I hope I didn't give the impression that my testimony relies on the Shroud. As far as changing priors, a testimony is like a concrete conclusion. Bayesian reasoning is never going to get you to 100%. By priors I meant navigating the messy middle particularly if you were undecided between the two extremes.
No, I was agreeing that your testimony in no way relies on the Shroud of Turin. How could it? You just recently discovered it seems legit, or at least really interesting.
I'm just saying that it would be a little bit strange if this particular relic--which would be about as holy as it gets for a Christian--wouldn't be something of note for the LDS Church, were it believed to be genuine. But it doesn't even meet that bar for the Catholics! Which makes sense, because Europe was awash in all kinds of relics, and so purely by chance some of them would be strange objects with an unclear provenance.
My priors are tuned to something like: "No claimed miracle or relic will shift my priors any way but backwards, unless the Power of God can be reliably demonstrated in a repeatable manner." In other words, historical anecdotes and strange artifacts are right out.
Now, if someone produced, oh, say a magical compass that worked in a way totally unexplained by magnetism or GPS, or a device to translate written text automatically without known technology, then at a minimum I'd have to start believing in Ancient Technology and perhaps Aliens.
But an old piece of cloth with funny stains on it? Boring. Unless you can show it does like magical healing I guess. Was that in the book?