Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
No, the scientists testing the Shroud of Turin were a mixed lot. Some of them were looking for refutation. Some of them were looking for confirmation. One of them at least was shown to be dishonest after the fact. He was one of those looking for confirmation. That does not mean that all scientists looking for confirmation were dishonest. Just that one. They all agreed at time of publication that it had been refuted. But sometimes religion causes a mental defect that I like to call "the stupid". Religious beliefs often lead to stupid thoughts. When one has a cherished belief the intellect may temporarily cause that belief to lose effect, but then "the stupid" occurs. The brain desperately searches for an answer, any answer, to justify one's former belief, and it is very easy to fool ourselves when it comes to cherished beliefs. He claimed to have samples that he took "by accident". The problem was that accident or not all of them agreed to ahead of time that private sampling was not to be allowed since one's personal bias could affect how that information was interpreted. This one scientist went back on his word. So if you read about a scientist that worked on the STURP team that changed his mind due to threads that the found you have to ask yourself:One of the things Karl Popper propounded about science, which has come to be understood more since Popper, e.g., Thomas Kuhn's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that contrary to the general belief, science and the scientific-method aren't a free-standing objective view of the world. Science always serves the ideology of the ones doing the science. As Sartre put it, we can only find what we're already looking for. Sartre gave the example of someone entering a bar looking for Jim. If there's a guy name Willy in the bar, whom the searcher has never met, his eyes will pass right over Willy in his search for Jim.
The scientists doing the science on the Shroud of Turin were searching for refutation. Wherever they looked they kept passing right over Jesus in their search for refutation. Everywhere they looked on the shroud there was Jesus. But they weren't looking for Jesus. They were looking for refutation. So they looked right past the person glaring back at them: Salvation ישוע as it were, was, is, will ever be.
John
"Was he lying when he agreed to not take private samples and do tests without everyone else? Or was he lying about his test results" Either way his work is useless. Lying about one's work is one of the few unforgivable sins in the sciences.
It appears that you have made a False Idol of the Shroud. I do believe that there is even a Commandment about that.
And you also broke the Ninth Commandment. You made false claims about the scientists involved. When making claims about others, as a Christian you need to be able to support those claims with proper evidence.