Legitimacy of the Shroud of Turin

I believe this is the first time in the history of PS that any atheist has suggested that biologist Scott Minnich was capable of providing good scientific guidance. A red-letter day!

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So wrong. We don’t even know if there is any blood on the “shroud” at all. I asked for a legit scientific reference to support his claim and received nothing but crickets in response

Another likely story that the Shroudies probably tell each other around a campfire.

By a biologist. So why should anyone care? If I want to read a book about human biology, I don’t go to an archeologist or art historian.

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I think it may be useful to provide a short reminder for some members of a widely used convention on this, and other, forums:

This is a quote.

When we do this we are not ourselves stating the material marked up in this way, we may not in fact even agree with it, we are simply providing it as a quote from another source.

When @Rumraket quoted the website www.shadowshroud.com (and more specifically it’s History page) as stating:

Several years later he decided to test his theory, so he met with Dr. Scott Minnich, a scientist friend, for advice on structuring the experiment.

…it was not “the first time in the history of PS that any atheist has suggested that biologist Scott Minnich was capable of providing good scientific guidance”, it was merely an atheist on PS quoting somebody else making this suggestion – I will leave it to others to work out whether this is the first such quote.

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And hey, I have no reason to think this Scott fellow can’t make suggestions for how to conduct a simple practical experiment like exposing a linen cloth to sunlight.

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Hi Faizal
Here is a paper identifying the blood on the Shroud and Sudarium as most likely AB.

Much of the analysis is both Chemical (Shroud) and Biological (Blood and DNA). The book organizes the evidence and is well resourced.

I’ve read that already. Please quote the passage where they describe how they personally removed samples directly from the alleged bloodstains on the “shroud” and subjected them to the usual tests employed in forensic science or archeology to detect blood stains on fabric. I couldn’t find that in the paper.

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Here is a brief discussion of methods. This is from page 5 which contains more detail.

In the early 1980s, Heller, Adler, and colleagues used labeled antibody reactive with human albumin to immunologically probe for blood components on the Shroud (5,13). For these studies, anti-albumin antibodies were labeled with a fluorescent tag and added to slides containing sticky tape samples taken from both bloodstained and unstained (control) areas of the Shroud and examined microscopically (Figure 6, top).

Well, yes.

But if the blood traces on the shroud were from Jesus, as is claimed, they would have been from being wrapped round a body. Unless some-one (@Giltil) will concede that either (i) the blood on the shroud is not Jesus’s blood, or (ii) some-one else was using Jesus’s blood as an artistic medium.

Oops. Apparently they are, and have ‘determined’ that Jesus was AB-positive.

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Thanks, that is what I recall.

Is this the standard method by which the presence of blood, and the type of any blood that might be found, is determined? Someone dabs at the cloth with a piece of adhesive tape, and then has someone else analyse whatever schmutz the tape might have been picked up several years later?

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Yes. So what?

The least-useful for blood transfusion. Figures.

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You said earlier:

If the blood traces were from being in contact with Jesus’s body, then the shroud was wrapped around his body, so the image would appear distorted.

I understand that you want the shroud to both to have been wrapped around Jesus’s body to explain the positioning of the ‘bloodstains’ and not have been wrapped around Jesus’s body to explain the lack of facial distortion.

But you can’t have it both ways.

Perhaps you should explain what position the shroud was in when the image was formed, that accounts for both the lack of distortion and the ‘bloodstain’ positions.

But you won’t. Because you can’t.

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You know, Kearse made an update on his 2012 paper. Enjoy.

1-s2.0-S2665910720300190-main.pdf (479.1 KB)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665910720300190

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A petty, caviling objection to my point. I was perfectly aware that Rumraket was quoting someone else, and I’m also perfectly aware that someone can quote something without agreeing with it. But context strongly suggested that Rumraket thought the procedure recommended by Scott Minnich was good. The opening statement of Rumraket’s post was not in the gray of a block of quotation, but in the white of Rumraket’s own voice, and it read:

The words “most probably” indicated that Rumraket found the described procedure highly plausible. And Rumraket knew that in the quoted matter there was a reference to Dr. Scott Minnich, who advised on structuring the experiment. The most natural inference is that Rumraket thought that Dr. Scott Minnich had made at least some (however small) intelligent contribution to the experiment. And since the experiment was, in Rumraket’s view, a pretty good one, the most natural inference is that Rumraket was conceding that Scott Minnich contributed something good with his advice.

Note, since you are being pedantic, that I did not say that Rumraket said that Scott Minnich provided good guidance; I said he suggested it – meaning that his endorsement of an experiment shaped significantly by Minnich suggested that he would grant some credit to Minnich. So my language was careful, and made no attempt to be materially misleading.

Next, I would ask you to find me any earlier opinion expressed by a PS poster, either directly stating or suggesting that Scott Minnich had ever provided good scientific input about anything.

Finally, I would point out that certain persons here in the past, including Roy and, if memory serves, you as well, have accused me of misleading by leaving out part of some quoted words. Well, that’s exactly what you did here. I originally wrote:

But you quoted me with some words missing, i.e.:

– without noting that I had prefaced the words you quoted with “I believe this is…” indicating uncertainty and openness to correction. I was in effect inviting anyone with knowledge to either confirm or deny that this was the first (albeit here only indirect) compliment paid to Minnich by a poster on this site. I was not writing declaratively.

The spirit of “catching someone out” around here on small matters of form is both pervasive and petty. My comment was a tentative suggestion that Minnich, an ID proponent, had actually received a compliment here, possibly the first ever. And it was offered in the spirit of play, the joke being that one of the inveterate disrespecters of ID scientists around here had (perhaps unwittingly) paid a Dover Trial witness a scientific compliment. I was trying to get a smile out of people. But apparently wit by itself is not sufficient around here; from now on, I guess I will have to add a smiley face even where I think the humorous intent should be obvious. (Though I would have thought the addition of “A red-letter day!” should have been sufficient to competent readers, even without the smiley face, to indicate that I was bantering playfully.)

OK, back to the Shroud …

(about which, by the way, I have no firm opinion and find tones of certainty – for either yea or nay – to be inappropriate, given all the unknowns)

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Such as this?

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Based on Kearse’s recent commentary, that could be a dog’s, cat’s, rabbit’s, etcetera, blood. Even if future analysis show it’s actual human blood, we would have to wonder how that leads to the conclusion that it belonged to Jesus.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: The Argument Clinic

Well, according to this study, the position of the shroud was the same when the bloodstain and the image formed. Moreover, it shows that the argument (which I used to endorse) that the top half of the Shroud could not have been draping a real body when the images formed-to avoid prominent image distortions-is incorrect.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330311578_The_Turin_Shroud_was_not_flattened_before_the_images_formed

tl:dr version: “Some guy wrote some words and printed out some pictures that, he says, mean the ‘shroud’ is real.”

Lather, rinse, repeat.

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