Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Threshold For Perceiving Images

I rather suspect that there is a rather fuzzy swath of undecidedness between certainty that an image is of a face and is not. But given an environment and a sane worldview we can usually avoid undecidedness. If we see a face in the clouds, I know it is a phantasm, an illusion, an apparition of sorts. And I am sure most of us think the same thing if we see a face on a piece of toast or in a smudge of a windowpane. It should be easy to know what we see given the context. Conversely, if we see a face in a Picasso, even if it looks less like a face than what we see on our toast, we know it is an image of a face because of the context. But what about the face on the shroud? Fake or real, by some unknown means, we know that it is meant to be a face. We don’t need the context. It looks far too much like a face to imagine that it is anything else.