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

Photons by the Millions

Scientists who study the problem of visual perception talk about information derived from light entering the eye. The 11^th century scholar, Alhazen who first figured this out. The information can be just about anything: a dot, a squiggle, a line, a blob of color. It consists of shapes and textures. It consists of complex relationship between one bit of information and another. At its most primitive level it is a photon here and photon there by the millions.

But the eye doesn’t figure out anything. It only takes in the signals it receives, focusing and scanning mechanically, and passes the information on to the brain as a series of neuronal signals. It is left to the brain to make sense of it, to interpret what we are looking at. And the brain can be easily fooled as anyone who has looked at optical illusions can attest. And we suspect that the brain can be fooled by a sort of cognitive bias. It is perhaps why so many of us see faces in rock formations and wood grains and on pieces of toast. It isn’t that the information isn’t there for us to interpret and misinterpret, it’s just that our brains see things differently. Given enough information we’ll all see things rightly or wrongly. And the shroud has a great deal of information on it.