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

The Real Issue

The issue was not the chemistry. It was not a problem that an image of a man was perhaps formed by vaporous action and chemical reaction. The issue was perhaps not even that the body might be a crucified man. The issue was the notion that for the cloth to have survived at all, it required that the man and the cloth be separated before purification destroyed the image and ultimately the cloth. The implication that it was so was because it was Christ’s burial shroud and because it was Christ’s burial cloth it was as it was.

It lighted a torch that has remained lit since the day that Pia took his picture and Delage pronounced his conclusion.

Because the image on the cloth itself is a negative image, and because we can’t figure out any other way that might have come about short of a miracle, we might be tempted to think that a forger of relics figured out how to make a really big photograph.  If we are still wedded to the idea that it must be medieval—rejecting the possible history and not being informed about the problems in the carbon dating—we need to come up with a new inventor of photographic negatives, someone other than William Fox Talbot to whom historians usually give the credit.