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

 Alhazen Better that Leonardo

I would have done better. I would have chosen Alhazen. Although not a great Italian painter like Leonardo—which we tend to forget these days as we imagine him a leader of a totally fictitious secret cult, the Priory of Sion, and a schemer who hid a picture of Mary of Magdala in his Last Supper—he was everything else that Leonardo was and much more.  Born in Basra around 965, he became the greatest scientist of his era. He was a physicist, a chemist, an anatomist, a mathematician and a philosopher. He is regarded by some as the first philosopher of science and the founder of the scientific method. His Book of Optics, translated in Toledo during the 12^th century in a scriptorium much like the one at the monastery of San Nicola of Casole, is a classic. His descriptions of the camera obscura rival those of Leonardo. His knowledge of the way light is reflected from surfaces, so wonderfully shown in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. If we can imagine that Leonardo invented photography, used it once, made no record of the fact—he was a prolific documenter—we can imagine that Alhazen did so. He might have travelled to Constantinople and found an opportunity to exchange the Image of Edessa with the fake relic of his own making. Might we imagine a motive. Surely: He was Muslim.