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

Direction of Light

Light, in order to produce highlights, shading and cast-shadows, must have direction. While light may come from many directions, bouncing off of walls and objects and diffusing in the air as it does, it must nonetheless convey a sense direction. If it does not, there is no way to convey a sense of depth.  Look at a picture of a globe or the earth. Without the play of light on its surface, without highlights and lowlights, it will look like a flat round disk. We can say that light is what the artist encodes on his canvas. Light is also what the photographer’s camera encodes on film. We will come back to that word encode.

When we look at the face of the man of the shroud, we certainly seem to see depth from the play of light. Look at the tip of the nose, at the sides of the cheeks and the recesses of the eyes. But where is the light coming from? What is its direction?  Image analysts, using computerized tools, tell us there is no light directionality at all. It doesn’t come from the left or the right, from above or below, or from the front. That is because the images we see on the shroud are not representations of reflected light. The areas of dark and light are not encoded light. They are not pictures by the hand and eyes of an artist. Nor are they some form of medieval proto-photography as some have suggested in a vague attempt to explain the images’ photographic-like negativity.

If you read about the shroud you will inevitably come across statements that say that the shroud images are three-dimensionally (3D) encoded. This confused me. What I thought of as 3D was completely different than what scientists meant.