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

Picknett and Prince and 3D

Even Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in their recent book, The Turin Shroud: How Da Vinci Fooled History, recognized the problem. “The 3-D information contained in the Shroud was, we were led to believe, an odd and extremely unusual property of the Shroud image,” they wrote. “Neither paintings nor photographs, unless they are taken under very specific conditions, behave in such a way.” They continued:

Quite spontaneously, without any special adjustments to the Analyzer, the 3-D images, now so familiar from Shroud literature, appeared on the screen. The moment has gone down in Shroud history as almost rivaling the revelation of Secondo Pia’s first sight of the negative effect.

Common sense, however, suggests that there has to have been more to it than that. It is a matter of scale, of calibration. The Image Analyzer simply determines the relative intensity of different points on an image. To display it in a form recognizable to us, it needs to know the distance represented by a given change in intensity, i.e., the scale. . . . There is no way that any machine, no matter how sophisticated, can work this out for itself. . . . In the case of the Shroud image, you just have to keep adjusting the scale until you get the most recognizable picture of a human body. . . . This in itself does not mean that the Shroud image has no 3-D information, but it does show that there must be more to the tale of the spontaneous appearance of the image without giving the Analyzer the required scale.

When we began our collaboration with Andy [Haveland-Robinson, a computer animations expert], we, like all other Shroudies, believed that the Shroud exhibits amazing, inexplicable, and unique 3-D information. Though we were persuaded that Leonardo had created the image, we could not see how he had managed to produce that particular effect and felt that attempting to replicate it would be a real stumbling block in our experimental work. Now we faced no such problem, for the much vaunted 3-D information simply does not exist, at least to the degree that we have been led to believe by the VP-8 pictures, and not beyond that explicable by the even lighting caused by a lengthy exposure in the sun. In that sense, the “3-D information” supports rather than undermines the photographic hypothesis. (42)