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

Cyberspace Speculation

Cyberspace is filled with conjecture about the height-field observation. Proponents of the shroud’s authenticity use this information to say that it proves that a body lay under the cloth, that the image was created when the body of Christ dematerialized during the resurrection releasing energy that somehow did the imaging. It shows no such thing. The only thing it shows is that the image acts like a height-field.

Picknett and Prince have a point when they say that the scale was unknown, but it is a pointless point. When NASA uses radar and lasers to measure the relative height of features on the moon and the earth, when meteorologists similarly measure the height of the swirls in a hurricane, they know the scale. But they know the scale because they have benchmark values that they have estimated in the past. Hence the computer programs know how high a crater is, approximately. It knows how high the bands of hurricane are, approximately. Thus when NASA or meteorologists build a three-dimension representation in two-dimensional space, they create approximately accurate pictures.