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

Thanks to Nicholas Allan

Fortunately, Nicholas Allan did build a gigantic camera and created a life-size image on cloth of a life-size statue, he created an amazing photograph. It looked quite realistic. But when attempts are made to see if it is anything like a height-field it fails. Allan’s photograph is a 3D representation in a 2D field. The shroud images are height-fields from which a 3D representation in a 2D field can be derived.

In the case of the shroud we don’t get a perfect three-dimensional rendering for many reasons: If, as scientists suspect, what is encoded on the shroud is the distance between any point on the man’s body and the cloth loosely draped about him, then the distance will be distorted by the drape of the cloth. We can assume it is not perfectly flat. We don’t know how fading of the images and the aging of the cloth might have altered the accuracy of height-field data. There are bloodstains and dirt that cause distortions.

The negativity and the so-called 3D encoding hardly cover the mystery of the images’ properties.