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

Lloyd A. Currie

As the Associated Press, the BBC and The New York Times reported on Rogers’ paper, some people wondered, just as Ball had, if it was possible that threads “were woven into the old cloth so cunningly that the textile experts who selected the area for analysis failed to notice the substitution.”  Others wondered if there was perhaps more to the story. Was this the whole story? How could such a mistake in radiocarbon dating happen? Was there something to learn from this?

About a year before Rogers’ paper was published, in early 2004, the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST, U.S. Government Printing Office) published an important paper by Lloyd A. Currie. Currie, a highly regarded specialist in the field of radiocarbon dating and an NIST Fellow Emeritus, wrote a seminal retrospective on carbon 14 dating. Because the Shroud of Turin was such a famous test, Currie devoted much of his paper to it.

Like Rogers, Currie dismissed any argument that radiocarbon labs had done anything wrong in dating the Shroud of Turin. Currie also rejected, as Rogers also had done, the theories of scorching effects or contamination caused by a bioplastic polymer. Significantly, Currie acknowledged that disguised mending was a viable explanation. He cited the work of Rogers and Arnoldi. He found it credible.