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

Chemograph

Is it serendipitous that the highlights and shadows of this chemograph (think photograph) appear as though created by reflected light? This visual quality is essential for our minds to be able to see the images as realistic pictures with perceived three-dimensionality?

Just as there is nothing like the Shroud's images in the world of art, there is nothing like them in nature; after all dead men do not normally leave images of themselves on burial cloths. Nature, of course, is filled with naturally formed images. There are petrified fossils and fossil molds. And sometimes when plants and animals are trapped between layers of rock and decompose, they leave carbon imprints on the rocks. The carbon is all that is left of them. We know of the ghastly thermal shadows of things and people from the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima. Leaves stain rocks and sidewalks but also when pressed between pages in a book for decades create highly detailed images of themselves.

But the Shroud images seem different. Except for part of a foot they are extraordinarily complete head to foot images. The part of the foot missing from the images may have been beyond the cloth. Another possibility, for which there is some anecdotal evidence, is that cloth was trimmed for bits of relic souvenirs.