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

Visual Blending

Like a playful Georges Seurat painting, the images on the Shroud emerge from discrete little bits of color in all the right places on the cloth. But unlike a cheerful and colorful Seurat, there is only one color in the Shroud's images. It is a single shade of caramel yellow. And unlike Seurat's pointillism, the bits of color are microscopically tiny. When we look at the Shroud, what we perceive as different shades of yellow is mere visual blending. Where there are more or larger bits of yellow the image appears darker. Where there is less yellow, the image appears lighter. Pixels, a word that means picture elements, is one way to describe the bits of color. The image on the Shroud is like a halftone photograph printed in a newspaper or a grayscale photograph printed in microscopic-size droplets of black ink on an ink-jet printer.

Very much unlike a Seurat, the image was not painted. Many tests including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and direct microscopic viewing of the Shroud confirm that the images were not painted despite the fact that Walter McCrone, a noted microscopic analyst found iron oxide and mercuric sulfide, both used in paint pigments.