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

The Appearance of Light

When we look at the Shroud we see what looks like a picture. What to our eyes seems like the highlights, lowlights, and cast shadows of reflected light on a human form is not light at all. It is certainly not light as a camera would detect it or an artist would see it and translate it to canvas. Technical image analysis reveals no directionality to the implied light of the highlights and shadows. The brightness does not come from any angle. It is not from above or below, nor from the right or the left, nor from the front. Furthermore, if the image was produced using photosensitive materials, the gradations of brightness would produce different shades of color, not discrete densities of pixels.

So what does the tonality of the image—made up of pixels—represent if not reflected light? With computer software we can plot the relative lighter and darker areas seen in the images and produce a three-dimensional isometric drawing of the body. With computerized virtual reality we can view the body from different angles. We can see the slope of the nose, the recesses of the eye sockets and the shape of the torso.  It seems that the image is a graphic representation of the distance between any part of the body and the cloth. This is startling. You cannot do this with a regular photograph or a painting or any known type of pictorial art. There is nothing at all like this imagery in the history of art.

In 1898, an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia, photographed the Shroud for the first time in history. On his glass plate negative (Talbot's invention) an extraordinarily positive image likeness of a man emerged. Pia's negative of a negative revealed the details of the ghost-like images. But the image is not really a negative. It just happens, serendipitously, to act like one. It is a topographic datagram in microscopic, monotonal pixels. However the image was formed, it was recorded chemically. The privilege of modern technology lets us see that it looks like a painting or a photograph of a naked man crucified with nails through his wrists. This same modern technology tells us it is not a painting or a photograph.