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

Did Leonardo da Vinci Do It?

There is the much ballyhooed, Dan Brown-on-steroids myth in the blogosphere and the world of cultish books that Leonardo da Vinci created the images with a primitive medieval room-sized camera.

 You can infer anything you want if you are selective with facts, promote conjecture, argue that the absence of evidence is evidence and mix in a bit suspicion. It makes for a nice mental mess called an apophenia; a belief in the connectedness of unrelated and meaningless observations.

For instance, the proponents of this conspiracy theory—and that is what it is—will tell you that the chemicals needed to make photographs existed in Leonardo’s day. But they also existed when cave dwellers painted their walls in Lascaux just about 16,000 years ago. They point out that Leonardo was a genius and he knew about the camera obscura, a box or room that enables you to project, through a pinhole or a simple lens, images on a piece of paper or a wall. But so did many scholars at the time of Leonardo. They just didn’t write about it as he did. Long before Leonardo, Abū Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham of Basra (965-1039), a Muslim philosopher, mathematician and scientist extraordinaire explained the camera obscura his Book of Optics.