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

Challenge to the Human Spirit

But the shroud is more than a challenge to our intelligence. It is a challenge to the human spirit not unlike the spirit that drives people to climb Mount Everest, grow the world’s most perfect tomato or fathom the universe.  In this sense, the quest to better understand the enigma of the cloth should be the primary impetus. Yet in the face of today’s unrelenting attacks on religion, and in particular Christianity, there is an almost inescapable, intuitive sense among believing Christians that it would be nice, if somehow, by way of the shroud, we could use science to prove the skeptics wrong.

So exactly what is the scientific quest for God? Well, first of all it isn't really a scientific quest for God. No one expects to find him by way of some experiment, or see him staring back at us through the Hubble telescope or neatly figured into some formula such as e=G+mc². He is not a law of nature, a theory or a hypothesis. The quest really is an apologetic, a defense of a belief in and about God in response to claims that God does not exist or need not exist as evidenced by science. Second, it isn’t completely scientific. In addition to real and true natural science it includes, in some aspects, what most scientists and philosophers of science think of as pseudoscience. As much as we may want to brush the unscientific part of it under the rug, we cannot do so because its proponents, many who are real scientists, and much of the non-scientist population at large, thinks it is science. It also engages philosophers of science in the question of its legitimacy. Should we be looking for and can we look for evidence of God with science?