Dawkins, Ricard

Richard Dawkins on the Shroud

In September of 2009, Richard Dawkins, in his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, seemed to trip over many of these points, directly or by implication:

[Carbon dating] has revolutionized archaeological dating. The most celebrated example is the Shroud of Turin. Since this notorious piece of cloth seems mysteriously to have imprinted on it the image of a bearded crucified man, many people hoped it might hail from the time of Jesus. It turns up in the historical record in the mid-fourteenth century in France, and nobody knows where it was before that. It has been housed in Turin since 1578, under the custody of the Vatican since 1983. When mass spectrometry made it possible to date a tine sample of the shroud, rather than the substantial swathes that would have been needed before, the Vatican allowed a small strip to be cut off. The strip was divided in three parts and sent to three leading laboratories specializing in carbon dating, in Oxford, Arizona and Zurich. Working under conditions of scrupulous independence—not comparing notes—the three laboratories reported their verdicts on the date when the flax from which the cloth had been woven died. Oxford said ad 1200, Arizona 1304 and Zurich 1274. These dates are all—within normal margins of error—compatible with each other and with the date in the 1350s at which the shroud is first mentioned in history. The dating of the shroud remains controversial, but not for reasons that cast doubt on the carbon-dating technique itself. For example, the carbon in the shroud might have been contaminated by a fire, which is known to have occurred in 1532. I won’t pursue the matter further, because the shroud is of historical, not evolutionary, interest. It is a nice example, however, to illustrate the method, and the fact that, unlike dendrochronology, it is not accurate to the nearest year, only to the nearest century or so. [Emphasis mine]

Dawkins is either clueless or selective. One wonders if he even checked Wikipedia. On the matter of the historical record he implies that the absence of evidence is itself evidence or as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” He was trying to justify his belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Dawkins Should Know Better

Historians know better and an evolutionary biologist of Dawkins stature should know better; for the absence of evidence argument is a favorite ploy by the don’t-believe-in-evolution crowd who unceasingly point to the absence of fossil records as evidence of God’s hand in creation. Historians are more careful, acknowledging that there may be missing data, gaps in the written records to be bridged, and Eurocentric biases to be overcome. Western-centric exceptionalism is clearly a means of seeing only what we want to see. For example, many of us learned from our school histories that David Livingstone, the British explorer and missionary, discovered Victoria Falls in 1855. None of us would go so far as to suggest that the falls did not exist before then, when they turn up in the historical record of the West. But when we widen our viewing lens we learn that  they were well known to Muslim scholars in the days of the Byzantine Empire and before that to the indigenous people of the region  as the Mosi-oa-Tunya falls (“Smoke that Thunders”). From stone artifacts found in the region, we can be reasonably confident that they were known 50,000 years ago.

Besan

But where are the records for it in Besançon if it was there? The city's Cathedral of Saint Etienne was struck by lightning in 1349 and burned to the ground along with countless records in its archives. That may explain why there are no records before the 1350s. That is not proof, of course. It is not proof of anything. But it does offer an example of why a claim of a lack of any history before the 1350s is not a sound historical argument.

There certainly was a burial shroud relic in Constantinople and there is extensive evidence, both historical and scientific, that this shroud is the same shroud found in Turin. We’ll see that as we proceed. But what about the verdict of the carbon dating from Oxford, Arizona and Zurich, dates “all—within normal margins of error—compatible with each other. . .”? We should not be surprised that the dates seem close. Actually, if we dig a bit deeper, we see that there are some serious statistical problems with the dates the laboratories measured. Dawkins only gives us averages of many tests that the labs performed. He implies this is a final verdict. He is praising carbon dating.

Historical Evidence and Scientific Evidence

There is historical evidence that the shroud is much older than the dates arrived at by carbon dating. We’ll see that this is so. We’ll also see scientific evidence that says the same thing. So, do we have an anomaly? If so, do we now have an explanation. The fact that three laboratories did the testing does not remove the possibility of an anomaly. The presumption in carbon dating is that all anomalies will eventually be explained, scientifically. But the fire contamination suggestion by Dawkins is old news. It never panned out. Neither did many other suggestions. Finally, one explanation did stick. It was published in a peer-reviewed journal and that was the paper that Molly from Alaska was seeking.

The paper was written by the late Raymond Rogers (1927-2005), a retired chemist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Interestingly he was not trying to dispute the carbon dating but to refute yet another “crazy” suggestion why the carbon dating might be wrong.

Letter to the Editors of

In a letter to the editors of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, in response to criticisms leveled at him by Joe Nickell, one of the magazine’s non-scientist columnists who had raised questions about Rogers’ scientific competence, Rogers wrote:

I accepted the radiocarbon results, and I believed that the "invisible reweave" claim was highly improbable. I used my samples to test it. One of the greatest embarrassments a scientist can face is to have to agree with the lunatic fringe. . . . Joe [Nickell] did not understand the method or importance of the results of the pyrolysis/mass spectrometry analyses, and I doubt that he understands the fundamental science behind either visible/ultraviolet spectrometry or fluorescence. He certainly does not understand chemical kinetics. If he wants to argue my results, I suggest that we stick to observations, natural laws, and facts. I am a skeptic by nature, but I believe all skeptics should be held to the same ethical and scientific standards we require of others. (1)

It would be unfair to blame the teacher in Alaska for not knowing the latest information about the shroud's carbon dating if Dawkins and so many others are seemingly unaware.  But Molly was aware or became aware. Maybe her religious convictions led her to read about the shroud on the Internet. Maybe she was inspired by science class and wanted to know more. Perhaps she had no idea what the Shroud of Turin was and looked it up in Wikipedia. She went the extra mile by finding additional information. She was fully entitled, in fact one might say obligated, to question her science teacher's claim on scientific grounds. The teacher’s proper response should have been, “let me see what you have.” The teacher might very well have turned this into a learning experience for her and indeed the whole class.

Jack of All Trades

That described me. I have no significant credentials. I am a jack of all trades. I had once shared Nickell’s skepticism about the shroud, mostly for the same reasons he gives. But, over time, I have changed my mind. Well, mostly. I now think the shroud may be real. Nonetheless, I agree with Nickell that many arguments from some proponents of the shroud’s authenticity cannot be supported by science or history. We will explore these in due course. We are a long way from being able to prove it is real. We may never be able to do so by today’s rigid epistemological standards—how it is that we know things to be true. This is largely due to our very advanced scientific and historical methods.

Nickell’s use of the phrase “sour grapes” is a peculiar choice of words. We can suppose (Nickell’s has a PhD in literature), that he referring to the Aesop Fable in which a fox, after not being able to find a way to reach some grapes on a vine, gives up and declares, “The grapes are sour anyway.” The implication is that scientists who had challenged the 1988 findings were doing the impossible and resorting to comical explanations. It is a peculiar way to characterize what scientists do regularly; that is to question, confirm, amplify or correct the findings of others who came before them.

Nickell does give a few reasons to doubt the validity of various challenges to the carbon 14 dating, but none that are in a sense scientific have anything to do with Rogers’ findings. Consequently, he falls back on one of his oldest argument, the one he has been stating over and over for years; the same argument Dawkins employed, the lack of any history before the 1350s.

It's a dicey proposition given that the carbon dating was once thought to override any historical claim that the shroud was authentic. Then, given that the carbon dating was challenged, he attempts to bolster it with an absence-of-evidence historical claim.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1902), more than anyone before him and since, has shaped what has become, particularly in the first decade of the 21st century, a significant debate about the existence of God. His two works, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man seemed to many people to remove the need for God in the creation of the world, mankind and all living things. Evolution completely contradicted a severely-literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation. How can you accept that God was responsible for the "creation of every living creature that moves, of every kind . . ." and man and woman distinctly as such in his image, by the sixth day no less. “Darwin made it possible,” said Dawkins, “to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”  

Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

He attempted from his perspective to give a measure of legitimacy to religion—which he respected—by defining “two great realms of nature's factuality and the source of human morality.” There was, he thought, as he explained in his now classic book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, two non-overlapping magisteria. (6)

Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, our era’s most famous militant atheist disagreed. As he saw it, non-overlapping magisteria or NOMA, as it came to be known in the heady world of academia, doesn’t work because religion makes claims about nature’s factuality, specifically its origins. To Dawkins, there was only one magisteria. Religion was simply bunk. One Internet pundit, a supporter of Dawkins’ views, dubbed Dawkins’ one and only magesteria SOMA. He defined it as science only magisteria. He suggested a name for what he said was a “brain-dead” magisteria. He called it COMA for creationism only magisteria. Oxford’s Alister McGrath, a biologist, a scientific-atheist turned Christian, now an Anglican priest who frequently takes to the stage to debate Dawkins one-on-one, in a serious vein suggested partial-overlapping magesteria, which he called POMA.

NOMA, SOMA, POMA and COMA

We can almost imagine gangs of academics roving about Oxford, their professorial robes waving in the wind, graffiting the hallowed stone walls of this ancient institution of learning with NOMA, SOMA and POMA (you won’t find many COMAs at Oxford).  Reality is not that far from this imagining. Dawkins has been helping to finance advertisements on the sides of buses in London that read: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Reportedly, lawyers insisted on the word, “probably’ given that fairness in advertising requires advertisers to substantiate any absolute claims. Christian groups responded by buying their own advertisements with Biblical quotations. An enterprising individual created a web site where anyone can graffiti the side of a virtual bus. Thousands did so. The bus ads have crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific and are now popping up in major cities around the world.

Unquestioned and unreasoned belief in God, naïvely assumed or merely based on revelation in myth was never universal. The very fact that arguments for the existence of God were ever formulated is testimony to the need to answer doubts. One example was natural theology, rooted in observations of nature. We can easily trace it back to classical Greek thought. It blossomed in the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

Natural Theology

Natural theology blossomed in the age of science as the first wave of the modern scientific quest for God in William Paley's 1802 book, Natural Theology.  Paley, by way of analogy, compared the complexity of living things to the lesser complexity of a watch. Upon finding a watch, he argued, we would immediately realize that it had a maker. Living things being even more complex, he reasoned, certainly were the products of an intelligent designer. But Darwin, just a few years later, demonstrated how very complex living forms could evolve from much simpler forms. Darwin’s ideas demolished Paley’s argument. Dawkins explained it best. Theologian McGrath agrees. In his book, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, he writes:

Dawkins holds that the existence or nonexistence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. In The Blind Watchmaker, he provided a sustained and effective critique of the arguments of the nineteenth-century writer William Paley for the existence of God on biological grounds. It is Dawkins's home territory, and he knows what he is talking about. This book remains the finest criticism of this argument in print. The only criticism I would direct against this aspect of The Blind Watchmaker is that Paley's ideas were typical of his age, not of Christianity as a whole, and that many Christian writers of the age were alarmed at his approach, seeing it as a surefire recipe for the triumph of atheism. There is no doubt in my mind that Paley saw himself as in some way "proving" the existence of God, and Dawkins's extended critique of Paley in that book is fair, gracious and accurate.

The Astonishing Claim

It is an astounding claim that seems not only against modern scientific sensibilities but against the sensibilities of people who, according to New Testament writings witnessed the risen Christ and all those who heard the story told.  Jesus of Nazareth, a peasant itinerant preacher rose from dead following his execution by crucifixion. It is what make Richard Dawkins wonder about Christians. He singles out Polkinghorne:

[He is one of a number of] good scientists who are sincerely religious . . . I remain baffled by their belief in the details of Christian religion.

The Unfair Charge

It is grossly unfair to think that all shroud research is this way. It is not. I personally know many of the scientists who are committed to ascertaining answers to the mysteries and questions—because Everest is there and the evolution of the tomato is unfinished, thanks be to God—who like Schwortz and Rogers don’t have a horse in the race.  I, too, don’t have a horse in this race. My reason may be different. Before I discovered the shroud, I already believed as I do now unaffected by the shroud and expecting to remain so.

Faith in God, Richard Dawkins tells us, is belief in the absence of evidence. He is right, so long as he gets to decide what is evidence and to define what and who God is. But for the Christian faith is trust in the absence of certainty but on the evidence of something. Those somethings for some may include scripture at some level of understanding, revelation, a vision, personal experience, intuition, wonderment with science, inference from history and philosophical insights; all things that Christians call grace.

God need not be thought of as some Guthian scientist creating universes in a celestial basement. Rather he is an artist forming creation. His paint and brushes are the laws of nature. He does so, so we believe, out of love and not need.

Beliefnet

The site bills itself as the largest unaffiliated spiritual web site on the Internet.  Spiritual perhaps, but definitely a business. Beliefnet now is part of the News Corporation that includes Fox Television; over 100 newspapers such as The Times (of London), the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post; the website MySpace and the television show American Idol. Beliefnet has created itself into vast multi-overlapping magestias for cyber warriors from various traditions, beliefs and peculiarities, all having to do in some way with faith. Visit the site and you will find thousands upon thousands of people debating, questioning and explaining. They are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Wiccans and Atheists and Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soulers. Everything is organized into groups and subgroups and fragments within each because there are so many varieties and beliefs. There are conservatives and liberals. There are rigid adherents to denominational intricacies and live-and-let-live and what-ever-makes-sense-to-you proponents.  Dig deep enough and you will find arguments akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and does the tune change the results.  

There are plenty of celebrity participants on Beliefnet. Michael J. Fox did an interview about his battle with Parkinson's disease and how it increased his sense of spiritually and gratitude. Michael Jackson wrote a moving essay for Beliefnet. “What I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary,” he wrote. “The Sabbath was when I could be.” Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have appeared in interviews with Laura Sheahen, Beliefnet’s senior religion editor.

There are countless interactive public interviews with many of the leading theologians and Biblical scholars. An interactive public interview is similar to a radio talk show in which telephone callers ask questions of guests.  On Beliefnet, the callers type in questions and the guest replies by typing a response. One such interview was with John Dominic Crossan.

As one might expect, there is plentiful discussion about the scientific quest for God on Beliefnet, and much of it can be very interesting until a extremist fundamentalist, be he a Christian or an Atheist, imposes himself into a discussion and saturates the dialog with  proclamations. “The Bible says. . .”

One of the more interesting areas of discussion that has spilled out from academia and the all so commonly disquieting Eastertide season of television specials. It is the quest for the historical Jesus.  Who was this man, Jesus of Nazareth, who Christians proclaim is the Son of God? Is there more to the story than what we know from the three synoptic gospels, the theologically rich Gospel of John, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul and others evangelists? In the context of what we know about 1st century Palestine and its people, is it believable? And in the context of a scientific worldview, is it believable? And nothing is more central to the story than the subject of the resurrection? Did it happen?

Richard Dawkins

[Carbon dating] has revolutionized archaeological dat-ing. The most celebrated example is the Shroud of Tu-rin. Since this notorious piece of cloth seems myste-riously to have imprinted on it the image of a bearded crucified man, many people hoped it might hail from the time of Jesus. It turns up in the historical record in the mid-fourteenth century in France, and nobody knows where it was before that. It has been housed in Turin since 1578, under the custody of the Vatican since 1983. When mass spectrometry made it possible to date a tine sample of the shroud, rather than the sub-stantial swathes that would have been needed before, the Vatican allowed a small strip to be cut off. The strip was divided in three parts and sent to three leading laboratories specializing in carbon dating, in Oxford, Arizona and Zurich. Working under conditions of scrupulous independence—not comparing notes—the three laboratories reported their verdicts on the date when the flax from which the cloth had been woven died. Oxford said ad 1200, Arizona 1304 and Zurich 1274. These dates are all—within normal margins of error—compatible with each other and with the date in the 1350s at which the shroud is first mentioned in his-tory. The dating of the shroud remains controversial, but not for reasons that cast doubt on the carbon-dating technique itself. For example, the carbon in the shroud might have been contaminated by a fire, which is known to have occurred in 1532. I won’t pursue the matter further, because the shroud is of historical, not evolutionary, interest. It is a nice example, however, to illustrate the method, and the fact that, unlike den-drochronology, it is not accurate to the nearest year, only to the nearest century or so. [Emphasis mine]

Alister McGrath

Dawkins holds that the existence or nonexistence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. In The Blind Watchmaker, he provided a sustained and effective critique of the arguments of the nineteenth-century writer William Paley for the ex-istence of God on biological grounds. It is Dawkins's home territory, and he knows what he is talking about. This book remains the finest criticism of this argument in print. The only criticism I would direct against this aspect of The Blind Watchmaker is that Paley's ideas were typical of his age, not of Christianity as a whole, and that many Christian writers of the age were alarmed at his approach, seeing it as a surefire recipe for the triumph of atheism. There is no doubt in my mind that Paley saw himself as in some way "proving" the existence of God, and Dawkins's extended critique of Paley in that book is fair, gracious and accurate.

Richard Dawkins on Joh Polkinghorne

[He is one of a number of] good scientists who are sincerely religious . . . I remain baffled by their belief in the details of Christian religion.