Do you think that The Shroud of Turin is a hoax?

Originally posted by SnakeLord
Umm not quite wrong. NASA didn't land anywhere near Cydonia and refuse to do so. And those pictures show nothing and prove nothing. Land on Cydonia then you have proof- which is what i said.
My apologies for not being more specific. By "quite wrong" I was referring to your comment "the whole 'face' issue remains unanswered". NASA already had an answer (based upon various measurements and calculations) to the 'mysterious face' but was still willing to specifically task a vehicle to take more photographs of the formation in order to satisfy those who continued to question.

The answer, to me, is quite apparent; looking at the other pictures one can easily see how light from a particular direction will cause shadows that look like a face. One of the newer pictures still looks like a face, although more like a gorilla's face than that of Jesus. However, the reverse does not appear to be true; that this is really a 'face' that somehow looks like natural and rather typical geologic formations from another perspective.

Of course, some people will never be satisfied with any explanation but their own; even if we land there to take more pictures and measurements someone will come up with the proposition that aliens or God purposefully developed a natural feature in order to look like a face to us from a particular perspective. They do it all the time with pictures of clouds and billowing smoke even though there is nothing about these occurrences that is unnatural. To belief, such as that, there is simply no rational response. One may posit that God deliberately placed the fossil evidence of evolution to test our faith as well.

~Raithere
 
Well don't get me wrong it is way more than likely to be nothing more than a hump of martian rock. Whatever people look at they find faces- usually very symmetrical. It's an inbuilt function i guess. However the mathematical analysis of the one side was a strong argument. NASA takes a photo from a distance so far away it hardly answers the question for certain. I'm just the kind of guy who needs a positive answer instead of a probable. When they launched the mars lander they declined from having it land any where near Cydonia which would have cleared up the issue once and for all. I'd rather they just did that instead of taking pictures from space.

The argument has pretty much always been that if shown to be symmetrical it would show design instead of natural occurence. I guess that's still not an answer but it's closer to one.
 
I'm not seeing anything to read at that link. It's just for ordering or downloading the sermon. Can you provide a different URL?
 
I believe the shroud probably is a hoax, but does it even matter? What would it prove? Jesus of Nazareth most likely did exist, but that doesn’t prove Mary was a virgin and he was the son of a god.

-N-
 
I'm not seeing anything to read at that link. It's just for ordering or downloading the sermon. Can you provide a different URL?
Click on play!

Even if it takes time to listen to, there is some very valuable information on there.

Carbon dating gets thrown off wildly by water (16:44)! If there was a great flood covering everything, as many people believe, then carbon dating will not be accurate at all!
 
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Please explain for us how carbon-14 dating could be thrown off by water. The presence of water would not affect the rate at which carbon-14 decays, so I'm really curious to hear your explanation for it.
 
Please just go and learn about the shroud and how it got debunked yourself, you'll be surprised how clear and concise it is. You won't be asking any questions at the end.
 
The presence of water would not affect the rate at which carbon-14 decays, so I'm really curious to hear your explanation for it.
Listen to the audio! it is all explained! (16:44)

All living things absorb Carbon-14 but when something that was living dies, it stops taking it in, so the amount of carbon-14 present in something (providing it was once living) can show how old it is. The more carbon-14 that is present then the younger it is and the less carbon-14 that is present, the older it is.

According to Science (Volume 130), living molluscs were dated by carbon-14 dating as two thousand three hundred years old!

According to Nature Magazine (Volume 22, March 1970), organic material from a castle mortar that holds the rocks together was dated. They knew that the castle was seven hundred and eighty seven years old but carbon dating estimated that it was seven thousand three hundred and seventy years old.

According to the Antartic journal of the United States(Volume 6, 1971), freshly killed seals were dated by carbon-14 to be thirteen hundred years old. Mumified seals that had been dead for thirty years (they knew when they had died) were dated at four thousand six hundred years old.

It seems that water messes up carbon-14 dating. Listen to the audio clips!
 
Sorry, but I'm not going to listen to the audio clips; I'm sure you can offer an explanation based on what you've heard, so please do so. Just paraphrase the explanation from the online lecture (or whatever it was) for us, please.

As to your examples of C14 dating being mistaken, I am afraid that they are not very convincing. It is well known that C14 dating cannot be used to date certain organisms (especially certain types of mollusks and creatures that eat mollusks) and the reasons for it are well understood. C14 dating basically only works for things that get their carbon from the air; it's not always accurate for sea creatures, which are often dated as being older than they actually are. It also can't be used on things that are less then around 60 years old, so your example of the living seals being dated incorrectly isn't surprising. It is accurate for the vast majority of once-living things that are less the 50,000 years old. C14 dating is generally only used to date biological samples, so it's entirely inappropriate to use it on castle mortar. I'm not surprised that it gave an incorrect date on that.

Also, it's important to note that in all of the cases you cited the C14 dating incorrectly dated things as being older than they actually were; I'd like to hear an explanation for how flawed carbon dating could date the shroud as being younger than it actually is.
 
Give me my shovel

Arguments in the audio:

Cosmic Dust - Should be 50 feet in 4 billion years:
This figure is based upon outdated and erroneous information that has been obsolete for about 25 years. This 25 year old estimate was 39,150 tons/day (which even the author admitted could be much lower). Newer figures show that the rate is 60 - 120 tons per day.

ref: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_arguments/moon_dust.html

Magnetic field decay:
Evidence shows that the magnetic field fluctuates rather than simply decays. That is, it grows weaker at times and stronger at others. This is like noting that the temperature is decreasing from July to December and then predicting that it will be twice as cold in June.

ref: http://www.infidels.org/library/mod...-earth/specific_arguments/magnetic_field.html

Sun getting smaller .1% per century, 5' per hour:
This one has been outdated for 60 years. Prior to discovering fusion there was a hypothesis that the Sun produced energy from gravitational collapse. We now know better. There was also an abstract (not a full fledged paper) written by Eddy and Boornazian that suggested that the Sun was indeed shrinking. Serious flaws were discovered in their methodology and it was discredited. The short of it is; the Sun is not shrinking... so there's nothing to explain.

Radiometric dating - accuracy
Different dating techniques usually give conflicting results.
This is not true at all. The fact that dating techniques most often agree with each other is why scientists tend to trust them in the first place. Nearly every college and university library in the country has periodicals such as Science, Nature, and specific geology journals that give the results of dating studies. The public is usually welcome to (and should!) browse in these libraries. So the results are not hidden; people can go look at the results for themselves. Over a thousand research papers are published a year on radiometric dating, essentially all in agreement. Besides the scientific periodicals that carry up-to-date research reports, specific suggestions are given below for further reading, both for textbooks, non-classroom books, and web resources. - Radiometric Dating, A Christian Perspective by Dr. Roger C. Wiens
Carbon-14 dating messed up by water:
While water can affect the ability to date rock surfaces or other weathered areas, there is generally no trouble dating interior portions of most rocks from the bottom of lakes, rivers, and oceans. Additionally, if ages were disturbed by leaching, the leaching would affect different isotopes at vastly different rates. Ages determined by different methods would be in violent disagreement. If the flood were global in scope, why then would we have any rocks for which a number of different methods all agree with each other? In fact, close agreement between methods for most samples is a hallmark of radiometric dating. - Radiometric Dating, A Christian Perspective by Dr. Roger C. Wiens
Here's the site for both quotes. It's quite excellent, including charts and references that are not 30 - 60 years out of date and in a level of detail entirely lacking in any of the opposing arguments:
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/resources/Wiens.html


Geochronology, 80 tests, 5 to 1 against an old Earth:
Seeing as his top 5 are so easily shown to be quite false and noting what seems to be deliberately contrived misinformation and misleading presentation (or at least his unwitting collusion in such), I believe the accuracy of this statement can be summarily dismissed.

The speaker has not demonstrated a single factually supportable argument. This is because there is no such evidence. It is quite likely that he realizes this, which is why he doesn't even bother to attempt to provide it in his speech; relying instead upon innuendo, suggestion, hearsay, and a couple of out of date snippets of text.

Frankly, I thought the entire thing was crap; I found it to be a deliberate and desperate attempt to get people to believe in the fallacy of the Young Earth interpretation of Biblical creation: A fantasy that is in direct contradiction with all relevant facts.

~Raithere
 
While water can affect the ability to date rock surfaces or other weathered areas, there is generally no trouble dating interior portions of most rocks from the bottom of lakes, rivers, and oceans.
C14 isn't used to date rocks anyway.
 
Originally posted by Nasor
C14 isn't used to date rocks anyway.
Good point... maybe I need to re-read this page again. It was really late when I read it before.

~Raithere

P.S. Nope... my bad. He was not talking about C14.
 
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