The face from the Shroud of Turin

Some years ago, I researched and wrote a piece for Christian History Institute in which I brought out a number of facts which suggested the Shroud of Turin was a hoax. Holy Shroud, Mysterious Relic.) These included contemporary statements, radio-carbon testing, pigmentation errors, and misleading reports on the shroud’s pollen content. A couple shroud believers wrote me angry emails.

My skeptical approach was right. Luigi Garlaschelli, an Italian professor of inorganic chemistry, has reproduced the shroud, using only methods available in the 13th-century. Carbon dating tests had established that century as the most probable era for its creation.

Garlaschelli was not the first to produce such an image. In Spring, 1982 Skeptical Inquirer also printed pictures of images reproduced using 13th-century techniques.

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of a human brain.

Research at Rutgers and UCLA is enabling scientists to “read” the mind. When people perform selected tasks, their brains tend to alter functional MRI (fMRI) images in predictable ways. By studying control images of subjects known to be performing one or another of eight actions, the researchers can then predict which action another subject is performing based on an fMRI. They guess right 80% of the time (chance would be 13%). Eventually, researchers hope to use fMRI to determine whether a person is lying or telling truth.

This research is still a far cry from real mind reading. True mind reading would be to know someone’s thoughts and motives the way the Bible says God can. However, the movement of science toward being able to do with crude mechanical apparatus what God is said to do through spirit goes some way toward confirming the plausibility of the Biblical claim. Allowing for a moment the hypothesis that God designed the brain, it would be surprising if he could not provide himself some means of retrieving information from it.

Robert Boyle

Boyle did not commit suicide. Instead, he determined to investigate truth in a new way, banishing the obscurity of the alchemist’s laboratory. As a result, he improved the scientific method, writing the first papers in the modern scientific style, listing hypotheses, conditions, equipment and results. His careful experiments soon relegated alchemy to the dust bin. (See my article on alchemy.) In response to a bit of Aristotalian reasoning by Hobbes regarding vacuum, Boyle developed the law of gases which bears his name. He also was a founding member of the Royal Society.

If more scientists would set out to resolve their crises of faith in Boyle’s spirit, starting from the premise that Christ as the agent of creation is responsible for both biblical revelation and natural truth, we’d have better science.

Detail from Dali's “Persistence of Memory.”

Constructing a new super-highway, workers blasted off the corner of a cliff. A pocket of air appeared within the stone. In it lay a sleeping man, surrounded by scientific implements and gauges.

Marveling that a man should be found within what had been solid stone, the workers approached. The sleeper woke. Through a translating device he spoke to them in perfect English. “Greetings, my friends. May I speak with your scientists?”

Awed at first by the sleeper’s technology and apparent ability to travel through time, the National Science Foundation was soon calling him a hoax, suggesting that one of the workers who “found” him had actually planted him there. For a rare moment the majority of Christians found themselves in agreement with the majority of skeptical scientists.

The time-traveling scientist stood before representatives of both groups and shook his head sadly. “You are like every other generation—every generation but one,” he said. “You reject me and the truth I bear. The ancients tried to stone me as a blasphemer because I taught that their gods, the sun and stars, were but gases and the moon but rock and dust. The Medievals tried to burn me as a sorcerer, saying my knowledge and power could have come only from the devil. Every culture I visited has labeled me as a madman or worse because my teachings did not agree with some prevailing theology, philosophy, taboo, or category—some false system which, like them, has perished or is perishing. Others brushed me off as irrelevant, because universal cycles would efface me and raise me up again endlessly.

“The one age which would have heard me out with respect is now a century gone. As for you—half of you denounce me because I insist that God created the heavens and earth through Jesus Christ and the other half because I say this all took place in a cosmic creation event more than 10 billion years ago. I will waste no more of your valuable time. Adieu.”

With that he walked to the great double doors of the meeting hall. As he passed outside, those within saw a translucent green egg envelop him, followed by a flash as bright as lightening and a thunderous rumble. They rushed to the entrance, but the time traveler was nowhere to be seen.

Donatello sculpture representing the prophet Habakkuk

It has a good basis, though.

Imagine a world in which everyone glorifies God.

Astronomers would show truthfully what they are learning—that God has made the earth a special and unique place designed for life. Biologists would praise God for the mounting evidence of the brilliant design of that life. Every other science and endeavor would seek to honor God with its discoveries.

Such a world is coming.

The prophecy that points to it is two and a half millennia old. “For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord,” predicted a prophet in Israel (Habakkuk 2:14).

For years I have dreamed of helping to fulfill that prophecy. I have written books, articles, and poems with it in mind. This blog, The Knowledge of the Glory, is my latest effort to participate in that visionary quest.