I. PROOF AGAINST THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE SHROUD OF TURIN
Robert draws (In search of the Shroud of Turin: new light on its history and origins, 1984) provides much evidence that the Gnostics created the Shroud of Turin in the 1st or 2nd century using a crucified victim or volunteer and methods that have been lost to history. Thomas of Wesselow (The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection2012) and John Loken (The Shroud was the resurrection: the theft of the body, the Shroud in the tomb and the image that inspired a myth, 2006) testify that the image on the Shroud of Turin was mysteriously created while covering the crucified body of Jesus. Many people judge the Shroud to be authentic even though the images are always created by humans and no one has been able to explain how a corpse could produce such a detailed bloodstained image on that large piece of linen. Loken and De Wesselow, by the way, are using the authenticity of the Shroud to give a historical explanation of the Resurrection of Jesus.
II. STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN MIND
There are five different methods of research that are involved in the study of the Shroud of Turin: science, metaphysics, theology, history, and philosophy. These investigative methods have their roots in the structure of the human mind and in the types of questions that human beings ask.
The scientific method is the result of a philosophical inquiry and reflects the way in which the human mind is structured. At the lowest level are observations, which require paying attention. At the inquiry level, humans ask questions about their observations. Humans want to know the cause of things, the relationship between things, and the unity between things. Extremely intelligent humans invent theories or hypotheses to answer these questions. At the reflective judgment level, humans gather evidence and decide whether a theory is true or merely probable. This level requires being rational. The fourth level is deciding what to do with our body, which requires being responsible.
third METAPHYSICS, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
This is an example of a scientific question: Why is the sky blue? A metaphysical question is: What is it to know that the sky is blue? Knowing the color of something means more than light entering your eye and a signal going to your brain. It means an awareness of this. Scientific questions arise from observations made with our senses. Metaphysical questions arise from our ability to transcend ourselves and become subjects of our own knowledge. The question about consciousness amounts to: What is the conscious awareness of humans versus the sensory awareness of animals? The theory or answer supported by the evidence and judged to be true by rational people is that it is a mystery. This can be expressed by saying that humans are embodied spirits or that the human soul (form) is spiritual. We can understand what a human being is because we know everything we do and everything that happens to us. But, we cannot explain or define what a human being is.
Many people confuse metaphysics with philosophy. Philosophy is a method of inquiry that transcends a more fundamental method of inquiry. Historiography and the scientific method are both examples of philosophy because they are above history and science.
In metaphysics, finite beings exist because humans have free will. Free will means that we have a center of action that unifies us with respect to ourselves and differentiates us from other human beings. A finite being is a composition of essence and existence, and an infinite being is a pure act of existence. In Western religions we call the infinite being God. Theology is the study of God’s revelation to humanity through the prophetic religions of the Near East, the mystic religions of India, and the wisdom religions of China. Theology involves a different kind of knowledge than metaphysics, science, or history. Knowledge of theology is called faith, and knowledge of the other three research methods is called reason.
IV. THE BIG BANG
Faith, science, and metaphysics are intertwined by the discovery of cosmic background radiation in the 1960s. In the 1920s, the universe was observed to be expanding, and physicists asked why. An astronomer, who happened to be a Catholic priest, invented the theory that the universe began to exist 14 billion years ago and was once smaller than a grain of salt. I am not using this phrase to ridicule the theory, but because of a calculation I did using the size of a grain of salt. The universe consists of hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars each. The density of the universe is small because all this mass is distributed in a large volume. If you compress the Earth into a volume the size of a grain of salt, the density becomes 7 times 10 to 29 times greater than its actual density of 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. If you squeeze all the galaxies into a sphere the size of Earth, you increase the density by a similar amount. (I assumed that the volume of a grain of salt is 1.5 cubic millimeters, and the universe is a sphere with a radius of 14 billion light-years. For the mass of the universe, I assumed that it is equivalent to the mass of 10 to the 21 power of the suns).
Five hundred thousand years after our known universe came into existence, electrons and protons formed hydrogen atoms and emitted photons with a specific energy. This is radiation that was discovered in the 1960s. Scientists now judge the Big Bang theory, as it was derisively called, to be true.
Many people consider the Big Bang to be evidence of the existence of God. This is not consistent with the cosmological argument, which is based on the assumption or hope that the universe is intelligible and the idea that a finite being needs a cause. As I understand it, the Big Bang is evidence that the universe is not intelligible, which means that it is evidence that God does not exist.
However, the Big Bang is the subject of study in theology because the Bible says that God created the universe out of nothing. This is one reason to believe that God inspired the human authors of the Bible because the human writers knew nothing about the expanding universe. It is not evidence for revelation because evidence is part of science, metaphysics, and history. Instead of evidence, theology has reason to believe and signs. We can see the truth of the metaphysical proposition that God exists in the same way that we can understand why the sky is blue. We can criticize the judgment, intelligence, and knowledge of people who deny or do not admit that metaphysics leads to the existence of God, or who do not know that density fluctuations, not molecules, make the sky blue. We cannot criticize the judgment of those who do not believe that the Bible is the word of God. In faith, we know that something is true because God tells us so. By reason, we know that something is true because we can see the truth of it. Faith is both a choice and a gift from God.
history and science
Scientists ask questions about things that exist. Historians ask questions about past events, which only exist in the minds of historians. There are different criteria for deciding which questions scientists and historians should try to answer. For example, it is a historical fact that Jesus was a healer and exorcist who did not charge for his services. This raises the question: Did Jesus heal anyone? However, this is not a good historical question because there are no before and after x-rays and other medical records from the first century.
The Shroud of Turin, on the other hand, is an artifact. It really does exist, and the question of how the image was created cannot be dismissed as a good scientific question. It’s like the question: What caused the Big Bang? In both cases, scientists must do everything they can to come up with a hypothesis.
