Russell Breault of the Turin Education Project said, "It's human nature to always want to put a name with a face. The scripture gives us the name. The Shroud gives us the face." The highlight of the History Channel program "The real face of Jesus" was the work of Ray Downing and his team at Studio Macbeth in an effort to cull a human face from the image on the cloth. Ray and his team are some of the best computer graphics artists in the world, specializing in the creation of accurate and lifelike death masks of famous people. Downing said, When you look at the Shroud, you have the impression that it's a picture, but it's not a picture at all. It's a database of information. If one were to single out one single thing about the Shroud of Turin which separates it from every other effort on the planet is that it encoded three dimensional information in a two dimensional surface. Downing and his team meticulously studied the Shroud. They had to overcome a number of difficult issues that were unique to this assignment. For example, the cloth was very dirty, with copious marks of bloodstains overlaid on the image of the body and had to be cleaned. At one point Downing said to a coworker, "I think the solution [about the problem of separating the distortion of the image] to it is to realize the Shroud wasn't hanging on a wall. It was wrapping a corpse." To separate the image of the man under the Shroud, bloodstains on the material had to be contrasted and highlighted in order to be digitally scrubbed from the body. A special raster algorithm known as Fast Fourier … [Read more...]
Proof versus evidence
Some of my atheist friends (excluding my friend Kyle, of course) are always demanding proof that God exists, but I've come to realize that they don't really mean it. What most of them want is to insist they have no reason to believe in a supernatural God, but generally because they simply don't want God to exist, because that would conflict with their existing worldview. Demanding proof that God exists implies that person does not fully understand the concept of faith. Proof and faith are mutually exclusive. If you have proof, faith is no longer required. Don't believe me? Let me prove it to you. (Pun intended) Anyway, honest scientists don't talk in terms of proof. Scientists mostly talk about what they can deduce from what the evidence tells them. Personally, I think that I waste too much of my life arguing with unhappy atheists. I don't particularly enjoy being constantly needled or ridiculed by very angry people simply for expressing my opinion, especially I don't really consider myself any sort of evangelist for Christianity. I'm just a writer. My best writing seems to focus on things that interest me, and because I consider myself a Christian, alleged evidence that supports Christian faith interests me quite a bit. But I understand that when I seek information about a story, I'm not seeking proof the story is true. I'm merely seeking evidence to support or debunk a claim being made. For example, I've said before that the Shroud of Turin will never and could never be fully authenticated as the burial cloth in which the body of Jesus Christ was … [Read more...]
