Absence of DNA ? No idea.
I just respect the test that says it.
You are right It sounds absurd. That doesn’t alter the veracity or not. It draws attention to a disparity with known science, to say these are not a substitution fraud. ( the obvious fraud hypothesis - which would DNA the victim)
It’s been repeated in so many places, analysed by so many different labs, it has passed the evidential threshold . The question is “why” not whether.
By way of comparison of absurdity for life origin : It sounds utterly absurd that a 10000 protein chemical factory can be a product of random chance, particularly because there’s literally no evidence it happened, no mechanism for it, no first cell structure even conjectured ,it can’t be made to happen , has never been observed to happen. Yet nobody seems to think it is other than a logical extension of what is known. So keen is science to reinforce that conjecture . It is not seen as extraordinary- A pile of chemical bricks is used as evidence of a self building evolving factory of incredible complexity! It’s not even evidence of self building.
So on the univedenced absurdity test , abiogenesis deserves a wacko award if anything does. Don’t get me wrong it might even be true. But it deserves more scepticism. It has yet to get beyond conjecture.
And that’s the problem I have with science raising barriers to what it does not like. I well remember a telepathy debate n where such was the disdain was shown by wolpert FRS who tried to debunk it without even looking at sheldrake evidence or experimental technique. The scientific establishment uses the falasy “ extraordinary claims” to raise barriers against what it does not like. Extraordinary is a subjective test.
Some of it gets too emotive, For emotive subjects take the shroud. The RC date was clearly false the day it was done, cloth dating was never certain, the other evidence disputing it massive and growing. The resistance to the chemical testing & and sudarium forensics is only apriori disbelief. It was up to the RC team to explain the evidence that disagreed with them ( as porphyrin chemist Adler did in disputing Mcrone and others) he explained why their results were a misunderstanding of shroud chemistry. Not that scpeptics ever accepted it because it reinforced apriori belief.
You make an assumption - on whether the phenomena are deliberate signs. I’ve no idea.
I can say the Eucharist is one of the fundamental dogmas , to point at Christianity, particularly Catholicism , and show apparent intervention in assumptions of life, so What better sign is there? Everyone discounts healing. You cannot impose the outcome.
I actually think - if it is a sign - it’s a sign aimed at Catholics not to profane the Eucharist and protestants to show their symbolic Eucharist theology Is wrong. . That makes it consistent with messages. Not aimed at sceptics at all.
I cannot say “ to believe gravity waves I need to see the floor ripple! “ if that’s not what gravity waves do.
it is what it is.
I do reserve judgement, but my prior credence is extremely low, for obvious reasons, and what you've described and what I've seen elsewhere doesn't significantly change that. As I've said several times, unless you can be certain of the provenance of the sample, the security of its transport and the tests it was given are irrelevant.
BTW - you didn't answer on the relevance of the claimed absence of DNA - are you suggesting Jesus had no DNA? If not, then what?
Hearsay - without verifiable evidence I am sceptical of those claims (it sounds like something only a non-biologist would attribute to a biologist) - and there is nothing to stop them asking for an anonymous sample to be tested. This happens in forensics all the time.
The same issues arise - it's hearsay anecdotal evidence, and any fraud that permitted direct sampling would ensure the statue was prepared. You believe it because you want to believe it.
All claims are not equally 'exotic'. If I claim that my tap water was brownish for 24 hours and smelled strange, and I presented a cup of brownish smelly water as evidence, even expert water quality technicians would give that claim fairly high credence. If I said human blood came out of my tap for 24 hours, and presented a cup of human blood as evidence, that claim would have extremely low credence. Subsequent evidence for the latter claim would have to be extremely strong to raise that credence to the level of the former claim prior to additional evidence.
That's what 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' means, it's Bayesian aphorism.
Again, a forensic lab can only test what they're given, they don't know its provenance.
At a different level, the whole idea seems absurd - if an omnipotent deity wanted to give an unambiguous sign of its existence it could restore an amputee's limb overnight and sign it, "God did it" or "God woz 'ere". But would it just make a slightly more competent version of the many 'bleeding this, bleeding that' fakes & frauds? - or is this another case of 'God Works In Mysterious Ways'?
And if the key to the religion is faith in things unseen, what would be the point of distracting the faithful with this kind of nonsense? Is God up there seeing who can tell the 'real' one from the fakes? Or is it a trap, e.g. "That one believes only because he thinks he's got scientific validation, Doubting Thomas!"
