Is science at odds with philosophy?

[Hans Blaster]

My Canoe Challenge

And Poe dealth with you promptly back then. Are you a [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] or something?

My Canoe Challenge

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... @Mountainmike, @Estrid, @Opdrey, @FrumiousBandersnatch ... is all of the bickering that's going on in this thread at the current moment simply over a couple of Catholic relics?

Are these the locus of this squabble about who has the bigger academic chops?

I'm lost at the moment, trying to get a handle on this conversation.

I've said my piece on Catholic relics; I'm currently contrasting my experience of relatively benign behaviour in academia with @Mountainmike's apparent experience of enough poor behaviour to require a song and dance about it.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... would they conclude that what was written on it was written 1000 years ago?

There are ways to tell whether the surface was damaged recently or long ago, though I'm not sure if such damage can be dated.

 

[Opdrey]

My Canoe Challenge

I am worried that you think that gets you around reading the rest of my post. Troubling.

 

[AV1611VET]

I am worried that you think that gets you around reading the rest of my post. Troubling.

The rest of your post, which seems to be based on something I already stated, makes no sense to me.

When the first sentence is wrong, the whole post has a tendency to follow suit.

When the first sentence agrees with the person it is responding to, the whole post tends to either "preach to the choir" or go downhill.

Or not make sense.

 

[Opdrey]

The rest of your post, which seems to be based on something I already stated, makes no sense to me.

Sorry to hear that.

When the first sentence is wrong, the whole post has a tendency to follow suit.

Given my sentence was a hypothetical I'm uncertain how you come to know it was "wrong".

When the first sentence agrees with the person it is responding to, the whole post tends to either "preach to the choir" or go downhill.

I thought you were more adept at reading. My apologies.

 

[Mountainmike]

Decomposition of lignin is exponential, and
dependent on temperature and humidity.
In case that is of interest

Eureka! Thanks - someone talking about evidence which is all I want to do.


You are aware of the context I presume?
Ancient linen loses vanillin. The shroud has little or none.
A guy called fanti used known control samples to conclude around first century.
@Opdrey rightly said it is so far unproven as a dating method , true. The question then is what other factors might be involved.

Regain as you say in fabrics is of course one. What is not disputable is it is much older than mediaeval, based on vanillin alone.

 

[sjastro]

So approx that of the wombat.

A shocking display of anti-wombatism.
Wombats are intelligent and have the largest brain capacity amongst marsupials.

The UN has set aside October 23rd as World Wombat Day to highlight the discrimination against wombats.

 

[Mountainmike]

I only ever wanted to talk about evidence.

@Opdrey only ever seems to want to talk about me , which is off limits, and like all ad hominems it descends into bickering.

Whether interested or not, I’m surprised you put ufos, ghosts, into the same category as the shroud.

The shroud is a real object at a known place. ( as are sudarium & linceul) It has been studied close up . It is probably the most studied artefact in history. Many books and papers, The cloths have the pathology of a crucified man, and the ( much older provenance ) sudarium has so many points of forensic correspondence they are the same victim.

So interesting or not to you , there is no doubt the cloths exist, the blood and pathology is real.

... @Mountainmike, @Estrid, @Opdrey, @FrumiousBandersnatch ... is all of the bickering that's going on in this thread at the current moment simply over a couple of Catholic relics?

Are these the locus of this squabble about who has the bigger academic chops?

I'm lost at the moment, trying to get a handle on this conversation.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

I only ever wanted to talk about evidence.

@Opdrey only ever seems to want to talk about me and like all ad hominems it descends into bickering.

If you want to present the current evidence and evaluations that are out there for the Shroud, that's fine by me. However, evidences are nearly always open to interpretation and some fudging, so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't place as much credance in the Shroud (or any relics) the way I might with, say, the letter to the Galatians and see it as an artifact of our faith.

Whether interested or not, I’m surprised you put ufos, ghosts, into the same category as the shroud.

Who knows? Maybe the Shroud is real. But I'm skeptical that the 'evidence' for it clearly shines forth as much as some in certain Christian communities would like to aver that it does, or at least any more than some of the bone ossuaries do that have been found and supposedly point directly to Jesus' dead body (as some skeptics like to highlight and push at Christians in their wonderings).

The shroud is a real object at a known place. ( as are sudarium & linceul) It has been studied close up . It is probably the most studied artefact in history. Many books and papers, The cloths have the pathology of a crucified man, and the ( much older provenance ) sudarium has so many points of forensic correspondence they are the same victim.

So interesting or not to you , there is no doubt the cloths exist!

Yes, I know the Shroud exists as an actual cloth that scientists can visually and empirically handle and research. But there are a number of contingencies in that process that I think will obscure any definitive, conclusive evaluations as to the exact identity and nature of the Shroud. However, I'd like to be shown that I'm wrong on that point, so if you have evidences, please put them before us for our scrutiny.

Thanks, Mountainmike!

 

[Opdrey]

Eureka! Thanks - someone talking about evidence which is all I want to do.

Which would seem to make it a pretty poor chronometer.

Regain as you say in fabrics is of course one. What is not disputable is it is much older than mediaeval, based on vanillin alone.

From a 2020 article (the important bits are highlighted in red):

"Rogers (2005) proposed a method for cross checking the dates of ancient textiles by measuring the loss of vanillin from residual lignin at the growth nodes of linen fibers. The tests he performed on the Shroud threads suggested to him a much greater age than the results Damon et al. (1989) obtained. However, Rogers’ method has limitations and his results have not yet been widely accepted. Freer-Waters and Jull (2010) examined a remnant sample taken from the original radiocarbon dating experiment under visible and ultra-violet light and found no significant contamination on the sample. Riani et al. (2012) evaluated the Shroud sample measurements and found in evaluating 387,072 plausible spatial sites of sub-sample locations a surprising heterogeneity in the measurements. Fanti et al. (2013) developed a series of relationships between characteristics of fiber over time and a method of estimating the age of the fabric. He subsequently applied these techniques to a series of fibers extracted from the Shroud and derived an estimated calendar age of 90 AD +/− 200 yrs (Fanti et al., 2015). However, at this time Fanti, et al.’s approach is relatively new and not yet widely accepted." (SOURCE)

Even Rogers himself (HERE) notes the effect of temperature in the vanillin loss:

"The major problem in estimating the age of the shroud is the fact that the rate law is exponential; i.e., the maximum diurnal temperature is much more important than is the lowest storage temperature. However, some reasonable storage temperatures can be considered to give a range of predicted ages. If the shroud had been stored at a constant 25 ◦C, it would have taken about 1319 years to lose a conservative 95% of its vanillin. At 23 ◦C, it would have taken about 1845 years. At 20 ◦C, it would take about 3095 years."

Rogers obviously biases his assumption by assuming a range of storage temperatures. When taken at face value those calculations are nice brackets, but if the Shroud has been stored under different conditions in different places (some places were a constant 25degC storage temperature would be unlikely, like in the Middle East) or maybe even exposed to a FIRE (?) it would seem that this is tenuous at best.

It's sorta kinda compelling, but if one can nit-pick 14-C dating apart this should be a piece of cake to pick apart chemically.

If vanillin is susceptible to thermal impacts (and that's explicit in the Arrhenius equation) it seems to me to be a pretty sketchy technique. Certainly compared to 14-C dating which would be expected to be relatively insensible to that kind of environmental change.

 

[Mountainmike]

Relics are not a article of faith, nor the basis of faith, and nobody treats them so. The corollary is that it would be surprising if there is no evidence of either Jesus the person or the miraculous, and it seems there is a core set of relics and phenomena that do defy explanation.

One thing many are surprised at, is that there are candidates of all three cloths of the tomb. The sudarium ( facecloth , used to wrap around the head post mortem) and tunic ( in argentuil, France) for which soldiers cast lots. All three cloths have big forensic correspondence, yet they have never been in the same place in recorded history, other than in the tomb.

If you want to present the current evidence and evaluations that are out there for the Shroud, that's fine by me. However, evidences are nearly always open to interpretation and some fudging, so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't place as much credance in the Shroud (or any relics) the way I might with, say, the letter to the Galatians and see it as an artifact of our faith.

Who knows? Maybe the Shroud is real. But I'm skeptical that the 'evidence' for it clearly shines forth as much as some in certain Christian communities would like to aver that it does, or at least any more than some of the bone ossuaries do that have been found and supposedly point directly to Jesus' dead body (as some skeptics like to highlight and push at Christians in their wonderings).



Yes, I know the Shroud exists as an actual cloth that scientists can visually and empirically handle and research. But there are a number of contingencies in that process that I think will obscure any definitive, conclusive evaluations as to the exact identity and nature of the Shroud. However, I'd like to be shown that I'm wrong on that point, so if you have evidences, please put them before us for our scrutiny.

Thanks, Mountainmike!

 

[Opdrey]

Relics are not a article of faith, nor the basis of faith, and nobody treats them so.

They are, however, venerated. They provided to the Medieval mind a direct and palpable connection to the faith.

That is why Churches were very interested in getting relics. It would provide a pilgrimage stop which is the analogue to the modern day concept of increasing tourist traffic to improve the city's economy.

Religious artifacts were not uncommonly faked for this purpose.

Obviously one's faith should not hinge on a relic. But there are many people for whom it is an integral means to bolster their faith.

 

[Hans Blaster]

A shocking display of anti-wombatism.
Wombats are intelligent and have the largest brain capacity amongst marsupials.

The UN has set aside October 23rd as World Wombat Day to highlight the discrimination against wombats.

I only hope they are more deserving than my mortal enemies (who already have a day): groundhogs.

 

[Opdrey]

I only hope they are more deserving than my mortal enemies (who already have a day): groundhogs.

Don't listen to @sjastro, clearly they are a stooge for "Big Wombat". At least they aren't Quokkas! Those things look like grinning idiots. Why are they so happy? No problems? Oh looky! Happy, happy, happy. Oh I hate 'em.

 

[sjastro]

I only hope they are more deserving than my mortal enemies (who already have a day): groundhogs.

On the subject of mortal enemies don't be fooled by a wombat's cute appearance.
Wombats are deadly creatures and use twerking to kill introduced predator species such as cats and foxes.

 

[Opdrey]

On the subject of mortal enemies don't be fooled by a wombat's cute appearance.
Wombats are deadly creatures and use twerking to kill introduced predator species such as cats and foxes.

Don't they also make cubic fecal pellets? Gotta hand it to the Wombat. Behind of Doom!

 

[Opdrey]

I can't help but notice that the "vanillin decomposition dating technique" pioneered by Rogers in 2005 doesn't show up in much of anything else other than papers discussing the dating of the Shroud. I'm genuinely curious how such a ground-breaking technique that could overturn 14-C dating and get around the problems from invisible textile repairs wouldn't be pursued more.

I could be missing something but if this is going to be the sine qua non of dating techniques shouldn't there be more active research on this important topic?

 

[Mountainmike]

First note that archeometry is a journal linked to Oxford.

At least They note correctly the lack of homogeneity which the 1988 daters should have done but did not, which is progress for Oxford, the most staunch previous defenders of the date. There was a time when neither archeometry or radiocarbon journal ( linked to Arizona) would entertain criticism. They rejected the Marino hypothesis which proved to be correct. There are indeed end to end spliced threads, with gum Arabic one end, not the other,

They also state that measurements
“were modified from their original ‘raw’ laboratory values and transformed into their published form using an unstated methodology”.
The figures were “ doctored” to show homogeneity.


But THIS is the fundamental problem -
they are playing with stats, and ignoring the elephant in the room.

As Rogers has shown in a variety of papers and books ( any since 2000) , the sample and shroud are made of different stuff.
- The sample has cotton.
- The linen is if different structure ( it is like garden cane) it has different diameter / node spacing and lignin.
- the sample is dyed and has such as gum Arabic.
- the Uv fluorescence and spectrographs differ.
- there are fibres found spliced end to end , one end dyed.

No amount of stats can put back in what was not in the sample . That paper speaks of “ contamination” - the contamination was most of the sample.

The reason for looking at other dating methods to begin with was the lack of relevance of the RC sample date, on the basis of “ what else san you do with the fibres to hand “. Fanti used 3 other methods, like strength. None of which are yet proven accurate, but all good enough to dismiss the idea of mediaeval.

One fly in the ointment of lignin dating is bleaching procedures noted by ( Roman) pliny and others, which could have removed it, rather than age.

Rogers also dismisses radiation for the mark ,although that cannot be exhaustive, and maybe he is right, but as he admits no one hypothesis works. His favoured Maillard reaction has problems with diffusion.

One that interesting to me is electrostatic discharge. Rogers says he failed to reproduce it, fanti did.

But question, if nobody knows how to fake it, how was it faked. It really does have the pathology of a crucified man, that corresponds to the sudarium.

Which would seem to make it a pretty poor chronometer.



From a 2020 article (the important bits are highlighted in red):

"Rogers (2005) proposed a method for cross checking the dates of ancient textiles by measuring the loss of vanillin from residual lignin at the growth nodes of linen fibers. The tests he performed on the Shroud threads suggested to him a much greater age than the results Damon et al. (1989) obtained. However, Rogers’ method has limitations and his results have not yet been widely accepted. Freer-Waters and Jull (2010) examined a remnant sample taken from the original radiocarbon dating experiment under visible and ultra-violet light and found no significant contamination on the sample. Riani et al. (2012) evaluated the Shroud sample measurements and found in evaluating 387,072 plausible spatial sites of sub-sample locations a surprising heterogeneity in the measurements. Fanti et al. (2013) developed a series of relationships between characteristics of fiber over time and a method of estimating the age of the fabric. He subsequently applied these techniques to a series of fibers extracted from the Shroud and derived an estimated calendar age of 90 AD +/− 200 yrs (Fanti et al., 2015). However, at this time Fanti, et al.’s approach is relatively new and not yet widely accepted." (SOURCE)

Even Rogers himself (HERE) notes the effect of temperature in the vanillin loss:

"The major problem in estimating the age of the shroud is the fact that the rate law is exponential; i.e., the maximum diurnal temperature is much more important than is the lowest storage temperature. However, some reasonable storage temperatures can be considered to give a range of predicted ages. If the shroud had been stored at a constant 25 ◦C, it would have taken about 1319 years to lose a conservative 95% of its vanillin. At 23 ◦C, it would have taken about 1845 years. At 20 ◦C, it would take about 3095 years."

Rogers obviously biases his assumption by assuming a range of storage temperatures. When taken at face value those calculations are nice brackets, but if the Shroud has been stored under different conditions in different places (some places were a constant 25degC storage temperature would be unlikely, like in the Middle East) or maybe even exposed to a FIRE (?) it would seem that this is tenuous at best.

It's sorta kinda compelling, but if one can nit-pick 14-C dating apart this should be a piece of cake to pick apart chemically.

If vanillin is susceptible to thermal impacts (and that's explicit in the Arrhenius equation) it seems to me to be a pretty sketchy technique. Certainly compared to 14-C dating which would be expected to be relatively insensible to that kind of environmental change.

 

[Astrid]

I can't help but notice that the "vanillin decomposition dating technique" pioneered by Rogers in 2005 doesn't show up in much of anything else other than papers discussing the dating of the Shroud. I'm genuinely curious how such a ground-breaking technique that could overturn 14-C dating and get around the problems from invisible textile repairs wouldn't be pursued more.

I could be missing something but if this is going to be the sine qua non of dating techniques shouldn't there be more active research on this important topic?

Since the rate varies it outta be a fav. for dating - deniers,
as they wont have to make up anything, the way they do
with radioactive dating and the speed of light which
must speed up and slow down to keep time with
their crackpot cosmologies.