Good science is being done everyday in laboratories and universities across the country. Good science happens when proper rules (protocols) are established and followed. It is good science that leads to breakthrough discoveries in medicine, technology and countless other avenues of research.

Bad science happens when the rules are ignored, when sampling gets sloppy, or worst of all, when results are dictated by politics or by some biased predisposition.

And then there is junk science. This is when pseudo-science seeks publicity for the sake of TV ratings and is just a masquerade for the cameras.

This Lenten season, Christians as usual were the brunt of yet another attack in the form of a junk-science documentary, James Cameron’s Tomb of Jesus nonsense on The Discovery Channel. Almost no credible archaeologist supports his claim, nor is it supported by the historical record. But things like that do not matter when you’re doing junk science; all that matters is ratings.

When it comes to bad science, there is no better example than carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. In 1988, three carbon dating labs were given a sample from the cloth and found out it was only 700 years old.

Or is it? Had they followed the original protocol of cutting multiple samples from different locations, we would have our answer.

But instead they cut only one sample from an outside corner precisely where the cloth had been held and handled hundreds of times over the centuries. A location any archaeologist would avoid like the plague because of potential contamination or in this case, repair.

They were supposed to perform micro-chemical tests to make sure the sample was fully representative of the entire Shroud. Did they do it?

No. At every step along the way they violated protocols that would have ensured their science to be impeachable. As a result, it has now been impeached and rendered irrelevant.

How? Enter Ray Rogers, a world-class thermal chemist with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory with over 50 published papers to his credit.

Doing the micro-chemical tests the carbon labs were supposed to do in the first place, he analyzed threads from the main body of the shroud with threads taken from the corner where it was dated.

Lo and behold, they are not the same! The presence of starch, cotton, and dye all indicate an area that was repaired.

The Shroud is made out of flax. There is no cotton, starch or dye anywhere except in this specific area that had been repaired.

Multiple samples would have caught this as an anomaly and eliminated the sample from testing. His research was published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, “ThermoChimica Acta,” in January of 2005.

Gleaning from the abstract he states, “The radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the age of the shroud.”

Where was CBS News or the Discovery Channel on this one? When the carbon dating results were announced in 1988, it was the lead story all over the world. When it was proven to be nothing more than bad science, it barely makes a ripple.

I accept that science and the media are both generally skewed against the Christian faith, but you think they could leave us alone during Lent.

Somehow, I don’t think they would be willing to do an expose on Mohammed during Ramadan. Happy Easter.

Russ Breault

Shroud of Turin Education Project, Inc.

Peachtree City, Ga.

www.shroud2000.com

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