Design in the Shroud of Turin - The Shroud of Turin Website

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12feature found in the fine tuning arguments, but it does not closely resemble thiskind of design argument either.An imaginary design argument perhaps comes closer to capturing the kindof reasoning found in the argument in question. David Hume appears to presentan argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that is secondary to theone that occupies most of his attention. Hume has Cleanthes remark that if allpeople simultaneously heard in their native languages a voice speaking somethingworthy of a benevolent Being, the origins of such a voice would be immediatelyknown. Philo, Hume’s foil, is strangely silenced by this, and seemingly neverreplies to it in the course of the Dialogues. 11 Perhaps Hume meant to indicate hissympathy with it. Hume’s argument here turns in part on our ability to recognizethat intelligent speech of the kind imagined derives only from intelligent beings.Unfortunately, Hume’s argument involves an imaginary situation, so its value liesin its capacity to test our logical powers, not in advancing any claim about theactual world. Imaginary arguments often have little relevance to the world as weactually find it, where we have to deal with the information we have, or think wehave, however meager or plentiful.Every design argument has some points on which opponents can plausiblybring pressure. The evidential force itself of an argument is a weakness in some,
13e.g., Paley’s, but the plausibility of crucial statements is the Achilles’ heel ofothers. The obvious point of weakness in the design argument from the Shroud isthat our evidence that weak dematerialization was the mechanism by which theShroud was formed, while impressive, is not conclusive. However, the conjecturethat a very powerful intelligence would be responsible for such an extraordinaryevent seems highly plausible.Perhaps we can vary the events slightly to test the claim that the argumentitself, apart from its premises, looks strong. If exactly two people haddematerialized in the way conjectured, whether at the same time or at differenttimes in human history, that would not challenge the claim that these are acts of apowerful intelligence. Neither would the claim be challenged if an animal, ratherthan a human, had dematerialized in the fashion suggested. These results indicatethat a significant argument from design is implicit in the Jackson-Trenn theory ofhow the Shroud was formed.The Shroud and the Resurrection of JesusIf the Shroud has its origin in the medieval world, and if the Jackson-Trenntheory is a reasonably close account of the mechanism by which the Image wasformed, then the Shroud is a portent of an ominous kind. The Shroud wouldconstitute grounds for thinking that some suprahuman power is intent on bringing11 Nelson Pike discusses this in his notes on Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p.
Page 1 and 2: DESIGN IN THE SHROUD OF TURINPHILLI
Page 3 and 4: 3The Theory of “Weak Dematerializ
Page 6 and 7: 6not tear the thread fibrils. Howev
Page 8 and 9: 8Trenn do not specifically comment
Page 10 and 11: 10dematerialized, or only atoms of
Page 14 and 15: 14about human dissolution of the mo
Page 16 and 17: 16circumstances is that the molecul
Page 18 and 19: 18APPENDIXThe evidence indicating t
Page 20 and 21: 209. The dorsal foot imprint has an
Page 22: 22Tribbbe, Frank C. Portrait of Jes

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