Here are two clips from a recent debate in Ireland on miracles, especially the so-called “miracle cures” that supposedly occur at Lourdes, France and similar shrines. On a panel of faitheists, priests, and advocates of the divine, Michael Nugent, head of Atheist Ireland, holds his own against the existence of miracles in an intellectually hostile but civil milieu. He’s the only one who even questions these superstitions.

I recommend watching the entire debate (the second clip), if for no other reason than to see the grasp that faith still holds on Ireland, even among doctors and t.v. presenters.

YouTube gives details of the debate:

Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland debates miracles on RTE’s Spirit Level with host Joe Duffy, Fr Richard Gibbons, parish priest at Knock, Louise Hall, author of a book on Medjegorje, and Dr Michael Moran, a member of the Lourdes medical miracle assessment committee.

The first short clip shows Nugent (who apparently has done his homework) taking down the efficacy of visiting Lourdes. The statistics on rates of spontaneous cancer remission (higher than the cure rate at Lourdes!) were new to me. If you don’t have 26 minutes to watch the second clip, at least watch this 1.3 minutes of takedown:

The second, longer clip (which includes the first) shows everybody but Nugent at least holding out the possibility that visiting Lourdes (or its equivalent in Ireland, Knock) really can cure you. Note that the priest says that cures “are not a matter of statistics,” which of course is bogus. How else can you show that visiting Lourdes will help your malady? But several of the faith-osculators say, “You really have to visit it for yourself.” They argue that you can’t suss out the true efficacy of this place until you go there and “encounter the divine.” Somehow the “atmosphere of calmness, energy, and spirutually” is a substitute for real evidence of God.

Doctor Moran is an annoying waffler. When Nugent asks him, “Do you believe that Muhammad split the Moon in two?”, the doctor, an apparent believer, replies, “I don’t really have much of a background in Islam, to be honest, so I don’t know.”  And yet the doctor calls himself a scientist. The proper scientific answer would be “we have no evidence for Moon-splitting.” (One Muslim woman says that this claim isn’t part of the Qur’an, but it is (see the link above).

Here’s the full video (recommended by Professor Ceiling Cat):

Nugent gives another eloquent answer when the obviously biased presenter asks the panel at 20:23, “Would you knock Knock?” Nugent asserts that atheists can indeed have a sense of community and meaning, and that the notion that religion gives us morality is a “con,” as are miracles themselves. Father Gibbons does not look happy. Nugent goes on to ask a good question, “If you attribute the cures to God, why don’t you attribute the diseases to God?” None of the believers have an answer, of course.

Thank God (can I say that?) for people like Nugent, who provided a genial smackdown of the tawdry Catholic trade of miracles in a land where that trade is still big business. But at least the discussion is being had in public, on television, and they do include an atheist. I’m always in favor of atheists like Nugent—those who really make a difference in this world.

It’s a common atheist trope to call out those people who, after a tragedy, say that those who survived were spared by God, or that such survivals were “miraculous”.

In fact, such criticism has become so common that it’s almost a cheap shot, and yet it’s still worth pointing out the hypocrisy implicit in asserting loudly that survivors were spared by God while not mentioning that, by the same token, those who died must have been killed by God. The reason to mention such things is that they reveal not only how common faith is, but how inconsistently it’s applied. I say this not to cheapen the horrible pain experienced by the friends and family of the missing, but to suggest that perhaps it’s palliative to know that these deaths were not God’s decision, but the inevitable vagaries of a natural world. The answer to “why me?” is simply “shit happens.”

So two items about the missing Malaysia flight 370, which almost certainly has crashed without survivors.

First, according to WBRC News in Birmingham, Alabama (I also heard this on NBC News last night), a man who almost boarded the doomed flight is attributing his survival to God:

A man with a ticket for the lost plane to Malaysia called a last-minute decision not to board an act of God.

Greg Candelaria works in global technology services, which requires him to frequently fly around the world.

He planned to board Flight 370 for business and then meet his daughter, who is in China wrapping up the adoption process for her child.

“I think this is a God thing,” Candelaria said. “I don’t think it’s coincidence. Part of my motivation was to fly over there on business and meet my daughter and my new granddaughter.”

Company policy mandated Candelaria fly back to Houston for the flight to Asia instead of his original plan to fly from Spain.

If all had gone as planned, he would have been on the Beijing-bound Flight 370 that vanished this past weekend.

Has anybody ever asked one of these exultant survivors if they think that the deaths were also “a God thing”? I’d be curious how they’d answer.

Finally, reader Chris sent me a link to the MSN News “picture of the day” about the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. The caption is this:

A sand sculpture in a beach in Puri, India, wishes for the well-being of the passengers of a missing Malaysian Airlines flight.

I find that ineffably sad in two ways.

A recent article by Carpinteri et al. (no link or free download, but judicious inquiry may yield you a pdf) demonstrates the two ways that religion is a pseudoscience.  The first is that it relies on empirical claims to buttress its dogma. While Sophisticated Theologians™ may argue that God is beyond all evidence, being some imperceptible and numinous “thing” that can neither be defined nor seen as interacting with the cosmos, that’s not what believers think.  So, for example, claims that Jesus was born of a virgin, died, was resurrected, or that Mohammad went to heaven on a horse, or that Joseph Smith received the golden plates in New York and translated them, or that 75 million years ago Xenu loaded his alien minions onto planes resembling DC-8s, or that there is an afterlife, and that good people go to Heaven, or that God hears and answers prayers, and is benevolent and all-powerful, are claims about the way the world is. And many of those claims are testable, though all have been refuted. In the prescientific era, these claims constituted a sort of science.

But as real science arose in the 15th and 16th centuries, and began eroding religion’s claims, religion began turning into a pseudoscience. That is, it still made empirical claims, but immunized itself against refutation of those claims using a variety of devices—the same devices used by other forms of pseudoscience like ESP, UFOlogy, homeopathy, and astrology. These include arguing that the propositions themselves are untestable, using poor standards of evidence (including reliance on “revelation” as a “way of knowing”), reliance on a priori personal biases that are not to be tested but merely confirmed, refusing to consider alternative hypotheses, and engaging in special pleading when religious tenets are disconfirmed.

We can see all of these—but especially in the last—in a paper by A. Carpinteri et al. on the Shroud of Turin, a paper that’s gotten a lot of publicity. It’s an attempt to defend scientific radio-carbon dating of the Shroud, which showed it to be a medieval forgery, by special pleading invoking earthquakes.

First, a short review. You almost surely know that the Shroud of Turin is a sheet of linen in a cathedral in Turin, Italy, bearing the likeness of a man who is said to be Jesus. The cloth is, indeed, supposed to be the burial shroud of Jesus. Here’s what it looks like: the image is much clearer in negative form than as a positive. Here’s the body (pictures from Wikipedia; there are actually two images on the shroud, as if the body had been enfolded):

The face in negative and positive:

Although scientists and artists aren’t yet sure how the image was made (it appears to include AB blood, suggesting, since Mary was a virgin, that God carried either an A or a B Landsteiner allele (or both), but what is not in dispute is that radiocarbon dating of the linen shroud by three independent labs puts the date at between 1000 AD to 1260 AD. In other words, the shroud was medieval, and could not have been Jesus’s burial shroud.

While religionists have raised numerous reasons why the dating could be wrong—foremost among them is the claim that the dated sample was taken from a piece of cloth used to patch the shroud much later—none of these appear credible. The Vatican itself takes no position on the authenticity of the shroud, which of course means that believers are free to think the Church thinks it could be real.

Science has thus debunked this as Jesus’s shroud.  But religionists, in their pseudoscientific way, won’t give up.  They have now raised a new ad hoc hypothesis to explain why the dating was wrong—earthquakes! To be specific, an earthquake occurring after Jesus’s body was wrapped produced a bunch of neutrons by shaking up the rocks. Those neutrons were captured by Nitrogen-14 to produce Carbon-14, the parent material used in radiometric dating. (This is in fact how Carbon-14 is formed in the atmosphere.) But Carbon-14 also degenerates back to nitrogen by emitting an electron. Carbon 12, the more common isotope of carbon, does not decay. Since a carbon-containing sample will have, when it is made or when its possessor died (like an old piece of wood), the same ratio of Carbon-14 to Carbon-12 present in the atmosphere at the time of manufacture or death, the Carbon-14 will gradually decay (no more carbon can be absorbed from the atmosphere). At the end, if we know the rate at which Carbon-14 decays (its half-life is 5720 years), we can estimate the age of a sample by simply measuring the ratio of C-14/C-12.

You can see, then, that if a sample were to somehow be able to be infused with extra Carbon-14 after it died or was manufactured, it would look younger than it was: as if the original amount of radiometric carbon had not sufficiently decayed to give it a lower and time-appropriate C-14/C-12 ratio.

And that is what Carpinteri et al. suggest: an earthquake around the time of Jesus’s death (33 A.D.) caused a huge emission of neutrons; those neutrons were captured by the nitrogen in the shroud, producing a higher level of C-14 than would have been there if the shroud were really made at the time of Jesus. That, in turn, would make the shroud look younger than it really was. In other words, they’re suggesting the original dating was wrong because the assumption (that no C-14 had gotten into the shroud) was violated by a big earthquake.

Oh, and they also suggest that neutron capture, presumably by the body, would have produced the image, though there’s no reason, scientifically, to think that an image could be produced by that.

Although there is evidence that some earthquakes can transitorily release substantial amounts of neutrons into the atomosphere, there are three scientific problems with this hypothesis.

1. The evidence for an earthquake is thin. The authors cite four sources. The first is Thallos, a historian in Rome who wrote about 50 A.D., and whose works mention Jesus as well as an earthquake and a solar eclipse that happened during the Crucifixion. This evidence is not credible (there was no solar eclipse then), and Biblical scholars no longer accept Thallos’s quoted words as evidence for the historicity of Jesus.

The second is the Gospel of Matthew, which also mentions an earthquake when Jesus died. Needless to say, this is not independent evidence, and the other Gospels don’t mention an earthquake.  Why not? If it had happened, wouldn’t all the Gospels have mentioned it?

The third source is Joseph of Arimathea, who, according to the Gospels, donated his own future tomb to Jesus. His “narrative,” a non-canonical Gospel that mentions an earthquake, is not accepted by scholars as independent evidence for the historicity of Jesus; indeed, I can find no credible evidence that this Joseph even lived.

Finally, Carpinteri et al. cite, of all people, Dante’s Inferno (XXI, Canto: 106-114) as mentioning a big earthquake, but who would possibly think that that is independent evidence for an earthquake, since Dante wrote this 13 centuries after Jesus supposedly lived and was, of course, basing much of his poem on the Bible. The authors fail to cast any doubt on the credibility of these sources.

2. There is no evidence that neutron emission during an earthquake could alter the C-14 content of a shroud. This, of course, could be tested in laboratory experiments, but the authors didn’t do it.

3. The alteration of the amount of C14 in the shroud would have to be sufficient to make it look sufficiently pre-modern, but not too young. In fact, the first accepted mention of the Shroud happens to be 1390, pretty close to the time when it was radiocarbon dated. If there was more C-14 generated by the earthquake, it would make it look like it dated from, say, 1600 or later, which wouldn’t comport with the historical records.  So the earthquake managed to give it a false data that happens to correspond to its first mention. That’s too much of a coincidence, and the authors don’t mention this.

4. There is no known way that an earthquake could, by neutron emission, produce an image of a body on a shroud. The authors don’t deal with this, either.

The Carpinteri paper is thus a confection of unlikely and untested hypotheses, all assembled to try to save the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as the true burial cloth of Jesus. It is not a piece of science, but a piece of apologetics.

Nevertheless, it’s been uncritically accepted in some venues. Take a look at the February 11 article in the Telegraph, “Turin Shroud may have been created by earthquake from time of Jesus.” It presents the theory, and offers not a single piece of counterevidence, nor a single dissenting scientist (and there are some), casting doubt on the thesis. This can be attributed to shoddy journalism, to a credulous or lazy journalist (Sarah Knapton), to a desire to placate a public hungry for evidence that Jesus really lived, or all of these factors. What is certain is that the Carpinteri et al. paper is deeply flawed, is not objective science but advocacy, and has been reported uncritically by the press. I’m just a lowly website writer who spent an hour reading the paper and an hour writing this piece and looking stuff up. Why couldn’t Knapton do the same thing?

Indeed, even Wikipedia does a better job than the popular press, and points out something that Ms. Knapton should have known: Carpinteri is the editor of the journal that published this flawed paper. What does that say about the review process? As Wikipedia notes:

A team of researchers from the Politecnico di Torino, led by Professor Alberto Carpinteri (and published in the journal Meccanica, where same Alberto Carpinteri is currently the acting Editor-in-Chief, believe that if a magnitude 8.2 earthquake occurred in Jerusalem in 33 AD, it may have released sufficient radiation to have increased the level of carbon-14 isotopes in the shroud, which could skew carbon dating results, making the shroud appear younger.This hypothesis has been questioned by other scientists, including a radiocarbon-dating expert. The underlying science is widely disputed, and funding for the underlying research has been withdrawn by the Italian government after protests and pressure from more than 1000 Italian and international scientists. Dr REM Hedges, of the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit of the University of Oxford, states that “the likelihood that [neutron irradiation] influenced the date in the way proposed is in my view so exceedingly remote that it beggars scientific credulity.” Raymond N. Rogers conducted various tests on linen fibers, and concluded that “the current evidence suggests that all radiation-based hypotheses for image formation will ultimately be rejected.”

Of course none of this counterevidence will shake the faithful, who will still see the Shroud as authentic, and will come in droves to pay homage when the Shroud has one of its rare showings. Like believers in homeopathy or ESP (or, now, Adam and Eve), they continue to hold their faith despite all scientific counterevidence.

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Carpinteri, A., G. Lacidogna, and O. Borla. 2014. Is the Shroud of Turin in relation to the Old Jerusalem historical earthquake? Meccanica DOI 10.1007/s11012-013-9865-x