Miracle of the Shroud / Blood on the shroud

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Effective Discussion

Me, #1905:
- Can someone point me to an effective discussion between people who start out with basic disagreements re the controversial issue they're discussing?
Dinwar,
- I don't understand how any of the above is an effective discussion between people who start out with basic disagreements re the controversial issue they're discussing.
--- Jabba
 
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Stop trying to draw attention away from you inability to address the flaws in your thinking, it only underlines your dishonesty.
 
Jabba: an effective discussion can only happen if both sides are willing to listen and consider the other side. In this case, your arguments have been considered and discarded for very good scientific reasons. You, however, refuse to consider the other side. Your current sidestepping of the issue (C14 dating, and your lack of understanding of it) in favor of this "effective discussion" thing are very telling. Just stop it and address the issue. You have been given a simple task by Dinwar (Show what contamination is necessary to achieve your dating). Get to it, or acknowledge that you cannot. And, if you cannot, you need to acknowledge that you are not in a position to question the C14 dating. THAT would be an effective discussion.
 
Jabba, this request to see how other discussions between disagreeing parties have progressed is nothing but an irrelevant diversion. Your one requirement in this thread is to provide a CREDIBLE reason to doubt the validity of the c14 tests.

Do this, and the tone of discussion here would be totally utterly inconsequential. Evidence and facts are what you need. Can you provide them? Where are the peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting your assertion that three separate labs were incompetent enough to all do the testing incorrectly?
 
Carbon Dating & Effective Discussion

- OK. At the moment, I see three main issues that you guys wish me to address:
1) How much I know about carbon dating.
2) Can I point to any independent scientific paper arguing against the dating?
3) What does my claim that no one has been able to duplicate the image on the Shroud have to do with the carbon dating?

- If I've missed something, or not paraphrasing correctly, let me know.
- If you have a preference, let me know.
- Otherwise, I'll pick one of the above myself and try to address it in a way that will satisfy you guys.

--- Jabba
Dinwar,

- I got several responses to the above, but only 3 suggested an issue to address, and they all suggested #2. No one suggested #1 (your main issue), so I went with #2. That was decided on 9 June in post 1794.
- It wasn’t till18 June, in post 1874, that I was able to present my findings.
- No one liked my answer, so I spent my next several posts responding to their responses.
- Perhaps I shouldn't have responded to any of their responses following my answer to #2, but instead, have dived right into an answer to #1… I don’t know.

- But note, that we actually “got somewhere” in our debate/discussion – I WAS FORCED TO ADMIT THAT I HAD BEEN WRONG about the number of peer reviewed papers on each side… That’s the kind of baby step I’m advocating.
- My next step would have been to start addressing the reasons that you guys aren’t impressed by the papers (non-PR included) that I offered. But now, I’m thinking that I should drop that for now, and try to answer #1 (How much I know about carbon dating).
- I assume that no one will disagree with that choice, but just in case, I’ll publish this now, and START WRITING UP my knowledge re carbon dating (rather than trying to include it in this post) and thereby give everyone a chance to disagree (and also, give me a chance to address one issue at a time).

--- Jabba
 
Hans,
- Just point me to one of those effective discussions on this forum between people who start out with basic disagreements re the controversial issue they're discussing.
--- Jabba

Me, #1905:
- Can someone point me to an effective discussion between people who start out with basic disagreements re the controversial issue they're discussing?

Dinwar,
- I don't understand how any of the above is an effective discussion between people who start out with basic disagreements re the controversial issue they're discussing.
--- Jabba

Dinwar,

- I got several responses to the above, but only 3 suggested an issue to address, and they all suggested #2. No one suggested #1 (your main issue), so I went with #2. That was decided on 9 June in post 1794.
- It wasn’t till18 June, in post 1874, that I was able to present my findings.
- No one liked my answer, so I spent my next several posts responding to their responses.
- Perhaps I shouldn't have responded to any of their responses following my answer to #2, but instead, have dived right into an answer to #1… I don’t know.

- But note, that we actually “got somewhere” in our debate/discussion – I WAS FORCED TO ADMIT THAT I HAD BEEN WRONG about the number of peer reviewed papers on each side… That’s the kind of baby step I’m advocating.
- My next step would have been to start addressing the reasons that you guys aren’t impressed by the papers (non-PR included) that I offered. But now, I’m thinking that I should drop that for now, and try to answer #1 (How much I know about carbon dating).
- I assume that no one will disagree with that choice, but just in case, I’ll publish this now, and START WRITING UP my knowledge re carbon dating (rather than trying to include it in this post) and thereby give everyone a chance to disagree (and also, give me a chance to address one issue at a time).

--- Jabba


How's about you stop wasting our time with this nonsense and start supplying your alleged evidence for flaws in the radiocarbon dating?
 
- It wasn’t till18 June, in post 1874, that I was able to present my findings.
- No one liked my answer, so I spent my next several posts responding to their responses.
- Perhaps I shouldn't have responded to any of their responses following my answer to #2, ...
- My next step would have been to start addressing the reasons that you guys aren’t impressed by the papers (non-PR included) that I offered. But now, I’m thinking that I should drop that for now...

You mean, you couldn't defend your claim these papers are worth consideration?
These papers:
...
- As far as I can tell, the invalidity side also has only two – one, the Rogers article in Thermochimica Acta; and two, http://www2.lse.ac.uk/statistics/research/RAFC04May2010.pdf. (Here, I’ve temporarily lost the citation for the peer-reviewed journal in which this paper was very recently (last month?) published, but I’m pretty sure that the journal was Statistics. Note that this paper had not been peer-reviewed when I was going around claiming that the invalidity argument had more PR articles than the one PR article (the original) claiming validity… Mea culpa…)

- I’m running into a lot more non-PR articles claiming invalidity, but I’ll skip most of them for now, ‘suspecting’ that you won’t be impressed. Here are 3:
http://shroud.com/pdfs/chronology.pdf - Marino & Prior, 2008
http://shroud.com/pdfs/addendum.pdf - Marino & Prior,
http://shroud.com/pdfs/jackson.pdf - Jackson’s proposal

OK, Jabba.
Roger's paper has been gone over here quite thoroughly.
You know that.

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/statistics/research/RAFC04May2010.pdf
You've yet to show it's peer reviewed.

http://shroud.com/pdfs/chronology.pdf - Marino & Prior, 2008
http://shroud.com/pdfs/addendum.pdf - Marino & Prior,

These two have been gone over.
You know that.

http://shroud.com/pdfs/jackson.pdf - Jackson’s proposal
I posted up the results of the Oxford testing of that proposal.
You know that.

" But now, I’m thinking that I should drop that for now."
You mean you are abandoning your claim these papers are meaningful to the discussion?
 
Just to make it clear just how aware Jabba is of the limitations of the papers he's posted, here his own explanation of the nature of the Marino & Prior source
- Marino and Prior have tried to gather up, abstract and list all the different scholarly arguments and evidence supporting a conclusion that the piece of the Shroud studied by the three universities in their carbon-dating was not representative of the larger cloth. M & P came up with 45 different entries and 25 pages worth -- not counting about 13 pages of appendices. ...

from http://debate.atheist.net/showthread.php?p=81352

Here's one post rebutting it:
http://debate.atheist.net/showthread.php?p=81066#post81066

Jabba, you know this doesn't repesent an original study.
You know it's been refuted.
Why post it up here?
 
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What I know about Carbon Dating

Dinwar,

- I know very little about carbon dating. And, the little I do know comes mostly from this thread.
- As I understand it, the dating is based upon the “ingestion” of 14C (a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about 5000 years) while the plant or animal “tissue” involved is living – giving us a way to estimate the time of death of the plant or animal tissue…
- I understand that there would have to be a lot of “contamination” by new tissue in order to account for a misreading of 1300 years. Harry Gove says that the weight of whatever is being dated would have to be about 75% brand new, to 25% old, in order to account for those 13 centuries. Gove accepted that Garza-Valdes did find some previously undisclosed contamination that remained after cleaning, but that Garza’s contamination wouldn’t account for more than 1 century of misreading.
- Whatever, I have to admit that my understanding is very basic, and I can’t swear that even my basics are correct…

- But mostly, I claim that we don’t need to be expert in a particular field in order to somewhat effectively judge the competing claims of experts in that field. In fact, we are forced to do this 'all the time...'
- For instance, when we vote for President, or Prime Minister, or whatever, we need to judge the person’s policies, or claimed policies, when very few of us are expert in the different fields of critical importance (economics, national security, social interaction, whatever) for which the candidates need to propose policies.
- In order to choose effectively -- even though we are not experts -- we try to ‘listen’ carefully, and apply our best logic to the candidates’ explanations and TO THEIR RESPONSES TO EACH OTHER. In other words, what we need to hear, or read, is EFFECTIVE debate between the candidates regarding the particular controversy. Which one is answering the questions, and seems to be making the most sense? And, this (EFFECTIVE debate) is what I claim is almost always lacking, and what some think tank or university should be thinking about.
- And it appears that none is – I haven’t seen, read or heard any real improvements in the debates to which I’ve been privy, and googling hasn’t turned up anyone doing that kind of specific research…

- Now, this isn’t to say that the probability of being correct in these judgments doesn’t correlate with one’s knowledge in the particular field -- but then, it IS to say that this correlation is nowhere near perfect.
- And that’s precisely what I’m trying to do here, in this thread, with my debate thesis. I’m trying to formalize and optimize our human effort to judge a controversial issue in regard to which we had little initial understanding. We need to hear both sides, back and forth, of the whole story…

- And then, while you, personally, have a good understanding of the carbon dating field, I would surely expect that most of your companions here had little more understanding of this field than did I when starting, but that they had pretty much made up their minds about this particular case of carbon dating before reading any of your explanations… In other words, they figured that they could judge this issue for themselves -- even though they had no experience, and little understanding, of the field itself.

- All that said, I’m probably not answering your question…

--- Jabba
 
Jabba,

You started off promisingly enough, but ended up with the same old blather.

Pity.

And that’s precisely what I’m trying to do here, in this thread, with my debate thesis. I’m trying to formalize and optimize our human effort to judge a controversial issue in regard to which we had little initial understanding.


There is no controversy.


We need to hear both sides, back and forth, of the whole story…


The story is that C14 dating has shown the Shroud of Turin to be a fake from the Middle Ages.

That's all, she wrote.

There is no other side.
 
- I understand that there would have to be a lot of “contamination” by new tissue in order to account for a misreading of 1300 years. Harry Gove says that the weight of whatever is being dated would have to be about 75% brand new, to 25% old, in order to account for those 13 centuries. Gove accepted that Garza-Valdes did find some previously undisclosed contamination that remained after cleaning, but that Garza’s contamination wouldn’t account for more than 1 century of misreading.
So how do you suggest the carbon dating tests managed to be so far out from what they would have to be in order for the Shroud to be a 1st century burial cloth?

If you accept that the carbon dating couldn't have been more than a century out, what does that leave?
 
...
- I understand that there would have to be a lot of “contamination” by new tissue in order to account for a misreading of 1300 years. Harry Gove says that the weight of whatever is being dated would have to be about 75% brand new, to 25% old, in order to account for those 13 centuries. Gove accepted that Garza-Valdes did find some previously undisclosed contamination that remained after cleaning, but that Garza’s contamination wouldn’t account for more than 1 century of misreading.
- Whatever, I have to admit that my understanding is very basic, and I can’t swear that even my basics are correct…

- But mostly, I claim that we don’t need to be expert in a particular field in order to somewhat effectively judge the competing claims of experts in that field. In fact, we are forced to do this 'all the time...'

Now that you understand why the challenges to the dating are baseless, why do you continue advocating a first century dating of the TS?
 
...

There is no controversy.

...

Perhaps you meant that there is no scientific controversy or that there is no controversy among people that are looking at the evidence objectively.

There is certainly a controversy. When I was looking around the web for answers to the questions that I posted earlier, I found many more sites promoting the idea that the shroud was associated with the first century and Jesus than sites providing objective information about the shroud.
 
Perhaps you meant that there is no scientific controversy or that there is no controversy among people that are looking at the evidence objectively.


I'd consider it to be a controversy if the people who were looking at the evidence objectively were in disagreement among themselves.

Disagreement between those who follow the evidence and those who are sworn to believe at all costs is no more a controversy than the existence of bigfeets or alien abductions.


There is certainly a controversy. When I was looking around the web for answers to the questions that I posted earlier, I found many more sites promoting the idea that the shroud was associated with the first century and Jesus than sites providing objective information about the shroud.


That sounds awfully close to an argumentum ad numerum.
 
What I know about Carbon Dating

Perhaps you meant that there is no scientific controversy or that there is no controversy among people that are looking at the evidence objectively.

There is certainly a controversy. When I was looking around the web for answers to the questions that I posted earlier, I found many more sites promoting the idea that the shroud was associated with the first century and Jesus than sites providing objective information about the shroud.
Dave,
- Thanks -- though I know that me thanking you doesn't make you any friends around here...
- I agree with your assessment except that I think that both sides have great difficulty looking at each others' evidence objectively. We humans just aren't nearly as objective as we think we are -- or at least, as objective as we would like to think we are. I've been quite surprised at how emotionally entrenched the scientists, and other researchers, studying this stuff -- on both sides -- seem to be. What'r'ya'gonna'do?
- I've been observing this in myself for a long time now, but in my best (admittedly, non-objective) opinion, seeing it in oneself tends to increase one's objectivity over time... And again, I've been watching this for a long time.
--- Jabba
 
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- I agree with your assessment except that I think that both sides have great difficulty looking at each others' evidence objectively.


There's your problem--only one side has any evidence.
 
... I think that both sides have great difficulty looking at each others' evidence objectively. ...

Could you explain in your own words just what are the objective obstacles to accepting the C14 dating of the TS, please?

Please don't post a link or repeat something you've posted up over the years.
This discussion really has to move forward, not simply go over the same old same old.
 
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