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Feb. 28, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:11:11
Edition 524 - Fr. Robert Spitzer
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Still Howard Hughes and this is Still The Unexplained.
Hey, thank you very much for all of your emails that continue to pour in more than ever.
And it really is gratifying to know your stories and also really nice to hear so many people saying that these shows help them to pass the time and perhaps alleviate, or is the word ameliorate, some of the worry that we all feel during this period of COVID and lockdown.
You know, I'll make no secret of the fact, you know, that I'm honest about these things.
Lately, I've been to hell and back with all of this.
You know, I'm just in a position that a lot of people who write to me are too.
But I think together we can pull our way through this and we are finding a way out of it.
And the politicians, if we are to believe everything that we are told, are telling us that we could be well on the path to a better future.
A future, of course, that won't be the same as the past.
I don't think things are ever going to be quite the same, but maybe is getting closer towards that.
And maybe we'll start having, hopefully, as a result of all of this, maybe a little bit more concern for our fellow man or woman.
What do you say?
I don't know.
Or maybe that is a step too far.
Time will tell.
So thank you for all of your emails.
If you want to get in touch with me, please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you to Adam for his work on that.
If you want to make a donation to the show, thank you very much.
If you have recently, thank you.
You can do that at the website.
If you want to send me an email, then you can do that by following another link on the website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you to Haley for booking the guests on the online show, including the one we're about to speak with.
Father Robert Spitzer, he is an expert on the Shroud of Turin and a man who uniquely, pretty uniquely, unites religion and science.
He believes that there is a place for science within religion and for religion within science.
The two, in many eras of history, it seems to me, but I might be wrong, have been diametrically opposed and at each other's throats.
They may come together, who knows?
So, a conversation with Father Robert Spitzer.
Most of it will be about the current state of play as to research into the Turin Shroud and what we know and what we need to know.
I think are the other two questions we can boil it all down to.
Let's see how this goes.
Thank you very much for being part of my show and part of my life for very nearly 15 years.
Let's cross to the United States now and Father Robert Spitzer is on the Unexplained.
Father Robert, thank you very much for coming on my show.
It's great to be here, Howard.
Thank you for having me.
You are a man who intrigues me from what I read about you.
You talk an awful lot about the fact that despite what often the church has said or the way that the church has behaved over the years, hundreds of years, you believe that science and religion actually can mesh, which a lot of people in the religious community, and I'm not just talking about the Catholic Church, but other churches too, a lot of people over the years have not believed that, but you do.
Yeah, there's no question in my mind that certain areas are particular to science and certain areas of religion are particular to religion, but there is a real confluence in a lot of different ways.
Certainly there is a confluence in the earliest eras of cosmology.
There's a confluence too in what we call fine-tuning of universal constants and conditions.
There's also a confluence even in, well, the scientific investigation of a remarkable relic called the Shroud of Turin.
There's even a confluence in the possibility of miracles.
There's a confluence too that's going on in consciousness studies called near-death experiences and another area of consciousness studies called terminal lucidity.
And there in all of these areas in physics, cosmology, medicine, these studies of consciousness from the vantage point of physics and medicine, as well as even the study of relics and miracles in an age where we have electron microscopes and can subject things to even pyrolysis and mass spectrometry and things of that nature,
we really have an access into what might be called transphysical explanations.
We just plain run out of natural or physical explanations.
And that can't be a perfect proof that there's a transphysical or supernatural explanation.
But nevertheless, there is that confluence, and it's happening in so many different areas.
In my view, it's almost inescapable.
But Father Robert, a lot of your, even today, a lot of your confederates, compatriots, your friends in religion, in Orthodox religion, wouldn't be thinking that way, would they?
Yeah, I would say that some of them maybe have not studied science very much or have not maybe studied the scientific aspects that touch upon transcendence or what I would call the places where the natural sciences run out of explanations.
And if you haven't studied those areas, that might be a problem.
You might just have a natural resistance and say, well, how can science make any determinations of these things?
Secondly, some people maybe have a fear of science because sometimes science has been sort of antithetical to religion in some respects.
However, today, that's not the case anymore.
The Pew Research Center, which is a well-known research center internationally, they did a massive poll of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is our biggest scientific organization here in the States.
And essentially, 51% of scientists turned out to be theists, that is to say, believers In God or in some kind of transcendent higher power.
41% turned out to be agnostics or atheists, 8% undeclared.
Well, if you really look at that, you'd say, well, yeah, obviously science can't be completely opposed to religion because 51% of bench scientists are either theists or practicing religion.
By the way, 88% of physicians in the United States, according to an NIH study, also practice religion.
So something's happening, and even the scientists are going along, as it were, with the confluence between faith and science.
For my listeners' benefit, I have to say this, but it isn't me saying this.
Is this just what you're saying, that there are possible confluences between science and religion?
Is this just the church trying to catch up with science, which seems to be gaining the ascendancy, seems to be gaining the upper hand?
And religion seems to be getting, some people may say, the upper hand these days?
Yeah, well, that's a good point.
I mean, I think in some ways the church is trying to catch up with science.
But I have to say also, in the same breath, it's also scientists who are initiating the dialogue about confluence.
So you have people like Francis Collins, who is the head of the Genome Project in the United States and now the head of the National Institute of Health, one of the big, as it were, brains in the biological field.
He is definitely an initiator of the dialogue between faith and science.
Your wonderful Anglican priest there, John Polkinghorn, as you probably know at Cambridge, or used to be in high energy particle physics there at Cambridge, he's definitely been a big instigator of the dialogue.
Certainly Owen Gingrich here in the United States at Harvard has been a big instigator.
And there's many, many others.
There's an organization here called the John Templeton Foundation, and they have definitely been putting this dialogue together for many, many years.
And so, you know, I would say it's coming, yes, from the church, and many of those churchmen are probably trying to catch up.
Many scientists, though, are also initiating the dialogue.
And now there really are some, you know, I'm a Jesuit.
I have a lot of colleagues in the Society of Jesus that are into the physical sciences.
They teach at the university level, at the graduate level in sciences.
And some of them have done their PhDs there at Oxford or Cambridge as well.
I'm going to sound like a terrible contrarian here.
I'm not.
I'm just trying to further my knowledge of these things.
But did Jesus not say, and I don't want to misquote here, blessed are those who have not seen yet believed?
In other words, religious people shouldn't need scientific proof of what they believe, should they?
Well, in a way, you know, Jesus certainly said that.
Blessed are those who have not seen but believe.
But, you know, you can't use science or even scientific evidence to ground your entire faith, because faith is not just a matter of what we might call intellectual certitude.
But I think science can bring definite evidence to the fore.
I think science can help in bringing intellectual certitude for faith.
No question about that.
But then there's a point at which the heart has to take over.
As the great mathematician Blaise Pascal once said, the heart has its reasons that the mind knows not of.
And it's at this point that a person has to be disposed.
So you have to want to believe, you know, in some sense, in this transcendent deity.
If you have a sense of good and evil in the world, then you would probably say, well, I might need this deity because, of course, I want that grace to protect me from evil.
Some people, of course, might say, well, I don't want to believe in a transcendent deity because I don't want to be responsible to a moral agency outside of myself or something.
And so they wouldn't have a movement of the heart.
Well, if you don't have that movement of the heart that just says, okay, you know, if you really are a deity and you really are good, then I'm going to be open to praying to you.
And I'm going to be open even to looking at what your will would be for me because I'd like to do what the creator, as it were, my creator, I would like to do what that creator would want.
Now, if you don't have that kind of movement of the heart, really wild horses aren't going to bring you there.
So you can use, you know, drag out Bernard Lonergan's contemporary proof for the existence of God or Mortimer Adler's contemporary proof for the existence of God.
Or you can bring out all the new recent scientific evidence that's come to the fore, the board of a Lincoln and Guth proof for even the beginning of a multiverse, if there really is one, et cetera, et cetera.
You can bring out all of this evidence, these new kinds of things on near-death experiences, right, where you have a real, you know, 81% of blind people, for example, will see for the first time when they're clinically dead, flat EEG, fixed and dilated pupils, no gag reflex, right?
Basically their brain is reduced to a sputtering of a few neurons in the lower brain.
And then all of a sudden, this person who has never had a single visual image in his brain for his entire life sees perfectly.
And not only sees perfectly, but goes right through the hospital walls and reports that there's a train that passed by with an arrow pointing to the right on the back of the sign of the train, going into a grove of trees, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, how Could that person have even hallucinated this vision?
Which, by the way, was 100% correct according to the train schedule.
It would have been passing the hospital at exactly that time with that very arrow on that sign on the back and so forth and so on.
And you look at that and you say, gosh, there's a lot of really interesting data from science in very well-controlled tests that have been done.
The Samuel Parnell one right there at Southampton, University of Southampton, is an excellent one, which was published in the Journal of Resuscitation.
The Pym Van LaMel one, which was published in, of course, the Lancet, your very fine medical journal in Great Britain.
You know, that was the 2003 and 2001 studies.
Very excellent.
You start compiling all this evidence, and you come up with what John Henry Newman would have called an informal inference, right?
Where you have enough stuff put together, where you have so many different facets, all sort of put together in one single domain, and it's not one single domain, but from various different domains, and they all point to a single conclusion.
So the cosmological evidence points there, the physics evidence points there, the near-death experience medical evidence points there.
And even an analysis of some of these remarkable relics and things of that nature point there, you start saying to yourself, hmm, maybe there is something, he would call it an informal inference because you have various different facts that point to a transphysical cause or at least non-explanation by a physical cause,
and they're all pointing together to this one transphysical explanation from various different antecedently probable sources.
But the final piece of evidence to, sorry to interrupt Father Robert, but the final piece of evidence scientifically that would be missing here, pointing to a higher power, there is a piece in the jigsaw is what I'm saying, that isn't there.
Yes, people do have these experiences, these near-death experiences.
I have a listener who has restricted vision, who during these COVID times has been having vivid, multicolored, three-dimensional dreams that, you know, in ordinary life, she cannot perceive in that way, but in her dreams, she can.
So that's a similar kind of thing.
But is it proof of a higher power?
Well, what it is proof of in certain cases is not so much a proof of the higher power.
It may be proof, though, that you have a soul that's capable of surviving physical death.
So, for example, if you can report accurately what's going on outside the hospital walls and you've been blind from birth, that is suggestive that you have a source of consciousness that is outside of your physical body.
So that would be one possibility, you know, where you say, okay, so maybe everything isn't in this physical universe.
Again, you look at various kinds of evidence from physics where you put together the entropy evidence, the Board of Lincoln and Guth proof, et cetera, et cetera, and you start saying, okay, there is some evidence that there must be some power, some transcendent power outside of our universe and even outside of a multiverse in order to get a complete explanation for physics as we know it.
So those things would be really pointing at least to this.
Physics doesn't explain it all.
Now, they do also have some things called philosophical proofs for the existence of God.
And those philosophical proofs do touch on the requirement for at least an uncaused reality, which has to be unconditioned in its existence, which would be absolutely unique.
Now, that kind of a proof, you know, there are many of them that exist in the contemporary form.
But when you start, again, it's putting all that evidence together that points to the transphysical.
That's what science, that's what philosophy, that's what logic can do.
There, you know, you kind of have to stop and you say, well, does that prove that there really is a God who is interacting with me, who cares about me?
No, it won't produce an interpersonal God.
It'll only get you to a deistic God.
A deistic God means a God that maybe is a creator of physical reality, but must itself be outside of physical reality.
You could get to, okay, you have a soul, and that soul is capable of surviving bodily death.
Question.
Well, can an organic physical process within this universe explain a transphysical entity like a soul, which will survive bodily death, and even the consciousness behind that soul, which also survives bodily death?
I would say no.
Current studies in philosophy of mind are saying this stuff is really difficult to explain.
So that's where science will get you.
And in all humility, you don't want to push that any further because now you say, what is that transphysical cause beyond our universe?
The transphysical cause of our soul, the transphysical cause that enables not only the universe to exist, but all of the fine-tuning of our universe at the Big Bang.
What is this transphysical cause?
Does he care about me?
Is he personal at all?
Or maybe he's Einstein's God.
Because, of course, Einstein believed in a very intellectual, rational sort of being, a sense of intelligence that certainly was behind some of the dimensions of the fine-tuning of our universe, for example, the initial conditions and constants.
Yet he didn't believe really that God was a personal God.
He was much more of a deistic person.
But then you have other great physicists like Werner Heisenberg, for example, or Max Planck, or James Clerk Maxwell, for that matter, and a variety of other people, Sir Arthur Eddington, who definitely believe that this being interacts with them.
But I would say the moment that they get to that point, they're leaving behind the domain of science.
They're leaving behind the domain of empirical verification, and they're turning to their own experience of that being within their mind.
So Eddington, you know, who of course was the stellar nucleosynthesis man, truly a great, great physicist, he basically said in a chapter called A Defense of Mysticism in his book, The Nature of the Physical World,
he just says, at the end, he says, you know, there is something beyond the domain of physics, something that impels us to move forward, something of mysticism, something of art, something that lies beyond the domain of science.
But science can scarcely challenge the warrant, he says, because science depends too on that intuition that drives it forward.
The light beckons ahead, he says, and the purpose surging within our nature responds.
But it remains, and I'm sorry again to jump in, all of it remains, Father Robert, a question, doesn't it?
And maybe that's the basis of faith, that, you know, the question is the faith.
You know, I can stand in the, I have a, I'm lucky enough during this awful period of lockdown to have a park very near where I live, and I can stand there in the darkness, stare into the sky, and there are no planes up there now going to Heathrow Airport because nobody's traveling anywhere.
And in the quiet and the silence, which is a rare thing for London, you know, I can look up there, and I do look up there, and I think the vastness of space, the infinity of the cosmos, the fact that this goes on seemingly forever, we're making more and more discoveries about it.
And yes, just as human beings, since before we had the internet or science or electric light or anything, have been looking up there and saying, is that all random?
But the problem with it is all that can ever be is a question.
Yeah.
Well, you know, again, you know, scientific inquiry, you know, you're quite right.
I mean, first of all, let me just distinguish.
You know, when you're out in the park and you're looking up and you have that sense of awe might be the best word to use for it, that sense, you know, that maybe there is purpose out there.
Maybe there is something of true significance out there.
Now, that, I would say, is more akin to religious experience, what Rudolf Otto in his classic work, The Idea of the Holy, would call the numinous experience, the human sense of the mystery, the holy other, the fascinating, right, that comes to us when we're looking at nature as you did in the park there.
There's no question that's an intersubjective experience, and that wouldn't be, of course, science, but it is something that you don't want to discount because you don't have any scientific evidence to validate it on the spot.
So maybe if we took John Henry Newman's point of view for just a second again and just said, well, you know, we have to allow that intuition to coalesce in some ways with what we do know from science and what we do know from philosophy and what we seem to know from science right now.
And as I said, 51% of scientists seem to think they know something.
It's not just aimless out there that points to theism or points to God.
And if that's the case, then maybe they have seen from scientific evidence that, yeah, this universe is not perfectly explicable.
And by the way, our time within our universe is not perfectly explicable from within the universe itself.
And then we look at the problem of what's called free parameters.
And free parameters are like these constants, right?
And so, or conditions, initial conditions of the universe.
Now, here's just an example of one that a scientist would latch onto and find somewhat probative, somewhat convincing.
And so he might say, okay, look, you've got to have very low entropy in our universe to have a universe like ours, as well as life forms in the universe.
But yet, in order to get our low entropy at the Big Bang, that we did get at the Big Bang, the odds against that happening are 10 raised to the 10 raised to the 123 to 1 against.
That number is so large that if you put every zero at 10 point type, our solar system could not hold that number in its entirety.
It's the same odds as a monkey typing the entire corpus of Shakespeare by random tapping of the keys in a single try.
Yet this condition is necessary for the universe we have and the life forms we have within it.
And so a scientist might say, how in the world is it possible?
And all you can, you only have two choices left.
Either there's a multiverse with 10 raised to the 10 raised to the 123 to 1 bubble universes in it, or there is an intelligent trans-physical entity that set that entropy parameter precisely as it is, highly, exceedingly improbable as it is, set it to the standard we have for the intelligent life forms we have and the beautiful roomy universe we have.
Or indeed there is simply a gap in our current understanding.
And look at how much we have learned in recent history, in the last 200 years in science.
And we have a lot more to learn.
I think our growth in scientific understanding is probably exponential, but don't hold me to that statement.
So I would say there are three explanations there.
And the last One is we simply don't have the key to explaining that.
Perhaps.
I don't know.
I think all three of the things that you said at the moment have equal validity, and I definitely include the possibility that there might be a higher power that is behind all of this.
But if there is a higher power, just to leave off on the philosophical side of it just at this point, but let's pursue this, then why does the higher power, why does God play games with us and not reveal him or herself in ways that we can more readily understand?
In other words, why do we have to guess?
Yeah, I think it comes down to just two words, free choice.
I think the being who created us, and of course, I'm a believer, and that creator, I think, created us specifically with the soul that we were just talking about that's capable of surviving bodily death, a soul which maybe, you know, it's not only a soul capable of intellectual reflection, but a soul that is self-reflective.
It's capable of capturing itself.
And the only reason I think we have that most remarkable and very inexplicable power, by the way, David Chalmers over there at Oxford certainly finds it and has written a comprehensive book on the role, what he calls the hard problem of consciousness or self-consciousness.
But the point I'm trying to get to is, I think that being made us with that remarkable self-conscious power because he made us free.
And why did he make us free?
Because he wanted us to be free to either choose him or to choose against him.
Well, why would he want that?
Because either he would want us to say, okay, if you are my creator, I am open to you and I'm going to follow you.
But he also wants to put enough doubt into the ambiance, as it were, enough room for deniability, as it were, to say, but wait a minute, you're probably not there anyway.
And so maybe I'll just act as if you are not there, as if I am my own God, and maybe I'm a God for a few other people as well.
So let's suppose I want to live a life of domination, not probably a life that you or I would want to live, but let's suppose I'd like to sort of be dominating others, doing kinds of things that might be really destructive to others and controlling others, et cetera, et cetera.
Let's suppose I want to live that life, but I might get this intuition that, boy, I'm taking kind of a godlike power onto myself.
I'm sort of, you know, delimiting people who are also born with the same kind of freedom I have.
You can get that sort of intuition.
This is wrong.
And wouldn't be appreciated by God.
There you would have the deniability.
There you could say, well, I'm not sure.
Maybe there is no God.
Maybe he doesn't hear.
Maybe I'm not responsible to any moral agency outside of myself.
You've got deniability.
And I think that's why God did it, honestly.
I think God wanted from the very beginning to the very end to maintain our freedom so that when we come to him, we come to him out of thanks.
We come to him and say, okay, I want to treat people as you would have me treat them.
You are my creator.
I want to give them the same co-equal dignity and status that I would give myself because I stand as one among all of them with you, you alone in the center.
So I think that's the basic reason.
But the problem that that creates, isn't it?
If it was all set up that way, is exactly the problem that's going to be experienced by some people hearing this.
In other words, some of them are going to say, right on absolutely to what you've just said, and others are going to say, I don't believe any of that religious claptrap.
It divides people.
Yeah, I mean, I can certainly say, you know, back to them is, well, it is, in a sense, religious.
There's no question.
And I wouldn't want to deny the religiosity of it because that's the faith part of this move to allow the transcendent to have an effect in your life.
But I think that's the main dimension of what God is asking.
He's basically saying, look, I'm not going to force you to acknowledge me.
I'm not even going to force you to acknowledge that there is anything transcendent.
I'll let you believe anything you want about yourself, about whether you are the center of things or whether you're not the center of things.
I'll let you believe it.
And that you can say, well, that's just a religious interpretation of the power I have in and of myself.
That's true.
It's my religious interpretation of the power you and I have in and of ourselves.
But if it's a true interpretation, if that is correct, that there really is a creator, that science has amassed a good deal of evidence for some kind of causative force outside of space-time asymmetry, some kind of causative force that enables us to have a transphysical soul surviving bodily death, et cetera.
If that, what's being pointed to, even a cause that most scientists today would admit to a higher power or a God, a conscious God, if that's the case, then my thought would be, well, then that would be very important to what we think about ourselves and how we live our lives.
In other words, how we give ourselves to others, whether we consider ourselves as being almost messianic in proportion to the freedom that we have, a kind of a Nietzschean worldview, right?
And I could turn it around on the other hand and just say, well, Nietzsche's Thoughts about being completely autonomous, being a law unto himself.
Well, that's also, in a way, religious because it's putting an interpretation on his view of humanity, and it's putting an interpretation on his view of the agency of his freedom.
He thinks his freedom is there.
It's a given.
It gives him this immense will to power.
And because of that, he wouldn't need anything outside of himself and nothing to be responsible to.
I acknowledge it's another point of view.
I don't think that's where the evidence is pointing, scientifically or otherwise.
And frankly, I don't think that's where the evidence from within myself is pointing.
I don't think I am a God unto myself.
I do not think that I can just will myself to a Zarathustrian power.
And so I have to be true to the evidence I see from science, from philosophy, and especially what I sense interiorly in my conscience, in my moral sensibility, in my religious sensibility.
I think we have lost, as a society, a great deal if we start, if people start to think, if some people start to think, that we can't have a debate like this.
I think we should be perfectly able to have a debate like this without somebody saying this is all rubbish or somebody saying this is all absolutely a given and why are you debating it?
As we said, it divides people.
I want to get onto the Shroud of Turin.
You've done a lot of research on the Shroud of Turin.
The so-called burial cloth of Christ, which went on public display, I think, for a very short time, I think about six years ago, to, as they say, in the theater-packed houses.
A lot of people wanted to see it.
A lot of people for hundreds of years have talked about this shroud.
It has a very mysterious past.
But science, which is what we're talking about, has in more recent years effectively debunked it.
There was a test on the cloth that said the cloth couldn't have come from the era claimed.
Thereby an ergo, it could not be the burial cloth of Christ.
There was some, this was the carbon dating, of course, in 1988.
There were irregularities more recently found in the blood on the cloth that showed apparently that it could not have been put there in the way that it was claimed that it was put there.
Nevertheless, you think that the Shroud of Turin is what it purports to be.
Is that so?
Yeah, well, first of all, that 1988 carbon dating itself was more or less debunked.
You know, in the last year's issue of Archaeometry, I believe it was the 2020 issue, Tristan Casabianka and his team actually did get the raw data from the carbon dating tests that were held by the British Museum.
And the British Museum did release the raw data to him and his team.
They did the statistical analysis of it and found that there was so much stratification and variation in the samples that it indicated that there was probably something akin to a confluence of threads from different ages blended together in the sample.
Now, he didn't come to that conclusion.
He just said, there's so much stratification and variation in these samples.
It's impossible to use these samples to date the Shroud of Turin.
And so that was his conclusion from the raw data.
And that pretty much is accepted by the scientific community.
He just did a regular old, you know, state the facts statistical analysis of the samples.
They're just invalid to proving a medieval dating.
Dr. Raymond Rogers in 1998 used these Reyes samples to also find the exact spot from where the sample was taken for the carbon dating.
And the spot that it was taken from was a corner of the shroud that was caught in a fire, the fire of Chambaris that happened in the 1400s.
And what, you know, some silver from the casket in which the shroud was laying actually burned through near that spot.
And these sisters, shortly thereafter, used a technique called invisible weaving to put in some threads to take the holes out of the shroud.
So it was patched or repaired then?
Yes, it was patched, not just on the back, it was patched on the shroud itself, because there were actually holes on the shroud, and you can actually see those.
And so unfortunately, the sample was taken from that area.
And when Rogers, Dr. Rogers subjected it to thermochemical analysis, you know, basically hydrolysis and mass spectrometry is what it's called, he found not only that there were cotton fibers in that sample, but also that the cotton fibers were dyed with a gum dye mordant.
Now, that was only available in Europe after the 11th century.
So why is that important?
Because the shroud is linen, and cotton fibers are nowhere to be found in the entire linen shroud except in the spots that had been burned and then woven back together with this invisible weaving technique by the sisters in the 1400s.
So again, the sample looks very invalid indeed.
And so the first thing is we do need to do another carbon dating and we do need to follow the original protocols that were defined by the Shroud of Turin Science Research Project.
And so that's the first thing.
We cannot use the current sample.
It is simply invalid, both by analysis of the raw data, a statistical analysis of raw data, and also by Chemical and thermochemical analysis.
Why do you think that hasn't happened then?
That was 1988.
It's 2021.
Why hasn't somebody actually moved on that?
Well, first of all, unfortunately, the British Museum didn't give the raw data to Tristan Casabianko or anybody else until last year.
And I'm not sure why that was, but I know there were several freedom of information requests made to the British Museum, but why they did it so reluctantly, I don't know.
But anyway, now that it is public, I do think there are several really excellent scientists who are asking that a subsequent carbon dating be done.
And I can't imagine it won't be done.
I just can't imagine it.
In the meantime, there have been four other tests that have been done.
They're not carbon dating tests, but they were done on samples that were available, these so-called Raya's samples.
So when the Shroud Turin was in the scientific, they did a 1978 very extensive scientific investigation of it.
But one of the things they did was to take sticky tapes and put them at every single spot on the shroud.
And so you can actually get a lot of fibers and fibrils from the shroud that stuck to the sticky tape, including pollen samples and things of this nature.
So these samples, these fibrils, were also used to do a Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy, a Raman laser spectroscopy, a tension and compressibility mechanical test, as well as a vanillin test.
All those tests, by the way, show that the shroud did originate somewhere near the first century, plus or minus 150 years, with about a 95% confidence level.
But that's not the only thing.
There's another, there's what's called the pseudarium Christi, the facecloth of Jesus.
Now, this facecloth, which goes back to a scripture passage in John's Gospel, but that face cloth has a provenance that goes back to 616.
That is to say, you've got a traceable historical provenance, and it's put into a cathedral in Oviedo, Spain in 700 by Isidore of Seville.
So that's where it stayed until this very day.
Now, the reason that date is so important of 700, or if you go back further in the provenance of 616, is because if you do what's called a digital overlay analysis photography, so you have a digital photography analysis,
and you just overlay it on top of the shroud, the face cloth has a series of bloodstains on it, and they correspond to the face on the shroud of Turin, the bloodstains on the face of the shroud of Turin, absolutely remarkably.
Sorry to interrupt again, Father Robert.
Is this the so-called Veil of Veronica?
No we're talking about.
No it is.
This is something different.
Okay.
This is something different.
If you kind of read John's Gospel, it says, you know, that John and the other disciple arrived at the tomb.
They peered inside and they saw the facecloth lying in a place by itself and then the burial linen laying in its own place where the body was.
Now, if you look at that, what was the facecloth for?
Why did the Jewish people use it?
Because if a body, for example, were very macabre, was beaten up, etc., and this was a revered person as Jesus was, then they would have taken that body off the cross and wrapped the face with a cloth that went around it and then over the top of the head down to the nape of the neck.
And they did it to keep the jaw closed, and then pleural edema fluid would be coming out of the nose and around the sides of the mouth.
And they didn't want that to be displayed, obviously.
And finally, of course, the body was just beaten terribly.
And it was a very macabre-looking sight.
So essentially, they put the face cloth there.
But then when they get to the tomb, they would have taken the face cloth off and then laid it in the tomb.
So you have two sets of blood imprints.
And that's where you've got that 70 coincidences on the front of the cloth.
And then on the dorsal side, the back of the head and the top of the head, you have 50 points of coincidence with digital overlay photography.
Well, I mean, the odds of this happening without these two cloths touching the same crucified face, I mean, you know, a bloody face, the odds of this happening are astronomically high.
And so you basically, it seems reasonable anyway to assume that they did touch the same face.
Well, if they have the same face, then the Shroud of Turin has to go back to 700 and probably to 616 AD at least.
The greatest mystery of all about the Shroud of Turin, the thing that draws casual observers like myself to the story time and time again, is the image that's imprinted upon it and how that image got there, almost like a photographic negative.
I'm looking at a piece now that appeared in Britain's Daily Mail newspaper in 2011.
A professor, I'm sure you've heard of Paolo Di Lazzaro.
Oh, yes.
And, you know, there was talk in 2011 of only something like an ultraviolet directional burst of radiation could have produced that.
And in that time, in that era, there was nothing that could do that.
That's right.
In fact, what's so interesting about De La Saro's study, first of all, you know, you're correct.
He did.
He replicated it.
But the reason he was using the ARF Exemer lasers to replicate it was, as you pointed out, he needed to see if this explanation for the shroud image could work.
The shroud has a series of anomalies on it that are very, very difficult to explain.
The first thing is, is that image is almost floating on the very uppermost surface of the fibrils of the cloth.
Now, That defies chemical explanation or powders or ointments or vapors or anything like that.
Because if you used a vapor or a liquid, like a chemical or a dye or a powder or an ointment, it would have immediately penetrated the fibrils, gone into the medulla of the fiber, right?
And then it would have also not only penetrated into the middle of the fibers and into the middle of the cloth, it would have also gone sideways into adjacent fibers.
So that's impossible because the Shroud of Turin has no such penetration.
The image does not go to the middle of the fibers, even the middle of the cloth.
It's sitting there on the uppermost surface, which is highly unusual.
That's the first thing.
Second thing is the Shroud's image is super crisp.
It is very, very clear.
The third thing about the Shroud image, as you put it, it's a photographic negative image.
And the fourth thing is that it's a three-dimensional photographic negative image.
In other words, there is actually data from the inside of the body, like the bones in the hand, in direct digital three-dimensional proportion to the flesh on the outside of the hand.
So how do you explain all four of these anomalies?
And by the way, it's not scorched at all.
So there's no fluorescing that would easily indicate a scorch on the shroud, right?
So there's nothing like that there.
So you've got to have a non-heat explanation, or at least a little heat, so that you're not going to have scorching.
You can't have a chemical explanation.
You can't have a vapor, a powder dye, et cetera.
So you basically are left with one explanation, and that's light.
So Lassaro, and by the way, this comes from John Jackson, originally formulated it with a series of good physicists from Los Alamos laboratories here in the United States.
But the main thing is what they saw was there's only one kind of light that will do the trick.
And that is a light that has basically a microwave frequency because if you had, basically what De La Sara says is you're going to have to have a light source, about six to eight billion watts of light will be needed to produce that image.
But you can't have the corresponding heat energy.
Well, the only way you're going to have that much light without the corresponding heat is if you have a pulsation of 140 billionth of a second.
And the only way you're going to get that is directional vacuum ultraviolet radiation, something akin to what you'd get in an ARF eczema laser in a laboratory.
So it gives out kind of a microwave style radiation, a really significantly high impulse, six to eight billion watts, but for this very short, you know, 140 billionth of a second.
And he actually did go into a laboratory and he took a series of cloths with the same spectral reflectance as the shroud of Turin.
He used the ARF eczema laser and did produce a similar kind of image right on the surface with the yellowish kind of color that did not scorch in any way the image.
But of course, in order to produce that image in a laboratory, you would truly need 14,000 ARF eczema lasers.
That's more than all the laser capacity we have in every laboratory in the world today.
14,000?
Well, not only did a medieval forger not have access to this kind of light source, but certainly not to 14,000 eczema lasers.
I mean, basically, you're talking about a huge light source.
And by the way, the wattage, 6 to 8 billion watts.
I mean, this is like getting a quarter million searchlights worth of light and having it come out of every three-dimensional point in this corpse.
Corpses don't usually give off light sources of that magnitude.
But DeLosaro has done something quite remarkable, and now it's been validated by others as well since 2011.
There are those who say it might have been some kind of natural process, although what, I think, is still debated and disputed.
And there have been those who said there was a man called, I'm reading here at the moment in a piece that the BBC wrote, a microscopy consultant, chemical and microscopy consultant, Walter Macrone, who said that some of the red so-called bloodstains seemed to contain the pigment ochre, suggesting that this may have been some kind of elaborate, incredibly elaborate painting.
Yeah.
Macron's analysis, though, comes from little specks that are on the Shroud.
And of course, this cannot...
It's about the bloodstains.
That's the first thing.
The second thing with Macron's analysis is he's talking about some specks that are present.
But those specks that might be ochre in color or something of that nature, right, have a reddish hue.
There's a lot of explanations for that, but the actual blood stains on the shroud of Turin have hemoglobin, genuine hemoglobin, all of them.
And of course, red ochre stains do not have hemoglobin.
They do not have partial DNA profiles.
They do not have an AB positive blood type, etc.
And every single one of the stains on the Shroud of Turin has all of these features that are unique to blood.
As well, I might point out, as a high incidence of creatinine and ferritin, which are two enzymes produced in somebody who is undergoing a severe polytrauma like torture.
So if you really look at this, I don't think Macron's analysis stands up to any kind of scientific scrutiny whatever.
I mean, all kinds of people, all kinds of artists took icons and touched them to the Mandelian.
So when the shroud was in Edessa, Turkey, and they had it sort of framed so that the face of Jesus, et cetera, was facing out of this frame, people would take icons, which could have had ochre in it or something, and they would touch these icons to this Mendelian, to the shroud in the frame, et cetera.
And that's one possible way you could get ochre specks on it.
But the blood, there's no doubt that the stains are absolutely genuine blood with hemoglobin, DNA profile, you know, positive, baby-positive blood type, et cetera.
How can we begin to try to prove then that the blood was that of Christ?
That would be really difficult.
The only way you can do that is circumstantially, because if you look at the wounds themselves, there are these incredible coincidences with the unique features of Jesus' crucifixion.
So, for example, if you take a look at the spear wound.
Okay, now this spear wound is probably, it's made by a triangularly tipped spear, which is a well-known legionary spear from Roman times that has that triangular tip, rips things out as you pull the spear out, etc.
That spear goes between the fourth and the fifth ribs at an angle sufficient to protrude the thoracic cavity.
Now, you can tell that from the actual wound on the shroud.
Well, if you go right up into the thoracic cavity, you are going to get, you're going to burst all that, there's water that's building up inside the thoracic cavity around the heart because of the crucifixion, right?
The person there is gasping for breath.
And so essentially, when the person gasps for breath, the water builds up, and so out would have flowed blood and water.
Again, the person on the shroud of Turin has wounds from a crown of thorns.
Now, that's a very unique feature in the history of crucifixions.
We only know of one where a person was crucified with a crown of thorns.
That's precisely what has occurred here.
But what's interesting is it's a Roman crown.
It's not a medieval European crown that goes around, as it were, the crown of the head.
It goes over the top of the head as well.
So it's a Roman crown.
By the way, the whip that was used to whip this man 131 times, this whip had three strands with these little pellets or bone fragments at the end of the strands.
That is definitely a Roman phlagrum.
That is a whip used by the Roman legionnaires.
And that whip, you know, who would have known this in medieval Europe?
I mean, it just didn't exist before we began to get all these kinds of artifacts when we started doing archaeology in a scientific way.
But this man was whipped from left and right.
So there's one person standing to the right, one person to the left, exactly as would have been done in a Roman whipping, except he undergoes way more whippings than would have been ordinary for the crucifixion.
Don't know why, but it certainly corresponds to Jesus being whipped, Pontius, Pilate saying, see, you know, behold the man, et cetera, as we find in the scriptures.
But the point I'm making is it's a circumstantial case, but it's a really interesting circumstantial case because there's a lot of features unique to Jesus.
The Roman crown of thorns corresponding to the scripture.
The spear that, I mean, Romans just plain didn't put people out of their misery early.
And yet this one is exactly as described in John's Gospel, goes right, they jab upwards into the body, and we can see the spear wound jabbing upwards between the fourth and fifth rib, going right into the thoracic cavity.
And of course, that would have poured out blood and a liquid that looked like water to the evangelist.
And then, of course, we would have also, you can see the coincidence that the blood itself contains that creatinine and ferritin admixture, implying a polytrauma.
You can also see that the man was vertical because the serum is separating from the plasma going downwards, you know, on a vertical axis.
That would imply anyway that he was hanging there for quite some time somewhere.
And he was nailed to the cross.
That wasn't unusual, but nevertheless, there it is, the evidence of the nailing.
And by the way, the nailing is done correctly.
It's exactly as the Romans would have done it, not like a medieval person would have portrayed it, right, where the nail goes right through the center of the hand in the medieval crucifixes.
Instead, it's going, yes, it starts in the middle of the hand, but it goes downward and it penetrates the wrist bone where, you know, it V's off over here in the back of the hand, and it goes right into the wood of the cross.
And the bones and the wrist are thereby holding the person onto the cross, which, by the way, would have been exceedingly painful.
But all these things are there present.
There are certainly coincidences with the scripture, with Jesus' crucifixion.
It's a circumstantial case, but it's a pretty good one.
And it does have all those unique features of a Roman crucifixion, of a man who claimed to be king of the Jews.
Father Robert, then, two things that are linked, connected, I think.
Number one, a piece of cloth that is so old, how come this has not deteriorated to the point where it's just fallen apart over such a long period of time?
You know, my father kept his old military uniform in a shed where we lived When I was a kid, and that began to fall apart after 40 years.
This, though, has survived intact for very much longer than 40 years.
So, how come it hasn't fallen apart?
That's the dumb question.
The slightly cleverer question, perhaps, that may be related to this, is how come there is such mystery around this piece of cloth?
Because through history, it has for long periods of time disappeared and then reappeared?
Yeah.
No, both really actually very good questions.
The first question is by no means dumb.
Of course, we do have a lot of linen cloths that originated in the very dry Middle East that still exist today.
We have much older cloths than the Shroud of Turin.
The linen cloth that is the Shroud of Turin is a very expensive cloth.
It was clearly made for someone with wealth, and it was made extremely well, probably the best kind of weaves that you could get at the time.
And so it's, as I said, we have many such cloths that go back even more in Egypt another thousand years earlier that have not completely fallen apart.
But this was a really excellent cloth, and it's linen.
It was a very hardy kind of linen cloth, very expensive, very good weave.
And it was always kept in very careful circumstance.
The only thing that happened was the fire of Chambarie.
That was a terrible thing, but the shroud was rescued from that fire.
But aside from that, it's always been kept in pretty much a sealed container until and unless the shroud was displayed.
So the fact that it's there, it is delicate, and then in the 1400s, as you pointed out earlier, the sisters did put a backing cloth on it.
But that doesn't affect the front.
It doesn't affect our ability to analyze chemically, thermochemically, what's happening on the cloth.
But there's a backing cloth that probably did help to keep the thing constituently integral.
So all of those things probably explain why it didn't fall apart.
It's a hardy, hardy linen.
But the second question that you have, it's a good question because the shroud disappears and then reappears.
And the reason is because the shroud had a variety, seemingly a variety of different names that it went under.
It wasn't called the shroud.
So initially, it was probably kept in Jerusalem until about 300 AD.
But we have a very, very good indication that we know this because there's a lot of what's called pollen fossils and pollen grains that are embedded in the shroud.
Well, the greatest number of pollen grains embedded in the shroud come from Jerusalem and northern Judea.
So it's been around that area of northern Judea for quite some time.
That's the highest proliferation of pollen grains.
But in addition to that, there are four pollen grains embedded in the shroud that are totally indigenous to that region.
There are no other pollen grains ever found anywhere beyond northern Judea of this sort.
So that's the first thing.
So we know it was there in Jerusalem for quite some time.
The second greatest proliferation of pollen grains comes from Edessa, Turkey.
And that was a real crossroads in the Middle East for a long, long time.
But again, we see three pollen grains that are indigenous to Edessa, not found outside of that region, embedded in the shroud.
Would have been really difficult for, by the way, a medieval forger to get this, you know, and these samples and put them in the shroud.
It has to come from some long-standing situation, being situated in Edessa, Turkey.
Now, while in Edessa, we see something very unusual.
A phenomenon called the Mandillion appears in Edessa, which is thought to be the face of Jesus Christ.
So it's a big, huge, framed face of Jesus Christ that's paraded around.
And all of a sudden, this icon, this Mandillion, becomes what you might call a prototype of all the iconography, Christian iconography of Jesus subsequent to that time.
Before Edessa in the 300s, the iconography of Jesus was a Roman face, a round face instead of an oblong face.
A Roman nose, which had a very characteristic nose instead of a Semitic nose like Jesus's.
A clean-shaven, you know, so there's, and Jesus was clean-shaven in the iconography after the Mendelian beard, a long beard, and, you know, a pronounced beard.
And then, of course, the long hair in the back, you know, as well, whereas before it was the Roman, almost short haircut that he was portrayed with.
So something happened.
And not only that, but these icons have 20 different enigmas that occur on the Shroud of Turin.
So, you know, there's a big kind of open box that's at the top of the nose of the man.
That open box suddenly finds itself into the icons of Edessa that are coming out of that changed iconography, etc.
So we have a pretty good suspicion that it went up to Edessa and it went there for maybe about 500 to 600 years.
We also know that the Emperor of Constantinople laid siege to Edessa and forced the king to take his bargain, basically, that he would give him the equivalent of about $900,000 and stop sieging Edessa if he would hand over the Mendelian.
And so the Mendelian seems to have gone at that point to Constantinople.
And then we have a series of crusaders from the West, like Robert de Clary, who think that they have, and they not only think, they attest that they have seen not only the face cloth of Jesus with the face in the front, they say they have seen it unfurled and that it is a complete burial cloth of Jesus.
We know then that it disappears after the Fourth Crusade.
It leaves Constantinople.
But who is leading this Fourth Crusade, who is one of these relic takers, is a man by the name of Hautan de la Roche.
And Hautan de la Roche, it happens to be the fifth generation ancestor of Jeanne de Vergy.
And Jeanne de Vergy is the wife of Geoffrey de Charnay.
And Geoffrey de Charnay is the one who revealed the Shroud in Leary, France in the 1300s, after which we know the precise provenance of the Shroud all the way until its resting place in Turin, Italy today.
So we know more than we thought we knew about the provenance of the Shroud.
There are ways of maybe filling in some of the gaps.
Yes, exactly.
Okay.
Last question.
And Father Robert, I find all of this fascinating, and your enthusiasm for this subject absolutely radiates right through our digital connection here.
So thank you for that.
Why do you think the Vatican has, yes, venerated the Shroud of Turin, but it hasn't gone as far as saying, the current Pope has not gone as far as saying that this is an actual relic.
In other words, this is the real deal.
I think the current Pope has called it an icon.
In other words, it's something that people revere.
But that's not to say it absolutely is what they think it is.
That is correct.
And the Vatican does not want to get itself involved in trying to make a scientific judgment.
So basically, like in the case of a miracle, you would need to get a real consensus of the scientific community to say that there is no other explanation than that this is the burial cloth of Jesus.
Now, there are a lot of scientists out there who are willing to say that they're 98% certain, but as you have said throughout this podcast, you've been saying, well, you know, there's things we just don't know.
And that's the problem with all scientific conclusions.
You can never be 100% certain of any scientific conclusion because a scientist doesn't know what he doesn't know until he observes it, until he discovers it.
And that's the problem of induction.
It's a problem of an observation-based discipline.
So we're kind of stuck there, but the Vatican will probably not make any kind of a judgment unless there was an overwhelming consensus of the scientific community that would say there just isn't another explanation.
And right now, that doesn't exist.
But nevertheless, the popes have said, boy, there are a lot of coincidences here.
And there is a lot of science that does point to the fact that this may be the authentic shroud of Jesus Christ.
I think they certainly have to await the next carbon dating, and it surely must come.
I do think there are some other dating tests that can be done to corroborate now the carbon dating.
And I think, you know, beyond the Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy and the Raman laser spectroscopy, there are other ones that can be done.
So we really do need a new 2025 Shroud of Turin research project to put all these unknowns, to get as much scientific data as we can about those unknowns.
If we can get that data into place, and we begin to see that maybe a lot of the scientific community, who is at least open to it, is willing to say we're without a scientific explanation at this juncture.
The Vatican will never say it's definitive.
They would just say, well, there seems to be a lot of probative evidence pointing to the authenticity of this shroud, but believers are free to believe or not to believe in the shroud as they wish.
And that will probably be the final verdict of the Vatican, even, frankly, 50 years from now.
Interesting.
Father Robert Smitzer, thank you for your time.
Do you have a website if anybody wants to read about you and your books, etc.?
Absolutely.
Two of them.
One of them is called Magiscenter.com, M-A-G-I-Scenter.com, and the other one is called CredibleCatholic.com.
One of these days, I'd like to have a debate with you about the nature of good and evil and the place of evil in this world and also exorcisms, why more and more people seem to be requesting those, why there seems in this day and age of enlightenment, so-called more and more people want that.
Sadly, we're out of time, but let's do that next time if you'd like to.
And thank you.
Absolutely.
Thank you very much for being such a gracious and obviously knowledgeable guest.
Thank you.
Your thoughts, welcome on this conversation with Father Robert Spitzer.
Food for thought, I think.
But you let me know.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
You can, of course, send me an email from there.
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So, that's it.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
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