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I did answer you in post 142. You say my silence is telling. I say that your blatant charge that no answer was provided is telling. You don’t read what we write, you argue vacantly, or there is something else going on. I suspect something else.

You would have anyone who is rational, given two choices of explanation for a phenomenon, fraud or miracle, choose fraud first. That implication is clear from your statement. Given that any miracle claim can be suspected of fraud, someone who agrees with you must choose fraud thus eliminating the possibilities of any miracles.

David Hume’s famous maxim on miracles states the problem you are trying to pose in a proper philosophical way. It reads: “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.” (See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding).

You demand a dichotomous choice: fraud or miracle. As we have stated, it is quite possible that the images were naturally formed and that the Shroud is a forensically credible earliest document of what happened from Friday to Sunday some 2000 years ago. But should this not be so, then in a sense analogous to Hume’s miracle maxim, I find a more persuasive case for believing in miraculously induced images than in the crafting of a fake relic in medieval times. For given all the empirical evidence, a medieval provenance is more preposterous, in a sense more miraculous.

The Shroud claims to be nothing that cannot be discerned from it scientifically. It does not define or rely on miracles or challenge nuanced definitions of the word. It does not rely on miraculous explanations to be authentic. It cannot be explained away by simple prima facie understandings drawn from bankrupt enlightenment thinking.

Only a fool would state that for any claim of a miracle, given that someone might suggest it was a fraud, we must accept that it is a fraud because rationality deems we must. Such an appeal to upside down rationality is irrational. That, sir, is fundamentalism not rationality. That, sir, is lunacy. I suspect you are neither a fundamentalist nor a lunatic. Thus when one considers, additionally, your irrational defense of the carbon 14 testing results despite the fact the wrong thing was tested, one can only conclude that you are not here to argue but to play the fool. You seem to be playing a game of chuckle-chuckle-see-me-being-silly.

I think you recognize the high probability that the Shroud is genuine and that troubles your so-called rational, a priori enlightened-scientific worldview. Thus you resort to lashing out like an angry chold. Or as Swordmaker put it better: "you are here only to throw stinkbombs and turds."