You are an engineer... at least that is what your FR page claims. I saw that yesterday.
Not similar" does not automatically mean the rest of the shroud is 1st century.
And I have never said that! All shroudie and I have said is that the C14 test is INVALID! It is. Invalidity does not prove the opposite, it merely invalidates the test and its conclusions. The results announced no longer have any validity in the discussion of the Shroud because of FLAWED science, the breaking of protocols.
As an engineer, would you accept a structural test that confirmed what you wanted to see about the strength of a bridge as accurate for the entire bridge when the test was of a stainless steel chord, and you learn that it is the ONLY stainless steel chord, on a regular steel structure? Of course you wouldn't... because you are a good engineer and would recognize the sample is non-reprentative of the structure. AND I am certain you would not go around certifying the safety of the bridge when you don't really know what it is capable of withstanding.
. . .yes, because even the most convoluted scam is more likely than a miracle. Scams have been proven to exist. miracles always seem to occur when nobody is watching.
A good question then is which is the greater miracle? That the Shroud is an artifact left behind by a man who is reported to have performed many miracles... or that an unknown artist c. 1325 created a masterpiece that defies replication 800 years later?
Yes, scams exist. There are many forged documents around... but that does not mean that there are also legitimate documents around as well.
As to the state of Joe Nickell's degrees, it proves that you ARE parroting his discredited and ignorant of the latest scholarship argments and articles.
I will weigh the hundreds of scientists who are investigating the Shroud with doctorates in Physics and Nuclear Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Forensic Pathology,Engineering, History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Biology, etc., many of whom are the best in their fields, who are studying this phenomenum and publishing their results in peer-reviewed scientific journals against Joe Nickell, PhD in Art, and Walter C. McCrone, (deceased Microscopist), the one Scientist that seems to be alone in his certitude that the Shroud is a fraud, both of whom have failed to get their "research" on this subject published in any peer-reviewed journals.
I also add in the facts that both Nickell and McCrone have been known to "fabricate" their facts, altering them to suit the needs of the moment. McCrone's work fails the test of reproducability - other scientists just do not see what he claims he sees. His credibility is about the same as Percival Lowell's (if he were still living) would be if he stuck to his claims of canals on Mars in the face of the the latest science on that subject.
Quite frankly, Joe Nickell is not qualified to challenge the people he is challenging in the way he challenges them. He demonstrates it by beating the same dead horses of already discarded hypotheses you wind up beating because you are echoing him.
I will give you credit at least for starting to look at the "flawed sample" hypothesis that Nickell has yet to even mention two to three years after the overwhelming eviidence was first starting to be published!
Oops! You actually wrote that in a public forum and claimed you are trained in science??? Imagine that you took your car in for repair and you asked the service technician to test drive it. When you returned to pick up your car he told you that he took a different car out for a road test. When you complained that that made no sense he told you that you had yet to provide him with evidence that someone else’s car did not have the same problem as yours.
Shroudie