Joe Nickell's opening sentence of this article totally mischaracterizes Roger's article, completely exposing his bias and his agenda because Roger's article said NO SUCH THING! It feeds into the preconceived notions of the target audience and what they WANT to believe:
"Longtime Shroud of Turin devotee Ray Rogers, a retired research chemist, now admits there is the equivalent of a watercolor paint on the alleged burial cloth of Jesus."First, It is the very existence of that "equivalent of a watercolor paint" that exists on the SAMPLE that makes the C-14 test invalid! It was never found anywhere else on the Shroud! Are you that idiotic that you, and Nickell, fail to understand this basic point? The sample that was tested was NOT representative of the main body of the Shroud!
Secondly, the entire C-14 sample was NOT destroyed in testing as Nickell claims. The fifth middle section sub-sample was preserved... and it shows exactly what was hypothesized, that one side was made of dyed cotton and the other side is made of original un-dyed linen material with a diagonal juncture skillfully joining the two sections, rewoven in a mixture... that was the third peer-reviewed work done in 2008 that nailed this down. Photomicrographs of the original entire sample before it was cut in five pieces and distributed to the three labs also show tell-tale signs of the differences between the two materials when it was known what to look for. That is why the 1988 C-14 test has been invalidated.
Nickell cites another notorious skeptic, McCrone, whose un-peer replicated work has been multiply times discredited TWENTY YEARS AGO by many expert scientists with far more sophisticated equipment than his polarized microscope and his unduplicated and unsupported opinion of what he saw!... down to the ELECTRON MICROSCOPE and X-ray micro-spectroscopic level—which are FAR MORE discerning than the human eye—instruments capable of discerning the make-up of the vinyl baggies the threads were transported in much less the make-up of the materials ON, IN, and AROUND the samples themselves. I told you this already. . . This is what skeptic sources do as I reported to you above. It is NOT SCIENCE. It is falsified, McCrone has been falsified in spades, ergo they and Nickell lie. Nickell asserts the following in his article, ALL FALSE:
"After McCrone discovered the image was rendered in tempera paint, STURP held him to a secrecy agreement, while statements were made to the press that no evidence of artistry was found. McCrone was then, he says, “drummed out” of the organization [Nickell 1998, 124—125; 2004, 193—194]. As evidence of its pro-authenticity bias, STURP’s leaders served on the executive committee of the Holy Shroud Guild."
See above for his claim of "tempera paint", none has ever been found except by McCrone. As a matter of fact, while scattered pigments have been found on the Shroud, no pigments have been found on the Shroud associated at all with the image or with the blood stains. Only McCrone claimed such.
McCrone claimed to have found Vermilion and Red Ocher... but NO OTHER scientist with far more sophisticated equipment could find any at all associated with the image or blood stains. What there was on the shroud was totally randomly scattered by environmental pollution and the pressing of painted copies to the shroud to sanctify them in the past.
Secondly, McCrone was NEVER an official member of STURP to be "drummed out". He was contracted by STURP to do some Microscopic studies, and under his contract was required to submit his work for peer-review. He refused, publishing instead in violation of his contract in his own, in-house magazine, The Microscopist, edited by Walter C. McCrone, reviewed by Walter C. McCrone. There was no special agreement placed only on McCrone. The "secrecy agreement" was part of the standard STURP contract that required anyone working on the Shroud to release information ONLY through STURP, not to make announcements on their own. McCrone broke that agreement by holding a press conference and publishing in his magazine in violation of his contract! Note how Nickell cites his OWN work for that statement?
STURP members had to physically retrieve the samples (lent to McCrone by STURP) that HE REFUSED to return or to forward the samples—which he took to referring to as "my samples"—to other scientists, as directed, for review or further research.
Finally, Nickell's claim of bias because STURP members were on the executive committee of the Holy Shroud Guild, the organization in the Catholic Church that has authority over the Shroud, is reversed and disingenuous. STURP incorporated members of the HSG executive committee so as to gain access to the Shroud. Without their inclusion, access would not have been permitted. STURP included agnostics, atheists, Christians of both Catholic and Protestant stripes, Jews, and other denominations. It was a SCIENTIFIC panel. Most went intending to find it was a medieval creation.
Nickell also attempts to defend the sample taking protocols by citing the C-14 committee's own protocols, but ignores that they were dropped at the last minute. . . and the sample taken from an area those protocols had specifically excluded, instead just citing the general guidelines about the sample being taken "away from patches and seams."
Nickell is also "shocked" that Rogers failed to cite McCrone's work. This is not shocking at all. Scientists do not cite superseded work that has failed the test of peer-review—especially un-duplicated work that has been found to be falsified. There is no point in reporting falsehoods. No reputable scientist reports twaddle and opinion that has been proven demonstrably wrong, especially when there was an obvious agenda being pushed, as there was with the Atheist McCrone. McCrone later became a laughing stock as his story about the type and source of the Red Ocher he'd claimed to have observed on the Shroud as pigment changed over the years... later claiming the red ocher had been mined from a source as that was developed only as late as the 1830s. Totally absurd. Do you see why he could not be considered reliable? Probably not.
Your citing of these articles as proof could be deemed a lie. They report falsehoods... deliberately. They are NOT TRUE. They are pushing a false agenda despite the state of the science. They cite already falsified data. Data that has LONG been proved false, yet these articles continue to trumpet them as if they were true. Do you want that? The evidence is that you do because you have been presented with the evidence of the falsification, and you again trot out the falsehoods. Why?
Sure, show us the corrected C-14 results. Oh, wait—there aren’t any?