Sunday, July 26, 2015

The God of Probability: The Shroud and Divine Providence

Providence and the Shroud

The fact that the Shroud has survived for more than nearly two millennia is virtually inexplicable. In the course of those millennia on many occasions it survived dire circumstances, narrowly escaping destruction.

The empty Shroud was first noted in the tomb by Peter and from that moment on we have conflicting reports of its location. The Shroud had to be kept a secret initially because as a relic of the crucified Christ it would be a prime object for seizure by both Roman and Jewish authorities. Later, iconoclastic movements would have made short work of it. It appears to have been hidden in the city of Edessa for some time. Eventually, Edessa came under control of a Muslim ruler.

In 944, it was wrested from Muslim control by a Byzantine Army and brought to Constantinople. An eye witness account recorded its weekly exposition in Constantinople and its disappearance when French knights looted Constantinople of its treasures in 1204 CE.

Its disappearance from Constantinople was fortuitous because Constantinople would eventually fall to the Muslims. By that time the enmity between Christians and Muslims had become so severe that Sultan Bayazid I boasted that he would conquer Rome and feed his horses oats on the altar of St. Peters.

The Shroud was openly displayed in Lirey, a small French provincial town, in 1355 by the Geoffrey de Charny a French knight who claimed ownership of the Shroud. Neither he nor his descendants ever satisfactorily explained how he came into possession of the Shroud. In 1453, it was transferred by de Charny's granddaughter to Duke Louis I of the House of Savoy. Eventually, it found a permanent home in Turin under the protection of the Savoy's. While the Shroud was safely ensconced in Turin two events that swept through much of Europe were leading to the destruction of many Catholic relics. One was the Protestant Reformation. John Calvin was particularly disturbed by the Catholic veneration of the Shroud. He never got his hands on it.

The second event was the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. When it was operating at full throttle, many Catholic relics and icons were fed to revolutionary bonfires.

Another narrow escape for the Shroud occurred in World War II. The Vatican was fearful for the fate of the Shroud and sought to hide it for the duration of the war. It was brought from Turin to Rome and initially it was proposed that it be hidden in the Monastery at Monte Casino. However, it was finally decided to choose a less conspicuous place, the smaller Benedictine Abbey of Montevergine, in the province of Avellino, northeast of Naples. Had the Shroud been secreted at Monte Casino it would most likely have been destroyed by the massive Allied bombing of Monte Casino in 1944.

In 1532 at Chambray, October 1972 in Turin, and a second time in Turin on April 11, 1997, the Shroud was threatened with destruction by fire and yet survived. Evidence of arson was found in an investigation of the 1997 incident.

The late John Heller who along with Alan Adler was responsible for the analysis of the blood stains on the Shroud noted that throughout the STURP testing of the Shroud: "The role of 'coincidence' was awesome." (Heller, Dr. John H., p. 221 Report on the Shroud of Turin Houghton Mifflin, 1983)

Divine Providence

But was the survival of the Shroud merely luck and were "coincidences" just happenstance ‑ or were they evidence of the intervention of Divine Providence?

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, providence may be defined as the practical reason, adapting means to an end. As applied to God, Divine Providence is God Himself considered in that act by which in His wisdom He so orders all events within the universe that the end for which it was created may be realized. (Providence, Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12510a.htm accessed July 23, 2015)

The hypothesis this I advance is that the accumulation of circumstances and events concerning the Shroud and its escapes from destruction may be attributable to divine intervention.

Teilhard placed Divine Providence at the center of creation:

"In the centre, so glaring as to be disconcerting, is the uncompromising affirmation of a personal God: God as providence, directing the universe with loving, watchful care; and God the revealer, communicating himself to man on the level of and through the ways of intelligence." (de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard (2011-06-21). The Phenomenon Of Man (Kindle Locations 5383-5387). Evergreen Books. Kindle Edition.  Paperback Edition, pp 292-293 First Harper Colophon Edition 1975 (Reprinted in Perennial 2002)

However, when it came to a specific intervention Divine Providence (such as we hypothesize for the survival of the Shroud) Teilhard is circumspect:

"Yet, whatever inner evidence we may have on this matter (and such evidence is perhaps much more certain than any reasoning), we cannot but recognize that the objectivity of such special or general interventions by Providence into our lives falls into the category of personal intuition rather than into that of the demonstrable." (Emphasis added)

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (2002-11-18). Christianity and Evolution (Harvest Book, Hb 276) (Kindle Locations 2140-2144). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

Providence and Probability

Science never stands still. Teilhard passed away in 1955. In the past 60 years science has expanded its reach into areas that in the past were beyond investigation by the scientific method. One of those the nature of consciousness in general, and among other things the nature of intuition which has been defined as "sub-conscious reasoning." The computer is a good vehicle for explaining the difference between consciousness reasoning and sub-conscious reasoning. Conscious reasoning is akin to information on a physical hard drive that must be called-up from the hard dive by the processor. Subconscious reasoning is like random access memory which can process information at blinding speed because there is no physical interaction necessary.

Intuition is a process which is pure thought and there is no need to access the conscious brain. Information is considered and utilized at blinding speed and appears to be instantaneous. Two recent works that discuss this phenomenon are BlinkThe Power of Thinking Without Thinking  by Malcolm Gladwell and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious   by Gerd Gigerenzer

There is one item that all of us factor into our intuition: the law of probability. That doesn't mean we are always right because our sense of the probabilities may be askew. Yet, it is possible to analyze the probabilities of a particular situation and arrive at a mathematical solution. Our subconscious does that intuitively.

In 2009 there was an election in Iran. The "gut feeling" or intuition was that it was rigged. That intuition was confirmed by a study of the election returns. The hypothesis was that absent human intervention (i.e. fraud), the last digit of each report would be a random number evenly dispersed from 0 to 9. The last digits of the election results reported from each district were not evenly dispersed. The application of the law of probability supported the intuition of fraud.

See The God of Probabilities: How voting fraud in Iran demonstrates the existence of God.

What the digits revealed is human intervention in the recording of the results that skewed them.

Given all the crisis visited on the Shroud, what are the odds that it would have survived? Our intuition is that Providence intervened to insure its survival to modern times  ‑ when science had developed to a stage that could unlock its revelation.

That is of course only a hypothesis – for now.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Coming of the Quantum Christ is available for order either as E-Book and four color print edition. You can get a 15% discount on the print edition.
 .


2 comments:

  1. Gnostics probably created the Holy Shroud in the 1st or 2nd century using a crucified victim and methods that have been lost to history. Talking about an “empty Shroud” means you are assuming there was an empty tomb. Raymond Brown argues that it is “historically certain” that Jesus was buried in a private tomb, but other Biblical scholars say Jesus was buried in a common grave for criminals. Maybe there is no real disagreement among Biblical scholars about this matter.

    The coincidence that is relevant is the Resurrection of Jesus as an historical event and the ability of Gnostics to create the Shroud. This is not evidence that Jesus is alive in a new life with God. It is a reason to believe Jesus is alive. Faith is both a decision and a gift from God. There is a difference between evidence and reasons to believe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. David,

      When it comes to a leaps of faith, your statement that Gnostics probably created the Shroud in "First or Second century" is a jump off the Brooklyn Bridge (which I periodically sell to pay the rent).

      I never thought of you as a skeptic of the carbon dating, but I guess you are. Second, you MAY have an important part of the truth in your statement: Gnostic possession of the Shroud circa One or Two century CE.

      If so, it may very well be one circumstance in the Shroud's survival. One thing about Gnostics, they believed in keeping secrets.

      But, here's a big but: There are four written accounts of Christ's Resurrection. Applying Occam's Razor, they are a Resurrection connected process is a lot simpler explanation than a secret process by a secret sect by that has been lost to history and is totally inexplicable.

      Your skepticism of the Shroud is your skepticism of the Resurrection. One thing about the Resurrection, it was never kept secret. We have four written accounts of it drawn from contemporary sources. You have nothing but your speculation, and I expect, an inability to deal with the idea of the Resurrection as history.

      Delete