Shroud of Turin News, October 2020

© Stephen E. Jones[1]

[Previous: August & September 2020] [Next: November 2020]

This is the October 2020 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. Emphases are mine unless otherwise indicated. The articles' words are bold to distingish them from mine.

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News:
"Charles A. Rogers," Canton Daily Ledger, Canton, IL, 13 October 2020. Charles A. Rogers [Right] was born to Forrest J. and Vera (Bath) Rogers in Canton, Dec. 22, 1941. His intense curiosity and talents for mathematics and analytical thinking sparked a keen lifelong passion for all things science and nature related ... A quiet, sincere Christian, Charles always looked for signs and symbols of what God wanted him to do with his life ... he attended Northwestern University on a full scholarship, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts in Physics. He earned a Master of Science degree from the University of Illinois in 1964, continued studying high energy physics, then in 1967 began work at the Critical Mass Laboratory at Hanford in Richland, Washington. In 1970 he transferred to Westinghouse as a Nuclear Criticality Safety Specialist in support of the Fast Flux Test Facility. In 1997 he served as technical program chair for a topical meeting of the Nuclear Criticality Safety Division of the ANS [American Nuclear Society]. He worked in criticality safety at Hanford until retiring in 2007 ... Ever the scholar, Charles studied and observed natural phenomenon and saw patterns that reflected God’s hands at work in history ... In July 2017 he presented a speech at the International Conference on the Shroud of Turin [in Pasco, Washington], explaining his theory of how free electrons could have formed the image of Jesus on the shroud ... Charles passed away Sept. 14, 2020 at home, in Richland, Washington, after a courageous six year battle against five separate cancers. Where all these physical/chemical explanations for why the 1st century Shroud has a radiocarbon date of 1290-1360, i.e. 1355 ±65 years, fail is what the physicist Frank Tipler pointed out, it would be a miracle if the Shroud was first-century but its radiocarbon date was what it would be if the Shroud was a fake:

"If the radiocarbon date is ignored, there are quite a few reasons for accepting the Shroud as genuine ... But ... what must be answered before the Shroud can be accepted as genuine - is why the radiocarbon date is exactly what one would expect it to be if the Turin Shroud were actually a fraud ... A few decades after de Charny's death [in 1356], the bishop of Troyes [in 1389] denounced the Shroud as a fake and said that he knew the name of the forger, who had confessed. So if the bishop and later skeptics were correct, we would expect the linen of which the Shroud is made to date from the time of the forgery. That is, the middle of the fourteenth century. When the radiocarbon date was discovered to be between 1260 and 1390 (95 percent confidence interval), most scientists (including myself until a few years ago) were convinced that the Shroud had been proven a fraud. If bacterial or other contamination had distorted the date, we would expect the measured radiocarbon date to be some random date between A.D. 30 and the present. It would be an extraordinary and very improbable coincidence if the amount of carbon added to the Shroud were exactly the amount needed to give the date that indicated a fraud. That is, unless the radiocarbon date were itself a miracle ..."[2]

"... in 1988 on the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud. What originally convinced me that the Shroud was a fake was the fact that the date obtained was precisely that expected if the Shroud were a medieval forgery. The Shroud first appeared in France in 1355, and the Arizona laboratory obtained a radiocarbon date of 1350. It seems incredible that later contamination came in exactly the right amount to give an exactly incorrect date. Unless the contamination ... were a miracle"[3]

Tipler believes that the Shroud is 1st century and that its 13th-14th century radiocarbon date was a supernatural miracle by God (but that would make God a deceiver)! See 18Aug15, 19Apr17, 09May17, 20Mar19 & 14Feb20. Including that a better explanation why the 1st century Shroud has exactly the right c. 1355 radiocarbon date if it was a fake, is that the radiocarbon date was a fake, the result of a computer hacking!

"Douglas J. Donahue," Arizona Daily Star, 25 October 2020 ... We are sad to say our beloved father Douglas Donahue[Left [4]] passed away September 25, 2020 ... He was born ... in Wichita, Kansas ... At 16, he drove his Model A across the Pasadena Freeway on its opening day in 1940 [Therefore he was born in 1924?]. WWII followed. Doug volunteered for the Navy ... Doug earned his PhD in Nuclear Physics at the University of Wisconsin and moved to Washington to work on General Electric's nuclear reactor. He loved Academia, took a professorship at Penn State University and, in 1963, began a 37 year career at the University of Arizona, including time as Chairman of the Physics Department. Doug was a pioneer in Carbon 14 dating. In 1983, he assisted in establishing the USA's first accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon laboratory. He radiocarbon dated materials across the world including dating the Shroud of Turin to the 14th Century ... Donahue, with Paul Damon (1921-2005), founded the Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory in 1981[5]. Donahue was present on 6 May 1988 [see 23Jun18] when Arizona laboratory first

[Above (enlarge)[6]: Extract of historic group photograph (presumably taken by Damon who isn't in it) of those present at the Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory on 6 May 1988[7] when the AMS computer terminal [left] displayed a date of the Shroud, which when calibrated, was "1350 AD"[8]. The alleged hacker, Timothy W. Linick (1946-89) [see 05Jul14, 22Feb16], is in a black shirt[9], standing in front of everyone, including laboratory leaders Donahue (behind the seated person) and Timothy Jull (behind and on our right of Donahue). This is evidence that Linick was in charge of the fully computerised AMS dating process[10] at Arizona laboratory and those present were acknowledging that [see 22Feb16, 22Nov16, 25Mar18, 23Jun18, 15Jul18, 27Sep18 & 28Oct18].]

radiocarbon dated the Shroud as "1350"[11]. Donahue was one of the 21 signatories to the 1989 Nature article[12] which claimed (fraudulently [see 17Feb19; 20Mar19 & 29May19]) that:

"... samples from the Shroud of Turin have been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry in laboratories at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich ... The results provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval ... AD 1260-1390, with at least 95% confidence"[13]

Donahue was reportedly "a devout Catholic"[14] who turned "pale" when he was the first to announce that the Shroud's radiocarbon date was "1350"[15]. But that might have been because Donahue was concerned for the Catholic faith of his wife, Dee, than for his own. Anti-authenticist David Sox (1936-2016) had written that "Donahue's wife [Dee], who believed the Shroud was genuine, was going for 2000 years" and "The night before his [Donahue's] wife [Dee] had jokingly threatened divorce if the Arizona test did not show the Shroud was 2000 years old[16], but Sox doesn't say anything about Donahue's own belief in the Shroud's authenticity. Significantly Douglas and Dee's children in their parents' obituaries, wrote of their mother that:

"Dee was a devout Catholic who volunteered with the Catholic Charities of Tucson and who would often slip into the Benedictine Sisters Monastery down the street from her Tucson home for afternoon prayers. Her spirituality was a cornerstone of her life"[17]

But of their father they wrote not a word of his Catholicism or Christianity:

"Doug's career was Physics, but his passion was his family and community. He taught the value of hard work, education, community engagement, compassion and generosity and choreographed family travels across the United States, Mexico and Europe, including sabbaticals in Oxford and Munich. He served with the Sam Hughes Neighborhood Association and was president of the St. Vincent DePaul Conference. He was an active tennis and badminton player into his nineties, competed in the Arizona Senior Olympics, and medaled in the National Senior Olympics in 2001 and 2007"[18].

The French Roman Catholic scholar, Br Bruno Bonnet-Eymard [see 23Jul15a], interviewed Donahue at his Tucson hime in 1991, in which Donahue played a video ridiculing Catholic devotion to the Shroud, and indicated that he believed that the Shroud was a 14th century fake on the basis of the false [see again 1389] d'Arcis Memorandum:

"Last October [1991], I was in Tucson where I met Professor Donahue. He took me to his home to show a video recording of David Sox's programme, `The Threads of Evidence', shown by the BBC in July 1988, three months before Cardinal Ballestrero proclaimed on 13 October 1988 the results of the carbon dating of the `threads' taken from the Holy Shroud (21 April 1988). The programme ridiculed the traditional devotion of the Catholic Church as personified by Father Rinaldi, and presented in advance the results of the dating process being carried out by the laboratories at that time, in order to make them conform with the historical documentation of the `Memorandum of Pierre d'Arcis'. This `Memorandum' revealed that Henri de Poitiers, Bishop of Troyes, had conducted an inquiry in 1355 and had actually discovered the forger [but see 11Jul16]. For Douglas Donahue, the case had been heard: `The Memorandum of Pierre d'Arcis...' he said, with an indulgent smile"[19].

That Donahue was not "a devout Catholic" who "genuinely had high expectations that the Shroud would be found to be of the first century"[20] is evident by his readiness to believe, on the basis of only one radiocarbon dating run, at only one laboratory, and "he did not care what results the other two laboratories got" [see 08Jun14, 30Jan15, 22Sep15, 10Feb18, 23Jun18 & 03Aug19], that the Shroud's radiocarbon date was "1350":

"Based on these 10 one minute runs, with the calibration correction applied, the year the flax had been harvested that formed its linen threads was 1350 AD-the shroud was only 640 years old! It was certainly not Christ's burial cloth but dated from the time its historic record began ... I remember Donahue saying that he did not care what results the other two laboratories got, this was the shroud's age"[21].

As I mentioned in my post of 03Nov16b:

"... in consultation with a leading Shroud pro-authenticist, on 17 May 2014 I emailed Professor Emeritus Douglas J. Donahue a co-founder of the Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory and a signatory of the 1989 Nature paper. I had read that Donahue was a Roman Catholic[22], who before the test had hoped that the Shroud was first century[23], and that his face became pale after the calculations produced by the AMS computer were displayed on the control console terminal's screen, indicating that the Shroud's date was AD 1350[24]. I therefore thought that when presented with the evidence that Arizona laboratory's radiocarbon dating of the Shroud had been hacked, Donahue might at least admit that was a possibility. So on 17 May 2014 I emailed Prof. Donahue at his Arizona University email address. I stated upfront who I was, the name of my blog with a link to it, and asked him the following questions:

"Have you any information that you would be prepared to share with me for me to publish on my blog about:

1) The circumstances of [Timothy W.] Linick's death?
2) The possibility of Linick being the leaker of Arizona's 1350 date?
3) The possibility of Arizona's C14 date of 1350 being the result of its AMS computer having been hacked?
4) The possibility of Linick being the hacker?

I don't want to receive information from you that I cannot publish on my blog as that will give me an insoluble ethical dilemma. However, if you ask me preliminary questions in reply I won't publish those.

If you wish to remain anonymous I would respect that and not publish, or tell anyone, your name, even my wife. I would just write, `someone who was there at Arizona Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory on 6 May 1988 when the Shroud of Turin was dated 1350 emailed me under the condition of strict confidentiality and anonymity that ...'"[25]

However, I have never received a reply from Prof. Donahue. And since if my theory [see 23Jul15b, 28Oct18, 29May19 & 14Feb20] was false, Donahue, like Jull and Ramsey (see 03Nov16a), would be in the perfect position to show that it was false, I can only conclude that Donahue's silence (as well as Jull's and Ramsey's), is itself evidence that my theory is true!"

I presume there will be an obituary of Prof. Donahue on the Arizona radiocarbon dating laboratory website and/or in the journal Radiocarbon. If there are any further obituaries of Prof. Donahue and I become aware of them, I will link to them and update this section (e.g. his year of birth) if necessary.

I have provided a link to this section about Prof. Donahue as an interim entry in my Turin Shroud Encyclopedia

Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]
2. Tipler, F.J., 2007, "The Physics of Christianity," Doubleday: New York NY, pp.178-179. [return]
3. Tipler, 2007, pp.216-217. [return]
4. "Douglas J Donahue," UA Science: Physics, University of Arizona, 2016. No longer online. [return]
5. "About us," Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, University of Arizona, 2020. [return]
6. Gove, H.E., 1996, "Relic, Icon or Hoax?: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Institute of Physics Publishing: Bristol UK, p.176H. [return]
7. Gove, 1996, p.264. [return]
8. Ibid. [return]
9. Jull, A.J.T. & Suess, H.E., 1989, "Timothy W. Linick," Radiocarbon, Vol 31, No 2. [return]
10. Sox, H.D., 1988, "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, pp.146-147; Gove, 1996, p.264. [return]
11. Gove, 1996, pp.264, 279; Garza-Valdes, L.A., 1998, "The DNA of God?," Hodder & Stoughton: London, pp.163, 180; Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., 2000, "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books: London, p.9. [return]
12. Damon, P.E., et al., 1989, "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16 February, pp.611-615, 611; Wilson, 1998, p.230. [return]
13. Damon, et al., 1989, p.611. [return]
14. Wilson, I., 1998, "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, p.11. [return]
15. Gove, 1996, p.264; Wilson, 1998, p.11. [return]
16. Sox, 1988, pp.147, 151. [return]
17. "Dee Donahue," In memoriam: Funeral notices, Arizona Daily Star, May 3, 2020. [return]
18. "Douglas J. Donahue," Obituary, Arizona Daily Star, October 25, 2020. [return]
19. Bonnet-Eymard, B., 1991, "Study of Original Documents of the Archives of the Diocese of Troyes in France with Particular Reference to the Memorandum of Pierre D'arcis," Shroud News, No 68, December, pp.6-18, 6. [return]
20. Wilson, 1998, p.11; 188. [return]
21. Gove, 1996, p.264. [return]
22. Wilson, I., 1991, "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, p.8; Wilson, 1998, pp.11, 188. [return]
23. Wilson, 1991, p.8; Gove, H.E., 1996, "Relic, Icon or Hoax?: Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud," Institute of Physics Publishing: Bristol UK, p.264. [return]
24. Gove, 1996, p.264; Wilson, 1998, p.10; Wilson. & Schwortz, 2000, p.9. [return]
25. Jones, S.E., 2014, "Re: Timothy W. Linick," Email to Dr. Douglas J. Donahue, 17 May, 10:48 PM. [return]

Posted: 6 November 2020. Updated: 12 April 2021.