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June 11, 2025 19 mins
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to the Gonzeye View podcast. I'm your host, Trevor.
It's been a little while since I've recorded. I've missed this.
I've missed talking into the Void within which I'm sure
there's a few listeners out there somewhere. So normally I
come on here and talk about the book God's Eye View,

(00:31):
which of course I encourage people to check out. It
was pretty incredible experience writing it. It's been fun going
around podcasts talking about it. I just went on the
Brothers of the Serpent podcast, which is an amazing show
for anybody who hasn't heard of it. They have a

(00:52):
huge focus on ancient Egypt and make a lithts and
the Younger Driest and all of these archaeological ideas. But
every once in a while they dip their toes into consciousness,
which was what we talked about. Anyway. So my wife's
on a work trip, I've got my kids watching Bluie

(01:13):
great show, and I thought i'd sit down and talk
to you all. I feel like I know you. I
don't know who's out there listening, but I feel like
I know you that I talk to you all about
a new project, a project I'm very insecure about so hopefully,

(01:34):
hopefully I can do a good job explaining it. I
wrote the last book, God's Eye View. It was really
something I was going through. You know, I've been an
atheist most of my life. Still wasn't really sure what
I believed, but I was starting to have some real
doubts about the scientific worldview, not science itself necessarily, not

(01:58):
the method, not the but the conclusion, the conclusion that
what you see is what you get, This is all
there is, life is just matter in motion. It's not
that I'm like fundamentally opposed to those ideas if those

(02:19):
conclusions were reached through good science, but they kind of weren't.
It was just sort of this insistence upon reductionism and
hyper rationalism and dismiss any idea even if it's empirical,

(02:39):
even if the idea makes sense, even if the idea
has been shown experimentally. If it sounds crazy, it is crazy.
And so anytime a scientific experiment sort of supported the
existence of God or the soul, it was just kind
of rejected. And so that last book was about Beth.

(03:00):
We went through quantum mechanics, we went through the neuroscientific
explanations of consciousness, and they just don't make sense. They're
just flawed. And so doesn't mean I have the answers.
I just poked some holes in those kind of mundane
mainstream answers. So anyway, I've been exploring trying to figure

(03:26):
out what I want to write about. I've had a
ton of ideas. I've written maybe four first chapters at
this point about different things, and I just I found
my topic. But I'm insecure about it because it's not
in any way related to the work I do. It's

(03:49):
you know, in some sense, it's scientific, but it's not. Well,
I'll just rip the band aid off and come out
and say it. I've become fascinated with the Shroud of Turin.
And if you're like me, or at least how I
was a year ago, you're probably like what everybody knows

(04:12):
the Shroud of Turin. If you even know what it is,
you know it's a forgery. It's a medieval painting or pressing.
It's not what many claim it to be, which is
the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, a two thousand year

(04:35):
old piece of cloth with an image of a crucified
man from Jerusalem, which we can only you know assume
would be Jesus. And you know, so the last book
my editor David, which if you've listened to my other podcast,
you know David. One of the things he told me

(04:57):
was that, you know, if you're going to do another book,
which I am, try to interview people. Don't just have
it all come out of your head. Interview some people involved.
And so I reached out to some people and lo
and behold they responded, not just like people sort of

(05:21):
affiliated with the Shroud, but like the main people. Let
me just give you a quick overview of the plot,
and you guys email me God's I view book at
gmail dot com and tell me if I should write
it or not. I'm halfway done, so don't be dooming. Okay.
So this team is called Sturp. They investigated the Shroud

(05:44):
in the seventies and what they found was the Shroud
had encoded within it three D information. And let me
explain if you don't even know what the Shroud is.
You know, about seven hundred years ago, supposedly a French
knight turned over this cloth to a king or to

(06:07):
a bishop, I forget who, and he claimed that it
had been in you know, his possession for some time
and that it was handed down through the generations that
it was the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ. So
the traditional Jewish burial would be to take the deceased
full cross their arms over their pelvis area, you know,

(06:32):
kind of in a modest position, and they would lay
them on a cloth and then fold the cloth over
them sort of sort of lengthwise, so as that the
fold is over their head basically, and they would be,
you know, entombed in this garment, this linen cloth. And

(06:57):
so this cloth sort of made it through the histories
into the possession of the Vatican, and I think most
Catholics at one time or another might have thought it
was real. But even the Catholic Church didn't really strongly
claim it to be real. They thought maybe it was
some sort of painting, although the method for painting it

(07:20):
was like not entirely clear. Doesn't look like a painting anyway.
A guy Secondo Pia, an Italian lawyer, about one hundred
and twenty five years ago, he took one of the
first ever photographs using an electrical light source, and it
just so happened to be of the shroud. And so

(07:45):
if you google the shroud. The actual shroud is white.
Most of the images you'll see of it online are
black because they like to show it in the negative.
And there's an obvious reason for that, because when Secando
took a picture of it, it went from just looking
sort of like a man ish like maybe a stain

(08:07):
from being in contact with the with the you know,
the dead body of Jesus for three days. It goes
from looking like a stain to an actual photograph. And
so basically what he found is that the negative image,
you know, people who aren't familiar with film, the brighter
spots of the image react more forcibly with the chemicals

(08:31):
in the in the in the film or in this case,
the glass plate, and they turn dark. So, you know,
very bright images are black and very dark images are white.
And so the shroud itself, because it's a white cloth,
is black on the negative. But what he realized is
that now it went from being the sort of low

(08:52):
resolution image of a man to this like high resolution
image in the And so the only way a photonegative
would be positive is if the object of the photograph
was itself a photo negative. Does that make sense. So basically,

(09:13):
the sort of logical conclusion is that the image is
not painting. It's it's like a piece of photographic film.
An intense light source or radiation source essentially burnt an
image into the linen. All that sort of things start

(09:36):
to get a little bit more interesting obviously, right, So
this was a big deal. All of a sudden, the
shroud went from being like maybe a piece of art
to actually maybe evidence of the resurrection. So, you know,
kind of a bold claim, obviously, and you know, there
was detractors of SECONDO and you know, I think he

(10:00):
did an excellent job defending himself proving that this was
an authentic image. He didn't alter it. It's not like
photoshop existed back then, right, And obviously this has been
replicated many many times. It's clearly at least behaves like
a photoonegative the shroud itself, and this thing has been
studied to death wide anglets, rays and actual sampling, and

(10:27):
you know, looking at the pattern of linen degradation and
it's kind of seems real. And so this team in
the seventies showed that it actually encodes three dimensional information,
and the only way you could encode three dimensional information
in a two dimensional cloth is if energy was emitted

(10:49):
from the object within the cloth perpendicular to the object itself,
if it was a pressing, like if it was like
bodily fluids pressed into the linen, things would be distorted,
like the ears would be distorted because they're kind of
you know, it's hard, it's hard to explain, like, in

(11:11):
order for a three dimensional image to be captured on
a two dimensional cloth, it's going to be warped unless
the body itself acts as an energy source with light
or radiation being emitted from it perpendicularly, which is what
you would expect if you know, the body were to

(11:33):
release a ton of energy for whatever reason. And this
obviously gets everybody excited. But then the shroud is carbon
dated to thirteen twenty five, give or take. And you know,
although it's still an incredible artifacts because no one knows

(11:56):
how a medieval artist could make such a thing. You know,
they didn't have beams back then, at least so we think.
But nevertheless, it's from thirteen hundred, so it's not the
burial cloth of Jesus. But immediately there is some skepticism.

(12:16):
There were some issues. First of all, the sample is
taken from the edge the edges of the of the
shroud have been repaired over the years. It survived a fire,
and cotton fabric was woven into the linen, and so
some in depth microscopy and X ray analysis even reveals
different weaves where the repairs have been sort of woven

(12:41):
in to the linen. And so basically, the objection was
raised that the sample was probably contaminated, and even if
it wasn't contaminated, it may have been a repair, a
medieval repair or earlier, or a mix of recent repair
and original, all of which would mess up with the sample. So,

(13:03):
you know, the people making these accusations did the reasonable thing,
and they requested the data, which is a normal thing
to do on a contentious paper like this, and the
scientists ignored them, which is unusual. And allegedly one of
the labs, the Oxford Lab who did the carbon dating data,

(13:25):
received a one million dollar donation immediately after publishing their paper,
an anonymous one million dollar donation which actually ended up
funding the lab of one of the researchers involved. Allegedly.
I've been trying to track down the actual paper trail.
It's difficult, but there's this guy named Tristan Casabianca, who

(13:49):
you know, after thirty years of people trying to get
the data, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with
the British Museum and was successful in obtaining the documents.
And yeah, apparently England has foyas too. I mean, I
thought that was an American term, but I guess they've
got the same thing. And so I've been speaking to
this guy, which is incredible that he's willing to speak

(14:13):
with me. But I mean, I don't want to make
too strong of a case here, but that radiocarbon dating
has been I would I hesitate to go as far
as thoroughly discredited, but it's certainly been called into question.
The samples were very heterogeneous. It just means that, you know,

(14:35):
they took one piece of cloth and cut it into thirds,
and yet the three samples look very different chemically, which
means they're probably all cleaned differently. There's different amounts of
contaminants in each of them. The location the sample was
taken from is very suspect, as mentioned, and we've now done.
You know, what I would argue is better dating since then,

(14:57):
which places the shroud at about two thousand years old.
And we all know what was alleged to have happened
two thousand years ago. So, man, it's just an incredible story.
It's just this piece of cloth, and when you look
at it in the negative, it sure looks like you

(15:19):
would expect Jesus to look like. And there's even, you know,
maybe credible evidence that this is where maybe our idea
of what Jesus came from, and all this old art
and there's there are, you know, potentially older examples of
the shroud existing in history before the date where we

(15:41):
allegedly foresee it, which is in the thirteen hundreds from
that French night I mentioned. There are even paintings that
have such a degree of similarity to the shroud that are,
you know, hundreds of years older than that thirteen hundred date.
There's no way that the artists in it see the shroud.

(16:03):
I mean they place blood patterned stains in the same way. Anyways,
it's crazy. And so when you look at this image,
alleged image of Jesus, you know, if you're if we're
trying to be really scientific, we'll say of the crucified man, right, man,
there's so much detail, so much detail, it's really unbelievable.

(16:28):
And I mean, down to his haircut, down to the
weave of the cloth, down to the pallen present in
the fibers. Everything speaks of a a cloth made in
Jerusalem two thousand years ago. He looks Jewish the way

(16:50):
like I mentioned his haircut, the burial practices. I don't know, Man,
it's a pretty wild story. I U. I don't want
to become victim of confirmation bias as a newly spiritually
open minded person, but I gotta say it's pretty compelling.
When you read the critical rebuttals of the shroud's authenticity,

(17:13):
they sound emotional. You know, the skeptical position normally sounds
more reasonable, but in this case, it sounds emotional. They're
making like red herring arguments and committing straw man fallacies.
And it's actually the side of this debate that's arguing
that it's the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ. They're

(17:36):
coming across as very thorough, they use very robust methodologies,
and they're being reasonable and logical, which kind of you know,
probably sounds counterintuitive to the more atheist rationalist folks. But man,
it's just it's a cool story. And so that's the story.

(17:57):
I'm going to try to tell I'm gonna try to
present both sides of the debate. I'm going to try
to somehow make it a narrative with some interesting characters
like Tristan and another really interesting scientist I've been communicating
with who's the senior author on most of these Shroud papers,
and maybe some even some of the skeptics, and so

(18:19):
it's a story of mystery, hope, and promise. So if
anyone has any thoughts on the matter, please email me
at God's iView book at gmail dot com. But until then,
by my first book, God's I View. On Amazon. To
search God's I View, look for the book with the

(18:40):
big black hole on the cover. I'm not a great marketer.
There's like four books with the title god'sye View, but
in my experience, my book comes up first, So if
it doesn't have a black hole, it's not the right book.
Also check out our new sub stack at Hemisphere Press

(19:00):
dot substack dot com. Talk to you, s
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