Once upon a time, it was said of all swans that they were white. And this was so because no one, at least no one during the Middle Ages in Europe or the Middle East, had ever seen swans of another color. It was as good as a fact. That was until 1697 when Dutch explorers discovered black swans in Australia. And thus, a logical fallacy got a name. Wiktionary defines the Black Swan Fallacy thus:
The black swan fallacy holds that if all you have ever observed in your field research are white swans, you might be tempted to conclude ‘All swans are white’. However, a black swan was discovered in Australia. Therefore, all it takes is one black swan to falsify the general statement about the universality of white swans.
And thus was made what was perhaps the greatest error in Shroud science. For once upon a time, and still today, it is said, “When input to a VP-8, a normal photograph does not result in a properly formed dimensional image but in a rather distorted jumble of light and dark ‘shapes’.” That is what it says on a page by Barrie Schwortz at shroud.com (updated in 2014). This thinking is repeated in many ways. You will find it in Jackson et al.’s Critical Summary, a defense of something called the “Fall Through hypothesis. You will find it in countless presentations, websites and books.
Bill Meacham put it this way:
Unlike ordinary photographs or paintings, the Shroud image converted into an undistorted three-dimensional figure, a phenomenon which suggested that the image-forming process acted uniformly through space over the body, front and back, and did not depend on contact of cloth with body at every point.
Unfortunately, that just doesn’t hold up.
The black swan moment happened at an international Shroud of Turin conference in St. Louis in 2014, Joseph Accetta, in a presentation, explained how a normal photograph could contain all the same type of three-dimensional information found on the Shroud. John Dee German, an optical physicist with STURP has said much the same thing.
To the left is a photograph of a death mask from Joseph Accetta’s presentation. Below, courtesy of Colin Berry who did the work, is the proof that Accetta was right.
So this statement at shroud.com, once thought to be true, is simply not true:
This spatial data encoded into the image actually eliminates photography and painting as the possible mechanism for its creation and allows us to conclude that the image was formed while the cloth was draped over an actual human body.
There is no basis whatsoever for concluding that the cloth covered a body.
Photography, painting and other methods are just as likely now as they were before the VP-8 was ever used.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, described by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II, explains how we fall into Black Swan traps:
- The event is a surprise to the observer.
- The event has a major effect.
- It is rationalized by hindsight.
In this context, re-read the page by Barrie Schwortz at shroud.com
Every option is back on the table. Yes, even John Jackson’s Fall Through hypothesis if one can recognize that it is a mere assumption and not established or valid science that the cloth covered Jesus’ body. It is for other reasons that I think the Fall Through hypothesis is unlikely. Read The Resurrection is Just Too Mysterious to Be Described