Not long ago I did a piece on the Shroud of Turin as an anomaly, both to science (as it appears to defy naturalistic explanations) and to faith (since, though potentially evidential, it is not mentioned in the documents or traditions of Christian faith).
I decribed the solution of Sam Shuster, a materialistic sceptic, which was simply to exclude the phenomenon as self-evidently impossible in his worldview, and therefore unworthy of examination. And that raises interesting questions about how, as humans and particularly as Christians, we deal with anomalies to our worldviews.
It is possible, and I would say important, to keep anomalies in mind as a check to our worldview’s validity, at least when we have reasons not to reject them as outright lies. For our problem is that “All men are liars” (Psalm 116:11) and, as some of the nonsense on YouTube demonstrates, people will invent anything to impress the gullible. But to dismiss everything as a lie, all the time, ignores the psalmist’s admission that he spoke in haste. Stuff happens.
For example, as regards the Turin Shroud, the accumulation of evidence may tip the balance from “probable fraud” towards “probable relic of the miraculous,” or vice versa of course. Since writing my previous blog, I discovered that the 3:1 herringbone weave of the linen cloth was not long ago taken as clear evidence of a fourteenth century mediaeval fraud, because no examples are known from the first century. It turns out though, firstly, that such a weave is known from costly first century silk and wool remnants, and secondly that there are zero examples of it from fourteenth century Europe, and only one from much later in the mediaeval period. If absence of evidence is evidence of absence, then the forgery hypothesis is marginally less likely than its authenticity on the basis of the linen weave.
In either scenario, though, that weave remains an anomaly. In Roman times linen was so costly it was compared to gold, making a rare weave of linen even more valuable. And who wraps a crucified criminal in billionaire-quality cloth, especially since by Jewish custom the bones would have been gathered into an ossuary after a year or so, and the shroud binned? And as for a pious fraud, when you can fool the public (and make a good profit) with any old cloth, why pay a king’s ransom for an excessively rare foreign linen to paint?
Yet contemplating that not very obvious anomaly, from a biblical worldview, takes us back to the gospel accounts, in which the rich Joseph of Aramathea, a secret believer within the Sanhedrin but not consenting to the condemnation of Jesus, obtains the body from the Romans, buys a new linen cloth (thus making the Shroud the oldest existing cloth in the world for which we have a record of purchase!), and buries Jesus in his own, unused, tomb. The artifact prompts us to realise that, perhaps from a sense of guilt combined with defiance of his murderous peers, Joseph was determined to give Jesus as close to a royal burial as was possible at short notice. And so, false or authentic, the Shroud has the positive effect of driving home to us that
He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Isaiah 53:9
Also after my previous post, I wondered whether the dimensions of the Shroud might be instructive. It turns out researchers have already thought of that. The mediaeval French cloth measurement (the ell) varied widely from place to place, but in the first century the standard measure of length in the Roman Empire was the Assyrian cubit – and the the Turin Shroud happens to measure exactly eight by two of those. An off-the-shelf purchase, put to use immediately, just as the Evangelist says.
So much for one anomaly. But other phenomena are also easy to reject out of hand, both for secularists and believers. For example, how do UFOs (now fashionably rebranded as UAPs) fit into a Christian worldview? Are extraterrestrials compatible with the Bible (and are they even compatible with science, seeing that it is coming to see earthlike planets as vanishingly rare)? What about time travelling humans as an alternative? Or do angels or demons fit the phenomenon better? In a recent Bible Study I confessed that, prior to my teenage conversion, I’d been embroiled in the UFO myth that Jesus was an enlightened ET, but that my interest in UFOs waned as I grew in faith. But after the study, one of the group – a mature and wise Christian – said that she’d actually seen a UFO as a teenager. I’ve yet to quiz her about it, and so who knows if she misinterpreted a weather balloon or a secret weapon. But having excluded, “It’s all lies,” it seems necessary to keep an eye on the question, lest a flying saucer invasion wrongfoots my faith, as well as incinerating my planet… or in case I ignore demonic resurgences prophesied in the word.
Similar things could be said about more traditional phenomena like ghosts. Because they are light-years away from the prevalent worldview, they become the stuff of guilty suspension of scepticism – a quick shiver of the spine as the fake videos appear on the news, and then we cast it aside. But if a reliable witness tells you of their experience (and that hasn’t yet happened to me convincingly) it’s probably a good thing to develop a theology of ghosts, if only to avoid dangerous spiritual deception. We might start with the disciples believing Jesus to be a ghost both when he walked on water, and after his resurrection. Jesus replied that he was not one, rather than scorning their existence. As for fairies, goblins, or dragons… well, maybe not, though understanding why they feature in folklore might be useful.
A rather different example of an anomaly is the unlikely existence of soft tissue in dinosaur remains, discovered a decade or so ago. To the young earther that is proof positive of a six-day creation in recent times (and hence to them not an anomaly at all), but to the Christian palaeontologist who discovered it, with very many other evidences that the earth, and the fossils, are much older than that, it certainly is anomalous. The scientific explanations so far are far from conclusive, but in my view it is valid for them to be sought, simply because one anomaly cannot overturn a complete system of knowledge. In the same way, the Christian (or Jew) is entitled to look for a “fix” for Dame Kathleen Kenyon’s not finding evidence for the fall of Jericho under Joshua, rather than rejecting the whole Exodus narrative. As it happens, further analysis and excavation seem to lead towards such a “fix.”
On the other hand, I would suggest that the tendency for young earthers to reject the entire body of evidence that the earth has a long history is even more egregious than Sam Shuster’s rejection of the Shroud on the basis of his materalistic mindset. Sadly I found this attitude in the book I recently mentioned, in which John Stott was condemned for tentatively accepting some form of evolution, because “the Bible clearly teaches that the world was created in six days.”
That attitude was present in a much more serious form in the otherwise good 2017 Crossway tome critiquing theistic evolution, and it is insufficient because it simply asserts the authority of (one understanding of) Scripture against all comers. Wayne Grudem should have known better, because it puts us on a level with Muslims denying Israel’s history and archaeology because of the Quran and the hadith, or the Mormon rejecting Egyptian linguistics because of Joseph Smith’s book. The Bible is true because it correlates with all truth, not because it trumps it.
What that dismissive approach means is that the whole body of scientific study becomes one vast anomaly to one’s biblical worldview, and as a result if one thinks about it at all, it is necessary to accuse all the world’s scientists of a grand conspiracy against the truth. Now, I’ve spent many years trying to understand the assumptions of scientists, and whilst there is undoubtedly serious bias caused by taking on board naturalism, either methodological or philsophical, that is insufficient to render all scientific evidence null and void. Scientists, like all of us in the West including young earthers, have indeed become tainted by materialist thinking, but there is no conspiracy beyond the mundane. I’ve become convinced (on studying the evidence) that current evolutionary science is on an insecure footing, but nothing has convinced me that the great age of the earth, the succession of species, or indeed the long history of mankind before Adam’s chalcolithic culture, are anything other than part of God’s reality. Hence I’ve sought to resolve the anomaly by closer examination of the genres of Scripture, and indeed its theology, some of the fruits of which are in my book The Generations of Heaven and Earth.
In this blog, my mind has been channeled towards particular kinds of anomaly that came immediately to mind. Many others could be found. For example the biblical teaching on women and marriage seems to run counter to most Evangelical practice: so should we soak up contemporary feminism, or espouse traditional practice… or maybe be challenged by the conflict to seek God in his word for a better way, rather than gloss over Scripture’s troublesome passages as anomalies? Similarly, discovering the unbiblical underpinnings of Charismatic theology, do we lapse into Enlightenment anti-supernaturalism, or deal with the dysjunction between belief and practice as a biblical challenge to be addressed, rather than as anomalies to be ignored?
My point is that there are certainly more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy, Horatio, and that the existence of those anomalies is a good reminder of our limitations. To ignore or reject phenomena that don’t fit our preconceptions is bigotry. And to shirk the effort of trying to fit them into our worldview, at least tentatively, makes us vulnerable to accepting the world’s interpretation of them. Since the world is, one day, destined to accept a miracle-working false Messiah and be deceived into hell, the biblically critical habit of thinking is a good one to nurture.
