I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but I keep forgetting to do so. During my summer vacation to the Adirondacks in New York, my wife and I took a break from hiking to get some dinner. As we were getting ready to chow down, lo and behold, I observed the following “miraculous” appearance in my wife’s soup!…
Laugh if you will, unbeliever, but you should tremble in awe at the miraculous appearance of…
Of course it isn’t Mr. Bill in my soup, folks. It’s just another classic case of pareidolia, the same phenomenon by which people think they see dogs or cars in the clouds, the so-called Face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, or visions of Jesus in a window. Essentially, our brains work as pattern-recognition machines, and one of the most familiar patterns which we are evolutionarily programmed to recognize is other human faces. So we tend to see human (or human-like) faces in bits of random data even when there really is no face there to begin with!
I really like how skeptical magicians Penn & Teller put it during their Bullshit! episode on supposed “miracles”, so I’ll let them have the last word 🙂
Just in time for Easter, the “History” Channel has come out with a television special which claims to have found the “true face” of Jesus Christ. And just how was this amazing feat accomplished? Supposedly through a complex, three-dimensional computer analysis of the Shroud of Turin.
Of course, this is a major media fail on the part of the “History” Channel, because the entire argument that this is the face of Jesus is based upon a false premise. Namely, the assumption on the part of both the “History” Channel and the researchers performing the computer analysis is that the Shroud of Turin actually did cover Christ… when in reality it didn’t.
All the evidence we have to date shows quite clearly that the Shroud could not have been the funeral covering for Christ, because all signs point to it being created sometime around the 13th century A.D. (see my previous blog posts on the Shroud of Turin here and here). And, unless I’m really bad at both math and a basic understanding of Christian theology, Jesus is supposed to have been resurrected a mere three days after his death, as opposed to roughly seven centuries!!! All the cool technology in the world won’t change the basic fact that if you start with a bad argument (i.e., the Shroud is authentic), you’ll still end with a bad argument (i.e., the “3D face of Jesus” is the real thing). In other words… “garbage in = garbage out”.
So while the “History” Channel might be going for ratings with the timing of this TV special, they get a big, fat failing grade for spreading yet more nonsense when they are supposed to be educating the public.
Mmmm-kay… I’m not seeing it. But then, I was never a big fan of MJ in the first place. And, of course, if you had never even heard of or seen a picture of MJ, then the blob in the clouds above would likely look to you like… well, like a blob.
The Skeptical Teacher 