A recent paper by Carpinteri et al. in the journal Meccanica (full reference in margins) demonstrates the two ways that religion is actually a pseudoscience. The first is that it relies on empirical claims to buttress its dogma. While Sophisticated Theologians may argue that God is beyond all evidence, being an imperceptible and indefinable spirit that can neither be defined nor seen as interacting with the cosmos, that’s not what most believers think. So, for instance, claims that Jesus was born of a virgin, died, and was resurrected, or that Mohammad went to heaven on a horse, or that Joseph Smith received the golden plates in New York and translated them into English, or that 75 million years ago Xenu loaded his alien minions onto planes resembling DC-8s, or that there is an afterlife and that good people go to Heaven, or that God hears and answers prayers, or that God is benevolent and all-powerful—these are claims about the way the world is. And many of those claims are testable, though most have been refuted. But the prescientific era, these claims constituted a sort of science—a hypothesis trying to explain how the universe operated.

But as real science arose in the 15th and 16th centuries and began eroding religion’s claims, religion began transforming into a pseudoscience. That is, it still made empirical claims, but immunized itself against the refutation of those claims using a variety of tricks—the same tricks used by advocates of other pseudosciences like ESP, UFOlogy, homeopathy, and astrology. These include arguing that the propositions themselves cannot be tested, using poor standards of evidence (including reliance on “revelation” as a evidence), reliance on a priori personal biases that are not to be tested but merely confirmed, refusing to consider alternative hypotheses, and engaging in special pleading when religious tenets are disconfirmed.

We can see all of these—but especially in the last—in the paper by A. Carpinteri et al. It’s on the age of the Shroud of Turin, and has gotten a lot of publicity. It’s an attempt to refute scientific radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, which showed it to be a medieval forgery, by special pleading invoking earthquakes.

First, a short review. You almost surely know that the Shroud of Turin is a sheet of linen that reposes behind closed doors in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. And it bears the likeness of a man who is said to be Jesus. Indeed, the cloth is reputed to be the very burial shroud of Jesus.

Here’s what it looks like: the image is much clearer in negative form than as a positive. Below is one image of the full the body (pictures from Wikipedia; there are actually two images on the shroud, as if the body had been enfolded):