A recent diatribe by Dale Glover’s is called Shroud Wars: Hugh’s Hypocritical “Hit-Piece,” and attempts to justify an earlier piece called Oakwood Bible Study #4: Refuting the Shroud Skeptics, which I criticised in detail – there are nearly fifty statements which are plain wrong – in my own post Absence of evidence? Make it up! In between these last two posts we exchanged several emails, in which Glover insisted that I add a ‘disclaimer’ to my post, apologising for calling him dishonest, a liar and a fake Christian. Actually I don’t think I called him any of those things, so I held fire until he responded to some clarifications I asked for on a couple of very specific points – we’ll come to them – which, when he did, I’m afraid, I did not find satisfactory. I did nothing, so Glover responded on his YouTube channel, in the hope of rescuing his good name. Still I let it go, but even more recently another abusive harangue has appeared, which I shall cover in another post.
Within the first paragraph of Hugh’s Hypocritical “Hit-Piece, Glover says: “I think it’s disgusting that I have to do this quick solo show to defend my honour and Shroud research because of the betrayal of someone who I thought was a friend, the Shroud skeptic Hugh Farey.” That sets out his canvas, so let’s see how he goes about it.
Firstly, of course, he has to establish that I did dishonour and betray him. He sets great store by the fact that I called him a liar, which of course I didn’t, deceitful, which of course I didn’t, and a ‘fake Christian,’ which of course I didn’t. I did say, and I meant it, that everything he said in refutation of the skeptical point of view was untrue, and that “sometimes, it is clear that he is quoting someone else’s invention and in other cases it’s not.” Nevertheless, Glover says that I have been stalking him “rather Satanically,” an accusation which he repeats several times during the course of his harangue. My blogs, according to him, have sporadically “viciously attacked” him, and implied that he was stupid, ignorant, lying, and manipulating data. Really? I invite readers to re-read …and Hugh Farey is Always Wrong! (lol!), The Very Definition of Pseudo-Science, and Absence of Evidence, Make it up! all on this medievalshroud blog, and judge for themselves.
“Hugh has called me dishonest, and that kind of slander is positively Satanic and will not be tolerated by any true bible-believing Christian. Take it back, Hugh. Now, what’s worse is that Hugh is actually lying in this blog. Every time he says that I’m lying, which entails a purposeful, deliberate falsification of the data, or calls me dishonest or a dishonest authenticist, Hugh is a liar.”
Nobody likes being called a liar, so I avoid it completely, with one exception – see below. My blogpost uses the word ‘liar’ once: “Rather than label any of these scientists liars, it is better to try to understand why they differed from each other.” ‘Dishonesty,’ I think is less aggressive, but it is also quite offensive, however justified, so I avoided that too, except in general terms at the end of my blog, having enumerated the dozens of untruths, distortions, misrepresentations and misinterpretations in Refuting the Skeptics. The word appears three times:
1) Regarding McCrone: “What a pity then, that Glover’s alleged refutation relies so utterly on denigrating the man rather than his findings. This is muck-spreading of a high order, so high, in fact, as to be transparently untrue, flinging all the accusations of dishonesty right back in the accuser’s own face.”
2) “An honest debate is one in which each side presents its evidence, explains what it means to them, and hopes the audience will be swayed to their point of view. A dishonest debate presents evidence which isn’t true, or tries to win by emotional blackmail rather than reason.”
3) “Maybe one day I’ll write a post called the Honest Authenticist – but I may have to invent him first!”
Determined to die defending his integrity, Glover begins to quote me, but then suddenly stops. To distinguish his quoting and his own words, mine are in italics. Referring to the four lectures to Oakland, he quotes me,
” ‘As a skeptic myself, I was particularly interested in the last one. If there is evidence that refutes the non-authenticist argument, I’d like to know what it is. But there isn’t. Rather to my surprise, most of Glover’s evidence is invented.‘ Oh, I just made it up. ‘Sometimes…‘ “
And there he stops, suddenly, without finishing the sentence. Why? Because he does not choose to confuse his listeners with my next line: “Sometimes, it is clear that he is quoting someone else’s invention and in other cases it’s not.” That wouldn’t fit at all with his line of argument, which is that I claim he is an out-and-out liar. Of his arguments, he quotes me,
” ‘Every single one is either completely untrue, or a distortion of the truth…’ ”
and he stops again. Why? Because the line continues, “or at best a misinterpretation or misrepresentation,” and that doesn’t fit his argument, which is:
“Every single one! Every single point that I raised is, according to Hugh, a lie. That’s dishonest. That is a lie on Hugh Farey’s part and he should be ashamed of himself. Apologise, right away, to me.”
This is a ludicrous distortion of what I wrote, and illustrates exactly what I meant about “distortion of the truth, or at best a misinterpretation or misrepresentation.”
“Just in general, all through his blog, Hugh says I’m lying about this, I’m just making stuff up, inventing out of whole cloth. That’s not true. Everything I state comes from credible pro-Shroud experts and peer-reviewed sources, and/or pro-Shroud expert books and papers written by the experts. I invented literally nothing. Every claim I make is coming from somewhere, so by Hugh calling me a liar, he’s actually calling all the experts that I’m quoting or using liars, dishonest, and all of that, including our mutual friend Barrie Schwortz, who recently just died. Hugh is disgracing Barrie Schwortz’s memory.”
That’s rather a grubby mischaracterisation, if I may say so. I don’t say he’s lying, except once, but I do say he is making stuff up, or misquoting the eminent scientists he is desperately trying to hide behind. Dragging Barrie Schwortz in front of him as some kind of self-justificatory shield is particularly distasteful, I feel.
“At one point I quote, word for word, Barrie Schwortz. Hugh says I was lying when I said that. Well, if I’m quoting Barrie, that means Hugh’s calling Barrie a liar, and that’s disgusting. I won’t tolerate that. Apologise for that, Hugh.”
This is sanctimonious piffle, as Glover well knows. He quotes, word for word, six words by Barrie Schwortz: “How does that smell to you?” Being a question, they do not constitute a lie or a truth. As it happens, “that” doesn’t smell ‘off’ to me at all.
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Now we move on to the clarifications I asked for, on three simple inaccuracies. One, a simple over-exaggeration, to emphasise the number of papers published by the STuRP team compared to the few published by Walter McCrone. The actual number would have been impressive enough, but so overegging the pudding seemed to me to be to be an unfair assault on McCrone’s integrity. For Glover to step back would have been easy and the error forgivable, but instead he wades in deeper and deeper, until “returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Here’s the exchange:
— Podcast, Refuting the Skeptics: “STuRP published all of their results and scientific findings and conclusions in dozens upon dozens of secular scientific peer-reviewed journals.”
— Blog, Make it Up: “This is untrue, as Glover knows very well. How many is “dozens upon dozens”?”
— email from HF: “Do you really think that STuRP published their papers in ‘dozens upon dozens of secular scientific peer-reviewed journals’?”
— email from DG: “Yes I really believe this is true. […] the people at Oakwood were shown (in Lecture 1) and also via my Slides/Blog afterward the very link to show them the dozens of papers for themselves, so there is nothing misleading here at all.”
— email from HF: “Go back to the 26 papers Barrie sent you, and count how many peer-reviewed journals they were published in.”
— email from DG: “I don’t see any problem here whatsoever, there are literally dozens of journal papers. Instead, you are trying to nitpick now that I have justified what I said on this front by now changing your objection to not be about the quantity of papers in general but the number of different journals as though having multiple papers in Applied Optics counts as only one publication or something.” [Emphasis mine]
— email from HF: “If, even after my carefully pointing it out, you can’t tell the difference between twenty-six papers and ‘dozens upon dozens of secular, scientific, peer-reviewed journals, the top journals in the world,’ then there’s no point in going on.”
— Podcast, Hit-Piece: ““I’ve got a STuRP file of 26 files. […] What I had in mind when I was presenting to Oakwood Wesleyan was the first 26 journals written by STuRP and STuRP scientists in secular peer reviewed science journals. […] There’s more than 24 journals that I had in mind. […] Was I lying to Oakwood? No, you can clearly see all of the “dozens and dozens” of journals. There are a lot. There’s 26 of them.”
“Quite frankly, you’re ridiculous and deluded, Hugh.”
Was Glover lying to Oakwood? Is it ‘lying’ not to know the difference, or not to care, between a single paper and a scientific journal? Is it ‘dishonest’ to claim that the number 26 can be called “dozens and dozens.” If I didn’t know him better, I’d say this was as crooked as a witch’s hat, but he argues his case so passionately and sincerely that it is clear he has no intent to deceive Oakwood, and in that sense he must not be called a liar or dishonest. He even displays a screen displaying the 26 papers and the nine or ten journals they were published in for all to see. So it is clear that, in his ardour, he has completely deceived himself. What he said was factually untrue and misleading. Distinguishing the words from the speaker, what Glover said was dishonest, even if he himself was not dishonest when he said it.
“There’s no deception here, there’s no dishonesty, and quite frankly, you’re ridiculous and deluded, Hugh, if you think that it is. I’m sorry, this is just something that me and Hugh fundamentally disagree on. […] I explained to him what I meant, again, it was just something I said off the cuff.” Really? The screen over which he says this “off the cuff” remark says: “STuRP’s results were published in more than two dozen of the world’s most prestigious secular science journals.” My definition of “off the cuff” is different from Glover’s.
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Next, I did say that Glover’s claim that he had characterised Walter McCrone from his reading of McCrone’s book was a lie. I do not believe that you can get “Walter McCrone was a bigoted atheist who hated superstitious Christians” simply by reading his book. Of course, if you already think that, then the book will do little to dissuade you, but “hate” is a strong word, and absolutely the opposite of the entire tone of the book, which, in its own assessment of the STuRP team, is written “more in sorrow than in anger,” and certainly not in hate.
In justification, Glover quotes a passage that begins, “One result of my experience with STuRP has been to divert me from a reasonably faithful Presbyterian to a committed Humanist.”
Although it is a direct quotation, Glover untruthfully inserts the word “Godless” before “Humanist.” The quote continues:
“I find Humanism an ideal vantage point from which to view and appreciate the Christian world. It is obvious I have had just as much, or more, trouble convincing STURP as I have in convincing the Church – a two front war. Although I hesitated to compare my situation with that of Galileo 350 years ago, there are similarities and differences. Both situations find a scientist pitted in a serious confrontation with the Church where I am known as the “adversary.” One difference, for which I am very thankful, is absence of a threat of physical harm in my case. Galileo was so pressured and harassed he was forced to recant. I am free to ignore pressures from STURP or the Church and I certainly have not recanted nor am I under house arrest for my remaining years as was Galileo. Civilisation and science have progressed significantly during the intervening years. The Church has progressed during those years – let us say – less significantly.”
Atheist? Certainly. Bigoted? If bigoted means something pejorative, you can’t tell from the extract above. Convinced he was right? Well, so is Glover, so it can’t be that. Disliking other people because of their beliefs? Well, so is Glover, so it can’t be that. If there is any meaning to the word that distinguishes McCrone from Glover, I don’t know it, and if there isn’t, and it is merely an insult, then it reflects worse upon the insulter than the insulted.
Hating superstitious Christians? As I say, “hate” is a strong word, and there is nothing in the passage above or in McCrone’s life to suggest that he hated Christians, even superstitious ones, or anybody else.
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McCrone’s character was not, as it happens, one of the three points on which I asked for clarification. The second was actually about Harry Gove, whose character Glover also attempts to assassinate by claiming that although he was committed to the idea of using several samples, as soon as the Vatican reduced the number to one he “went ahead with it anyways.”
Glover’s full statement is “If Dr Harry Gove had so much scientific integrity, when he was told, ‘No, we’re going to stick with dating the one sample,’ why didn’t he say, ‘Well then, fine, we’re not going to do it because this isn’t going to be a proper scientific result.’ instead, he went ahead with it anyways.” How do I interpret this? How do my readers? Instead of saying “we’re not going to do it,” “he went ahead with it anyways.” For Glover to pretend that what this means is simply that he concurred with the result when it was finally discovered is a weird distortion of the English language.
But maybe there was a linguistic slip. Like thinking that there is no difference between the words “paper” and “journal,” maybe Glover is confusing “going ahead with it” and “going along with it.” Maybe Glover means that when the Vatican decided only on a single sample, Glover simply accepted their decision, and agreed that one sample was adequate after all.
But he didn’t do that either. He wrote letter after letter to the scientists involved, to the authorities in Turin, to the US ambassador to the Holy See and to the Pope himself begging them to change their minds. In a letter to Nature he insisted that “all these unnecessary and unexplained changes unilaterally dictated by the Archbishop of Turin will produce an age for the Turin Shroud which will be vastly less credible than that which could have been obtained if the original Turin Workshop protocol had been followed.”
Eventually, when all three labs had produced dates around the beginning of the fourteenth century, he had no option as a scientist but to agree that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the Shroud must be medieval. Even so, he continued to follow reasons why the radiocarbon dating could be wrong, corresponding with Thomas Phillips, and studying the hypotheses of Bruno Bonnet-Eymard, Holger Kersten and Elmar Gruber. This is not “going ahead with it.” The penultimate paragraph of his book reads: “What is the answer to the question as to whether the Turin Shroud is a relic, an icon or a hoax? In my view is certainly not a hoax and, unless a plausible scientifically valid reason is found for the radiocarbon date being too young, it cannot be a relic. I believe it is an icon and, arguably, the most important icon in Christendom at that.”
I think that’s quite generous, for a “disgusting,” “scumbag,” atheist, but Glover devotes the next five minutes to spewing invective. Concluding that the radiocarbon date was in fact correct was, according to Glover, unscientific and dishonest. “A consistent scientist, like Harry Gove, wouldn’t just biasedly say, ‘Oh, it won’t generate a reliable result,’ and then, when they did it, say, ‘It’s reliable; it’s reliable.’ That’s a liar, Hugh, and Hugh defending him is disgusting. What a real scientist would do – what I would do if I was a scientist, because I’m honest – is, I would say, ‘It will not generate a reliable result. Oh, they went ahead and dated it anyways? I’m not going to accept this. No, this is still unreliable. You went ahead and dated it: it’s meaningless.’ “
There is a certain irony to this. Glover currently adheres to the miraculous neutron radiation hypothesis of Robert Rucker as the most likely reason for the radiocarbon date being medieval. But if the radiocarbon date is actually “meaningless,” then there is nothing to explain. The hypothesis is predicated on the measurements made by the three laboratories being entirely, and precisely, accurate.
But Glover is on a roll and verges on the unhinged. If Harry Gove thought that a single sample would produce unreliable results before the cloth was tested, he should have thought the same afterwards, when the date came out, and in 1996, “when you’re writing your little book, trying to make money for yourself, out of greed. […] According to Glover, Gove didn’t change his mind at all. He thought ‘I know! I’ll lie! And say yes, the results are good!’ That’s what Harry Gove did. That’s what I meant when I said he went ahead with it anyways. Is that a lie? No! It’s not! You don’t dare say I’m a liar about that, or that it’s completely untrue. It’s completely true!”
Sententious tosh. It’s travesty of misrepresentation from beginning to end.
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Another thing that I claimed was wrong about the radiocarbon dating was that STuRP did not “set it up that they would take three samples from different locations on the Shroud.” In triumphant justification, Glover finds a quote from a book – by a “world’s expert” – “to show Hugh for the liar that he is.” This is what it says: “In the section of the proposal dealing with radiocarbon testing, the issue of ‘contamination’ was briefly outlined with the statement that such contamination, based on STURP’s 1978 examination of the Shroud, must be considered as being ‘spatially non-uniform over the entire Shroud.’ Consequently, the proposal specifically recommended that at least three samples be removed from three different carefully pre-analysed locations on the cloth and that a sample should also be taken from the Holland backing cloth and tested as a ‘control’.”
It seems a pity that neither the ‘world’s expert’ nor Glover seem to have read the proposal of which they speak. This is what it actually says.
“We request permission to take samples from several different non-image locations on the Shroud. Two hundred milligrams (200mg) from each of the burned areas under and around the patches (excluding the dorsal shoulder foldmark intersection area) will be trimmed away. This material can be removed without affecting the visual appearance of the relic or causing image to the fabric structure. Conservatively, this quantity will provide three samples for each participating laboratory. We also request 200-mg-samples from the presumed side strip, one patch, and lower right-hand corner of the Shroud. Each such sample is the equivalent of about two square inches (10 cm²) of material. We also request a 200-mg-sample from the Holland backing cloth.”
This is well over three samples. Depending on what constitutes a ‘burned area,’ this proposal is for a minimum of nine and a maximum of twelve or so samples. Collapse of stout party? Not really. Most of the samples were to come from charred shreds, which were later rejected for fear of contamination during the fire. Apart from those, there was one from the side-strip, which could also have been anomalous, and only one from the Shroud cloth itself. There is nothing to suggest that they should be carefully pre-analysed locations. It is untrue to imply that STuRP recommended three or more equivalent samples, in order to make a fair comparison between them, as was later advised at the Trondheim and Turin conferences.
Demonstration that Glover is a liar? Certainly not. If you haven’t read the STuRP proposal, you won’t know what it says. Demonstration perhaps, that he hasn’t read the primary sources, or my detailed discussion of the 1984 proposals at medievalshroud.com. This is one of those untruths in which it is clear that the invention – misrepresentation would be better – was not his.
Demonstration that I’m a liar? “I was right! Hugh lied! Hugh’s a liar! Let’s use his own hypocritical double standards against him! Hugh said that this was completely untrue. You’re a liar, Hugh; you’re a liar, there it is. […] Don’t believe you, Hugh, don’t believe you.” Well, let the reader judge for themselves.
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Then we move to the so-called ‘Blue Quad Mosaic Image” which, according to Glover, “is a scientific instrument that allows you to see the different chemical composition of the cloth.” This is literally nonsense, but Glover doesn’t really know what these images are or how they were obtained, so we can’t accuse him of dishonesty, although if he had read my blog on the subject, he would be a lot better informed.
Here are the four quad mosaic images taken by STuRP in 1978:
Each is a clumsy composite of three separate black and white images, taken through coloured filters and then re-projected on top of each other through coloured filters, not very satisfactorily. We note the broad blue bands across three of the photos, two red strips, and seven corners of dark green. Here, on the other hand, is the selection Glover chose as a “helpful visual” to illustrate his point.
The two areas outlined in white are described by Glover: “Here’s the rest of the Shroud cloth. It comes off in the blue quad mosaic as an orange or yellowish colour. Here’s the area they carbon dated. For whatever reason it’s coming off as dark blue in colour. There’s clearly a difference, that this scientific instrument, the UV-fluorescence studies, is picking up here, that reflects some kind of chemical difference in the composition.”
This is wrong on several counts. By omitting the broad blue band, Glover can pretend that “the rest of the Shroud” is fairly uniformly one colour, and “the area they carbon dated” is fairly uniformly another. The different colours reflect some kind of chemical difference. But that’s nonsense. “The rest of the Shroud” is clearly marked out by a number of different colours, orange, blue or red according to which parts of which image you look at, colours which certainly do not reflect some kind of chemical difference in the composition. And “the area they carbon dated” is no such thing. It is the Holland cloth, which in fact is exactly the same colour as the adjacent corner of the Shroud, so that Glover cannot tell the difference between the two different materials.
But Glover ignores all this, and pounces on the fact that he mischaracterised the “scientific instrument” as “UV-fluorescence studies.” Apparently, “that’s just nit-picking nonsense. I just mis-spoke for half a second. […] I referred to it as UV-fluorescence […] that was just a brain-slip.” Indeed. I expect it was. Same as his outlining of the whole of the Holland cloth area instead of the radiocarbon corner was a brain-slip, and not knowing the difference between a paper and a journal was just a brain-slip. However, that doesn’t make them any less wrong, or misleading. Glover goes on: “He’s [HF] manipulating and lying to people in his blog by saying that I [DG] don’t know the difference and that I deliberately got that wrong.” I didn’t say that at all. I simply said that “he confuses the colour separation technique of the mosaics with UV-fluorescence.” That’s not manipulation or a lie, it’s exactly true. But Glover goes on: “Pathetic, Hugh, pathetic. That’s what a servant of Satan does. Do better! You claim to be a Roman Catholic and serve Christ? Do better!”
Servant of Satan? Really? By now, Glover has lost all touch with reality. He stabs at the bright sky-blue triangle in the bottom left hand corner and declares: “This is a piece of the cloth that was removed. That’s why it’s coloured differently, because it was removed in 1973. This is empty space. On a blue quad mosaic, this is what the empty space looks like. ” Oh, dear me; of course it’s not. Glover seems to think it’s a hole. In fact, it is simply another part of the Holland cloth. It seems that at some time in its history, but after being attached to Shroud, the Holland cloth was stained or dyed, perhaps to match the rest of the Shroud, so that after the Raes sample was removed, the little triangle now exposed is a different colour from the rest of the cloth, although it is exactly the same material.
So. Glover mis-spoke the UV-fluorescence thing, and he thinks that where the Raes sample was removed the Holland cloth has a hole in it. Both things he said were completely untrue. But: “These two things are lies on the part of Hugh; deliberately manipulating data, and this is why everyone calls him a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Am I? Do they? Are they justified?
Next comes an extraordinary justification for why Glover didn’t show the blue band across the top third or so of the quad mosaic image. It may have been the result of a completely different cause from the reason why the radiocarbon corner is a different colour. And because that’s possible, I haven’t proved that the radiocarbon corner is “not due to an invisible reweave patch.”
One piece of evidence for this, according to Glover, is that the blue band has no well defined edges (“This looks random. It’s not a perfect cut, or square”) whereas the radiocarbon area does (“This is a perfect rectangle, or square, just like an invisible reweave patch would be. So this is in fact live evidence that supports an invisible reweave hypothesis.”). But it isn’t. The area he thinks is the radiocarbon area is no such thing. It is the Holland backing cloth, exposed because the side-strip is considerably shorter than the main cloth it is attached to.
Is he lying? Of course not! Nobody deliberately dishonest would make such an ignorant mistake. Is he ignorant? Not that either; no doubt if he goes back to an ordinary photo of the Shroud he’ll see the error immediately. So what is it? Another brain-slip? Well, I can’t tell, but this whole section is untrue and misleading, just like all the rest.
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And that’s basically it, apart from wild ad hominem remarks and self-justification. The bottom line is, and it’s repeated over and over again, that I’m a liar, and surely the essence of a lie, be it malicious, inadvertent or whatever, is that it is an untrue statement. So, if any of my readers have got this far, return to Absence of evidence? Make it up! and then come back to this Lasciate ogni speranza, and tell me if I’ve said anything untrue.