Epistle to Ansgar: Letter 15 (God and Evidence)
24 April 2025 AD
Quasimodo Sunday
Dear Godson,
The name Quasimodo, is from the text of the traditional Introit for this day, which begins “Quasi modo geniti infantes...” from 1 Peter 2:2 “As in the fashion of newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby.”
The hunchback in Victor Hugo was foundling discovered on this day, and named after it (albeit, the name is a play on words in Latin, as it also means half-formed).
This day is also known as Saint Thomas Sunday, as it was eight days after Easter. Here the doubt of Thomas was assuaged when he saw the living Christ with his own eyes. He was invited to put his finger into the wound as he had previously demanded, but instead fell to his knees and cried out that Christ was Lord and God. Christ replied, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
The request for evidence, if asked honestly, is always to be respected. Sad experience, however, shows how rarely the request is made honestly.
The confirmed atheist will not look at the evidence, and or will invent some farfetched excuse to dismiss it after a cursory inspection. One would hope skeptics would be prone to doubt.
The amount of physical evidence for the claims of Christ is actually remarkable, and include miraculous apparitions and visitations for which there is simply no other explanation aside from divine intervention. We will here mention only four.
The words below are not mine. I am repeating reports from several sources, tedious to mention. Any truly thorough investigation would require a book, or many volumes, not a brief letter like this one. Let the following list serve as a starting point for any further marathon curiosity might provoke.
- Shroud of Turin
The Shroud of Turin contains the image of a young man with scars and wounds consistent to the description of the torments of Christ given in the Gospel: pierced side, thorn-scars on the skull, whip marks of a Roman scourge on the back, bruises from carrying the cross, nail marks in his wrist.
This last point merits emphasis. Religious art invariably portrays Christ with the nails driven through his palms, which would not have supported an adult body. However, a nail driven between the radius and ulna of the forearm would support a body and allow for the lingering death by pressure on the lungs as the victim’s arm strength slowly failed. Moreover, such a nail would sever the nerves in the wrist, causing the fingers to curl in a particular way. The image of the hands in the Shroud show the hands and wrists just so: it is safe to say no Medieval forger would have the historical nor medical knowledge to deceive the forensic methods of many centuries later.
The image is not painted nor dyed, and, in fact modern science cannot account for the image at all. It seems to have been scorched into the cloth by radiation issuing from the body itself, producing a three dimensional image like a photographic negative.
The discolorations which form the human image are only on the outermost fiber layers as microscopic pixels. They penetrate to just a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair. The only way to make an image like this is with a burst of high energy.
It first appeared in the West in the Sixteenth Century, where it was held to be a fraud. Carbon dating tests in the 1980’s seemed to confirm that assertion, dating the cloth to the 1300’s. However, it was then discovered that these tests had been performed on one corner of the cloth where the fabric had been torn and repaired. The seamstress of the Middle Ages were so meticulous that microscopic analysis of the repaired corner was needed to discover the seam of the needlework.
X-ray test done later confirm the age and province to be First Century Palestine.
The blood on the linen is from a human male with AB+ blood type, donors blood. Blood samples taken from bleeding Eucharistic wafers from other reported miracles agree with this blood type.
In addition, the blood shows high levels of creatinine and ferritin, evidence of severe, multiple traumas, such as a man would suffer when tortured to death.
Pollen grains found within the Shroud indicate that it had been present in the Jerusalem area, then northern Syria, Anatolia, Constantinople, and Europe, which is path legend reports the Shroud was moved after being found in Jerusalem. The pollen grains show 28 different pollen species, many from plants that grow only around Jerusalem.
All modern attempts to recreate the Shroud have fallen short. The blood, pollen, fabric weave and radiation-image are unique and unduplicatable.
- Mantle of Guadeloupe
Shortly after the conquest of the New World, in winter, on barren hill called Tepeyac, an Aztec peasant and recent convert named Juan Diego encountered an apparition of a beautiful lady surrounded by light, who instructed him to have a church built there. She instructed him to run to Tenochtitlan and tell the Bishop all that you have seen and heard.
The bishop was skeptical of the aged and rustic peasant, and asked for a sign. Returning to the hill after some delay, Juan Diego was instructed by the Lady to climb to the top of the hill and gather the flowers there. It was midwinter, and he doubted, knowing there could be no blooms on the bald hill, but climbed. He found a bed of Castilian roses, a breed from Spain, which did not, at that time, grow in that hemisphere. He gathered then into his tilma, a mantle of cactus fibers.
When he displayed the roses to the Bishop, an image was seen embedded into the mantle. Unlike every other cactus fiber tilma, this did not rot nor decay, and is still visible and on display in Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
This miracle precipitated the greatest flood of conversions in the whole history of Christianity. In the seven years following this miracle, approximately eight million Aztecs converted to Christianity.
The image itself is replete with symbolism that neither Spaniard nor Aztec was likely to inscribe.
The image shows Mary as a humble but royal maiden. Under her feet is the Moon, which for the Aztecs represented the devil. In this way the image depicts Mary as crushing the head of the serpent, and corresponds to the description of the woman described in Revelation.
According to the Nahualt culture, Juan Diego’s culture, Our Lady is pregnant in the tilma as shown by the shape of her waist and by the four-petal flower resting on her womb, which in Nahualt culture is a symbol of pregnancy. Two crosses and a black maternity band are present on the wrists of the image, signifying she was with child. At the center of the picture is an Indian cross. On the brooch around her neck is a black Christian crosses.
Mary appears as a beautiful young Indian maiden with the dark skin and hair theirs, her hands folded in an Indian manner of prayer. Her pale red dress is the color of an Aztec princess. From the folds in her garment, it can be seen that her feet are positioned in the Aztec step of their victory dance, and, at the same time, bowing the knee.
The main color or the tilma is turquoise. This color was reserved for the supreme god Omecihuatl. The color symbolizes the royalty of the gods and life and unity of everything that exists.
Her eyes are looking down. This is a position of humility and also reveals that she is not a god. Indian gods always looked straight ahead.
Her face shows compassion. She has.
Mary stands in front of and hides the sun, but the rays still appear around her, signifying that she is greater than the sun god, the greatest of the native deities. Twelve rays of sun surround her.
The pattern of stars strewn across her mantle mirrors the exact position of constellations on the day her image appeared on the tilma, Dec. 12, 1531.
Many scientific studies of the tilma have been conducted. The tilma remains just as vibrant as it was in 1531. Famous Mexican artists such as Miguel Cabrera (1695-1768) determined that it is impossible for the rough surface of the tilma to support any form of painting. One of the unusual characteristics of the tilma is that up close the features are unremarkable, but the tone and depth emerge beyond six or seven feet and the image becomes more radiant and photogenic.
The astonishing discovery that reflections of people in Mary’s eyes, perhaps Juan Diego and Bishop Zumarraga or the interpreter Juan Gonzalez, were confirmed by two scientists in 1956. This phenomenon is seen only with human eyes, not in a painting.
Philip C. Callahan, a research biophysicist at the University of Florida, undertook studies by infrared photography in May of 1979. The infrared photography determines that there are no brush strokes, over painting, sizing, or preliminary drawings on the tilma. He reported that large portions of the tilma were painted in one step. The work did show damage from the 1629 flood. He concluded that the original image on the tilma could not be the work of human hands.
The image is made of pigments that have not been identified by chemical analysis as coming from any known animal, vegetable or mineral dye.
The image has not faded or dulled with time. Earthquakes, fires and an anarchist bomb have damaged the church, but the Tilma emerged each time unscathed.
A close examination of the eyes shows reflections of the people she was viewing in the Lady’s pupil. It is not feasible that any painter or clothe-dyer of Spain or Mexico in those years could have added this detail by any means known to man.
- Stone of Las Lajas
One day a woman named María Mueses de Quiñones was walking with her deaf and mute daughter, Rosa, when a storm forced them to take shelter in a cave. All of a sudden, little Rosa spoke for the first time, declaring that she saw a beautiful lady.
Later, when Rosa went missing, Maria returned to the rocky area of the cave, and found Rosa playing with a little child whose mother stood nearby. The Lady was Mary and the baby was Jesus.
Later still, little Rosa fell ill and died. Distraught, Maria took her to the rocks to ask Our Lady to intercede with her divine Son to bring Rosa back to life. Rosa revived and recovered.
The curious villagers, hearing this tale, returned to this area, and found an image of Our Lady, robed in the stars. She is holding the Child Jesus and handing St. Dominic a rosary; the Child Jesus is extending a friar’s cord to St. Francis of Assisi.
Pious visitors later added images of crowns above mother and child, but these are painted with ordinary paint, and excite no interest.
After extensive investigations, civil authorities and scientists determined that the scene was not a painting at all. The image is miraculously part of the rock itself.
Geologists have since bored core samples from several places in the rock and discovered that there is no paint, dye, or pigment on the surface of the rock. The colors of the mysterious image are the colors of the rock itself and extend several feet deep inside the rock.
- Grotto of Lourdes
In 1858 apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to a poor, fourteen-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubiroux, in the hollow of the rock of Massabielle. The vision one day told the girl to drink of a mysterious fountain, in the grotto itself, the existence of which was unknown, and of which there was no sign, but which immediately gushed forth. On another occasion the apparition bade Bernadette go and tell the priests she wished a chapel to be built on the spot and processions to be made to this grotto.
Over four thousand reports of inexplicable cures to various ailments and diseases, tuberculosis, tumors, sores, cancers, deafness, blindness, and so on followed from the many pilgrims and visitors to the chapel.
A medical staff from the Bureau des Constatations Medicales at Lourdes maintains a station there to record and confirm such reports. However, those cured are not obligated to report to the doctors after a miracle cure, and many do not. The extensive lists of cures are therefore lower than the real number, perhaps considerably. The station is free to all physicians to visit, regardless of nationality or religious belief.
There exists no natural cause capable of producing the cures witnessed at Lourdes. This includes the theory that an unknown natural cause is producing these results. If an unknown law of this nature did exist, the pilgrims of Lourdes would not be cognizant of it any more than the rest of mankind; neither would they know any better than others how to set it in motion. Moreover, Because any growth (and consequently any restoration) of the tissues of the organism is and must be accomplished by the increase and growth of the protoplasms and cells which compose every living body: whereas the cures at Lourdes have been reported to be instantaneous, final and complete.
Instantaneous regeneration of tissue is such short time frames is scientifically impossible to explain. If we insist the explanation must be natural, this means the entire basis of our understanding of medicine and biology must be overthrown and replaced from the foundations up.
Ironically, the Holy Mother Church is very reluctant to confirm as miraculous any cure not accompanied by evidence beyond reasonable doubt. Hence the number of miracles the Church officially confirms at Lourdes is far fewer than the list of cures the medical authorities state have no known natural explanation.
This short list cannot even begin to list all the apparitions that did not leave physical evidence behind, such as the Miracle of the Dancing Sun at Fatima, which was witnesses by three thousand people, and seen up to thirty miles away. Men can and do fill libraries and weekly columns with ongoing reports of faith healings and similar miracles in an unbroken tradition leading back to the Bronze Age, not the least of which is the eyewitnesses to the resurrection itself, who left written reports, and who died under torture rather than retract.
The amount of physical evidence for the existence of Christ is abundant than similar evidence for the existence of Caesar, or for the somewhat incoherent theory of Darwin.
Those who doubt, do not base their doubts on evidence.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
