Is The Shroud Of Turin Demonic?

What's below is something I posted on TurretinFan's blog. It's applicable to contexts other than the Shroud of Turin as well. I'm responding to TurretinFan's comments to the effect that the Shroud, if supernaturally produced, could come from some supernatural source other than God:

The Shroud could be attributed to demons or the paranormal abilities of a human, for example. So could answers to our prayers, healings, our sense of how God is guiding us in a particular situation, the miracles recorded in the Bible, etc. We make probability judgments about the source(s) of these phenomena. There are a lot of principles we can apply to make such judgments, and I won't go into those in depth here. (I've done so in other contexts in the past, like when discussing near-death experiences. For anybody interested in the sort of principles I'm referring to above, see my material on near-death experiences here, especially the comments section of the thread here.) For one thing, I don't begin with some sort of default assumption that the Shroud is a deception. Similarly, I don't begin with the premise that other objects are deceptive, that individuals are lying when they tell me something, etc. The burden of proof is on the shoulders of those who would want us to think the Shroud is something other than what it seems to be. Beyond that, the uniqueness of the Shroud, its pro-Christian nature, and the response it's elicited among non-Christians, for example, suggest to me that it probably isn't demonic or the result of human paranormal activity.

The objections that are typically raised against it in some Christian circles, such as an alleged inconsistency with John 19:39-40 or 20:7, are dubious, minor objections that are far outweighed by the pro-Christian nature of the remainder of the Shroud. (More substantial charges of contradiction are often leveled against the Bible itself and the miracles it records, yet we don't conclude that those Biblical books or Biblical miracles are demonic.) I doubt that Satan would reserve such an unusual miracle for leading people astray on such minor issues, a miracle that would simultaneously lead people to so much confidence in other Biblical accounts, including ones of a more significant nature.

And any appeal to Satan's alleged desire to promote the use of images would depend on an argument for the inappropriateness of images. We've been over that ground before. A few of us on the Triablogue staff have argued in depth for our view that images are acceptable, as long as they aren't venerated inappropriately (e.g., the bronze serpent of 2 Kings 18:4 was acceptable, but was abused by some people). Even if we accepted the premise that images of Jesus are inappropriate, which is a premise I actually reject, it would still have to be argued that the Shroud violates that principle. If the image on the Shroud was produced by some sort of normal natural process that occurred while Jesus was in the grave or was produced supernaturally by Jesus' resurrection, for example, neither of those scenarios (or others of a similar nature) would involve humans making an image of Jesus. (Jesus is a human, and He could be said to have produced the image in some sense, but I'm referring here to mere humans.) When Jesus was on earth, He would have left footprints in the sand, sweat marks and fingerprints on objects He touched, etc. We distinguish between those things and the making of images. The premise that we shouldn't make images of Jesus does render it less likely that God would leave us an image in the Shroud, but the two could coexist. I think the Shroud image, if authentic, weakens the argument against images, but doesn't refute it. And, again, we'd have to ask whether Satan would be so interested in weakening the argument against images. Would he be willing to promote so many other aspects of Christianity in the process of adding such minor support to the argument for the permissibility of images?

But why raise something like the demonic theory to begin with? In our earlier discussions, you and Coram Deo kept suggesting that there's no significant doubt that the Shroud is a forgery, that it's easy to dismiss, etc. You went as far as to claim that we have "about as good confirmation that it was a 14th century hoax as one could hope to get". You and Coram Deo kept appealing to the medieval photography theory, pointing to similarities between the Shroud and medieval artwork, referring to how incompetent the hoax supposedly was, etc. You didn't say anything about the involvement of paranormal factors. An appeal to something like demonic deception or human paranormal activity as an explanation of the Shroud would be a radical departure from what people like you and Coram Deo have been arguing. It would be a significant concession.