Shimrod, sciencegeek, Don T: thanks. And I'm not even a scientist.

One more point: if scientists were as arrogantly dogmatic as some would claim, why did they bother to investigate the shroud in the first place?

They could have just laughed it off.

The reason they tested it was that spectacular claims had been made accompanied by photographic and historical evidence. They knew that a the provably genuine shroud of Christ with a possibly inexplicable image would be the greatest scientific discovery in history.

They didn't test it to debunk it; they tested it because they wanted to see if it really was a miraculous artifact from the first century.

And the weight of the scientific evidence says that it isn't.