But faith is an impostor. This can be readily seen in the way that all the extraordinary phenomena of the religious life—a statue of the Virgin weeps, a child casts his crutches to the ground—are seized upon by the faithful as confirmation of their faith. At these moments, religious believers appear like men and women in the desert of uncertainty given a cool drink of data. There is no way around the fact that we crave justification for our core beliefs and believe them only because we think such justification is, at the very least, in the offing. Is there a practicing Christian in the West who would be indifferent to the appearance of incontestable physical evidence that attested to the literal truth of the Gospels? Imagine if carbon dating of the shroud of Turin 28 had shown it to be as old as Easter Sunday, AD 29: Is there any doubt that this revelation would have occasioned a spectacle of awe, exultation, and zealous remission of sins throughout the Christian world?