The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
Stop signs have been a traditional part of our cultural landscape for so long that we have forgotten to ask the most important questions: Do we actually need to stop at intersections any more? Do we really believe in safety? Or are we just going through the motions?
Professor E. Z. de Bunkre, a scholar of human behaviour at intersections, believes that it is time to move on. “Stopping is no longer a viable option in our fast-paced, modern society. Safety is dead, but we still haven’t managed to bury it yet.”
“A poll taken in 2018 shows that only 8 percent of scientists believe in personal safety. Another 17 percent admit that there could be something in the universe that corresponds to safety, but only in the sense of a supreme state of being OK,” added Professor de Bunkre.
“We now have enough scientific data and models to determine whether safety is a viable hypothesis or not. Believers say that safety affects every aspect of their lives, and gives them hope for a better future. As scientists, however, we must determine whether this faith is warranted by the evidence.
“If safety were real, it would produce real effects in the material world. Safety has particular attributes that should be empirically testable, particularly since believers say that safety is not localized but is available everywhere. So when we look for it inside a box, no matter how small, we should either find it, thus confirming its existence, or not find it, thus refuting the existence of safety.1
“If safety exists, then there must be something in the universe that is completely safe. But material science demonstrates that there is nothing that cannot be altered, broken, or damaged in some way. Therefore, safety is an illusion.
“Furthermore, long-term experiments have observed the effects of so-called safe groups in comparison with a control group of unsafe participants who did not come to a complete stop at intersections. After 15 years of observation, no statistically significant difference in health or wellbeing could be discerned between the safe and unsafe arms of the study. Other trials have examined various acts deemed safe and could not detect any outcome that was not explainable in purely physical terms such as mass, volume, velocity, and chemical composition.
“People who stop at intersections have not been found to be any more moral or honest than those who inch forward through intersections without stopping. There is, consequently, no correlation between faith in safety and ordinary ethical behaviour. Rather, the opposite has been indicated in several studies; believers in safety are more likely to engage in patriarchal acts such as forcible restraint (i.e., seat belts) and child abuse (e.g., spanking). Researchers surmise that believers are compensating for their inadequacies in other areas by being extra-scrupulous at stop signs.”
When asked whether his own laboratory work was safe or not, or whether the very concept of safety was now meaningless, Professor de Bunkre replied that this type of questioning was irrelevant, as it had no relation to scientific fact.
The final question, on a personal note, was about his own wife and children, and whether their safety was no longer a concern for him. The Professor declined to answer, only adding that he was busy preparing for next month’s conference, entitled ‘Love: Another Failed Hypothesis’.
1 Victor J. Stenger, God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist, p. 27
The GOD You Already Know 