The purpose of this parody is to draw out the fallacies in how scientific physicalists frame their claims to disprove the existence of GOD. Some may object to certain features of the analogy, and even point out that it is wrong to say that safety cannot be detected or measured. Indeed, a whole industry has been built around quantifying and reifying safety. But that is precisely my point. Any abstract absolute, such as safety or love or knowledge, can be shrunk, concretized, and re-presented in such a way as to foster the illusion that the subject matter is totally covered. And there are practical pressures to do just that – to reify and monetize our intrinsic goods into tradable goods, or to dismiss them if they cannot be marketed in some form or another.
In this way, safety is no longer an ideal with a generally accepted meaning or denotation and a vast cloud of connotations, which is normal for any absolute, but a quantifiable object defined in terms of, say, consecutive man-hours without loss or accident, or a ratio of events per population. The innately known but unarticulated aspect of its value is what motivates us to prioritize safety. Challenged to put it into practice, however, we will inevitably reify it. When we do so, we no longer ‘know’ it directly or innately, even though we can tabulate and map it by various measures.
Making practicality and measurability, let alone commercial applications, as the sole criteria of truth has long-term, undefinable effects on that ineffable and priceless entity we call the soul. If we insist on the quantitative alone, then safety is a ratio, love is sexual activity, knowledge is facts, beauty is popularity, and truth is the results of the latest poll. Then a newborn child is an expense or, worse yet, an excrescence, and a human being is a consumer, a unit of production, and potentially cannon fodder or a trafficable commodity. Once the spirit of anything is excluded, then what remains is a quantifiable and possibly even lucrative carcass.
To make sense of any frame, we reduce it. But then we tend to forget that it has been reduced, and begin to identify the original concept with our reification of it. This happens in all fields, and with every type of faith. Believers in GOD do this with God, and make him a god, an idol. (See my note about these three terms in Chapter 1.) Initially filled with the fervour of the Absolute, they expend their faith on ever more constricted manifestations of His Infinity. There can be no finality, closure, or sense of possession with the Eternally Open. So followers of even a monotheistic faith will tend to over-invest in and sacralize its concrete manifestations, one or another aspect of their religion. This happened to the Jews as they began to consider themselves as having an exclusive and racially based eternal relationship to God. The Christians elevated the prophet ‘Isa (peace be upon him) to divine rank as a co-eternal Son of God. And the Muslims followed suit in various ways, from a purportedly primordial Light of Muhammad (may GOD bless him and give him peace) or the infallible and sinless descendants of ‘Ali to the belief that the Qur’an, the Word of GOD, is uncreated.*
* Belief in an uncreated Qur’an has been a bedrock of orthodox Sunni theology for over a thousand years, and is therefore not to be dismissed lightly. The doctrine was formulated to guard Muslims’ trust in the unchanging infallibility of the Qur’an, and so deserves, at the very least, the respect that any time-tested basis for firm monotheistic faith should have.
Considering the ferocity of former debates over this issue, moreover, many scholars have declared it to be one that a believer should avoid discussing altogether, or one that will at any rate have no substantial impact on the fundamentals of his/her faith. And so I have relegated more detailed treatment of this issue to Appendix 1.
If I were to listen only to such scholars, however, this book would never be written. My faith demands that I push my intellect ahead of it, forcing it to look into matters that, once illuminated, will make it stronger, in keeping with the command of the Qur’an itself (20:114) “Say, ‘My Lord, add more to what I know.’”
This is not to deny the outstanding history of the people of Isra’il, nor the sanctity of ‘Isa (peace be upon him), nor the lasting validity of the Qur’an. But neither the Jewish nation, nor ‘Isa, nor the Qur’an are God. The Jews are a vessel of God’s blessing because GOD willed it so. ‘Isa became a model for humanity because GOD chose him. The Qur’an is a holy book because GOD speaks through it. GOD Himself is the Source and Author of all holiness. Neither the Jews, nor Jesus, nor the Qur’an are authoritative by themselves. But when anyone attacks them by casting reasonable doubt on their validity, our faith is shaken to its core because we allowed our faith to slip insensibly from the Transcendent Authority into certain acts or examples of that Authority. I call this naïve faith – the habit of taking the part or instantiation as equivalent to the Whole. When we lose our faith in that part, many of us go on to forsake the One Who by definition can never truly be forsaken. We abandon the entire Fort, which we could easily hold forever, only because the enemy is making headway lobbing duds into the moat.
The GOD You Already Know 