by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

SML83 

Ob Fuss and his wife, Kate, love to take a bus on their vacation tours through the mountains of a distant country. They love the scenery, the freedom of not having to drive themselves so they can view it, but have never learned the native language. Their tour group for this event is a mixed lot of people whose main rapport has turned out to be a love for the rocky scenery along a river road that winds, climbs, and descends from clinging precipices back to water level several times between stops. Ob first notices a problem when Kate, and a few of the other women, stifle a chorused scream while the bus leans hard to round a very sharp turn. He glances out the window, shudders when he sees no road beneath them, and turns to look at Kate. "I will swear we were tipped up onto two wheels," she exclaims, clawing his arm to keep her balance.

Now paying more attention to the driver than the view, Ob observes they have been descending a long, winding slope. The driver has geared down, but the bus is still picking up speed. He notices the driver has not made any effort to use the brakes. He can't ask him why because he cannot speak the language, and he wishes to avoid distracting the hard-focused man from his job.

He notices an atheistic couple have observed him, and have also begun paying attention to the conditions of their journey. A Christian couple has begun praying, a Catholic woman is saying her beads. "I think we are traveling with no way to stop," he tells Kate. "I don't see any signs of the bus having brakes."

"Can that be true?" the Jewish man sitting behind them challenges him. "How can you know that?"

"Just pay attention," Ob instructs, hoping to distract the man enough to keep him busy. "Watch what's going on, and you'll get the idea on your own."

He took notice that the atheist couple appeared to agree with that sentiment. Her eyes on her husband, Kate covers her mouth with her hand to hold back her fear. He takes her hand to guide her, and they move closer to the atheist couple, who seem almost too attentive to the bus's actions, as if they felt too much enjoyment from the mystery to feel their own fear. "Did I hear you say this bus has no brakes?" an agnostic woman queries them in passing. "I can't believe you really know that. How can you be so certain?"

"Just pay attention," Ob repeats the same instruction once again.

"To what?" she presses him. "I see nobody testing anything that tells me what you claim is true."

"You could go press the pedal, and see if it makes the bus stop," he suggests while following Kate onto the empty seat behind the atheist couple.

"Why should I be the one to do that?" she shrieks, her eyes wide in dismay at such a suggestion.

"You're the one who needs to know before you'll accept anything as true," he responds. "It's your concern, and so your responsibility to satisfy that."

"I can't accept that on just your say so," she counters. "I refuse to believe it."

"It makes no difference to the results whatever you believe, but only whether it's true." Fear glazed her eyes in spite of her bold statements, he notes when he studies her face for a moment before sitting down.

A tree looms straight ahead, just as if the bus would strike it head on. At the last instant the driver whips the steering wheel and the vehicle screams leftward onto a steeper place in the road. The driver attempts to downshift, misses his gear, and grinds it back into the gear he had left. The bus picks up speed, its engine wailing. Ob expected parts to fly loose from it, but it holds until the bottom.

One of the Christians stops praying long enough to turn around and glare at Ob. "I cannot bring myself to believe this bus has no brakes," he declares, his tone accusatory. "How do you expect to keep a bus under control without brakes to hold it back. I believe you must have some evil agenda you are lying to put across to us."

Taken aback at being accused of something unnamed, Ob nevertheless maintains his calm demeanor. "Just pay attention," he says. "You can see for yourself how things are going, and that no brakes are there to hold us back."

"Prove it," the Christian man demands. "I have faith in the bus company, that they would not risk their customers' lives in such a frivolous way. I can see what you are saying, and cannot accept that as proof, but would rather blame it on the driver, who surely knows the route well enough to drive it in any manner he deems right."

"Yes," the agnostic person agrees. "The careening bus is no proof there are no brakes. I cannot help but wonder what you were thinking by suggesting such a thing. Do you have any proof that is irrefutable?"

"I think your faith in something not present is misplaced, and that your own senses disagree if you'll pay attention to them. That he never bothers to press the pedal is proof enough for me," Ob rejoins. "It seems he is risking his own life as well as all of ours, and I can see by the look on his face that he is as worried as any of us."

"That's no proof," the agnostic argues while the Christian couple shakes their heads in disgust. "He is more than likely behind schedule, or has a date or a meeting to attend at the end of his run. You will need to do better than that, or I suggest we would all be better off to remain oblivious to his wild driving and enjoy the scenery."

"Yes. Yes," the Christian folks agree. "Let us remain oblivious, and let us pray just in case we need to do that."

The bus screams down the hill and tips up one more time as it rounds a curve at the bottom. There is a rest stop waiting there, but the driver whizzes past it at a very high rate of speed while Ob, Kate and the atheists shout for him to stop. He cannot understand them, grins in his mirror and steers the bus around the next curve at the base of a new ascent, the accelerator pressed hard against the floor to keep the vehicle rolling. Kate clings to Ob, but relaxes as the vehicle slows to a crawl on the long incline. "I assume that passing our regular stopping place is additional evidence the bus has no brakes," Ob whispers to Kate. "I can only wonder why he isn't stopping, now that he most likely could."

"I can only wonder what will happen on the next decline," one of the atheists adds. "If, as it appears is true, we have no brakes, we'll have a repeat of that same experience over and over until the end of this trip. I'll surely find that to not be very enjoyable."

"I wish you'd stop repeating that same old tired line," the agnostic argues. "You have no evidence to support your hypothesis, and all it is doing is scaring all the rest of us and making us angry."

"If you don't believe it, then why should it scare you whatever we say?" the atheist man wonders aloud.

"Because, I also have no evidence that it's not true," the agnostic explains.

"You have no evidence at all?" Ob queries.

"None, but your hypothesis," the agnostic woman assures him.

The driver shifts down to a lower gear. The bus bounds forward with a lurch when he engages its clutch, then begins groaning while it picks up speed, its gears sounding like the voice of pain repeating, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" Ob looks out his window at a river growing smaller at the base of the precipice it climbs and the sounds smooth out into a long, endless kind of a moan. "Should we continue risking life and limb about something we have no evidence at all to exist?" he queries.

"It does seem foolish," his wife agrees, while the atheists nod their own agreement.

"You will look foolish," the agnostic admonishes her, "if you make the driver stop and it turns out he does have brakes. With none, how will he hold the bus still long enough for us to get off?"

"Good point. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is easier to prove that something exists than that it does not," the atheists advise her. "You are small. Go forward, while it is relatively safe to do so, and press down on the brake pedal."

"That may be true," she argues. "But, is it not the onus of the one who makes a claim to provide the proof? I most certainly do not feel capable to do as you suggest." She turns her head once again to glare at Ob. "Is this not the man who has made a claim about the brakes?"

"Why, I suppose you must be right," the Jewish man asserts. "It was he who insisted they do not exist, and so it must be up to him to prove it."

The atheists, however, have a different view of things. "Actually, as is common to us, he only noticed an apparent lack of function and brought it to our attention," they inform him. "The company who provides the bus, by their agreement with us and with the people who license their business, make a claim by inference their vehicles are safe and fully functional. That betokens each bus they provide will have all the necessary equipment to be safely driven on the roads for hire, which includes lights and brakes. It is the onus of the driver to make use of such equipment if it is there, and he has shown by his actions an inability or reluctance to do that. I would say, by the ordinary way to consider such things, that the absence of his usage demonstrates an absence of the equipment."

They had climbed to a level place in the road by this time. Fearful that what follows might be another wild downhill scramble, the Jewish man climbs to his feet. "Never mind any more of this foolish arguing. I am going forward to settle this once and for all." With that, he stamps the floor with his cane to make it clear how he might approach the problem of reaching for the pedal.

You've never heard of any gods like the ones in This World

"That's not necessary," Ob shouts, and jumps to his own feet to run forward and motion for the driver to stop in a parking area he seemed about to pass, and then make motions to convey his need to use one of the restrooms. The driver nods his understanding. The bus lurches once again while he drops into a lower gear and releases the clutch, then continues such downshifting until he finds a vacant spot toward which to take aim. He coasts into it, shuts off the engine, and the bus arrives at a stop while making deathlike throes.

Everybody vacates the bus while the driver begins calling on his cell phone and speaking to someone in an urgent tone. They wander around a while, still arguing, use the restrooms, peer over the precipice at the river that now looks like a shiny string on the ground far below. Someone notices the driver has opened the luggage compartments and has begun removing their baggage. Ob goes to offer a hand. The Christians attempt to re-board the bus. "No, no, no," the driver tells them, waving them away so he can shut the door.

"Why won't he let us back on?" they demand of Ob.

"No brakes," Ob replies.

"You keep saying that. Did he tell you that?"

"No," Ob answers.

"Then, how can you know?"

"I don't have to know," Ob attempts to explain. "Just do like I told you: Observe, and act accordingly. It makes no difference if there are brakes or not, if no one can show us that they're there."

The driver's ears perk up about now, and soon another bus appears on the scene. The driver motions toward it, and his signals show them to gather up their luggage and load it into the new vehicle. They climb aboard after the bus rolls in with a whooshing sound of air while its nose settles and then rises up after the stop. Everybody climbs aboard. The rest of the ride seems almost boring after all of that excitement.

How different would all our lives be, if everything nonexistent were this obvious?

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —