Today in the wacky world of news: a group of “Muslim scientists and clerics” call for a switch from Greenwich Mean Time to what has been informally dubbed ”Mecca Time”. This article reports on a conference held in Qatar, and lists some of the advantages of this new time system. In the spirit of skeptical inquiry, as well as for my own amusement, I have decided to go through the article and examine it on a claim-by-claim basis to see whether this proposed system has any merit.

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.

Assuming they aren’t referring to the geometric center of the earth, is Mecca really the center of the earth for modern day Muslims? It is certainly sacred, and as such plays an important role for the faithful, but does it make sense for Muslims to set their clocks by its time? Considering that there are Muslims living all over the world, this is bound to wreak havoc on their schedules, as it would be incompatible with most time zones and would make even simple tasks such as scheduling a meeting incredibly difficult. From a practical standpoint, this plan is already sounding pretty bad. On top of that, we have to factor in the prayer schedule that Muslims actually follow. Though I’m not 100% sure about this, Wikipedia tells me that Muslim prayers are performed based on the time of day (i.e. sunrise, noon, sunset, etc.), thereby making this proposal even more baffling. Why does it matter what time it is in Mecca if you’re going to be praying when the sun rises where you are? As for the direction of Mecca, aside from re-enforcing the previous point about Mecca being the center of the Earth, I fail to see its relevance to Mecca time. A compass is probably a better tool than a watch for determining direction.

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

Actually, according to Wikipedia, as of 2001 the Earth’s magnetic north pole lies under Ellesmere Island (part of Northern Canada). The magnetic north pole is prone to shifting over time, and does not coincide directly with Earth’s geographic north pole; however, I’m fairly certain it isn’t going to be found under Mecca any time soon.

He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.

This is an example of a common logical fallacy, as opposed to an argument for why this new system should be used. Many practices of the colonial British empire, such as slavery, were bad practices and deserved to be abolished, but this does not mean that a practice is bad simply because it was used, or spread by, the British empire. In fact, the British empire was responsible for spreading many good practices around the world that still work well today (democracy, common law, rock music, tea… to name a few). Additionally, change for the sake of change is rarely a good thing.

A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim “qibla” - the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.

This must be referring to the aforementioned comment about Mecca being in alignment with the Earth’s magnetic north pole (since no other “scientific” evidence is given in the article). Unfortunately, this is wrong. Science seems to be in a continual state of flux within the religious community. They accept it when it supports their beliefs, and disregard it (or openly attack it) when it doesn’t. Not that this is anything new.

The meeting also reviewed what has been described as a Mecca watch, the brainchild of a French Muslim.

The watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth.

It’s a watch… with a compass. I find it hard to believe that the design for a watch that keeps “Mecca time” as opposed to “Imperialist British time” would be so revolutionary as to warrant a global change in the way Muslims tell time.

The meeting in Qatar is part of a popular trend in some Muslim societies of seeking to find Koranic precedents for modern science.

It is called “Ijaz al-Koran”, which roughly translates as the “miraculous nature of the holy text”.

The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicize the textual evidence.

We already have a name for this type of activity: post-hoc rationalization - or - bad science. This type of interpretation completely misses the point of “modern science”. The scientific method is about making a claim (a hypothesis) and then testing the claim through experimentation and observation. Science is not trying to make the data fit a pre-determined conclusion. Why is this bad?

When we begin our inquiry with a pre-determined conclusion, we are bound to interpret the data wrong and run up against false-positives. To begin with, the human mind is just too good at pattern recognition for its own good. Humans can extract “meaningful” patterns from completely random data — and often times see what they want to see in meaningless imagery. If we start out specifically looking for one result, then we will find that result.

The second problem with this type of analysis is it leads us to draw causal relationships that may not actually exist. Any statistician (they don’t even have to be a good statistician) will tell you that a correlation between two or more sets of data does not imply the existence of a causal relationship. Often times, there could be variables outside of what we anticipate that could be the cause of the correlation — or sometimes the correlation is completely coincidental. By looking at religious texts, and then modern scientific discovery, and trying to show how the two are similar, we ignore both of these possibilities. In fact, with the sheer volume of religious text out there, combined with the many ways it can be interpreted, you’re bound to run across a coincidental relationship eventually.

But the movement is not without its critics, who say that the notion that modern science was revealed in the Koran confuses spiritual truth, which is constant, and empirical truth, which depends on the state of science at any given point in time.

This article is right about one thing: spiritual truths (or truths derived from scripture) and scientific (empirical) truths are not the same thing, and rarely match up. Spiritual truth is a constant, and that’s fine, but it isn’t truthful in the sense that it reveals truths or properties of our natural world. It’s more of a self-referential and self-contained “truth”, with no relevance outside of the scripture from which it was derived.

Give me good old-fashioned empiricism any day.

In conclusion: just as boys will be boys, and girls will be girls, religious nuts will be religious nuts. This proposal makes about as much sense as Fight Club. Erasing credit ratings by blowing up bank buildings? As if they don’t keep off-site backups of the data on which their entire business relies. As if that would really create a level playing field.