Galileo, God and Me Snailing through an Essay on Truth

As a teenager, I was a boasting sceptic and a budding rationalist growing up in a devoutly Hindu household in Chennai. My Appa deeply believed in God, but he questioned most religious rituals, calling them silly and archaic in front of his elders. I questioned him.

I questioned the existence of God. This triggered spirited debates with Appa after dinner starting from my late teenage years. But I must admit one thing which I saw with my own eyes. Belief in a God fuelled my Appa day to day and this undeniably, indirectly, had a positive effect on my life. The concept of God worked for him. But I still cannot believe in a God and I am always up for a debate over coffee, which I had many times with many people while growing up.

Galileo cheered me from the galleries of my mind during those teenage debates. I marvelled at his audacity to tell the world that the Earth revolves around the Sun even when God’s own authorities dictated otherwise. But as I was leaving my teen years behind, I encountered a “Flat-Earther”.

The middle-aged small business owner sat next to me on the bus. We struck up a conversation. He seemed confident and articulate. In the dawn of the social media age, a forwarded text on his mobile phone seemingly triggered his passionate analysis of the Earth being flat. I recalled reading a magazine article that expressed amazement at such groups in some corner of the world. Or wait, is it some “side” of the world? But that day, I wasn’t prepared to share a seat with a Flat-Earther on my casual bus ride in Chennai. I was off-guard.

I offered the classic proof. A ship leaving port disappears slowly from the bottom up as seen through binoculars, I told him, still on the edge of my seat.

“Refraction,” he replied instantly, leaning in. “The atmosphere… gradient lens… curving rays… moist air…”

My mind caught only fragments of his sentences. There were words I vaguely remembered from my high school physics. As a comeback, I tried pointing out that we already have pictures taken by satellites. Nope. He dismissed space agencies as a mere geopolitical trope, continuing with a grand explanation. All I remember now is his crisp and clear delivery.

I sat back against the hard bus seat, my counter-arguments dying in my throat. The Galileo inside my mind left the hall, I suppose, for a short walk.

I took a deep breath and looked at him, thinking of his argument, clarity and conviction. I duelled with my father on the question of God, but I couldn’t poke a hole into the argument of some guy who thinks the Earth is flat. Gasping for breath, I hammered my last, and weakest, hit.

“So, you think the entire world is wrong and against you, but you alone stand with the truth?”

My inner voice whispered, Just like Galileo?

Our conversation was brought to an end by his destination. We exchanged smiles and departed, but the event lingered in my mind. The debate was not even about a sophisticated topic requiring years to form a position and hours of untangling before finally agreeing to disagree over a valuable exchange of information. It was about the Earth being flat. That made a lasting impression, precipitating up from my lake of memories at times.

True, the Flat Earth belief is extreme or even silly to ponder over too much. But we all meet people who deviate wildly from the prevailing narrative while possessing the restless curiosity and bold scepticism that we admire in Galileo. Yet they reach conclusions seemingly opposite to where those qualities should lead. And being “that person” doesn’t have to be permanent, nor does it apply to every facet of a person’s life. In fact, “that person” could be the one in the mirror. It could be me on a specific topic.

With a portal to a universe of information in our pockets, Galileo’s principles should move all of us closer to true knowledge, yet the reality is quite different. I am a twin sibling to the internet, not in blood but by bond. I grew up around the same time the internet grew up. The number of times I encountered the above situation only has increased exponentially as I became an adult. Naturally, I wanted to understand this phenomenon.

The best way to understand something is to write about it. This is true not only because you do the research and the thinking, but because when you write, it is like pouring your brain connections out onto paper or a screen like an external store, so you can look at it. You can then process it further in beautiful cycles of reinforcement, right up to the point you think it is good enough to put back into your mind and share with others.

Of course, good enough for you does not mean it is good enough for others, which you can only know when you throw your work out into the world and the world throws something back. Like flowers, or hopefully something soft.

I started writing on the topic elaborated above with the working title “Crisis of Truth” almost a year ago. Though not continuously, I tried to work on it from time to time. But occasionally I took two steps forward and had to fly back. There were also months when I never touched it. But one great thing about writing is even if you had to massacre a bunch of your darlings sometimes, the learning you gained when you incubated them stays with you.

In fact, working in parallel, I published a bunch of pieces which were indirectly fuelled by this unfinished essay. With this motivation, I am snailing further with the essay on “Truth” along with a couple of others. I will share each one whenever it is good enough to throw out into your hands. Stock up some roses just in case!

— sAb
(RECORD 007)