The Reluctant Skeptic: A Journey Beyond God Part 3

How I Learned to Think & Reason

Read the whole series

• Part 1: When Doubt Finally Became Louder Than Faith
• Part 2: Why the Human Mind Craves Certainty and How Beliefs are Formed
• Part 3: This Article
• Part 4: Sākṣī: Subjective certainty disguised as objective truth
• Part 5: Knowledge is not the same as Thinking
• Part 6: Coming up

“The greatest obstacle to discovering the truth was never another person’s argument. It was my own certainty.”

The Mystery That Began on Television

If someone had asked me twenty years ago what I enjoyed watching on television, my answer would probably have puzzled them.

I was never particularly obsessed with cricket except in my teens. I followed neither Formula One nor football with any great enthusiasm. Friends discussed NFL over lunch. Others stayed awake through the night to watch Cricket World Cup. I, on the other hand, would be sitting in front of the television completely absorbed by a documentary on plate tectonics, fossil beds or the formation of the Himalayas.

Even today, that sentence makes me smile.

Given a choice between an India–Pakistan cricket match and a Discovery Channel documentary reconstructing the extinction of the dinosaurs, I would almost always choose the dinosaurs only to toggle once every 15 minutes to track the score and get back to that dinosaurs episode again.

Not because I disliked sport. I simply found the Earth itself far more mysterious.

Looking back now, I realise those documentaries entertained me for reasons that had very little to do with geology or paleontology. They appealed to something much deeper. They never felt like classrooms. They felt like hands-on detective stories with active participation in solving the crime.

The presenter never began by announcing the conclusion.

Instead, he would kneel beside what appeared to be an ordinary cliff face somewhere in Montana or Arizona and point to a thin dark line running through layers of sandstone. To an untrained eye it looked completely insignificant — a stripe of darker rock no thicker than a notebook.

Then the questions would begin.

Why is this layer darker than the others?

Why is it found not just here but in Italy, India, Japan and South America?

Why do the fossils below this line differ so dramatically from those above it?

Why does this layer contain unusually high concentrations of iridium — an element that is comparatively rare on the Earth’s surface?

The documentary never hurried to answer those questions. Instead, it patiently gathered clues. One clue ruled out a volcanic eruption. Another weakened the hypothesis of gradual climate change. A third pointed towards something far more dramatic.

By the end of the programme I had not merely watched scientists explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. I felt as though I had solved the mystery alongside them. That feeling was strangely addictive.

The satisfaction came not from being told the answer. It came from understanding why every other answer had quietly failed. Without realising it, those documentaries were teaching me something far more valuable than geology.

They were teaching me how to think.

A Detective Story at My Own Desk

A decade or so later, I found myself recreating exactly the same experience at my own study table.

The detective story had changed. The method had not.

On one side of my desk lay a copy of the Bhagavata Purana, a text I had read repeatedly over many years and deeply respected. Beside it sat commentaries on the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and works from the Dvaita tradition in which I had received some formal training. On the computer was the transliterated Sanskrit text open for easy search.

Many of those books were filled with pencil marks accumulated over decades. Some passages carried exclamation marks beside them, reminders of moments that had once filled me with excitement. Others were crowded with question marks, silent witnesses to ideas I had never fully understood.

On the opposite side of the table rested an entirely different collection of books. Population genetics. Evolutionary biology. Geology. Astronomy. Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Statistics.

If someone had walked into the room at that moment, they might have concluded that I had lost the ability to choose a hobby.

In reality, I had never consciously planned to compare these subjects with one another. One book had simply led to another.

Genetics raised questions about human origins. Human origins led me to archaeology. Archaeology wandered naturally into geology. Geology eventually opened the door to astronomy. My professional work in artificial intelligence deepened my appreciation for probability, uncertainty and statistical reasoning. Without noticing it, I had spent years assembling pieces of what seemed like entirely different puzzles.

Only much later did I realise they were all trying to describe the same universe.

That particular Sunday afternoon began with a surprisingly innocent goal. I wanted to see whether these different descriptions of reality could be reconciled. There was no desire to disprove scripture. No determination to defend science. No hidden agenda waiting to emerge victorious.

Every one of those books was quietly trying to answer the same question. They were all attempting to explain reality. I simply assumed that if two sincere attempts were describing the same reality, they should eventually converge.

The authors certainly disagreed with one another. They belonged to different centuries, different cultures and often completely different ways of thinking and looking at different domains. Yet they were all looking at the same universe.

Some approached it through revelation, some through philosophy, others through mathematics, observation or experiment. The methods were different. The destination was the same from a larger perspective — the truth.

I assumed that if I read widely enough and carefully enough, reality would eventually reveal itself. That assumption, although sincere, contained a flaw that I did not recognise for many years.

So I began drawing timelines. I sketched the chronology described in the Puranas. Beside it I drew the geological timescale. Perhaps, I thought, the ancient authors were speaking symbolically. Perhaps some genealogies intentionally omitted generations. Perhaps the numbers were poetic rather than historical.

I erased one diagram. Drew another. Shifted dates. Moved events. Started again. Each adjustment seemed promising for a few minutes. Then another contradiction quietly appeared from somewhere else. One reconciliation solved one problem only to create two more. Hours passed almost unnoticed.

When Reality Needed Too Much Editing

The afternoon sunlight slowly moved across the room. My cup of coffee had long since gone cold. Sheets of paper covered the table, filled with arrows, dates and hurried notes that even I struggled to decipher.

By evening I leaned back in my chair, exhausted rather than enlightened. What lingered in my mind was not a particular contradiction. It was a single sentence that had quietly surfaced without invitation.

Reality should not require this much editing.

I remember repeating those words to myself several times. Not with triumph. Not with disappointment. Simply with curiosity. Something about the entire exercise suddenly felt backwards.

For months I had assumed that the contradictions lived inside the books. Perhaps the scripture needed reinterpretation. Perhaps the geology textbook had overlooked something. Perhaps historians had misunderstood archaeology. Every inconsistency seemed to demand another explanation, another adjustment, another ingenious reconciliation.

Then, almost accidentally, another thought entered my mind. It was so ordinary that I almost dismissed it. Yet it would eventually change the direction of my thinking far more profoundly than any argument about religion ever had.

Calibrating the Wrong Instrument

As an engineer, I had spent most of my career solving problems that involved measurements. Whenever two instruments disagreed, we almost never began by questioning reality itself. If an oscilloscope suddenly reported impossible voltages, we calibrated the oscilloscope before rewriting the laws of electricity. If a weighing scale claimed I had gained ten kilograms overnight, I questioned the weighing scale long before questioning biology. If software produced impossible results, the first suspicion fell upon the algorithm, the sensor or the input data — not upon mathematics.

Calibration came before conclusion.

Why, then, had I never extended the same discipline to the instrument through which every philosophical conclusion had travelled?

My own mind.

Every argument I had ever accepted. Every scripture I had ever admired. Every scientific paper that had persuaded me. Every conclusion — religious or otherwise — had passed through exactly the same instrument. And yet I had never once paused to ask whether that instrument itself deserved examination.

That evening I quietly closed every book on my desk. For the first time in many months, I found myself completely uninterested in geology, genetics or scripture. Instead I opened a fresh page in my notebook and wrote a question so simple that it almost felt childish.

How does a human being decide what is true?

I stared at that sentence for a long time. The longer I looked at it, the stranger it became.

Until then I had been asking questions such as Does God exist?, Did evolution happen?, Can consciousness emerge from matter?, What is morality? and Do human beings possess free will?

Suddenly every one of those questions seemed premature. Before answering any of them, I first needed to understand the machine that was producing the answers. Perhaps, I realised, I had been investigating the universe while taking the investigator for granted.

I was examining every book. I was questioning every author. I was comparing every worldview. But I had forgotten to examine the instrument through which every one of those ideas was passing. My own mind.

That possibility was both unsettling and exhilarating. For the first time, the mystery was no longer God. The mystery was the human mind itself.

An Assumption I Never Knew I Was Making

Closing the books that evening did not immediately make me a better thinker. It merely exposed an assumption I had carried for most of my adult life without ever noticing it.

Somewhere along the way I had quietly come to believe that careful reading, professional success and years of analytical work had somehow calibrated my own thinking. I knew software. I knew statistics. I understood machine learning models, computer architecture and systems engineering. I had spent three decades designing machines that processed information with remarkable precision.

Without ever saying it aloud, I had begun assuming that the machine doing all this thinking — my own mind — must surely be trustworthy by default.

It wasn’t.

Or at least, it wasn’t trustworthy simply because it belonged to me. That realization was surprisingly humbling. Intelligence, I slowly discovered, is not a calibration certificate. Reading more books does not automatically improve judgement. Neither does sincerity. Nor experience.

The mind is not born calibrated. It has to be questioned, challenged and occasionally corrected by reality itself.

Only much later would I understand how often it quietly deceives us. That assumption now seems almost embarrassingly naïve. Intelligence, I would later discover, is not a calibration certificate.

At the time I had no vocabulary for what I was beginning to discover. I did not yet know about confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance or Bayesian thinking. I only knew that something inside my own mind seemed far less objective than I had always believed. That suspicion would soon become impossible to ignore.

A Question That Followed Me Everywhere

I carried that notebook with me for several weeks. The question written on its first page looked almost disappointingly ordinary.

How does a human being decide what is true?

It wasn’t a philosophical statement. It wasn’t even particularly original. Generations of philosophers had wrestled with exactly the same question long before I was born. Yet for reasons I could not explain, it refused to leave me alone.

The more I looked at that question, the more I realised it should above almost every other question I had been asking.

• Does God exist?
• Did evolution happen?
• Can consciousness emerge from matter?
• What is free will?
• What is morality?

These suddenly appeared to be second-order questions. Before answering any of them, I first needed to understand the machinery producing the answers — the mind and how it arrives what it thinks is true.

I would open the notebook while reading a research paper on genetics. The question returned. I would sit through a discussion on Advaita and Dvaita. The question quietly resurfaced.

A documentary on astronomy. A lecture on probability. A conversation over coffee. A newspaper article discussing politics. Somehow every subject seemed to bend back towards exactly the same puzzle.

Not what should I believe. But how does a human being arrive at belief in the first place?

The more I reflected upon it, the stranger the question became. Until then I had treated my mind rather like a camera. Information entered. Understanding emerged. The process seemed almost automatic.

If I read enough books, thought carefully enough and remained intellectually honest, surely the conclusions would naturally become more reliable.

It was an assumption so obvious that I had never bothered to examine it. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Watching People Think

Around this time I found myself paying less attention to the conclusions people defended and more attention to the way they reached those conclusions.

It was a subtle shift, but it changed almost every conversation I had thereafter. Previously, if someone argued that consciousness could not emerge from matter, I instinctively evaluated the conclusion. Now I found myself asking a different question.

How did this person arrive here?

When another confidently declared that evolution was impossible, I became less interested in debating evolution than in understanding the path by which he had reached that certainty.

The same curiosity extended to atheists. And eventually, rather uncomfortably, to myself. How had I arrived at my own conclusions? Which books had influenced me? Which experiences had quietly shaped my thinking? Which assumptions had I inherited without noticing?

I had spent years examining ideas. Very little time examining the machinery producing them.

The Evening I Stopped Listening to Conclusions

One evening, during what had become an entirely familiar kind of discussion, this new habit suddenly changed the way I listened.

Someone quoted a verse from scripture with complete confidence. Before anyone had time to respond, another person opened his phone and produced a scientific paper that appeared to contradict it. A third insisted the verse was symbolic rather than literal. Someone else quoted a respected philosopher. Another produced an archaeological finding.

Within minutes the discussion had expanded to include genetics, cosmology, Sanskrit grammar, quantum mechanics and, as happens with remarkable consistency these days, a YouTube video that apparently settled the matter once and for all.

A few years earlier I would have joined the debate exactly as everyone else did. I would have weighed arguments. Compared references. Produced my own quotations. Perhaps even enjoyed the intellectual contest. That evening something different happened.

I quietly stopped listening to the conclusions. Instead I watched the people. It was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had. Every person around the table appeared intelligent. Every person had clearly spent years reading. Nobody lacked references. Nobody lacked confidence. Nobody lacked sincerity.

What seemed strangely absent from the room was not intelligence. It was uncertainty.

Each participant welcomed evidence that supported his existing position with remarkable enthusiasm. The very same quality of evidence became strangely inadequate the moment it challenged that position.

Each participant appeared to be searching less for truth than for confirmation. Evidence was welcomed when it agreed with existing beliefs and subjected to microscopic scrutiny when it challenged them. The same standards of proof were rarely applied to one’s own position and to the position one opposed.

The standards had quietly changed. Not because the evidence had changed. Because the conclusion had.

I returned home that evening thinking far less about religion than about something much deeper.

If thoughtful, educated and genuinely well-intentioned people could look at exactly the same evidence and sincerely reach completely different conclusions, perhaps the real mystery was not religion at all.

Perhaps the mystery was the human mind itself.

Learning to Walk Beside an Idea

Over the following weeks I began performing a small experiment. Whenever I encountered an idea that immediately felt ridiculous, I deliberately resisted the urge to dismiss it. Instead I forced myself to ask a different question.

Suppose this person is entirely sincere. What would the world have to look like for this conclusion to make sense?

That tiny change produced a remarkable difference. The first question “How is this person wrong?” prepared my mind for argument.

The second “How did this person get here?” prepared it for understanding.

Those are not the same activity. One attempts to defeat another person’s conclusion. The other attempts to reconstruct another person’s reasoning. More often than not, I discovered that intelligent people were not irrational.

They were starting from different assumptions. Sometimes they possessed different information. Sometimes they had assigned different importance to the same evidence. Sometimes they had inherited an idea so early in life that questioning it had never occurred to them.

Occasionally, I realised with considerable embarrassment, the person whose assumptions most deserved examination was me.

When Answers Became Less Interesting Than Thinking

For the first time in my life, I found myself becoming less interested in collecting answers and more interested in understanding the process by which answers are born.

That process, I would soon discover, is both magnificent and deeply flawed.

Our minds are capable of extraordinary insight. They are equally capable of quietly deceiving us.

The challenge is that they rarely tell us which is happening. And that, I was about to discover, changes everything.

The Price of Wanting to Be Right

A few years ago, while travelling through rural Karnataka, I stopped at a small roadside tea stall. It was one of those places that every Indian instantly recognises. A few plastic chairs. A dented aluminium kettle permanently sitting on the stove. Glass tumblers arranged upside down on a steel tray. The owner knew almost every customer by name.

As often happens in India, conversation began long before the tea arrived. Someone mentioned politics. Another quickly shifted the discussion to cricket. Within minutes the conversation had wandered, quite effortlessly, into religion.

I have noticed that Indians possess a remarkable talent for doing this. We can begin with the price of onions and somehow arrive at the Mahabharata before the second cup of tea.

That afternoon was no different. One gentleman confidently declared that modern science was finally proving everything written in the Vedas. Another dismissed religion altogether. A third insisted that both science and religion were incomplete.

Nobody appeared angry. In fact, everyone seemed genuinely interested in the discussion. Yet as I quietly listened, something curious began to bother me.

Not a single person changed his mind. Every new piece of evidence entered the conversation only to strengthen the position each participant already held. By the end of an hour, everyone possessed more evidence. Nobody possessed more uncertainty.

That journey home stayed with me far longer than the discussion itself.

An Uncomfortable Discovery

Over the following weeks I began paying closer attention — not to what people believed, but to what happened inside my own mind while they were speaking.

It was a surprisingly uncomfortable exercise. Whenever someone produced evidence supporting an idea I already accepted, I found myself nodding almost immediately.

“That makes sense.”

“Exactly what I thought.”

“Good point.”

The evidence felt obvious. Natural. Almost self-evident.

Yet when exactly the same quality of evidence challenged one of my own conclusions, an entirely different person seemed to awaken inside me.

Suddenly I became extremely demanding.

Where was the original source? How large was the sample? Has the experiment been replicated? Who funded the research? Could there be another explanation?

The evidence itself had not changed. Only my relationship with the conclusion had changed. That realization embarrassed me.

For years I had quietly assumed that I evaluated evidence objectively. Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps none of us do.

The Illusion I Had Been Carrying

Like many engineers, I had unconsciously developed enormous confidence in analysis. Engineering rewards careful thinking.

A failed circuit has a cause. A software bug has an explanation. A compiler complains for a reason. Eventually, if one remains patient enough, the problem usually yields.

That habit had served me remarkably well throughout my professional life. It had also quietly taught me something that turned out to be false.

I had begun believing that sufficiently intelligent people naturally arrive at sufficiently reliable conclusions. In other words, intelligence itself becomes a kind of guarantee.

Looking back now, I realise how strange that assumption was. History offers almost no evidence for it. Some of the greatest mathematicians believed extraordinary superstitions. Brilliant physicists defended ideas later shown to be incorrect. Nobel Prize winners occasionally spent decades promoting medical claims that simply failed when tested carefully.

Intelligence was never the guarantee I imagined it to be. It was merely a powerful tool. Like every powerful tool, it could be used equally well to discover truth or to defend comforting illusions.

The Blind Spot I Could Not See

This realization forced me into another uncomfortable question. If intelligence could not protect me… what exactly could?

I found myself thinking about eyesight. Nobody considers wearing spectacles a personal failure. Poor eyesight is simply a limitation. The spectacles do not make us intelligent. They merely compensate for a weakness we already possess.

Then another thought quietly appeared. Perhaps reasoning works the same way. Perhaps the human mind contains blind spots that are completely invisible from the inside. The frightening part is that a blind spot cannot announce its own existence.

By definition, we cannot see what we cannot see. That possibility stayed with me for months.

Life Refused to Behave Like Software

Around the same period another illusion also began collapsing. For almost thirty years I had lived inside the wonderfully logical world of engineering.

Software eventually compiles. Hardware eventually works. Algorithms eventually converge. Even difficult problems usually surrender after sufficient analysis.

Life turned out to obey very different rules. There are no compiler warnings for broken relationships. No debugger for grief. No unit tests for raising children. No design documents explaining why good people sometimes suffer while dishonest people prosper. No stack trace for losing near and dear ones. No technical manual describing how one should continue living after watching someone they love disappear forever.

I slowly realised that I had unconsciously expected life to behave like engineering. Life politely declined.

The First Real Crack

The first genuine crack in my worldview did not come from archaeology. Nor genetics. Nor astronomy. It emerged from a contradiction inside my own thinking.

Every day at work I dealt with uncertainty. Machine learning models produce probabilities, not certainties. Statistical estimates arrive with confidence intervals. Predictions contain error bars. Engineers routinely discuss false positives, false negatives and margins of error.

None of this bothered me. In fact, I considered uncertainty a sign of intellectual honesty. Then I noticed something almost absurd.

The moment the conversation shifted from machine learning to philosophy, from statistics to religion, I quietly abandoned everything I had just practiced.

Suddenly I wanted certainty. Absolute certainty. Either God exists. Or He doesn’t. Either scripture is true. Or it isn’t.

Where had all my comfort with uncertainty disappeared? Why did I demand a level of certainty from philosophy that I never expected from science? The contradiction became impossible to ignore.

Disciplines that had earned my respect through centuries of observation, experiment and relentless self-correction openly admitted uncertainty.

Yet disciplines possessing the least empirical evidence often expressed the greatest confidence.

I could no longer pretend that this asymmetry was accidental. Something much deeper was happening. And whatever it was, it seemed to originate not in religion… not in science…

but inside the architecture of the human mind itself.

That simple question stayed with me for months. Eventually I realised that before asking what reality is, I first had to understand how human beings construct their picture of reality in the first place. That journey, far more than the debate between science and religion, would permanently change the way I think.

A Different Kind of Journey

Until then I had imagined that my search was about God. Instead, it became a study of something much closer and infinitely more familiar.

The investigator. The human mind itself.

Before I could question scriptures, philosophies or scientific theories, I first had to understand the instrument that interprets all of them. Only then could I hope to separate conviction from evidence, confidence from certainty, and understanding from the comforting illusion of understanding.

The debate had quietly changed. It was no longer between religion and atheism. It was no longer between faith and science. It had become a debate between two versions of myself.

The one that wanted to be right. And the one that wanted to understand and corrected. Only one of them, I eventually discovered, was capable of learning. And that, I believe, is where genuine thinking begins.

Read the whole series

• Part 1: When Doubt Finally Became Louder Than Faith
• Part 2: Why the Human Mind Craves Certainty and How Beliefs are Formed
• Part 3: This Article
• Part 4: Sākṣī: Subjective certainty disguised as objective truth
• Part 5: Knowledge is not the same as Thinking
• Part 6: Coming up