The Bhawal-Chatterjee God vs. Science Debate

Reblogged from Sagnik Chatterjee’s blog, ‘@chatsagnik‘.

For all the elderly people out there, we youngsters don’t actually waste our time on social networking sites. Most of us actually have meaningful discussions and use them to showcase our creativity and thoughts to others. Shallow interpretations arise mainly because of a generation gap.

 So girls who post selfies on Instagram are actually not very far away than,” Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” The only difference is, they don’t have a magical mirror. Thus they ask their friends for comments (read: compliments).

Apart from showcasing beauty and wit, the internet also has become the hot-seat of various intellectual discussions. I do not know whether the following conversation qualifies as “intellectual” but it certainly made me want to post on the blog.

Sagnik Chatterjee: “Try not to start a war before i get home” S01E01-Sherlock

Jayant Bhawal: Shankhadeep still hates it.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Doesnt make him a bad guy. He is just ignorant 😛

Jayant Bhawal: Who says it does?
I don’t like the Bible. To an orthodox christian, it may make me a bad guy. To an atheist, it doesn’t matter.
But well, the logic of god is bullshit.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Dont say these things to me.

Jayant Bhawal: I love to argue about it.
How and Why do you believe in such a concept anyways?

Sagnik Chatterjee: My beliefs are with me. Your beliefs are with you.

Jayant Bhawal: I mean, come on!

Sagnik Chatterjee: See for me the concept of god is like the concept of love. There are people who don’t believe in love. Or people who stop loving after something bad happens in their relationship. It’s the same thing with god. People don’t believe in him. Or stop believing in him after some bad incident.
That’s it.

Jayant Bhawal: But GOD can be disproved.

Sagnik Chatterjee: For you.

Jayant Bhawal: Anyone!
Even for you.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Maybe yes. I still wont choose to believe it. That’s the difference.

Jayant Bhawal: I want to know what all gods you believe in.

Sagnik Chatterjee: I belive in a higher power. One god. When I pray. I pray to god. What u r speaking of: it’s the concept of deities. They are all manifestations of the same form.

Jayant Bhawal: Why do you think something controls everything? Why not as a very complex chain of events that trigger each other in a network?

Sagnik Chatterjee: Who said god controls everything?

Jayant Bhawal: You believe in a higher power. What does your higher power do? What reason do you have to put your faith in it?

Sagnik Chatterjee: It gives me inner strength. If god were to control everything what fun would that be? If everything was pre determined then what would be the point of living?

Jayant Bhawal: Why can’t that higher power be your will power, or your emotions that your subconscious mind is taking care of, something biological rather than abstract?

Sagnik Chatterjee: See you know what Soumajeet says? “Everyone is a batman”?
There is a similar quote in indian mythology. “Har Har Mahadeva”.
It means all of us are our own gods.
People like Sai Baba, Gautama Buddha, Mahavira.
They unlocked their full consciousness.
That’s why they are saints.

Jayant Bhawal: Whoa, that line, even though I’ve heard a million times, from the very saints and bitches who tell people to pray to Shiva and stuff, means THIS? This is great shit!

Sagnik Chatterjee: That what we should aim for. Search for our own gods.

Jayant Bhawal: And, so you use the word god, but you don’t refer to any deity. It’s something inside you.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Yeah of course. Something inside me empowers me.

Jayant Bhawal: Then why call it GOD? Why use an identifier for it that is commonly used for something that refers to something supernatural?

Sagnik Chatterjee: Because you have to give it a name. My life. My philosophies. My rules. And god isn’t something supernatural. People who have carefully read Gita, or Bible will know. Problem is with the people who take words at face value.

Jayant Bhawal: ^True that.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Do u remember Aesop’s fables? The Grapes are Sour story?

Jayant Bhawal: I remember a few animals from there. And the golden goose which was probably from Panchatantra. 😐

Sagnik Chatterjee: Now imagine you were taught that story without being taught the moral. what would you think?
1. There was actually a fox who wanted to eat grapes?
2. There was actually a goose who laid golden eggs?
The holy texts are like that. They just haven’t got the morals printed at the bottom of each page. That’s why we needed the scribes and saints to come and interpret them for us.

Jayant Bhawal: Yes yes! Jesus never walked on water or turned water to wine. It always means something else.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Full of imagery and metaphors… because they contained loads of advice and people get bored.. so they made it into stories.

Jayant Bhawal: But, the entire human population believing in god seems to have misunderstood that.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Maybe. I keep my mind open.

Jayant Bhawal: Also, the Bible, from what I’ve seem in the Ham vs Nye debate, might as well contain some lies. Cuz, written by people after all.

Sagnik Chatterjee: It’s a story book bro! 😛 Books exist to sell themselves. To sell out to a wider audience.

Jayant Bhawal: And the original text would have been turned into chinese whisper.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Exactly…

Jayant Bhawal: So, basically, you’re an atheist too. You just didn’t want to, or, just didn’t say it that way.

Sagnik Chatterjee: I am not an atheist. Being an atheist means a lot of things. It is also a very rigid thought process. There is NO god. No this No that. I don’t like to put labels on myself.

Jayant Bhawal: To ME, atheist means, someone who doesn’t believe in something controlling them. No deity, no higher power. TO them, the whole universe runs on some sort of mathematical formulae, some of which have been discovered, everything happens for a reason, the reason being a chain of events too complex to be comprehended easily.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Then i am not an atheist.
because: I am very bad in maths 😛 😛 xD

Jayant Bhawal: So am I. -_- But it’s not dependent on me to find those formulae, I just like to know that there are people who know about it. Who can explain it to me.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Of course everything is random. Every thing is undetermined. You have a small problem in your definition

Jayant Bhawal: I believe nothing is random. Not even random numbers.

Sagnik Chatterjee: See
Everything can be determined empirically.
But once u cross the papers of your maths book…. mathematics ceases to have much of an influence on real life.

Jayant Bhawal: Maths ceases to have influence in real life, on what’s in front on my eyes, but maths is the backend guy of the universe. Almost all of the universe follows the inverse square law!

Sagnik Chatterjee: See?
“Almost”
That statement itself is empirical.

Jayant Bhawal: There come black holes, science hasn’t answered  everything.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Black holes arent totally black. You know? They send out radiation?

Jayant Bhawal: A century ago, my almost would have been “some”. Maybe after a century, we’d discover so much more, that it’d turn back into “some”. Yeah, I do.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Do u know the name of the radiation?

Jayant Bhawal: I don’t know the name. I forgot actually.

Sagnik Chatterjee: The name is hawking radiation.

Jayant Bhawal: As anyone would expect. 😐 That guy. Tell me he invented hawkings cookers too. And I’d jump off a cliff.

Sagnik Chatterjee: No 😛

Jayant Bhawal: I read it too, but that was years ago, and I forgot, as I forget everything.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Hmm i see. I love to read. I don’t like jobs. I wont work for an MNC. -_- I will become an author. And I think I might post this on my blog 😛 so what do you think? Am I right or am I wrong?

Jayant Bhawal: Right or wrong about?

Sagnik Chatterjee: God.

Jayant Bhawal: Were we even on god? For all I see, you don’t even believe in the popular(dumb, as even you would say it) definition of god.

Sagnik Chatterjee: It’s not dumb. They just don’t understand.

Jayant Bhawal: You look like an atheist to me, you do question things, you do not believe in something controlling you, you do use logic where someone believing in deities doesn’t, that’s enough to be an atheist for me.

Sagnik Chatterjee:  Hmm.

Jayant Bhawal: Not understanding something and yet defining it and sticking to it hard regardless of how many proofs you are gives, that is dumb.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Well if it’s a compliment thank you . xD 😛

Jayant Bhawal: Fearing something you don’t understand. THAT. Is dumb.
It’s of course not a compliment, and you don’t do that anyways. You listen to logic. Like any other atheist.

Sagnik Chatterjee: I was born logical but love ruined me xD

Jayant Bhawal: However, there are a lot of atheists who think all it takes to be an atheist is not believing in god, when it’s more like “being ignorant” for them.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Yes that. I don’t like that.

Jayant Bhawal: They can’t believe in god cuz they can’t see it, that, them, etc. But they can’t disprove it, that, them etc. Btw, you do believe that random numbers aren’t random right?

Sagnik Chatterjee: They of course aren’t random. Because they need a seed.

Jayant Bhawal: Well, then what about seedless rand functions?

Sagnik Chatterjee: Yeah what about them?

Jayant Bhawal: where do they get the seed?

Sagnik Chatterjee: Maybe they are inbuilt. random functions implicitly seed from machine time.

Jayant Bhawal: That’s how every programming language does it.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Yeah so everyone uses a seed

Jayant Bhawal: Since all of them more or less come from assembly.

Sagnik Chatterjee: Hence no one is random. Just a function of time.

Jayant Bhawal: Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. This line always makes so much sense…

Sagnik Chatterjee: Yeah.

Jayant Bhawal: It’s from AC btw.

Sagnik Chatterjee: You know that’s why I love love stories: nothing is TRUE. but everything is PERMITTED.
Yeah I know its from AC. God everyone has this obsession with AC. You, Tanushree, Rahul!
I am going off.
Tada 😀

Jayant Bhawal: Hmm, go then, Tada!

Jayant Bhawal and Sagnik Chatterjee debating God vs Science. (Image just for visual representation)
Jayant Bhawal and Sagnik Chatterjee debating God vs Science. (Image just for visual representation)