God's Debris
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God's Debris: A Thought Experiment (ISBN 0-7407-4787-8) is a 2001 novella by Dilbert creator Scott Adams.
God's Debris creates a cohesive but iconoclastic philosophical universe, via the idea that the simplest explanation is the best (the literally simplest, as opposed to Occam's Razor), that surmises that an omnipotent God annihilated himself (because God would already know everything possible except his own lack of existence) in the Big Bang and exists now as the smallest units of matter and the law of probability, or "God's debris", hence the title. This theory is actually a form of pandeism, the concept that God created the universe by becoming the universe.
Adams offers recommendations on everything from an alternative theory for planetary motion to successful recipes for relationships under his system. He proposes another pandeistic concept with the hypothesis that God is currently reassembling himself though the continued formation of a collective intelligence in the form of the human race, modern examples of which include the development of the Internet. He bills God's Debris as a thought experiment, challenging readers to differentiate scientifically accepted theories from "creative baloney" designed to sound true.
The central character, according to the introduction, knows "literally everything", and Adams, whose knowledge is as relatively limited as the next man, had to come up with a way around this. He used the aforementioned "simplest explanation" for each concept raised in the book because, while "in this world of complications, the simplest explanation is usually dead wrong", there is something more comfortable and more convincing in the simplest explanation than in anything complicated.
The book defines God as primordial matter (like quarks and leptons) and the law of probability.
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[edit] Philosophical roots
This book can be classified as a modern version of the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. Its only deviation is the statement that "There is only one Avatar at a time", whereas in Hindu mythology there can be multiple avatars existing simultaneously. For example, in the Ramayana, Rama and his three brothers were said to be the avatars of Vishnu. Another similarity the book bears to Vedantic texts, such as the Gita and Upanishads, is its narrative style. Much like these ancient texts, it has a question and answer format between two characters in a fictional setting.
God's Debris also subscribes to the Lakoffian point of view. George Lakoff said: "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."
[edit] Publication
Given Adams' fame as the author of the Dilbert comics, publishers were wary of publishing any book by Adams without Dilbert content. The book was therefore released initially as an e-book (with comparatively small "publishing" costs). Based on its rapid success, however, it was also quickly released in hardcover format. The book can now be found for free online (see external links below).
The book has its critics, both on the theories and on the narrative style.
[edit] CMM for the soul
Page 123 of God's Debris contains a CMM (Consciousness Maturity Model) definition for the soul. Just like Software Engineering Institute SEI-CMM, it too has five levels.
- Level 1: Consciousness at birth: pure innocence, self-awareness.
- Level 2: Acceptance of a belief system: blind faith.
- Level 3: Awareness that authority figures may be wrong.
- Level 4: Skepticism and adoption of scientific methods.
- Level 5: Avatar, understanding that the mind is a delusion-generating machine. There is only one Avatar at a time.
[edit] See also
- The Religion War, the follow-up to God's Debris
- Brahman
- Advaita Vedanta
- The Footprints of God, novel written by author Greg Iles.
