pyesetz | Book review: God's Débris

Another book I received as a Winter Holidays gift was God's Debris: A Thought Experiment, by Scott Adams. It was the top-ranked ebook of 2001 (4500 copies sold). I got it in dead-tree paperback form because I'm an old fogey (and also for professional reasons I won't go into here).

GD is a book about God. It talks about God using a viewpoint that's rather like scientific pantheism (defined). I think it's somewhat similar to the implied viewpoint in Douglas Adams' HHGttG. People who like to thump their inerrant Bibles won't grok this book. Unfortunately, people who like well-presented solid arguments won't like it either; nor will those who've come to expect a big dollop of humor in their scientific-pantheism books. If you've liked Adams' more famous work, that says nothing about whether you'll like GD, which tastes almost but not entirely unlike tea and is thoroughly devoid of any humor.

Adams is a dedicated self-promoter who likes to write press releases in which he quotes himself. He designed this book "to make your brain spin around inside your skull". He warns persons under 14 not to read it because "the ideas are powerful". With such hyperbole on the back cover, the contents could not fail to disappoint—and they don't.

When I think of brain-spinning ideas, I think of the Great Questions like "What is the difference between a cow?" or "What if our entire universe is just a molecule in some hyperdimensional dog's dewclaw?". Okay, I'm weird, but that's what I think. Adams' brain-spinning ideas are comparatively mundane, more like "What if some random geek in a nowhere job has unknowingly been spending his entire life preparing to become the next Avatar?" Yawn—seen it. Or "What are the odds that our generation is the first one to actually understand reality?" Duh, zero of course—heard it before.

The Package and The Old Man: The opening chapters set up the narrative storyline. They also set up the reader for disappointment, because only the first two and last two chapters make any sense as a novel. The body of the book is just the Avatar talking at the Narrator for no reason. Imagine a Dr. Who episode where the Doctor goes into a soliloquy about the time-space continuum for a minute. Now imagine the Doctor talking about time-space for 27 minutes of a 30-minute show, while the Daleks sit around waiting for him to finish so they can "Exterminate! Exterminate!" Now imagine the supporting characters standing around with the Doctor, talking idly about Dimensional Transcendentalism for days on end, while ignoring their jobs/ bodily functions/ the everpresent Daleks/ etc. This book is even less plausible than that.

Your Free Will and God's Free Will: Ick! God can be omipotent without being omniscient. Adams appears to be trying to disprove omnipotence, but all his arguments are aimed at omniscience. Being omnipotent means God can do anything that *can be done*. But if scientists are correct in theorizing that our universe contains unknowable facts, God cannot know those facts. That doesn't stop God from doing anything that can be done; He just can't know all the consequences of His actions. And anyway the Narrator seems far too comfortable with these philosophical dialogues. He is supposed to be a package-delivery boy. Research is conclusive that "idea people" do not do well in jobs that require driving vehicles all day: they don't pay enough attention to the road. Yet this fellow, seemingly quite at home with Socratic discourse, is supposed to have umpteen years of experience as a driver, a job he passively throws away by continuing to listen to the Avatar, without thinking about why he is doing it.

Delusion Generator:

As my lunch hour blurred into afternoon, I had technically abandoned my job. I didn't care. [...] my mind was more alive than it had been since I was a child. (Maybe you should try an RPG?) [...] "What does it mean to be yourself?" he asked. "If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you're doing that already. If it means to act like you're exempt from society's influence, that's the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to 'be yourself' is obviously nonsense."

Adams is being deliberately thick here. People often do what other people tell them to do, instead of what they personally think they ought to do. So the advice to "be yourself" is quite sensible with the first meaning proposed.

Reincarnation, UFOs, and God:

"There has to be a difference between real and imagined things", I countered. "My truck is real. The Easter Bunny is imagined. They are different."
     "As you sit here, your truck exists for you only in your memory, a place in your mind. The Easter Bunny lives in the same place. They are equal."
     [...]
     "Like the Easter Bunny, the past exists only in your mind," he said. "Likewise, the future exists only in your mind because it has not yet happened."

I think this point got a better treatment in HHGttG (book 3 chapter 29): "The past is a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind." Or perhaps this can be shortened further: "The past is a fiction to explain the gap between what I do and how I feel about it."

God's Motivation: Finally Adams introduces an idea I haven't heard before, although perhaps others have: God created the universe by destroying Himself, and now our purpose is to put Him back together. There is a similar plotline in HHGttG (book 3 chapter 32), where the pulverised robot Hactar uses "encouragement and suggestion" to induce living creatures to put him back together so he can finish destroying the universe.
It seems to be a requirement in books of this type to include a major fallacy, to "break the mind of logic" perhaps, or perhaps to act as a cover for any *inadvertant* lapses in the author's thinking. In HHGttG we see the Babel fish, whose evolutionary nonplausibility causes God to vanish in a puff of logic (book 1 chapter 6). This is not central to HHGttG's point. But in GD the major fallacy is a major defect: God destroys Himself to create the universe because it was the one thing he could do whose consequences He couldn't predict. How do we know He couldn't predict that? Because otherwise He would have had no reason to destroy Himself! Circularity, anyone?

Et cetera: Several chapters are devoted to developing the idea that God lives in the probabilities. To us the flipping of a coin is random, but God can encourage and suggest the coin to flip in a manner that furthers His goals. Or something like that. There are also a few random snipes, such as a chapter on how the Holy Land can't be holy because its atoms are constantly exchanged, its position in the galaxy is constantly moving, etc. "The concept of location is a useful delusion." Yes, indeed. This review is too big already, so I'll just move along...

Relationships: This is the only chapter containing any advice useful for day-to-day existence. A woman wants a man who will make sacrifices for her. A man wants a woman who will accomplish things for him. Everyone wants a conversation partner who will listen when we talk about ourselves and our hopes and dreams. Seem to be such a person and you will succeed. Minimize your victories and overemphasize your failures to make others feel good and want to be around you. Touch people. Remember names. It's too bad that this chapter is so far into the book that most casual readers will never find it.

Affirmations: This is the last chapter before the Avatar starts to tell the Narrator why he was summoned, so it functions as a kind of "bridge" or "turning point" in the story. But it seems quite unrelated to anything else in the book. In his Introduction Adams says, "You won't discover my opinions by reading my fiction." This is the rankest poppycock. There's no better way to take the measure of a man (or dog) than by reading his fiction. The narrative structure of GD is a giant arrow pointing to this chapter on "Why don't daily affirmations work for everyone?" To make sense of this the reader must already know that Adams credits his own financial success to his use of daily affirmations (insert Stuart Smalley reference here). In this chapter he is trying to answer a question that truly bothers him: why doesn't everyone succeed when they do what Adams did to succeed? His answer is cogent and makes good use of the vocabulary set up in previous chapters, but the boiled-down version is "because it's not God's will", which is one of the traditional excuses trotted out by plutocrats.

Fifth Level and Going Home: Why are there only five levels of awareness? Why is there only one person alive at a time on the fifth level? Why is this similar to the "Guide Mark II" device in HHGttG book 5, which uses fifth-dimensional awareness to encourage and suggest its way to completing its missions? Why did Douglas Adams die at age 49 while contemplating a sixth HHGttG book? Why are there five questions in this paragraph?

After the War: GD ends with a foreshadowing of another war between Christians and Moslems, which is the subject of Adams' appropriately-named sequel The Religion War.

(Previous book review: America: THE BOOK.)