A reader’s thoughts: a review of God’s Debris

Ever heard of the term: OCCAM’S RAZOR? It says that “If a collected set of facts can be explained by two different theories, then the simplest explained tends to be the best one.” For example, let’s say while you were passing alone through a deserted path at night and you have seen something 5 foot tall, dressed white with lengthy white hair standing at some distance. It can be explained by saying, it is a ghost, or the other explanation would be that it’s some woman in white. Both of them explains the facts or observations. But the first explanation assumes the existence of ghosts. But the second one doesn’t assume or take any extra information for granted. In a way, it’s the simplest explanation and the best one.

Using Occam’s razor as one of the tools, Author Scott Adams wrote an excellent book by the name God’s Debris: A thought experiment. He says he wrote some non-scientific statements which seem to be true until we read it carefully. He wants us to find such things in his book. But I for one just spent all the time reading this 144-page book in awe. He did a tremendously awesome job by presenting the book in an arguably easy way by writing it in a dialogue form.

The story begins with a mailman entering an open door of an old man’s house, where he is supposed to deliver a parcel. Old man rejects the parcel and thus the epic conversation between the mailman and the Old man begins, which spans from the second chapter till the last chapter.

There are many things, many little topics discussed in the book, which I wish to speak about. But then again I would like all the readers to read the book, which by the way is a small one, just covers 144 pages. So one of the things he speaks about is: What motivates the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God that many of us so breathtakingly believes in and painstakingly worship? What makes him wake up in the morning? Get out of his bed? (just saying). First, let me explain to you what omnipotent and omniscient means. Omnipotent which is the combination of Omni(all)+potent(capable), combinedly it means someone who is capable of doing anything and everything. So as you might have guessed Omnipresent means someone who is everywhere. Omniscient is what we call someone who knows everything there is to know, everything at every single entity there ever is or ever will be, everything in the past, present and future.

So our so-called God that he is speaking of, is capable of doing anything, knows everything.

This leads to many questions. Questions like “if God knows everything that is going to happen, he must know what we are going to do next. Does that mean our every action is pre-decided? Does it mean there is no free-will?” The author spends a good deal of time in explaining us the actual meaning or rather a novel way of looking at free-will. I am not going to discuss it.

Then there comes this awesome question, the answer to which is the reason behind the book’s title, “God’s Debris”. As I wrote above: What motivates the all present, all-capable, all-known God? There would be no task he might find interesting as he is able to do everything and anything with ease. He knows everything that is to be known, so knowledge does not motivate him. What do you think will be the answer?

The author of this book says, the so-called God might have only one wish. To know what happens once he stops his own existence? He knows all of his actions, But once he ceased to exist, he won’t be knowing what happens, the author convinces us with this answer through the words of Old man, not just convincing, but I would fully agree that If such a God ever exists, his only motivation would be to do something he can’t or to learn something he doesn’t know. If you are still following, what follows this is amazing. In order to know what it is, God dies in way leaving huge debris.

God’s debris is what is left. The event of Death might be what we know as Big bang. he doesn’t put stress on this point but he says God’s debris consists of God dust which makes up this whole universe. And the other component is Probability. Then comes two rules:

• Every beat of time, bits of God dust disappears and appears at new places. The Probability is high for the reappearances of these bits near other bits.
• The other non-zero probability is for the cases where they appear to be moving in a straight line.

Using these basic assumptions, the authors explain many things from Gravity to Evolution, free will and much other stuff. Then he says we are all evolving into single grand consciousness, which is again God. So our entire existence is to begin as debris to God back again. It is a head-spinning task to finish this book. And by the end of the book, he speaks of 5 levels of awareness:

• 1st: Awareness of one’s existence at birth
• 2nd: Awareness of others around you and to believe in the authority
• 3rd: Awareness of one’s delusions, but still comfortable with them
• 4th: Adopting Skepticism and scientific methods
• 5th: Avatar state, being aware that our brains are delusion generators and to be aware that science is again another belief system

Putting aside the name Avatar, I would agree to his words that our brains are delusion generators. Scientific studies say that our brain always tries to cover up the gaps in our memories with some interesting made-up stories. You might sometimes forget what happened and then remember some alternate way a certain event happened, you might be in disagreement with your friends. For example, the colour of the shirt you wore while attending a certain event in the past. If the brain lost the memory, it fills the gap with some random colour, which may turn out to be wrong if look back into the photos. The author meant something different when he said brains are delusion generators. But the above version might help to get an idea as to how deceiving our brains are.

Then there is this thing, Science being a belief system. While the author means that our scientific theories might be entirely different from the way of workings of Universe, we just believe them as they are satisfying the observations. I will give you another version of Science being another belief system just as the Theists believe in God. In science, we believe the work of others. Since so and so scientist experimentally proved this, we take this so and so theory to be right. But have you tested it yourself? No, You just believe the work of others. Even most of the top Scientists out there do not begin their work from anything. They take someone’s work either experimental or theoretical as the founding stones for their work. So it is again based on not so but yet belief. Scientists need to be of the fourth level here, fully sceptic.

Scott Adams makes up pass-through this thought-provoking fundamental questions, biases and issues. I would suggest everyone read this book. After reading the book, you will feel that the featured image is justified, Yoda teaching Skywalker.

This is my first time writing a review on a book. Hope I interested you in reading the book. Comments and suggestions are very much encouraged. Thanks to you Sahitesh, for introducing me to this book.