Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    God's Debris: A Thought Experiment
    Unavailable
    God's Debris: A Thought Experiment
    Unavailable
    God's Debris: A Thought Experiment
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    God's Debris: A Thought Experiment

    By Scott Adams

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    God's Debris is the first non-Dilbert, non-humor book by best-selling author Scott Adams. Adams describes God's Debris as a thought experiment wrapped in a story. It's designed to make your brain spin around inside your skull.

    Imagine that  you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life: quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything?

    You may not find the final answer to the big question, but God's Debris might provide the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what's wrong with the old man's explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends, then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.

    It has no violence or sex, but the ideas are powerful and not appropriate for readers under fourteen.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAndrews McMeel Publishing
    Release dateDec 24, 2013
    ISBN9781449459840
    Unavailable
    God's Debris: A Thought Experiment
    Author

    Scott Adams

    Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, the comic strip that now appears in 1,550 newspapers worldwide. His first two hardcover business books, The Dilbert Principle and Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook, have sold more than two million copies and have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for a combined total of sixty weeks.

    Read more from Scott Adams

    Related to God's Debris

    Related ebooks

    Religion & Spirituality For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Inkwell

      Nov 26, 2020

      Inkwell
      1 min read

    • Article

      Pushing Buttons: Happy 50th Birthday To Atari, Whose Simple Games Gave Us So Much

      Jun 30, 2022

      Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian’s gaming newsletter. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. This week marks a truly important video gam

      5 min read

    • Article

      Wait, Wasn’t Peter Thiel a Libertarian?

      Jun 19, 2020

      ELEVEN DAYS AFTER the first case of an American suffering from COVID-19 was reported, an essayist at an online journal run by the Claremont Institute—whose stated purpose is to “restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preem

      16 min read

    • Article

      Are We Having Too Much Fun?

      Apr 27, 2017

      Are We Having Too Much Fun?
      9 min read

    • Article

      Move Fast And Break Things

      Oct 28, 2019

      Move Fast And Break Things
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Multiple Multiverses May Be One and the Same

      Jan 26, 2017

      The name of the image—the “Flammarion engraving”—may not ring a bell, but you’ve seen it many times. It depicts a traveler wearing a cloak and clutching a walking-stick; behind him is a varied landscape of towns and trees; surrounding all is a crysta

      11 min read

    • Article

      Chaos Under Heaven: Trump As Raging Bull In A China Policy Shop

      Mar 14, 2021

      Covid-19 has left more than 530,000 Americans dead and China’s standing with the US at a historic low. Only Iran and North Korea fare worse. US opinion is no outlier. China’s reputation has taken a beating in Australia, the UK, Sweden, the Netherland

      3 min read

    • Article

      Virtual Reality Poses the Same Riddles as the Cosmic Multiverse

      Mar 9, 2017

      On most days, we do not wake up anticipating that we may be suddenly thrust into the sky while popcorn shrimp rains down like confetti, as some guy roars from above: “Hey, there, I’m Jack. And you are in a computer simulation.” Instead, we wake up th

      4 min read

    • Article

      Everywhere Around Us

      Sep 23, 2023

      Everywhere Around Us
      5 min read

    • Article

      Good Bones

      Mar 19, 2020

      Good Bones
      18 min read

    • Article

      Famous People

      Mar 1, 2022

      Famous People
      15 min read

    • Article

      You Talkin' To Me?

      Jun 22, 2023

      You Talkin' To Me?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Fall-down COMEDIAN

      Apr 11, 2021

      Fall-down COMEDIAN
      3 min read

    • Article

      Diary Of A Country Mouse

      Mar 3, 2020

      THURSDAY, 10 DECEMBER. Giles shows us the sample mice and I am, as if for the first time, overcome with joy. Perhaps when I was a child I had feelings like this—but not in many years. I look, for instance, at a small gray mouse, smaller than the othe

      17 min read

    Reviews for God's Debris

    3.5/5

    300 ratings15 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      As per the introduction, "God's Debris doesn't fit into normal publishing cubbyholes. There is even disagreement about whether the material is fiction or nonfiction. I contend that it is fiction because the characters don't exist. Some people content that it is nonfiction because the opinions and philosophies of the characters might have lasting impact on the reader." My local library categorizes this one as nonfiction, but I can see how a fiction/nonfiction disagreement could occur. The premise is simplicity itself: A delivery man delivers a parcel to a new address, signature required. When he receives no answer at the door, but find the door unlocked, he enters the home and encounters a wizened old man wrapped in a blanket warming himself by a fire in the fireplace. The book is the conversation between the old man and the delivery man, on topics lofty and diverse enough to make my head spin. In essence, the take-away for contemplation is that the human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth; that science is a belief system, not unlike religion, albeit a useful one and that probability is the inevitable recombination of God's consciousness and the best way to understand the universe. A very simplistic summation of a compact little book packed full of everything from free will, reincarnation, ESP, pattern recognition, willpower and affirmations. Some of the 'conversation' tends to involve a bit of circular reasoning that goes nowhere but overall, I found this one to give me something to think about. I have already placed a hold at the library for the sequel, The Religion War. A short, and at a times, thought-provoking read.
    • 3/5
      Scott must have been reading The Shack and tripping on some major opiates when he wrote this. Short, but thought provoking and similar to Michael Dowd's stuff on Evolutionary religion.
    • 5/5
      This is a book that completely opened up my brain when I was thirteen years old. It was more than teaching me something new, it was teaching me that things could be new; that the world could be vastly different from what my teachers were telling me or what I could perceive with my senses. If you need a good brain-jarring or just trying to mix the world up you should read this book.Though looking back at it now from much older eyes (ten years later) the book it more cute and nostalgic than anything else.
    • 4/5
      If you ever enjoyed Dilbert, do yourself a favor and thank the man who did so much to make cubicle life a little more bearable by giving this short and very original book a chance. Plato would have loved (or perhaps loves) it - I'm sure God does.
    • 4/5
      some of the chapters were gold. Adams warns that the all-knowing character in the book makes some scientific fallacies which is good in a sense, it keep the reader on their toes and makes them analyse everything. However, the misconceptions regarding the limitations of evolution are worrying, there's already enough misinformation surrounding this subject. The analogy between living evolution and the evolution of cookware was however clever and well presented.
    • 4/5
      I read this free download on the recommendation of another LibraryThing member (Thanks, Leah!) and really enjoyed it. It is very short and thought provoking. There isn't much of a plot (it really is a thought experiment) but is never boring. It's also not for everyone - if you are religious and easily offended by ideas contrary to your own, walk away. The most intriguing bit is the author's own admission that some of the ideas are legitimate scientific or philosphical principals and some are just plain made up. Part of the experiment is to see if you can tell the difference. I admit some of them have me stumped! Either way, it's really fun to challenge your assumptions, think in a different way, and ponder the preposterous. Recommended!
    • 5/5
      God's Debris is a short story written by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame as, defined accurately in the title, a thought experiment. Scott does an excellent job in this philosophical work putting ideas, some old and some new, together in a new way.It's a great read if you don't mind someone challenging the status quo. I recommend this book to those looking for something a bit different.
    • 4/5
      While ostensibly departing from his openly humorous and subtly philosophical Dilbert comic strip, Adams in effect reverses modalities and becomes openly philosophical and subtly humor in this work. Adams himself states there is a flaw in his logic. There are probably many, yet as a whole this book works well as a vehicle for a very practical approach to living in peace, harmony, and tolerance.
    • 5/5
      If there is one book I’ve recommended to every single friend of mine who has shown even the slightest interest in a different interpretation of the concept of god, this would be it. Even though Adams clearly pitches it as fiction in the preface but this book surely rings true to its claim of making your brain twist inside your skull.
      Must read for open minded and curious people, especially those not bogged down by the chains of dogma.
    • 3/5
      This was a weird one. Sort of like what Carlos Castaneda would write if he hung around with the physics club for too long.
    • 4/5
      A very interesting and thought provoking work. Scott Adams is the author of Dilbert, but this book is not that. The book explores a wide range of topics relating to philosophy, physics, and understandings of God. If you like philosophy, ethics, or theology and read the book with an open mind you will find plenty of gris for the mill. I found it fascinating and an opportunity for thoughtful introspection.
    • 4/5
      From the writer of Dilbert... but not funny... Very interesting ideas, one per chapter that really gets your mind thinking. I have read about some of these before, but this book throws them all together to explain and offer alternative views that exist today. Definitely a good read which will have you thinking twice about the world and universe around us.
    • 1/5
      The author announces, without a trace of modesty, that the ideas in this book will cause your head to spin. He obviously believes he has created some sort of new breakthrough in thinking. In reality, it's an insipid mixture of New Age, Eastern mysticism, quantum flapdoodle, and a totally superficial reading of sources that he chooses to consider scientific (though it's tough to know, since he doesn't reference where he gets his scientific information; one would think it might be from that awful movie, What the Bleep do We Know?, except this book came out earlier than that movie). The philosophy is nothing particularly new, and extremely unsophisticated, like that of a high school boy who has just been introduced to a new idea and believes himself the master of it. The science ranges from trivial to correct to half correct to flat out wrong; he doesn't appear to understand much of it at all, but presents it as though he has a better comprehension than science itself. He presents a series of aphorisms for right living toward the end that he apparently believes are deep wisdom, but are really just the sort of 1980s psychobabble twaddle that was ubiquitous on greeting cards and in self-help books. The characters aren't developed at all; they are just a mechanism for spouting a lot of philosophy in a simplistic, self-edifying way, and the extreme age of one of the characters is a transparent ruse for making his every utterance seem extremely profound. It doesn't work. In fact, the level of profundity in this particular book brings to mind a bit of faux wisdom concocted solely for the purpose of being faux wisdom - "An owl in a bag troubles no man." In short, it sounds much more important than it really is. About the only thing in the book that I found worthy of giving the half star I gave it was his discussion of probability theory, which was actually decent (possibly because he has an MBA). His discussion of evolution is ludicrous and shows an extreme lack of understanding of this subject; his arguments are arguing against a total straw man, and not evolutionary theory at all. Statements like "How would the first of a new species find a mate?" - the sort of question creationists throw out in the mistaken smug assertion that they will stump all scientists. They usually believe they have when the scientist walks away with a stunned look on their face, not realizing said scientist is thinking "How can I possibly conduct a conversation with this person?" The book is chock full of such straw men, as well as a priori reasoning, and smug assertions that have no logical argumentation, no evidence, and no bearing on reality in many cases. This reads like a kindergarten "take that" challenge thrown out to philosophers and scientists alike, most of whom will never bother to answer him, because the time it would take would not be worth the result when they encounter the smug hard-headed assurances that there is a "fifth level" at which one person exists who realizes that everyone else is wrong (and it isn't too hard to realize that, in spite of his assertions at the beginning of the book, this is the role that Adams sees for himself). In short, a lame, trite, and banal work of nonsense. I'm only glad it's short, so I didn't waste more than 2 hours of my life on this tripe.
    • 1/5
      The author announces, without a trace of modesty, that the ideas in this book will cause your head to spin. He obviously believes he has created some sort of new breakthrough in thinking. In reality, it's an insipid mixture of New Age, Eastern mysticism, quantum flapdoodle, and a totally superficial reading of sources that he chooses to consider scientific (though it's tough to know, since he doesn't reference where he gets his scientific information; one would think it might be from that awful movie, What the Bleep do We Know?, except this book came out earlier than that movie). The philosophy is nothing particularly new, and extremely unsophisticated, like that of a high school boy who has just been introduced to a new idea and believes himself the master of it. The science ranges from trivial to correct to half correct to flat out wrong; he doesn't appear to understand much of it at all, but presents it as though he has a better comprehension than science itself. He presents a series of aphorisms for right living toward the end that he apparently believes are deep wisdom, but are really just the sort of 1980s psychobabble twaddle that was ubiquitous on greeting cards and in self-help books. The characters aren't developed at all; they are just a mechanism for spouting a lot of philosophy in a simplistic, self-edifying way, and the extreme age of one of the characters is a transparent ruse for making his every utterance seem extremely profound. It doesn't work. In fact, the level of profundity in this particular book brings to mind a bit of faux wisdom concocted solely for the purpose of being faux wisdom - "An owl in a bag troubles no man." In short, it sounds much more important than it really is. About the only thing in the book that I found worthy of giving the half star I gave it was his discussion of probability theory, which was actually decent (possibly because he has an MBA). His discussion of evolution is ludicrous and shows an extreme lack of understanding of this subject; his arguments are arguing against a total straw man, and not evolutionary theory at all. Statements like "How would the first of a new species find a mate?" - the sort of question creationists throw out in the mistaken smug assertion that they will stump all scientists. They usually believe they have when the scientist walks away with a stunned look on their face, not realizing said scientist is thinking "How can I possibly conduct a conversation with this person?" The book is chock full of such straw men, as well as a priori reasoning, and smug assertions that have no logical argumentation, no evidence, and no bearing on reality in many cases. This reads like a kindergarten "take that" challenge thrown out to philosophers and scientists alike, most of whom will never bother to answer him, because the time it would take would not be worth the result when they encounter the smug hard-headed assurances that there is a "fifth level" at which one person exists who realizes that everyone else is wrong (and it isn't too hard to realize that, in spite of his assertions at the beginning of the book, this is the role that Adams sees for himself). In short, a lame, trite, and banal work of nonsense. I'm only glad it's short, so I didn't waste more than 2 hours of my life on this tripe.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I was surprised to run across a non-fiction work by the creator of Dilbert, especially one that set out to examine weighty issues about the meaning of life, the universe and everything in just over 100 pages. I was hesitant to get it at first, especially since the book’s set-up was eerily similar to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael---a cringe-worthy example of philosophy ‘lite’ if ever there was one. Fortunately there are no telepathic gorillas here. The Socratic dialogue between the two main characters can be irritating at times; however, it serves its purpose well. And while he does have a definite philosophic stance (notwithstanding his disclaimers), Scott is less interested in providing answers to the key issues in the science vs. religion debates than he is in challenging people to think more critically about the big questions in life. God's Debris is an unexpected delight: chock-full of clever and thought-provoking metaphors, it is a quirky "thought-experiment" worth engaging in.