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Title: God's Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams ISBN: 0-7407-2190-9 Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing Pub. Date: 15 September, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.86 (117 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Exercise your brain
Comment: God's Debris is one of those books that seems far too short. I read it in one sitting and wished for more. Whether or not you agree with Adams' conclusions, it will get your mind working in unexpected areas. Like the Tao Te Ching, Voltaire's Candide, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Richard Bach's Illusions, my mind will be returning to questions and ideas raised in God's Debris for the rest of my life. Following is an excerpt from an e-mail I sent Scott Adams immediately upon finishing the book:

I just read God's Debris, and I was quite impressed. Clarity. Simple and profound. Many of the ideas correspond to my own thoughts, but you put a slightly different light on them or combined them in new ways, to my utter delight. It is very satisfying to compliment myself with the notion that a third party has confirmed that my ideas were grander than I had thought. I will bask in the illusion. However, while reading I couldn't help feeling that something even beyond these notions was creeping up behind me -- some way of seeing even further outside the human box, or perhaps further inside it. Perhaps even the idea that our notions are "delusions" is a purely human one -- resting on the shaky notion that there exists some absolute truth or fiction about things, when truth and falsehood are only a "useful delusion" that helps us to avoid being fooled in our daily lives. The idea (delusion) in the previous sentence helps me feel better about making practical use of my delusions, though I'm not sure why.

Rating: 5
Summary: Decipher Factual Errors, Specious Arguments, and Conjecture!
Comment: For those who love Dilbert, please realize that this book has nothing to do with that enjoyable character. There's also no humor here. Instead, you will find a fable that presents a unified theory of cosmology, religion, and knowledge. Before you get excited about all that you can learn, realize that this unified theory is deliberately flawed by Mr. Adams to provide you with a thought experiment to locate what is wrong with the argument. So the book is actually a brain teaser in its primary intent. It is a brain teaser that most people will find exceeds their knowledge of probability, physics, religion, philosophy, evolution, psychology and logic. So, to pick it apart you will probably need to assemble a team of people with deep knowledge in those areas. As a result, God's Debris is perfect for a serious book club. After understanding what's wrong with the arguments in the book, many will probably begin to see more unity in everything that happens based on a better platform of knowledge. That's well worthwhile.

I found this book fascinating as a puzzle, and enjoyed picking the arguments and misstatements apart. It reminded me of a question on the bar exam from many years ago where I had to write about what the law was in regard to a will written by an illiterate person. Great fun!

Mr. Adams warns that this book is for "people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls." He also says that it is "a view about God that you've probably never heard before." I certainly agree with both of those points. He also warns that what's in the book "isn't true . . . but it's oddly compelling." He also notes that people under the age of 14 should not read it. Although he doesn't say why, anyone who reads this book without a foundation in the subjects described may actually believe what's proposed by the Avatar. The world has enough false beliefs in it. I applaud Mr. Adams for helping to avoid creating any more.

After this book has honed your knowledge and critical thinking skills, I suggest that you take arguments that you read in other books and practice seeing what is wrong with them. All nonfiction books provide thought experiments of that sort!

I do hope Mr. Adams will write another of these thought experiments.

Overcome the appeal of simplicity to see through to the dynamic reality!

Rating: 1
Summary: An amateur rehash
Comment: What a waste of pages. It's an extended dialogue of the trashiest straw man sort, badly reiterating most every argument related to relgion. If you've never read anything about religion you could mistake this as profound or interesting; if you have you'll find it incredibly underinformed and badly written.