Dilbert's God
Scott Adams's strange vision.

By Jeremy Lott, senior editor of Spintech magazine
October 27-28, 2001

God's Debris: A Thought Experiment, by Scott Adams (Digital Owl, 99 e-pp., $4.95)

f you're a literary critic, keep in mind that I hate you too and I said it first."

Not exactly the best way to go fishing for free publicity, but there it is, right smack dab in the introduction to Scott Adams's first non-Dilbert book, God's Debris. The intro functions almost as a warning label: The ideas expressed herein are "inappropriate for young minds"; Old people should likewise bow out; Those likely to be offended are invited to take a pass.

All this plus the restrictive e-book format — whose printing function was enabled only after massive reader protest — and the e-book-only release would lead most reasonable people to conclude that Scott Adams does not want you to read this book.

But why? What's the point in writing a book and then making people navigate a minefield in order to be able to read it?

Close readers of Adams's Dilbert prose books could sense something like this coming. After a manuscript chock full of gags to satisfy the "induhviduals" who might be reading, we came to anticipate the last section where he put away the exploding bananas and office humor and let us know what was on his mind. In The Dilbert Principle, he told us of his ideas to really make business work better. The Dilbert Future put the question of whether what is explained by gravity couldn't be better understood in terms of a universe that is expanding at a much more rapid clip than previously thought.

And now, in God's Debris, Adams animates the well-worn genre of the Socratic dialogue with his musings on weighty issues: God, religion, community, free will, morality, the mind. The upshot is, among other things, a modern Gnostic fantasy and a skeptical argument for belief. The two players are an anonymous UPS driver stand-in for Adams and a mysterious ancient "man" named Avatar who "knows literally everything" and who, by explanation, upends most of the deliveryman's assumptions.

Though Avatar occasionally mouths vapid vaguely Eastern-sounding sayings ("the answer is that the question has no why"), for the most part, he succeeds in accomplishing what Adams intended: spinning the readers' brains around in our skulls. In so doing, he constructs a theology that is simultaneously so foreign and so familiar to the Western mind that readers will be just as likely as the UPS driver to be shocked by the ideas espoused.

Congruent with monotheism, Avater's "God" is infinite. But, unlike the major Western streams of thought, he senses a conflict between an infinite God and a creator God. "Humans are driven by all of our animal passions plus loftier-sounding things like self actualization and freedom and love," Avatar explains. "But God would care nothing for those things, or if he cared he would already have them in unlimited quantities. None of them would be motivating." None would lead to Genesis. But what, he poses, if God was all knowing with only one exception: He didn't know what would happen if he blew himself up.

According to this theory, we are God's debris; the bits attempting to come back together. The emergence of life and its increasing complexity that ultimately led to man, he correctly notes, scaled walls that would normally be insurmountable without an organizing principle. The human mania for connectivity — he uses this to describe the recent unbridled enthusiasm for all things Internet — and the stubborn religious impulse are both driven by this attraction. They reflect a complex underlying truth of which skeptics are willfully
unaware.

What an odd idea. It reminds of the popular moniker that some theologians used to refer to God a century ago: "the universal mind." It also bears more than a little resemblance to the Gnostic idea of a fragmented God waiting to be reassembled through knowledge ("gnosis"). Though a brief review can't begin to do this strange book justice, Adams's own denouement seems to explain it: "The description of reality in God's Debris isn't true, as far as I know, but it's oddly compelling."