I love Scott Adams. I read his blog daily and enjoy many of his thought experiments and meanderings. I was a fan of his comic Dilbert by the time I hit 7th grade. Yeah, I was that kid. I suppose it’s no surprise I had an office job by the time I was 16.
So why it took so long to get around to reading God’s Debris — his short, free thought experiment of a book — is a mystery to me. I literally started last night and finished this morning. It was, as expected, an easy read that was thoroughly thought-provoking.
The entire book is a conversation between two men. One is teaching the other his theory on life, the universe and everything based on the simplest explanations for everything.
The climactic idea they reach is this: God, being omnipotent and all-knowing, can know everything except what would happen were He to no longer exist. So in an effort to maintain His omniscience, He destroys himself. This destruction is our Big Bang, and the entire existence of the universe is a collection of His debris, slowly reformulating into a single consciousness as God recollects himself back into His all-powerful self.
Yeah, it sounds crazy and weird. That’s what’s so fun about it. And the fact that Adams explains it so easily only makes it that much better of a read.
I highly recommend God’s Debris for anyone who enjoys exploring philosophy and religion. You can download it as a free PDF and it’s a very quick read, so there’s not much excuse not to read it.
Am I the only one more surprised that that much ink would only fuel one flight that doesn’t even circle the globe once? I was expecting to see something like “it would fuel a space shuttle from here to Mars three times!” But no. Just one flight that’s probably less miles than I’ve traveled by air in the last year or two. That’s depressing to me. Time to stop flying, I guess. Or start praying that those stats are grossly miscalculated.
“In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.
Well, what do you know. I guess the past few years all that going to the gym just to stay healthy has not been in vain. So many ask why I don’t feel bad that I don’t lose weight at the gym. Now we all know.
This is definitely an encouragement to work more on my diet, though. I fluctuate between good and poor diet far to much. And I’m someone who actually is conscientious of what I eat much more than many people I know. Kind of scary.
It upsets me a bit to see that the question “can ‘real’ Christians be depressed?” is even something we need to address. Do we need a full 10-paragraph article? I was almost expecting Onion-esque satire with a one-word article: “Yes.”
Why would anyone, in this day and age, expect that faith protects us from the same sicknesses the rest of humanity is plagued with? Or do people just not know that depression is just as much a physical/chemical issue as it is a spiritual one (if not more so)? I guess I thought better of people. That’ll teach me.
Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. A good day to talk about the theory of evolution. Or, in my case, how little I care about it.
When Christians get up in arms about evolutionary theory, I ask, “How does this affect your day-to-day faith?” I don’t want to project my own manner of thinking on others; maybe other people really do struggle in the face of Darwin’s ideas. But my guess is that, for most Christians, it has no significant effect. And yet it’s considered one of modern Christianity’s biggest issues.
I’ve decided to stop caring about it. It’s not a good use of my time to figure it out because I’m not a scientist. In fact, evolutionary theory seems to help them figure other things out that have potential to benefit our society. Nor do I have any conclusive evidence that Genesis is meant to be a literal translation of our creation.
It’s kind of nice to not care about things. Life is a little bit easier. Chalk up another one for “to be wise is to be sad.” (Or maybe “to be wise” should just be “to know” in this case.)
Socrates might have been on to something with that whole “I know nothing” thing.
