God’s Debris, by Scott Adams (free electronic version, buy) is a nice little book about a parcel delivery guy making a delivery that changes his life.

It turns out that the old man at the house is omniscient, and a dialogue about many topics - the universe, evolution, how we think, reality - unfolds. That’s basically all there is to the book: a dialogue between two people, one of them curious, the other giving unexpected answers. All around a central theme, a suprising theory of what God is (if you’re dogmatically religious and thus can’t stand people toying around with the definition of “God”, don’t read the book).

Scott Adams is a bright guy but hardly knows everything, which is a bit of a problem if you’re writing a dialogue where one of the parties is omniscient. He therefore admits in the introduction that he just made guesses in some places. The recipe he followed was roughly finding the simplest explanation he could manage to come up with and then massaging it until it sounds true. He is blatantly wrong on some topics (I found the discourse on evolution nonsensical), but most of the time he has managed to come up with stuff that is at least mildly thought-provoking.

It didn’t make my mind spin, but I thouroughly enjoyed the book. With a free electronic version available, definitely worth reading it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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