God, be merciful to me, a sinner!
I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!
I finished a very dangerous book today called God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment. I did not expect such a dangerous book to come from Scott Adams, the pen behind the popular cartoon Dilbert. I guess this kind of philosophy is beginning to permeate our society though, and its coming from a usually humorous author just makes it that much more palatable to the common ingest-er of ideas. It is ironic that such a serious work is written by such a typically funny writer; however, it is also ironic that it purports to concern itself with God’s debris, while I believe that the philosophy outlined therein is the means by which we shall turn into debris mankind.
I say it is dangerous because it is what happens when man loses his grasp on the great knowledge of the past: He turns inward, puts all his confidence in his own reason, and then, when that is exhausted and shown to be fruitless, he turns (because he cannot turn to the rejected knowledge) to the destruction of his own intellect. Out of desperation, man has tried to make everything meaningless. It is the thought to which G.K. Chesteron alluded when he said ”There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” That thought is that the world is a delusion, it is created by man’s mind, and all thinking is useless.
Let me illustrate what I mean. [[spoiler alert!]] The ideas are conveyed through a conversation between a wise old man and a skeptical young man. The premise of the book is that God has destroyed himself, creating what we call God’s debris. This explosion is the only reason we exist; we crawl back together and form groups and nations and, eventually, a whole world that acts as a collective until we, together, reconstitute God himself. God is composed of two aspects: the most minuscule particles at the basis of matter are specks of God; the other aspect is probability. Nothing in life is certain: only probable. Adams uses this concept of probability to posit an explanation for everything from gravity to light to ethics.
It’s very interesting up till now; it worsens when he gets beyond metaphysics into epistemology and ethics. The old man asserts that all things are merely delusions and true knowledge of things is hopelessly beyond comprehension. We weren’t designed to understand all things, he says, and so the best we can do is accept the simplest, most accurate explanations we believe we know, reject the others, and hope our lives work out well without clashing with others’ too much… After all, our only goal is to unite as a world so as to better constitute God amongst ourselves. Thought comes to an end, and–reminiscent of Socrates, but a whole lot scarier, because God is not only unknowable but dead–he says the only route to wisdom left open is to forget what we think we know, our delusions. It ends by extolling the systematic devaluation of all revered wisdom and knowledge… resulting in man’s eventual suicide.
So basically, it really worries me that this book is out there. The ideas it contains are nothing new: just a nicely-packaged, systematic constitution of many of the ideas of our postmodern age. What worries me is how readily available and popular this book makes them. But I guess that’s the biggest irony (out of many) of the whole thing–those who shallowly buy into this book whole-heartedly will be succumbing to possibly the greatest delusion of their lives.
I saw coming towards us a Ghost who carried something on his shoulder. Like all the Ghosts, he was unsubstantial, but they differed from one another as smokes differ. Some had been whitish; this one was dark and oily. What sat on his shoulder was a little red lizard, and it was twitching its tail like a whip and whispering things in his ear. As we caught sight of him he turned his head to the reptile with a snarl of impatience. ‘Shut up, I tell you!’ he said. It wagged its tail and continued to whisper to him. He ceased snarling, and presently began to smile. Then he turned and started to limp westward, away from the mountains.
‘Off so soon?’ said a voice.
The speaker was more or less human in shape but larger than a man, and so bright that I could hardly look at him. His presence smote on my eyes and on my body too (for there was heat coming from him as well as light) like the morning sun at the beginning of a tyrannous summer day.
‘Yes. I’m off,” said the Ghost. ‘Thanks for all your hospitality. But it’s no good, you see. I told this little chap’ (here he indicated the Lizard) ‘that he’d have to be quiet if he came–which he insisted on doing. Of course his stuff won’t do here: I realise that. But he won’t stop. I shall have to go home.’
Some thoughts bouncing around in my head and influencing me right now:
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It’s only in wanting something else, more, that one can find those things they thought they wanted in the first place.
Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalm 37:4
Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Luke 9:24
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C.S. Lewis
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Sanctus Real – “Lead Me”
I look around and see my wonderful life
Almost perfect from the outside
In picture frames I see my beautiful wife
Always smiling
But on the inside, I can hear her saying…
Everything dies in the Winter. Nothing is spared beneath its painful, icy veneer. The amount of death always amazes me. I see it throughout the world, its countless relationships, and in winter.
Last night I went for a pretty epic walk in the frigid snow of a Michigan January night. I was out for about an hour and a half, and smoked two pipe-fulls of tobacco. It was glorious, and the perfect setting for contemplation and reflection, crying out to God for his forgiveness and blessing, his hand in my life. I noticed while sitting on a bench next to Chemical Bank downtown that the concert shelter, lacking its summer-time banners, was as bare as the leafless trees, man’s creation mimicking God’s natural putting to sleep of all life in the winter.
But though this world is so dead, God is ever-faithful, and every year he breathes life into the world again, reviving the seed of himself that he placed there to preserve each precious creation of his. It is no accident, I believe, that this crazy time happened in Winter, nor that I happened to have this thought last night, while contemplating my mistakes and the painful pruning God is doing in me. He had to tear me down, but he will build me back, I know and trust.
This has been a difficult Winter thus far, and I’ve seen a lot of death’s effects working its way out of me. But I know that God’s will is to work that death out of me; in fact, he died so that death would have no more grip on me; I’m dead already. When I think back over all the depression and brokenness that has occurred this Winter (and in the preceding months), I remember God’s faithfulness and that he can forgive even me. If I will be faithful to him, I know he can bring joy back into my life. I believe, God; help me overcome my unbelief. I want to believe that you can change me and my ability to relate to others. Please renew my resolve to follow you and breathe your life into me again.
Movement in our stillness 