by Scott Adams
“Religions are like different maps whose routes all lead to the collective good of society. Some maps take their followers over rugged terrain. Other maps have easier paths. Some of the travelers of each route will be assigned the job of being the protectors and interpreters of the map. They will teach the young to respect it and be suspicious of other maps.”
“Okay,” I said, “but who made the maps in the first place?”
“The maps were made by the people who went first and didn’t die. The maps that survive are the ones that work,” he said.
At last, he had presented a target for me to attack. “Are you saying that all the religions work? What about all the people who have been killed in religious wars?”
“You can’t judge the value of a thing by looking only at costs. In many countries, more people die from hospital errors than religious wars, but no one accuses hospitals of being evil. Religious people are happier, they live longer, have fewer accidents, and stay out of trouble compared to nonreligious people. From society’s viewpoint, religion works.”
Delusion Generator
As my lunch hour blurred into afternoon, I had technically abandoned my job. I didn’t care. The time spent with this old man was worth it. I didn’t agree with everything he was saying, but my mind was more alive than it had been since I was a child. I felt like I had wakened on a strange planet where everything looked familiar but all the rules were different. He was a mystery, but by now I was getting used to his questions that came out of nowhere.
“Has anyone ever advised you to ‘be yourself’?”
I said I’d heard that a lot.
“What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.”
“You make it sound as though our brains are designed to trick us,” I said.
“There is more information in one thimble of reality than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is beyond the human brain to understand the world and its environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified illusions that act as a replacement for understanding. When the illusions work well and the human who subscribes to the illusion survives, those illusions are passed to new generations.
“The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions are fueled by arrogance—the arrogance that humans are the center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the magical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We presume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation for our playground. We believe that God—because he thinks the same way we do—must be more interested in our lives than in the rocks and trees and plants and animals.”
“Well, I don’t think rocks would be very interesting to God,” I said. “They just sit on the ground and erode.”
“You think that way because you are unable to see the storm of activity at the rock’s molecular level or the level beneath that, and so on. And you are limited by your perception of time. If you watched a rock your entire life it would never look different. But if you were God and could observe the rock over fifteen billion years as though only a second had passed, the rock would be frantic with activity. It would be shrinking and growing and trading matter with its environment. Its molecules would travel the universe and become a partner to amazing things that we could never imagine. By contrast, the odd collection of molecules that make a human being will stay in that arrangement for less time than it takes the universe to blink. Our arrogance causes us to imagine special value in this temporary collection of molecules. Why do we perceive more spiritual value in the sum of our body parts than on any individual cell in our body? Why don’t we hold funerals when skin cells die?”
“That wouldn’t be practical,” I said. I wasn’t sure it was a question meant to be answered, but I wanted to show I was listening.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “Practicality rules our perceptions. To survive, our tiny brains need to tame the blizzard of information that threatens to overwhelm us. Our perceptions are wondrously flexible, transforming our worldview automatically and continuously until we find safe harbor in a comfortable delusion.
“To a God not bound by the limits of human practicality, every tiny part of your body would be as action-packed and meaningful as the parts of any rock or tree or bug. And the sum of your parts that form the personality and life we find so special and amazing would seem neither special nor amazing to an omnipotent being.
“It is absurd to define God as omnipotent and then burden him with our own myopic view of the significance of human beings. What could possibly be interesting or important to a God that knows everything, can create anything, can destroy anything. The concept of ‘importance’ is a human one born out of our need to make choices for survival. An omnipotent being has no need to rank things. To God, nothing in the universe would be more interesting, more worthy, more useful, more threatening, or more important than anything else.”
“I still think people are more important to God than animals and plants and dirt. I think that’s obvious,” I argued.
“What is more important to a car, the steering wheel or the engine?” he asked.
“The engine is more important because without an engine, there is no reason to steer,” I reasoned.
“But unless you have both the engine and the steering wheel, the car is useless, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Well, yes. I guess that’s true,” I admitted.
“The steering wheel and the engine are of equal importance. It is a human impulse—composed of equal parts arrogance and instinct—to believe we can rank everything in our environment. Importance is not an intrinsic quality of the universe. It exists only in our delusion-filled minds. I can assure you that humans are not in any form or fashion more important than rocks or steering wheels or engines.”
Reincarnation, UFOs, and God
I didn’t know how much of the old man’s opinions to take at face value. Everything he talked about had a kind of logic to it, but so do many things that are nonsense. I decided it was best just to listen. Whatever was happening to me, at least it was different. I liked different.
He started again. “If you want to understand UFOs, reincarnation, and God, do not study UFOs, reincarnation, and God. Study people.”
“Are you saying none of those things are real?” I was offended by his certainty, given the thousands of eyewitness accounts for each of those things.
“No,” he said, “I am saying that UFOs, reincarnation, and God are all equal in terms of their reality.”
“Do you mean equally real or equally imaginary?”
“Your question reveals your bias for a binary world where everything is either real or imaginary. That distinction lies in your perceptions, not in the universe. Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabulary are your brain’s limits, not the universe’s.”
“There has to be a difference between real and imagined things,” I countered. “My truck is real. The Easter Bunny is imagined. Those are different.”
“As you sit here, your truck exists for you only in your memory, a place in your mind. The Easter Bunny lives in the same place. They are equal.”
“Yes, but I can go out and drive my truck. I can’t pet the Easter Bunny.”
“Was the rain from this morning real?”
“Of course.”
“But you can’t see or touch that rain now, can you?”
“No.”
“Like the Easter Bunny, the past exists only in your mind,” he said. “Likewise, the future exists only in your mind because it has no
t happened.”
“But I can find evidence of the past. I can check with the weather people and confirm that it rained this morning.”
“And when you get that confirmation, it would instantly become the past itself. So in effect, you would be using the past, which does not exist, to confirm something else from the past. And if you repeat the process a thousand times, with a thousand different pieces of evidence, together they would still be nothing but impressions of the past supporting other impressions of the past.”
“That’s just mental gymnastics. You’re playing with words,” I said.
“An insane person believes his world is consistent. If he believes the government is trying to kill him, he will see ample evidence of his belief in the so-called real world. He will be wrong, but his evidence is no better or worse than your evidence that it rained this morning. Both of you will be converting evidence of the present into impressions stored in your minds and you will both be certain your evidence is solid and irrefutable. Your mind will mold the facts and shape the clues until it all fits.”
“That might be true of crazy people, but not normal people.”
“Clinical psychologists have proven that ordinary people will alter their memories of the past to make them fit their perceptions. It is the way all normal brains function under ordinary circumstances.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do,” he replied.
God’s Motivation
“If you were God,” he said, “what would you want?”
“I don’t know. I barely know what I want, much less what God wants.”
“Imagine that you are omnipotent. You can do anything, create anything, be anything. As soon as you decide you want something, it becomes reality.”
I waited, knowing there was more.
He continued. “Does it make sense to think of God as wanting anything? A God would have no emotions, no fears, no desires, no curiosity, no hunger. Those are human shortcomings, not something that would be found in an omnipotent God. What then would motivate God?”
“Maybe it’s the challenge, the intellectual stimulation of creating things,” I offered.
“Omnipotence means that nothing is a challenge. And what could stimulate the mind of someone who knows everything?”
“You make it sound almost boring to be God. But I guess you’ll say boredom is a human feeling.”
“Everything that motivates living creatures is based on some weakness or flaw. Hunger motivates animals. Lust motivates animals. Fear and pain motivate animals. A God would have none of those impulses. Humans are driven by all of our animal passions plus loftier-sounding things like self-actualization and creativity and freedom and love. But God would care nothing for those things, or if he cared would already have them in unlimited quantities. None of them would be motivating.”
“So what motivates God?” I asked. “Do you have the answer to that question, or are you just yanking my chain?”
“I can conceive of only one challenge for an omnipotent being—the challenge of destroying himself.”
“You think God would want to commit suicide?” I asked.
“I’m not saying he wants anything. I’m saying it’s the only challenge.”
“I think God would prefer to exist than to not exist.”
“That’s thinking like a human, not like a God. You have a fear of death so you assume God would share your preference. But God would have no fears. Existing would be a choice. And there would be no pain of death, nor feelings of guilt or remorse or loss. Those are human feelings, not God feelings. God could simply choose to discontinue existence.”
“There’s a logical problem here, according to your way of thinking,” I said. “If God knows the future, he already knows if he will choose to end his existence, and he knows if he will succeed at it, so there’s no challenge there, either.”
“Your thinking is getting clearer,” he said. “Yes, he will know the future of his own existence under normal conditions. But would his omnipotence include knowing what happens after he loses his omnipotence, or would his knowledge of the future end at that point?”
“That sounds like a thoroughly unanswerable question. I think you’ve hit a dead end,” I said.
“Maybe. But consider this. A God who knew the answer to that question would indeed know everything and have everything. For that reason he would be unmotivated to do anything or create anything. There would be no purpose to act in any way whatsoever. But a God who had one nagging question—what happens if I cease to exist?—might be motivated to find the answer in order to complete his knowledge. And having no fear and no reason to continue existing, he might try it.”
“How would we know either way?”
“We have the answer. It is our existence. The fact that we exist is proof that God is motivated to act in some way. And since only the challenge of self-destruction could interest an omnipotent God, it stands to reason that we...”
I interrupted the old man in midsentence and stood straight up from the rocker. It felt as if a pulse of energy ran up my spine, compressing my lungs, electrifying my skin, bringing the hairs on the back of my neck to full alert. I moved closer to the fireplace, unable to absorb its heat.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” My brain was taking on too much knowledge. There was overflow and I needed to shake off the excess.
The old man looked at nothing and said, “We are God’s debris.”
God’s Debris
“Are you saying that God blew himself to bits and we’re what’s left?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he replied.
“Then what?”
“The debris consists of two things. First, there are the smallest elements of matter, many levels below the smallest things scientists have identified.”
“Smaller than quarks? I don’t know what a quark is, but I think it’s small.”
“Everything is made of some other thing. And those things in turn are made of other things. Over the next hundred years, scientists will uncover layer after layer of building blocks, each smaller than the last. At each layer the differences between types of matter will be fewer. At the lowest layer everything is exactly the same. Matter is uniform. Those are the bits of God.”
“What’s the second part of the debris?” I asked.
“Probability.”
“So you’re saying that God—an all-powerful being with a consciousness that extends to all things, across all time— consists of nothing but dust and probability?”
“Don’t underestimate it. Probability is an infinitely powerful force. Remember my first question to you, about the coin toss?”
“Yes. You asked why a coin comes up heads half the time.”
“Probability is omnipotent and omnipresent. It influences every coin at any time in any place, instantly. It cannot be shielded or altered. We might see randomness in the outcome of an individual coin toss, but as the number of tosses increases, probability has firm control of the outcome. And probability is not limited to coins and dice and slot machines. Probability is the guiding force of everything in the universe, living or nonliving, near or far, big or small, now or anytime.”
“It’s God’s debris,” I mumbled, rolling the idea around in both my mouth and mind to see if that helped. It was a fascinating concept, but too strange to embrace on first impression. “You said before that you didn’t believe in God. Now you say you do. Which is it?”
“I’m rejecting your overly complicated definition of God—the one that imagines him to have desires and needs and emotions like a human being while possessing infinite power. And I’m rejecting your complicated notion of a fixed reality that the human mind can—by an amazing stroke of luck—grasp.”
“You’re not rejecting the idea of a fixed reality,” I argued. “You’re saying the universe is made of God’s debris. That’s a fixed reality.”
“Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with anything bu
t a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based society. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer comforting. Science is whittling at them from every side. Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.”
“If your God is just a metaphor, why should I care about him? He would be irrelevant,” I said.
“Because everything you perceive is a metaphor for something your brain is not equipped to fully understand. God is as real as the clothes you are wearing and the chair you are sitting in. They are all metaphors for something you will never understand.”
“That’s ridiculous. If everything we perceive is fake, just a metaphor, how do we get anything done?”
“Imagine that you had been raised to believe carrots were potatoes and potatoes were carrots. And imagine you live in a world where everyone knows the truth about these foods except you. When you thought you were eating a potato you were eating a carrot, and vice versa. Assuming you had a balanced diet overall, your delusion about carrots would have no real impact on your life except for your continuous bickering with others about the true nature of carrots and potatoes. Now suppose everyone was wrong and both the carrots and potatoes were entirely different foods. Let’s say they were really apples and beets. Would it matter?”
“You lost me. So God is a potato?” I joked.
“Whether you understand the true nature of your food
or not, you still have to eat. And in my example it makes little difference if you don’t know a carrot from a potato. We can only act on our perceptions, no matter how faulty. The best we can do is to periodically adjust our perceptions—our delusions, if you will—to make them more consistent with our logic and common sense.”
