Rating:  Summary: Makes you think, even if you disagree. Review: Note to those that gave this book one star: I have read the other reviews, and disagree that there is nothing new or ground breaking here. Maybe I have not read all the newest philosophies, or kept up on new age physics. But I also do not think that Scott Adams is trying to impress those that are into the newest philosophies and metaphysics.For heaven's sake people take this for what it is. Personally, I think that Mr. Adams has done a tremendous job of getting the average person to take a look at their day to day lives from a new perspective. And, for those that are knocking this because it is similar to something that you have already read, well, at least it got you thinking enough to write in and knock this book. Either he is a genius, or an idiot. Not sure which, maybe both. But I thouroughly enjoyed this book. I enjoyed talking about it with my friends and family, and enjoy their reaction when they read it. And, if you are looking for humor, this is not the book for you.
Rating:  Summary: Never taken a high-school philosophy class....? Review: Oh please. What was it the book would say it would do? Spin our brains around or something? This book could have been a 10th-grade philosophy student's final essay. The ideas in this book are so old, so trite, that frankly it just restates questions philosophical questions that smart bored twelve-year olds have already asked.
"Do we have free will? Well, if God knows everything, doesn't He know what we're going to do next?"
Crickey, what a good question!
"Woah, woah, but get this one: If God knows everything, doesn't He know what HE is going to do next???"
Wow! My brain is spinning around!
Seriously though. If this were aimed as side-reading to a highschool freshman's introduction to philosophy, there would be no problem in writing such trite. But to market this book as containing original thought, as one that will make you think, either implies that Adam's truely thought he was on to something new here, in which case he ought to have taken more philosophy classes, or that it was over-hyped both by him and his agent.
Rating:  Summary: Teacher's resource? Review: This was an interesting book, but does not stick in my mind quite the way the author suggests it might. I think this book might be best read by 9th/10th graders as it may present some new or interesting perspectives to them. (It's also short and a fun read).
Rating:  Summary: Intellectual enlightment for the common man. Review: What a great read. Scott Adams has produced a book that gives much food-for-thought about a presence of a god or lack thereof. It is the perfect introduction to his most recent release, "The Religion War" (a continuation of the story)
Both of these stories ask simple questions that invoke the reader into pondering the possiblities. We can only hope that Adams can contribute to a new age of intellectual enlightenment.
Everyone should read this book.
Rating:  Summary: Could have been much better. Take a lesson from Sagan Review: When I heard of this book, I was hoping that Adams, world-class humorist that he is, had with "God's Debris" written a profound and amusing treatment of Omega Point theory - the idea that everything that has ever happened will be replicated and perfected in some distant, heavenly future. Having years ago read Frank Tippler's "The Physics of Immortality", I felt that a popularization of the subject of this dry, voluminous, yet thought-provoking book was long overdue. As a longtime Dilbert fan, I would have liked nothing better than for Adams to write one.
For about the first third of "God's Debris", I though he might have. His forward warned not to hold the story up to excessive factual scrutiny, and "Physics of God-Dust" promised showed promise to get into some cool speculation about quatitized time and quantum gravity. Alas, this promise was never fulfilled. By the time Mr. Avatar began discoursing on the physical non-existence of light and the instantaneous effect of changes in gravity - ideas at odds with the last century of experimental Physics - all hope had fled. And, this book having only the thinnest narrative framework, the events and characters created only to present its ideas, when those ideas become unignorably wrong, the reader is left with nothing. In fairness, the information on social skills in "Relationships" is sound and worthwhile, but occurring as it does nearly at the end of the book, it was a struggle to regain interest.
This book is one of the rare ones that I had to put down several times, not to reflect upon, but because its failings were so painful.
The pity is that this needn't have been. A competent physicist could have marked this book up with a sprinkling of additions and corrections that could have kept it on track, and made it into a book that would stir the imagination of more experienced and technically literate readers, while not leading less experienced ones into a grab-bag of archaic intellectual pitfalls. When Carl Sagan, no slouch scientifically, wrote "Contact", he invited folk like Kip Thorne to proofread it, the result being a bestselling novel with practically no scientific holes.
The idea of a "5th level human being", a step above the 4th level ("skepticism ... good working grasp on truth, thanks to science, your logic , and your senses) is deeply intriguing. To be convincing, however, such a character must evidence that he has acquired the "good working grasp" skills of the previous level of consciousness. Otherwise, the ancient wise man comes across as an enthusiastic but naive youth. A "man who knows everything" would always include the Michelson-Morley experiment in an explanation of Special Relativity, and be numerate enough to avoid statements like "if you flip a coin often enough, eventually it will come up heads a thousand times in a row" (The odds of 1,000 consecutive heads is 1/2^1000 =~ 1/10^301. If every person presently alive on earth flipped a trillion coins a second until all conventional matter has vanished from the universe (10^124 sec), the chance of one person getting 1,000 heads in a row is still worse than 1:10^270 !)
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