Wednesday, January 17, 2007

God's Debris: A Thought Experiment

Here is a thought experiment I've just copied and pasted on this blog from Wikipedia. Honestly, I would make the effort to rewrite it in my own words so you might think "ooh, he's put in some time and effort for this" but I won't because I have an English lesson in... about 5 minutes, so no can do! It's called God's Debris and you might've already considered using it yourself. Catch ya in a bizzle...

God's Debris creates a cohesive but iconoclastic philosophical universe, via the idea that the simplest explanation is the best (the literally simplest, as opposed to Occam's Razor), that surmises that an omnipotent God annihilated himself (because God would already know everything possible except his own lack of existence) in the Big Bang and exists now as the smallest units of matter and the law of probability, or "God's debris", hence the title. This theory is actually a form of pandeism, the concept that God created the universe by becoming the universe.
Adams offers recommendations on everything from an alternative theory for planetary motion to successful recipes for relationships under his system. He proposes another pandeistic concept with the hypothesis that God is currently reassembling himself though the continued formation of a collective intelligence in the form of the human race, modern examples of which include the development of the Internet. He bills God's Debris as a thought experiment, challenging readers to differentiate scientifically accepted theories from "creative baloney" designed to sound true.
The central character, according to the introduction, knows "literally everything", and Adams, whose knowledge is as relatively limited as the next man, had to come up with a way around this. He used the aforementioned "simplest explanation" for each concept raised in the book because, while "in this world of complications, the simplest explanation is usually dead wrong", there is something more comfortable and more convincing in the simplest explanation than in anything complicated.

1 comment:

Saxon said...

good stuff Tom... wonder what the Devil's debris is...