An Open Letter to Scott Adams

For the deathbed convert

Dear Scott,

I kind of hate this kind of thing. This open letter to a famous person thing. The chances of the famous person ever reading it are so low that it winds up just being a blog post disguised as a “letter.” Yet here I go, doing that thing I kind of hate, on the very slim chance that you will ever read it.

Yesterday you announced that you plan to convert to Christianity. Some friends have been bugging you about this for a while, and you don’t resent them for it, because this is after all The Most Important Thing Ever. You know that if they weren’t bugging you at this point in time, they wouldn’t be your friends. And time, for you right now, is of the essence.

When you announced your diagnosis last year, I was sad to hear you were considering the option of ending your own life. I understood why you were considering this, of course. But I very much hoped you could be persuaded out of it, and I’m thankful that you were. I admire the calm collectedness with which you are now facing death. Dying gracefully in public is quite a feat. Hats off.

Of course, the downside of dying in public is that when you make an announcement like you made yesterday, you’ll get thousands of replies, from Christians, atheists, and everyone in between. You’ve stated your intention not to respond to any of these suggestions, questions, complaints, etc. What happens next is, after all, between you and Jesus. You also sound irritated with people insisting there’s “one right way to do it.”

Well, fair enough. This little letter will be just one more reply among the many, and I am no more owed a response than any of those numerous others so eagerly crowding your mentions right now. But maybe it could still be helpful to someone, in some way.

Before I do any theology here, maybe I should start with a little epistemology. In the past, you’ve proposed that the true nature of reality is unknowable. Unfortunately, we will never have a leisurely chat in which I learn exactly what you mean by “knowledge.” I assume we would agree that there are at least a few things we can know for certain: “I exist.” “I am being appeared to laptoply.” “A circle is not a square.” But I don’t think knowledge is limited to what we know for certain. This includes knowledge about God.

In your announcement, you describe your conversion like a wager: Nothing lost if you’re wrong, everything gained if you’re right. I am obviously not privy to the conversations you’ve been having with your Christian friends, but I hope they’ve been offering you reasons to think this is better than a spin of the wheel. I’m sure you’ve heard some of those reasons at some point. I can’t say I know God exists in the same way I know 1 + 1 = 2, but I can say a whole lot of things about the nature of reality make a lot more sense if He does. And really, isn’t that how we come to know anything about anything?

So my first word is a word of encouragement: Good news! It looks like all this stuff is actually true! You are not in a Vegas casino spinning the wheel. Here, in the winter of your life, see yourself in a forest, following footprints in the snow.

Now for the part I don’t relish, because I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a lot of the people annoying you right now. You said, “The dominant Christian theory is that I would wake up in heaven if I have a good life.” With respect, if someone told you this, that someone is wrong. It is of course not your fault if this is how Christianity has been presented to you. But it’s not Christianity. Believe it or not, that’s good news too.

I realize this might not make much sense. We feel intuitively that having a good life, doing good stuff, must have something to do with where we go when we die. And there’s something to that intuition. Trying to be good, to do good, is like trying to follow a lit path. Light has a source. So does goodness.

Of course, we’re not always good. But we feel bad about that. So we do our best to assess the damage and pay for it, like good people do. “Sorry I broke your window. What do I owe you?” “Sorry I broke your heart. Where do I send the check?”

And, well. That’s not how it works.

I sing “Jesus paid it all,” but I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure how that works either. It still makes more sense than thinking I could write all those checks, though.

You’ve said one of your tests for a good worldview is that it makes you happy. That’s not nothing, I guess. But a lot of things can make us happy, at least for a while. The real question is, does truth make you happy?

You said all the replies were almost talking you out of this. I assume that was tongue in cheek. But maybe it expressed something real. Hopefully you understand that no one means to discourage you. They only want you to know how good the good news actually is.

Before your announcement, you talked a bit about the simulation hypothesis. I admit, I’ve never seen the appeal. Some have tried to put a God spin on it: This whole universe is God’s video game, and we’re all just living in it. I doubt this, because I doubt God is like that. I doubt He’s up there hoping I’ll think the tree or the waterfall are real when they’re just so many pixels on His screen. I think He made the first tree, and the first waterfall, and the first everything, because He thought a universe with trees and waterfalls and everything was better than a universe without them. And then He made the first man and the first woman, because that was better than a universe of trees and waterfalls and everything with no one to enjoy them. And then the man and the woman decided a universe with more humans was better than a universe with only two. And somewhere along the way, two people decided a universe with Scott Adams was better than a universe without him.

We think so too. And we hope to see you again soon.