Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, died recently. Barely a week before, he had declared an intent to convert to Christianity, but it was the kind of conversion that caused theological disturbance.
Adams spent decades examining the human condition with surgical clarity, exposing organizational absurdities and psychological self-deception. He had a real gift in pattern recognition. His legacy rests on an ability to notice what others didn’t examine, especially when incentives and power are factored in. But his conversion seems not to have carried the same intellectual heft.
In a recent conversation with Doug Keck, I turned to Adams’s final days and to remarks publicly shared by his wife that spread rapidly. In those remarks, Scott recounted that Christian friends urged him toward Jesus as death approached, and he described his response with candor. He framed belief in Christ as a rational hedge, explaining that faith promised gain if heaven followed and cost little if it did not. He appeared to approach eternity as a final rational calculation. Here were his actual words:
Many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I’m not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won’t need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
Hardly the words of a man deeply converted. Instead, his posture echoes an application of Blaise Pascal’s famous wager. Pascal argued that reason alone fails to deliver certainty regarding God’s existence, yet reason still presses man toward a necessary decision. The wager is a pragmatic argument, suggesting that it is rational to bet on God’s existence; in a nutshell, if God doesn’t exist, you’ve only lost a little and would have lived a good life, but if God does exist and you don’t believe, you lose everything.
In short, Pascal’s wager is a decision theory argument, not a positive proof. It does urge a life of faith, albeit for the best possible outcome even if God doesn’t exist.
Pascal aimed this argument at skeptical elites who prized intellect and were averse to commitment. Yet Pascal himself never intended the wager as a destination. He offered it as an intellectual threshold, hoping to move the skeptic from calculation and decision toward ultimate encounter and personal conversion.
Nonetheless, Adams, consistent with his intellectual biography, approached belief as an optimization and calculation problem rather than as a surrender of intellect and will. He acknowledged that he still did not believe in God, yet he professed Jesus as Lord as a hedge for the hope of heaven. This represents a very Protestant formula, badly deficient in its understanding of conversion, sacrament, and ecclesial life. Yet even so, I wish to state unequivocally here: it offers a real glimmer of hope, which is sufficient grounds for us to say prayers for his soul.
The Catechism does present us that consideration:
As regards children who have died without baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say, “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,” allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without baptism. All the more urgent is the Church’s call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy baptism (1261).
Scott Adams was not a child, and the Church does not presume salvation apart from repentance. At the same time, the Church also refuses to limit divine mercy to human formulas. As the Catechism teaches, “the grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom,” and “the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom” (1742). In essence, divine grace acts where it will, even at the edge of death. And that might well give us a real hope for Adams’s salvation. Let us not despair in that, and let us pray for his soul.
The other issue is the attitude that might ensue from so public a deathbed “conversion.” That would be the age-old trope of postponing salvation to the very end. That way lies indescribable eternal danger. Scripture consistently warns against postponement. The Letter to the Hebrews insists, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (4:7). St. Paul presses the same urgency, declaring, “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2). Christ himself announces at the outset of his ministry, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The entirety of the Scriptures speaks of justification and repentance with consistent urgency, accompanied with a reverential fear of the loss of heaven and the eternal fires of hell.
This is precisely why delay carries spiritual danger. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night,” Paul warns, adding that when people say, “There is peace and security,” sudden destruction follows (1 Thess. 5:2-3). For this reason, believers are urged to live attentively, “making the best use of the time, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:16). Jesus rebukes spiritual procrastination directly: “Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look . . . the fields are white for harvest” (John 4:35).
Augustine of Hippo understood this temptation intimately. In his Confessions, he admitted begging God for conversion later rather than now, recognizing eventually that his delay by itself was a form of resistance against grace and divine life. Habits are formed over time and through acts of the will. The soul that delays salvation also trains itself to negotiate with grace instead of receiving it reverentially. Habit hardens the will, making a deathbed conversion often nearly impossible. This insight echoes throughout the Christian tradition. Postponed repentance grows more difficult with time, and the promise of future conversion might well be one of the enemy’s most effective comforts.
Scott Adams understood incentives and cognitive bias. He understood clearly how systems decay when feedback arrives too late. That insight applies with severe clarity to our spiritual life. Adams never made that connection through most of his life, but a soul trained to postpone conversion trains itself away from surrender. Faith is assent, sure, but it also demands more than assent; it compels the acceptance of the lordship of Christ over every facet of our existence.
At the threshold of our death, all human cleverness reaches its limit, and control simply evaporates. Therefore, the proper posture toward Scott Adams is neither presumption nor despair, but prayer—generous, non-critical prayer. The Church entrusts all souls to God’s mercy, even when outcomes remain hidden, just as it entrusts unbaptized children to God’s mercy while urgently calling the living to respond without delay.
Scott Adams’s life stands as a warning that applies all the more strongly to those who still have time: receive Christ’s lordship now. Invite him into every dimension of our life, rather than reserving him for emergencies. Repentance delayed is potentially salvation lost. Meanwhile, faith embraced transforms everything.
Christ is calling us right now—this very moment. Today still matters.