Well, that about wraps it up for God

"The Babel fish," said the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe.  It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it.  It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with.  It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them.  The practical upshot of all this is if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.  The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this:  "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

---from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Comments

[Kevin]

Heh, I always liked the Hitchhiker's Guide.

[Domoni]

We watched it last night. I think I prefer the TV series. But I am an old man prone to "it was better when I was a wee lad" sort of prattle.

I need to again read all the books of the trilogy.

[Claire]

Thanks for all of the Douglas Adams love this morning. A nice way to start a very rainy Monday. I found Douglas Adams on my parents' bookshelves when I was about 14. I love old, used, crinkly, yellowed paperbacks. I started a quote book mainly because I had a deep need to write down the hilarious things I was reading from the Hitchhiker books. At that point of my life, I would devour the entire collection of an author. I read all of Adams's books, including Last Chance to See, his non-fiction book about traveling the globe to see endangered animals before they all died out. There is this section in it where he has this highly spiritual moment with a lemur in Madagascar that is marvelous. Though, in the end, the two Dirk Gently books were my favorites. How can you not love a book where Thor and Odin are two of the main characters? Anyhow, thanks!

[burritoboy]

Actually, the Babel Fish is not so bizarrely improbable. We assume that the Babel Fish is some sort of parasite (I don't believe there is any mention of anyone actually feeding their Babel Fish), drawing nutrition from the host's body (ok, brainwaves from the sentient beings near the host). The hosts of the Babel Fish take great care to protect their Babel Fish, and presumably there are large Babel Fish fish farms somewhere. This is only so because the Babel Fish provides such unique benefits to the host, such that the host readily provides food, shelter and massively increased breeding opportunities to the Babel Fish species. Otherwise, in a universe with many planets and wildly divergent environments, Babel Fish would be unlikely to spread much beyond their home world. As it is, the Babel Fish hosts intentionally spread the species to many different worlds, again an evolutionary benefit.

While it seems strange to evolve such translation abilities, what better way is there to convince your hosts to allow you to lodge in their ears (surely one of the safest locations around)? Those early Babel Fish ancestors who didn't have translation abilities were quickly removed by the hosts, while those with greater abilities were highly prized and recieved much increased breeding opportunities.