Question to Ponder

I’m a fan of the writings of Douglas Adams. In my personal library, I even have a signed copy of Last Chance to See (I bought it used, so the inscription is not, alas, dedicated to me).

Adams like Pullman was an atheist. Like Pullman, he tried to encourage his brand of atheism in his books. Unlike Pullman, Adams had a sense of humor and could and did laugh at himself and his own position as he did at theists. He wasn’t so into himself that he thought he knew everything nor did he have any great literary pretensions. He wrote primarily to entertain his audience, but like all authors, he put a bit of himself into what he wrote, and his own beliefs are made very clear throughout all he wrote.

The popularity of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the subsequent adventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and Zaphod Beeblebrox has provided Adams a bit of a cult following. Because behind many a joke there is some truth being exposed, many of his atheistic fans take the implied logic behind his jokes seriously, and try to develop it into a critique against the existence of God. Whether or not this is what Adams wanted them to do, it has been done. Even if he did not, his jokes reveal much about the frame of mind by which many atheists enter the debate (and especially those of more good will like Adams). Thus I thought it would be interesting to look at one famous quote by Adams, and to see what the readers of Vox Nova think about it. What are the presuppositions involved in the text? What are the problems of those presuppositions? How would you answer them?

The Babelfish is small, yellow and leech-like, 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 supplied them.  The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language. The speech patterns you actually hear decodes 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 mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes 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 you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

“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.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God. 

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Or, for those who enjoy a multi-media approach, you can watch the entry on the Babel Fish from the televised version of the HHGTTG here: