I hate to see someone darken Douglas Adams' name with such an absurd argument that wasn't even in the books. People gave kudos for it as well! Tut tut! Am I the only true DNA fan here?
The argument that you completely misquoted and shredded to pieces was this:
Now for everyone who gave kudos to the above post and consider themselves a Douglas Adams fan, I have only one word for you: Belgium.
To address the argument in the previous post:
The argument that you completely misquoted and shredded to pieces was this:
Quote:The Babel fish 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 the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that 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 it 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 you exist, and 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 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 small 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.
Now for everyone who gave kudos to the above post and consider themselves a Douglas Adams fan, I have only one word for you: Belgium.
To address the argument in the previous post:
Quote:Man says: God, for you to exist you should have faith in yourself. But if you have faith in yourself it means you do not 'know' you exist.Non-sequitur. It does not follow that for God to exist he has to have faith in himself. Having faith is not a prerequisite of existence; faith is something that only beings with thinking minds can have, so your argument would effectively null the existence of anything without a mind...which is silly.
Quote:So, if God is a theist, he believes in his existence but doesn't know he exists.Non-sequitur again. Theism is the belief in God; it says nothing of knowledge of God. However, assuming that the God we are talking about is omniscient, her therefore knows everything. So he knows he exists. God is therefore a Gnostic Theist.
Quote:If he knows he exists, as he has to, because he needs to be aware of his own existence, then he needn't have faith. And not having to have faith makes him an atheist.Third and final non-sequitur. It does not follow that "not having faith" makes you an atheist. Not having faith *could* make you an atheist, but it could also mean you have knowledge of God's existence, and therefore have no need for faith. God would come into this category, since being omniscient (see assumption made in my previous paragraph) he knows he exists.
