The Babel Fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain; the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language--the speech you hear decodes the brainwave matrix. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind bogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final 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 a faith I am nothing.’ ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It proves you exist, and, therefore, 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 dead easy’ says Man, and for an encore he proves 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 (“It’s 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.
