Well, I'm certainly not going to get into this debate. Anyway, if Thewaka (Diane) wanders in from the Religion and Liberty forum, this thread will get sliced and diced anyway. But I can't resist a bit of levity. Have any of you ever read Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I really like his humorous proof that God does not exist. Or no longer, anway...
It relies on the existence of the Babel fish, which, unfortunately, is not actually proven to exist either. Not a very rigorous proof, as I'm sure you'll all agree, but here it is anyway, for your amusement...
The Babel fish... is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on the 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 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 mind-bogglingly 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 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.
