Babel Fish
From RationalWiki
The Babel Fish is an invention of famed atheist Douglas Adams, who used it in his series of books called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is a small creature, whose existence the Guide calls "the oddest thing in the universe". If worn in the ear, it feeds on the user's brainwaves and excretes a matrix which encodes every known language, thus allowing the person immediately to understand anything in any language.
In the Babel Fish entry in the guide, reference is made to how Oolon Colluphid used the existence of the Babel Fish to argue for the non-existence of God:
- "I refuse to prove that I exist", says God, "for that would deny faith, and without faith I am nothing".
- "Ah", says man, "but the Babel fish is a dead giveaway. It proves you exist, and therefore you don't"
- "Whoops, I hadn't thought of that", says God, and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
[edit] Origin of the term "Babel Fish"
Babel in Adam's Babel Fish has origins with the Tower of Babel story contained in Genesis.
[edit] Hoax spawned by this story
An amusing hoax was spawned by this story which appeared for a time on both WP and CP. It referred to a certain concept called "Khalufid's Fork", which was allegedly conceived by an "Arabian philosopher" called "Ul-an Khalufid". The argument was suspiciously similar to that presented by "Oolon Colluphid". Before we get too smug though, we must remember that we were also taken in for a while. The article on Conservapedia is in the running for the longest surviving hoax article. It was posted on 5th April 2007 and finally deleted on June 12th 2008, having been edited by six different people, other than the original author.
