Babelfish Language Translation - Proof that God does not exist

Babelfish is an online language translation service from altavista. It is the most popular and the oldest language translation service on the web.

To translate a block of text, just type into the text box in your language and choose the source and target languages and click translate. Alternatively, if you want to translate a webpage, just put the link into the text box and click the translate button. That is as simple as language translation gets.

There is also an option to embed the language translator into your website for people who do not understand the language of your website. Check the link for more details.

Now for the fun part. Altavista named its language translator Babelfish drawing inspiration from its first reference in the book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Following are Babelfish's introductory paragraphs from the book:

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, 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 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 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 for 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 argument, 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 pedestrian 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.

On a serious note, has communication and removal of language barriers led to more wars? Communication technology sure changed the world and made it a smaller place, but did it make the world any safer?