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Monday, June 3, 2002
11:40 - The Babel Fish Lives On
http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html

(top) link

Here's an interview with Douglas Adams, from three or four years ago when he was still hanging around this unfashionable little planet (and when we thought The Hitch-Hiker's Guide was going to be released as a Disney movie in 2000). It's in American Atheist magazine, and it's a must-read for any DNA fans.

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

Exactly.

Of course, this assumes a scientific thought process-- one that considers the burden of proof to be a valid concept, and one where arguments for the nature of faith ("Ah, but you see, that's what's so clever about it: There always has to be room for doubt, or else faith would mean nothing! That's why God didn't hand down the Ten Commandments on little titanium wallet-sized cards, even though he certainly could have!") are specious and silly. So this doesn't really forge any new ground on the matter.

But it does let us remember the guy fondly.

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© Brian Tiemann