Time And Relative Dimension In Space

Man the maker looks at his world and says, “So who made this, then?” Who made this?—you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, “Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me, and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male.” And so we have the idea of a God. Then, because when we make things, we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself, “If he made it, what did he make it for?” Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, “This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely,” and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

He was a staunch atheist, famously imagining a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, “This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” The biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book, The God Delusion, to Adams, writing on his death that, “Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender.”

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