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 the 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. "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 zebra crossing.

The next year the radio series became the basis for a BBC television mini-series broadcast in six parts. When he died in 2001 in California he had been trying again to get the movie project started with Disney which had bought the rights in 1998. The screenplay finally got a posthumous re-write by Karey Kirkpatrick and the resulting movie was released in 2005.

". Adams also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983) Last Chance to See (1990) and three stories for the television series Doctor Who. 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!" to demonstrate his view that the fine-tuned Universe argument for God was a fallacy.