Religion and atheism in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, Faculty of Divinity
Course: Literary and Artistic Approaches to Sacred Texts
Term 1 - 2002/03, 7. Fachsemester

Religion and atheism in Douglas Adams′ "Hitchhiker′s guide to the galaxy"

von

Christian Schlegel

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I Introduction... 3

1. General Introduction... 3
2. About the Author... 4

II Sideswipes on Religion... 6

1. Two Thousand Years after One Man Had Been Nailed to a Tree... 6
2. The Bible and other Best-selling Books... 7
3. A Proof for the Non-Existence of God... 7

III Evolution or Creation... 10

1. Remarks on Evolution... 10
2. Mankind: The Masterpiece of the Creation... 10

IV The Quest for Meaning... 12

1. Deus Ex Machina... 12
2. “Life, the universe and everything“ = 42... 14

V Conclusion... 17

Bibliography... 18

List of Works Cited 18
List of Works Consulted... 18
List of Internet References... 18
Table of Figures... 19
Appendix... 20
Summary of the Story... 20

I Introduction

1. General Introduction

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams first appeared as a BBC broadcast in 1978, which was also turned into a TV series. The most successful publication was that of the book, which appeared one year later. It was a best-selling novel in the UK, the United States, and Germany. Douglas Adams had the idea for the book on a trip to Europe during which he read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe. Although it is a very funny and entertaining story over and over, it receives a large extent of its jokes from a serious background that is rather expected to annoy the readers of such literature instead of giving them a good laugh. Adams draws lots of his humour from theology and philosophy by employing their theory in the protagonists every day’s life, which is completely upside down.
Douglas Adams says about himself that he is not just a confessing atheist, but rather a radical atheist. This attitude leads us to the task of this seminar paper. It will examine some of the theological and philosophical elements, which appear in the text, and how the author’s personal confession influenced their use. Furthermore as a result we will see in how far this piece of literature can be regarded as serious criticism of religion.

2. About the Author

Douglas Noel Adams was born on the 11th of March in 1952 in Cambridge (UK) where he studied later at St. John’s College. In 1974 he gained a Bachelor and afterwards a Master in English Literature. He died in May 2001 of a sudden heart attack in Santa Barbara/California.
He described himself as a committed Christian while he was a teenager and he even used to work for the school chapel. At the age of eighteen he met a street evangelist and stopped to listen to him, but what this man had to say seemed to be complete nonsense for Adams. In the years he had spent learning History, Physics, Latin, Math, he said, he had learnt something about standards of argument, proof, and logic and he could not find these things in religious matters at all. One cannot “apply the logic of physics to religion, […] they [are] dealing with different types of ‘truth’. I now think this is baloney […].”¹
Adams had the opinion “that the arguments in favour of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of something as interpretative and opinionated as history”², which is why he became an agnostic. But after years of thinking he did not come to any finding. God still was the only sufficient “explanation for […] life, the universe and everything.”³ At his early thirties Douglas Adams encountered evolutionary biology for the first time in Richard Dawkins’ books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker and found therein “a concept of such stunning simplicity [… that] gave rise […] to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life.”⁴ Right at the beginning of The Selfish Gene one can read that, in the author’s opinion, “Darwin [… had] put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist.”⁵ Evolutionary theory provided enough facts and explanations for Adams that he no longer needed God to fit in the gaps of his nescience about the meaning of human existence. He did not believe that there is no God, but he was convinced that God does not exist.⁶
In the progression of this paper we will come across several allusions to Douglas Adams’ affectation to evolutionary theory, which he often uses to oppose religious concepts of the becoming of the world. This proves that these affectations already existed before Adams had read Dawkins’ books. It is a funny but suiting coincidence that his name is often found abbreviated as DNA (Douglas Noel Adams), which also means Deoxyribonucleic Acid - the human inherited material. “I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of – […] my initials are D N A!”⁷
During an interview Adams made a confession that clearly shows that his attitude towards religion influenced all his writings:
“I am fascinated by religion. […] It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I’ve thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.”⁸

II Sideswipes on Religion

[...]

1 http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html

2 ibid.

3 ibid.

4 http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html

5 Dawkins 1976: 1

6 cp. http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html

7 http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

8 http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html