Ever read Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?"

To solve the communication problem, he proposes an animal, the "babelfish", which can convert any language into any other. To do this, it reads the minds of those around its and then converts their thoughts into ones understandable by it's host, resulting in universal linguistic translation. Adams contends this is highly improbable.

Indeed.

Let's look at this idea in a bit more detail, shall we?

The human mind is incredibly complex: a hundred billion brain cells interact with each other in a three-dimensional matrix, firing off billions of chemical signals between them, and producing a little, tiny bit of electrical energy each time this happens.

Now, some of these billions of firings have to do with our conscious thoughts. A minority, I would expect, since many are involved in processing sound and visual events, operating our digestive system, keeping track of circadian rhythms, twitching random muscles, monitoring body temperature, noting the taste in our mouth, feeling the sensation on the back of our scalp, etc.

The first task then, is an editorial one: To pick out, among all these billions of interactions of similar neurons, the relatively few which constitute the current "conscious thought" we are thinking. We would have to pick these out, some how encode them in a linear fashion, transmit them over a comparitively huge distance, and then somehow map them onto another brain.

Further, let's consider how the brain performs this task of thinking. Let's say you're thinking about your grandmother. The current theory is that there are group of cells which store the memory of your grandmother in your brain. Since I've never even met your grandmother, there is no corresponding set of cells for her in my brain.

So to map your specific thought about your grandmother onto my brain, that idea would have to be translated in three dimensions: I would probably need, instead, a set of visual stimuli which would model your grandmother's face, and perhaps some historical information about who she was. Or we would at least have to find and trigger the word "grandmother" in my brain -- a word not guaranteed to be in the same location as any other brain.

Now, perhaps, if we had hundreds of years to research such a thing, and had lots and lots of funding, we could determine one brain's thought-layout, read, with an extremely high degree of resolution, it's firings, transmit and encode the relevant ones, read another brain's layout, and, with again a tremendous degree of resolution, mysteriously cause only certain neurons to fire, biochemically -- by stimulating them from a distance. And not just fire, but fire correctly, sending out a signal only along the desired dendrites. Sequenced with other dendritic firings to a high degree of precision.

Perhaps I could believe such a thing might be scientifically possible. I do not currently see how to do the last bit, but perhaps I lack some knowledge.

Douglas Adam's babelfish is supposed to do just this. Not just among humans, but among critters supposedly evolved in totally different planets, in different mental configurations. No wonder he calls it fantastically improbable -- I doubt we'll ever be able to do it at all, even with our best efforts.

But, as improbable as this sounds, Roddenbury, Spielberg, and Lucas believe in something even less likely:

Invisible babelfish.

They believe that there is some part of the universe, some blind law of nature, some "natural mechanism" like volcanos or rain, which will perform this tremendously complex task for us. And that said mechanism is invisible and undetectable to current science.

Uh, right: Some non-sentient part of the universe can read your mind, dear reader, figure out what it's thinking, and, among all human beings, each with their billions of brain cells and trillions of connections, transmit it to mine.

Absurd! The laws of physics make no distinction between a neuron and a skin cell. Impersonal laws can't pick out the chemical interactions from one but "edit out" another! Futher, the buzzing of a flourescent light, or energy with a CPU is much, much, much "louder", electromagnetically, than your brain: Why would the "quieter" one travel further? And how would an impersonal universe, or law therein, perform the difficult brain-remapping and thought-retranslation functions?

The only way such a thing could even be possible would be to propose some kind of sentience with a high degree of intelligence. To do it "invisibly" would require this intelligent sentience to reside either in another set of dimensions, or outside the universe in which we are trapped.

Christianity provides a logically consistent way this could occur:

(1) Christians, and all theists in general, believe the universe was created by a "personal" (i.e. sentient, or self-aware) force. It would be no trouble at all for that force to understand the layout of it's creation's minds and manipulate them from "outside" said created universe.

I'm not saying this does or doesn't happen. I'm just pointing out that if you believe in a sentient universe-creator, that creator will certainly have the ability to read and write thoughts from brains within said universe. One follows logically from the other.

(2) Christianity asserts the existence of extra-dimensional or extra-universal (it's not clear which) sentiences which possess higher intelligence than humans. Such sentiences might also be in a position to observe or influence human mental activity.

"Logic" is not a set of conclusions. It's a way of evaluating statements to see if they lead to a contradiction or not. You cannot believe in "invisible babelfish" while eschewing angels. Belief in psychic phenomenon is irrational unless you propose a mechanism by which it can occur.

The visible universe provides no such mechanism.

To be logical, one needs to either become a radical materialist atheist, and assert no such phenomena are thus possible, or admit that a high degree of extra-dimensional intelligence would be necessary to perform such a function when no ultra-complicated "babelfish" can be seen in the three dimensions we occupy.