BOSTON, MA — A tense standoff threatened to extend much longer than just the remainder of the afternoon, as an atheist was determined to sit and wait for his IKEA coffee table to assemble itself.
The man, a highly educated intellectual who staunchly refuses to believe God exists, sought to finally prove the spontaneous formation of the known universe by sitting and observing the disparate pieces of the IKEA table come together to form an orderly, functional whole.
"It's only a matter of time," he said as he sat in a chair with his arms folded and stared at the pile of boards, screws, nuts, and bolts. "Those religious whackjobs believe a higher power is necessary to assemble something into an organized creation? I'll show them."
Three hours in, the man was still waiting for a single piece of the disassembled coffee table to move by itself. "This doesn't discourage me in the least. It'll happen," he said defiantly. "Once the right environmental requirements are met and all the cosmic dominos fall into place, I'll have a coffee table. It's inevitable. I just need to be patient."
As day turned into night, the man's resolve seemed unwavering. "This doesn't prove anything," he said. "The universe took hundreds of millions of years to come together. That's just science. It's in every textbook. Though this coffee table isn't nearly as complicated, I'm willing to wait it out. All of those Christians will look like fools."
At publishing time, word had spread that the man had died of old age without any evidence that his coffee table was any closer to being assembled than it was when he opened the box.
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