Inventing Gods

Inevitably [after the first computer was built], popular articles by science journalists about giant brains began to appear in the Sunday supplements. In one sense this lurid description was literally true—for the 30 ton ENIAC filled a large room—but those starry-eyed writers intended more. In a widely circulated joke from those days, a group of engineers assemble the most powerful computer that had ever been conceived and ask it the ultimate question: Is there a God? After several tense minutes of clicking and clacking and flashing of lights, a card pops out which reads: There is now.

Alwyn Scott, "How Smart is a Neuron? A Review of Christof Koch's Biophysics of Computation", in Journal of Consciousness Studies, No. 5, 2000, pp. 70–75.