[An outdoor stage area. At the back of the stage we see a large Wicker Man, with plenty of room inside for the large mounds of straw piled nearby. Adrian walks onstage, to rapturous applause. Several born-again Christians in the audience are actually raptured by the applause, and float off into the darkening sky, only to freeze and suffocate at high altitude.]
Adrian: Good evening, everybody! Ladies, gentlemen, and... erm... illiterate rednecks, I see. Welcome to Burn The Strawman!
[Bold Fenian and the band launch into a rousing chorus of the theme-tune. Rednecks fire their guns into the air.]
Adrian: Tonight, we have as our very special guest, John Clayton, the author of the creationist pamphlet "A PRACTICAL MAN'S PROOF OF GOD". Welcome him, please!
[Music fades; audience claps politely and/or throws empty beer bottles as Practical Man walks on, accompanied by Kira (Kali being on holiday)]
Clayton: THE BEGINNING
If we do exist, there are only two possible explanations as to how our existence
came to be. Either we had a beginning or we did not have a beginning. The Bible
says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis
1 :1). The atheist has always maintained that there was no beginning. The idea
is that matter has always existed in the form of either matter or energy; and
all that has happened is that matter has been changed from form to form, but
it has always been. The Humanist Manifesto says, "Matter is self-existing
and not created," and that is a concise statement of the atheist's belief.
[Assorted Rednecks : Wheeeeeeee Doggie! Hey, he looks like my brother. No, you are your brother, Bubba. And your uncle.]
Adrian: Incorrect. Firstly, the Humanist Manifesto was written early last century, and has been revised twice since. The Humanist Manifesto 2000 is the latest version. Also, not all atheists are humanists, and not all humanists will agree with everything in the manifesto. Do you think there is some sort of secret initiation ceremony where newbie atheists must sign the Manifesto in blood? For the record, most atheists (as well as a significant number of believers) see the current Big Bang cosmological model as being the most likely explanation for our existence. This is hardly compatible with the Genesis concept of God magicking things into existence in an almost random order (like the Earth before the Sun, fr'instance), and also pretty much destroys the rest of your argument from step 1.
Clayton: The way we decide whether the atheist is correct or not is to see what science has discovered about this question. The picture below on the left represents our part of the cosmos. Each of the disk shaped objects is a galaxy like our Milky Way. All of these galaxies are moving relative to each other. Their movement has a very distinct pattern which causes the distance between the galaxies to get greater with every passing day. If we had three galaxies located at positions A, B. and C in the second diagram below, and if they are located as shown, tomorrow they will be further apart. The triangle they form will be bigger. The day after tomorrow the triangle will be bigger yet. We live in an expanding universe that gets bigger and bigger and bigger with every passing day.
Now let us suppose that we made time run backwards! If we are located at a certain distance today, then yesterday we were closer together. The day before that, we were still closer. Ultimately, where must all the galaxies have been? At a point! At the beginning! At what scientists call a singularity!
Adrian: Okey-day, I'll agree with that. And guess what? I'm an atheist! Uh-oh...
[Audience: Oooooooooh! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! He say he's a durned ay-theist? Where's mah tar 'n feathuhs?]
Clayton: A second proof is seen in the energy sources that fuel the
cosmos. The picture to the right is a picture of the sun.
Like all stars, the sun generates its energy by a nuclear process known as thermonuclear
fusion. Every second that passes, the sun compresses 564 million tons of hydrogen
into 560 million tons of helium with 4 million tons of matter released as energy.
In spite of that tremendous consumption of fuel, the sun has only used up 2%
of the hydrogen it had the day it came into existence. This incredible furnace
is not a process confined to the sun. Every star in the sky generates its energy
in the same way. Throughout the cosmos there are 25 quintillion stars, each
converting hydrogen into helium, thereby reducing the total amount of hydrogen
in the cosmos. Just think about it! If everywhere in the cosmos hydrogen is
being consumed and if the process has been going on forever, how much hydrogen
should be left?
[Audience murmers: 25,000,000,000,000,000,000? That's a lot of stars! Wonder what they're all for?]
Adrian: The sun? Looks more like some wierd eyeball monster from a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Anyway, the sun does not "compress" hydrogen into helium, it burns it via nuclear fusion. The helium produced is also used as a fuel for the star when the hydrogen begins to run out, which won't happen to our Sun for a very long time yet. The reason being that the Sun is very, very, very BIG! To a human mind, the Sun is almost unimaginably HUGE! IT'S BIG! That's why it's not a problem to have it convert 4 million tons a second into energy for the next five billion years. Your other mistake is to say that atheists believe the stars have been burning forever. We know that our sun is about 4.5 billion years old. Stars form in successive generations. After the Big Bang, the first stars to form consisted of hydrogen and helium. As they burn out and explode, they release gas and heavier elements, which go on to form new stars and eventually planets. There are stars forming today - we can see them in the Orion Nebula, for example. Nobody thinks the stars have been burning for eternity.
[Backstage: Roadies with pitchforks can be seen stuffing straw into the Wicker Man.]
Adrian: We'll be right back after this important sublimal commercial break, sponsored by the EAC!
[three minutes of atheist brainwashing adverts pass, and we return to the studio to find B. Fenian just finishing a tournament of Duelling Banjoes with a strange looking young redneck in the second row. B.F. returns to the band clutching his hard-won solid gold fiddle, as the odd redneck vanishes in a cloud of smoke, smelling suspiciously of sulphur and brimstone]
Adrian: Welcome back! Do you feel better now?
[Audience, in perfect synchronisation: Yes. We. Do. Adrian. Thank. You. Very. Much. Where. Do. We. Sign? ]
Clayton:A third scientific proof that the atheist is wrong is seen in the second law of thermodynamics. In any closed system, things tend to become disordered. If an automobile is driven for years and years without repair, for example, it will become so disordered that it would not run any more. Getting old is simple conformity to the second law of thermodynamics. In space, things also get old. Astronomers refer to the aging process as heat death. If the cosmos is "everything that ever was or is or ever will be," as Dr. Carl Sagan is so fond of saying, nothing could be added to it to improve its order or repair it. Even a universe that expands and collapses and expands again forever would die because it would lose light and heat each time it expanded and rebounded.
Adrian: Erm... And where exactly would it lose this "light and heat" to, pray tell? Does it somehow leave the universe via a back door that nobody has noticed?
[Audience: some try to leave stage via back door, but find it locked. One Redneck marries his grandma, becoming his own grandfather and creating a paradoxical rift in space/time. Great Cthulhu slithers through and takes a seat on the back row, munching what Kira hopes is popcorn.]
Clayton:The atheist's assertion that matter/energy is eternal is scientifically wrong. The biblical assertion that there was a beginning is scientifically correct.
Adrian: I assert that your assertion about the atheist's assertion is what is wrong, in this case.
Clayton:THE CAUSE
If we know the creation has a beginning, we are faced with another logical question_was
the creation caused or was it not caused? The Bible states, "In the beginning
God created the heaven and the earth."
[Audience: He's got a point, you know. The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.]
Adrian: Aha, that's all sorted out then. God did it. Oh, but wait, there's still the problem of the Earth being formed about eight thousand million years after the beginning. That would seem to be a wee tad inconsistent with your theory, wouldn't it?
[Audience: Aawww... flippin' 'eck. Whad 'e say? What big words mean?]
Clayton:Not only does the Bible maintain that there was a cause_a creation_but it also tells us what the cause was. It was God. The atheist tells us that "matter is self-existing and not created."
Adrian: Well, to be picky, matter was not created (as in, hand-rolled by a bloke on a cloud somewhere), as it formed as the Big Bang fireball cooled down.
Clayton:If matter had a beginning and yet was uncaused, one must logically maintain that something would have had to come into existence out of nothing. From empty space with no force, no matter, no energy, and no intelligence, matter would have to become existent. Even if this could happen by some strange new process unknown to science today, there is a logical problem.
Adrian: Erm... If this strange new process accounts for it, then the only logical problem would be trying to invoke a Magic Man In The Sky as an explanation.
Clayton:In order for matter to come out of nothing, all of our scientific laws dealing with the conservation of matter/energy would have to be wrong, invalidating all of chemistry. All of our laws of conservation of angular momentum would have to be wrong, invalidating all of physics. All of our laws of conservation of electric charge would have to be wrong, invalidating all of electronics and demanding that your TV set not work!! Your television set may not work, but that is not the reason! In order to believe matter is uncaused, one has to discard known laws and principles of science. No reasonable person is going to do this simply to maintain a personal atheistic position.
[Rednecks: My TV set is lost in the grass in the yard. Along with my truck and wife].
Adrian: The point of the singularity is that current laws of physics do not apply to it - they simply become unusable. That's why it's a singularity. Quantum physics just cannot deal with the singularity of the Big Bang, so you're once more attempting to mislead your readers.
[Backstage: Roadies continue stuffing straw into the Wicker Man, now almost full]
Clayton:The atheist's assertion that matter is eternal is wrong. The atheist's assertion that the universe is uncaused and selfexisting is also incorrect The Bible's assertion that there was a beginning which was caused is supported strongly by the available scientific evidence.
Adrian: May I borrow your Bible a minute? Thanks. I just want to look up in Genesis the passage that say "Eight billion years after the beginning, following several generations of stellar evolution, God created the Earth" [ flicks through Bible for a few moments ] Heeeeeeeyyy... There's nothing about that in here at all! You should ask for your money back, mate.
Clayton:THE DESIGN
If we know that the creation had a beginning and we know that the beginning
was caused, there is one last question for us to answer--what was the cause?
The Bible tells us that God was the cause.
Adrian: Aren't we lucky that the Bible tells us this? None of the other religions have thought up anything as good as that for an explanation.
[Audience: Hear Hear! (several blood-curdling shrieks from vicinity of Cthulhu - crowd quickly edges away from him. Several Rednecks wonder if there's good eatin' on that thar slimy pandimensional critter?) ]
Clayton:We are further told that the God who did the causing did so with planning and reason and logic. Romans 1:20 tells us that we can know God is "through the things he has made." The atheist, on the other hand, will try to convince us that we are the product of chance. Julian Huxley once said: "We are as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh by a long series of singularly beneficial accidents."
Adrian: And he was right. The key phrases, which you misinterpret as "chance", are "blind forces" and "beneficial accidents" - as in the natural, ongoing, observable process of evolution through natural selection. This is not random chance, as any basic introduction to evolution will tell you. Also, on knowing God through the things he made, judging by a lot of the cock-ups to found in the natural world, he would appear to be a bit of an incompetent doofus. Your retinas, for example, are wired the wrong way round - if God did it, it would seem he wants us to look at the inside of our skulls! From an evolutionary point of view, this sort of duff design is to be expected.
Clayton:The subject of design has been one that has been explored in many different ways.
Adrian: Until Darwin demonstrated that "design" was not an issue any more. Over 150 years ago. I'm sorry, did no-one tell you?
Clayton: For most of us, simply looking at our newborn child is enough to rule out chance.
[Audience: Cootchy cootchy coo. Oo's a ikkle darling, den? (disturbing slobbering noises from back row)]
Clayton: Modern-day scientists like Paul Davies and Frederick Hoyle and others are raising elaborate objections to the use of chance in explaining natural phenomena. A principle of modern science has emerged in the 1980s called "the anthropic principle." The basic thrust of the anthropic principle is that chance is simply not a valid mechanism to explain the atom or life. If chance is not valid, we are constrained to reject Huxley's claim and to realize that we are the product of an intelligent God.
Adrian: So, it's a choice between Huxley and Genesis, eh? I see at the side of the stage that the False-Dichotomy-O-Meter is flashing red.
Clayton:THE NEXT STEP
We have seen a practical proof of God's existence in this brief study.
[Audience: Hurray! Where's the nearest church? Hang on, he's done no such thing! HUNGER! FEED! RAAAARGGGLLLLGGGHH! ]
Adrian: The only proof we have seen is of another creationist foisting a poorly conceived strawman on a gullible public. If only Zorb were here right now, but alas he prefers the gunge tank to the straw warehouse.
[Audience: Zorb! Zorb! Zorb!]
Clayton:A flood of questions arise at this point. Which God are we talking about?
Adrian: No, what are you talking about? Do you even know?
Clayton:Where did God come from?
Adrian: Too much crack on your breakfast cereal? That would do it.
Clayton:Why did God create us?
[Rednecks: To watch Bible TV shows and marry our mothers! Wooo!]
Adrian: Well, if he wanted to, then he can't have been a perfect deity without wants or desires, and therefore does not exist. Oh dear...
Clayton: How did God create us?
Adrian: Pixie dust, apparently. More to the point, why do people insist on creating Gods every time there's a tricky question? Hey people, let's not bother trying to think this one through, let's just point to the Man In The Clouds and stop all this pesky "thinking" business.
[Audience rolls about hooting with laughter. Rednecks stare at the sky in awe. Cthulhu looks impatient.]
Clayton:All of these and many more are answered in the same way_by looking at the evidence in a practical, common sense way.
Adrian: If that translates as "strap a Bible to your face and do not question it", then I'd agree. Audience? Has he persuaded you?
[Audience: No! Burn the strawman! Burn the strawman! FOOD! NEED FOOD!]
[Kira punches the Big Red Button, detonating the Strawman. While the audience is distracted, Cthulhu stretches out a tentacle, grabs Clayton and swallows him whole, before disappearing back through the space/time rift, closing it neatly behind him.]
Adrian: Thank you, and goodnight. Hey. where'd he go?
[Bold Fenian and the band strike up with "Whassa Matta You?", as audience begins to leave, returning to their homes, apartments, and trailers.]
