Today’s Challenge:

Write something antithetical to your personal beliefs, from the point of view of someone who truly believes what they are saying. No sarcasm allowed.

 

Cast:

Andrew

The character is based on the Australian Andrew Snelling. He is a Creationist, with a PHD in Geology, who works for Answers in Genesis. He successfully sued the US government to be allowed to extract fossils from the Grand Canyon, using an executive order from Donald Trump.

 The Play

Andrew sits on a park bench.

ANDREW:

Is this your dog? May I? Hey boy. Who’s a good boy? Aren’t dogs great. All the dogs. All the different kind of dogs. Same thing, different type. They haven’t changed into anything else. They’re still dogs, with teeth and fur and paw. Tails, what we leave of them anyway, still wag. Small changes. Trivial, aren’t they? I mean, dogs haven’t changed into something else have they. Dogs can’t be fish or spiders or chicken. And it’s been like that for 20,000 years. They’re only within what we call biblical coins because the bible doesn’t talk about species. It talks about the coins and and so you’ve got the dog kind you’ve got or the cat kind I’ve got and there’s lots of variation. God made things with such amazing ability to vary because he just loves variety I mean look at all the flowers that we can enjoy in this park or all the the different animals that we join you know you’ve got your favourite dog and I’ve got my favorite pet dog and God has given us all this variety so that we can enjoy his creation. Those small changes are not evolution and we agree that there are small changes happening today so what we really mean by the term evolution or what they try to extrapolate from the small changes is the big changes. Okay. Because the real idea of evolution is those big changes where life developed spontaneously we’re told from nothing matter came from nowhere and chemicals combine to form life and the first cell developed through time by these big changes, new bodies, new plans.

Apologies, it’s been a long day. I just got out of court. My accent? From Sydney. Sydney, Australia, you know. I know that seems a long way from here. Other side of the world. Oh, well, there’s a question. I was born to devoutly Christian parents, regularly attended church, a very strongly strong Bible believing Church, and I remember early years of growing up. My mother and father were so proud. By the time I was five, I was expected to sit in church and not fiddle and fool around but pay attention to the preacher. There was a very godly devoted pastor devoted to his people and devoted to God’s Word and systematically preaching God’s Word. Also the older folk in the church mentor the younger folk and they were very strong in Bible teaching and so I had a very quickly had a very good head knowledge of the scriptures. Scripture memorization was stressed and practiced and so life was good. I was a good Christian boy, they all said, even the pastor and the elders. I remember my parents beaming. A good boy.

Do you like fossils? Fossils are supposed to be this record of past life. Well, it’s not really. It’s a burial mound. A graveyard of dead things, and when you look at fossils you don’t see living things – all you see if the impressions of a graveyard. It all depends on your perspective of course. In classes, in biblical classes, it’s abundantly evident that during Noah’s great flood, all the billions of dead things were laid down under rock, buried by the rising waters all over God’s earth. And so they appeal to the fossil record to unearth missing links or signs of transition from fragments of incomplete fossilised skeletons. Of course they are missing the soft parts. You don’t always see anatomy or other crucial parts with that stuff, and so they point to these incomplete fossilised skeletons, fossilised, and they make a big hoo-ha. This one shows a lima, they say, who ate like a human, and in six months it will be another fossil and everyone will get excited and it’s all designed to make the public think that they found it, they found the missing link, the transitional form that proves their theories. This one apparently shows transitional man, from monkeys. Then it all dies down. The fanfare. Because their missing links are incomplete. I mean, you can literally poke holes in them. Well, all we know is that 120 years after Darwin, is that we haven’t found, they have found Jack, just a few bits of jaw and femur, in ever increasing numbers. But the timeline remains fractured and jerky. Even my lot, so-called Christian academics, they don’t stand on the authority of God’s word that the record we have of God’s earth proves that it is young and there was a global flood a year long that produced all the fossils. They believe that human, real human experience; the evidence of our eyes is meaningless.

It was just before my eighth birthday when I went with my older brother – off to a holiday camp – it was it was term break and our denominational churches had a property out of the city and they took the kids off for a bit of fun for a week – and it was during that week that, in the midst of all the fun, that God really spoke to me and so what had become head knowledge went to the heart and I remember vividly on the Friday night, the last evening of the camp you know, in tears at my bedside with the counsellor there, you know, I couldn’t commit in my life to the Lord without repenting and seeking him with his forgiveness. And he said, “you’re a good boy, Andrew. A good boy.”

The court case? I’m going to mine the Grand Canyon. I just want some rocks. They turned me down because they didn’t like the questions I was asking. But they are just normal rocks. They are mundane. You ever been to the Canyon? It’s awe inspiring, you know. Truly God’s handprint. But the sand grains are believed to have been eroded and washed faraway; those huge white cliffs. But evidence? There is no erosion between sediment layers. It’s a crock. There’s a knife-edge flat featureless boundary between those two rock layers for mile after mile through the Grand Canyon yet the geologists claim that there’s ten million years missing at that boundary what would have happened during ten million years of weathering and erosion. You’d get a topography, not a flat featureless boundary at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The tip of each sandstone sits on the pre-flood rocks and we have evidence of huge erosion there with boulders being picked up from the underlying rock layers indicating rapid erosion. We find whole Rock layer sequences deposited rapidly in quick succession look at the walls of the Grand Canyon from the two peaks, supposed to be representing 300 million years of slow and gradual sedimentary deposition from when the plateau was pushed up. Those rock layers were bent and folded like a scrunched up plastic cup but they were folded without fracturing. They had to be soft and if they were bent without fracturing that means that they could only have just of being deposited. 300 million years never happened. All those rock layers have to be rapidly deposited in quick succession during the flood year. So you see, when you ask the right question, you get the right answers. Who are we going to believe the scientists who work there who don’t know everything – we all sometimes make mistakes – or the Word of God who was there, who saw what happened and told us what happened during the flood and what we see in God’s world agrees with what we read in God’s Word. And that’s what I’m going to prove.

“Then God said, “God called the dry ground “land,” and he called the water that had come together “oceans.” And God saw how good it was. Then God said, “Let vegetation sprout all over the earth, including seed-bearing plants and fruit trees, each kind containing its own seed!” And that is what happened: Vegetation sprouted all over the earth, including seed-bearing plants and fruit trees, each kind containing its own seed. And God saw that it was good.”

I used to get angry, when I was at at home, in Sydney, working day and night in the librabry, on my undergrad. No one thought like I did. I knew everyone mocked me – The Bogun Bible Basher – but I was young. Now it just makes me sad. Sad that anyone could not look at all this, all of God’s wonderful, magical Creation, and see only molecules and science and no master builder behind it all. Because, it is all amazing. My the Lord Jesus Christ direct your paths and he will faithfully bring you to your journey’s end when he calls you home.

You really do have a lovely dog, you know that, right? Good boy.