feigning an interest in brass band music to distract me from my lecture! (He closes his door, and from behind it produces a quiver of arrows and a bow. These he brings downstage and places them on his desk.) (Pleasantly.) Does, for the sake of argument, God, so to speak, exist? (He returns upstage and finds an archery target, which he leans up against the upstage bookcase, resting on the day-bed.) (To mirror.) My method of inquiry this evening into certain aspects of this hardy perennial may strike some of you as overly engaging, but experience has taught me that to attempt to sustain the attention of rival schools of academics by argument alone is tantamount to constructing a Gothic arch out of junket. (He extracts an arrow from the quiver.) Putting aside the God of Goodness, to whom we will return, and taking first the God of Creation—or to give him his chief philosophical raison d’être, the First Cause—we see that a supernatural or divine origin is the logical consequence of the assumption that one thing leads to another, and that this series must have had a first term; that, if you like, though chickens and eggs may alternate back through the millennia, ultimately, we arrive at something which, while perhaps no longer resembling either a chicken or an egg, is nevertheless the first term of that series and can itself only be attributed to a First Cause—or to give it its theological soubriquet, God. How well founded is such an assumption? Could it be, for instance, that chickens and eggs have been succeeding each other in one form or another literally for ever? My old friend—Mathematicians are quick to point out that they are familiar with many series which have no first term—such as the series of proper fractions between nought and one. What, they ask is the first, that is the smallest, of these fractions? A billionth? A trillionth? Obviously not: Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest number ensures that there is no smallest fraction. There is no beginning. (With a certain relish he notches his arrow into the bowstring.) But it was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright. (He is about to fire the arrow, but changes his mind, and turns back to the mirror.)
Furthermore, by a similar argument he showed that before reaching the half-way point, the arrow had to reach the quarter-mark, and before that the eighth, and before that the sixteenth, and so on, with the result, remembering Cantor’s proof, that the arrow could not move at all!
DOTTY (off): Fire! (GEORGE fires, startled before he was ready, and the arrow disappears over the top of the wardrobe.) Help—rescue—fire!
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