God and Deception
While watching a video Ed Babinski referred me to (here), I again encountered the ‘deception objection’, as I’ve come to call it. It states that God would not operate in ‘X’ manner because to do so would be deceptive. This is an objection I’ve been giving thought to for the last couple of months, and I don’t think I can agree with it. The issue I take with it is that deception requires the intent to deceive, or the desire to give a false impression — intentionality. Such that God, when performing a certain act of creation, did ‘X’ with the intention to deceive. The problem is that we possess preconceived notions and conceptions that we bring into varying circumstances. It is one thing to approach a situation from a specific angle and think, “Well if God did it this way, then He would have acted deceptively, therefore He couldn’t have” and quite another for God to have actually acted deceptively from His viewpoint. What we easily call ‘deception’ may just be ignorance on our own part. To be clear, this reply is usually a rejoinder to “that’s just how God did it” and however insufficient “that’s just how God did it” is, I don’t believe this rejoinder does any better.
I don’t know how this addresses what could be replied: “How do you know God didn’t create the world 6 minutes ago”. Or perhaps one can be deceptive without the intention to deceive (whereas I’ve been looking at this having the same sort of distinction between telling a lie, and telling a falsehood). In any case, writing down thoughts just to see where I’m at.
I think that we as mere mortals have viewed science as magic, the unknown as something we have discovered, and the mysteries of God as deception. We put God within our viewpoint and demand that He answer to us on our ground. When He doesn’t, either he is not real or he is deceiving which means he is not real. When we box God in, we don’t really believe in God.
Exactly — when we box God in, we “re-create” Him in our own image, and ther what are we really ‘worshiping,’ other than ourselves? It’s funny how easily we’ll accuse God of deception, or rule ‘such-and-such’ out because it doesn’t coincide with how we see things… Perhaps we might do well to remember God’s answers to Job.
Having heard this rejoinder many times in the creationism/evolution/old earth debate many times (which I’m presuming this post is linked to) I too have questioned it as a valid argument.
I think we need to decide whether reality is reliable or not. If God has revealed himself in creation then it should be very reliable.
As per God’s reply to Job, no we weren’t there, but the fingerprints are all over the place. We can never have all the answers, but we can make some very good inferences.
Random thoughts after only 1 coffee.:)
I’ll provide a more substantial reply in a little bit; just to say now though, that my point in bringing up Job was merely that there are some ‘things’ which are beyond our ability to fully comprehend (I believe ‘why does God allow suffering’ is one of them, the Trinity, the Incarnation, etc.). I’m not saying this is necessarily the case with evolution or creation, but I am saying that we should be willing to acknowledge — or admit, if we have to — when we come ‘face-to-face’ with a ‘mystery’.
I suspect the bigger question is whether we deceive OURSELVES by claiming such things as:
1) God created all the major “kinds” of animals more or less as they “appear” to us today.
2) God created the genes of humans, chimps, and other animals, placing the same retro-viral segments in the same relative places in the genomes of closely related species (keep in mind that when viruses insert their DNA into a genome the odds are not in favor of such insertions being in the same relative places), and God created the genes of humans with remnants of a second centromere inside human chromosome number 2 and in the place where it would have been if that chromosome had been the result of a fusion of two previously separate chromosomes (as exist in our ape cousins).
3) [for self-deceived “Flood geologists”] God sent a destructive Flood that ground rock down all over the earth into fine particles, and then God laid down those particles about a mile thick on average all over the earth, and while doing so He also miraculously ensured that all the fossils as well as microfossil species, and even fossil fragments of larger species, were laid down in a specific order relative to one another, and order suggesting that mats of algea and jellyfish and worms came before jawless fish, which came before fish, which came before amphibian-like fish, which came before amphibians, which came before reptile-like amphibians which came before reptiles, which came before mammal-like reptiles, and bird-like reptiles, which came before mammals and birds, and early mammals came before lemurs came before monkeys, which came before early apes, which came before upright apes, which came before the first human species.
4) [for self-deceived “young earth cosmologists”] That all of the light coming from stars and galaxies more than 6 thousand light-years away from the earth is not a record of celestial history, but merely light that was created “in transit” to make it look like cosmic history stretches more than 6 thousand light-years into the past. So when you look up into the sky you’re not seeing light that started from all those stars, and a history of ancient events that took place on those stars, but you’re seeing light created “in transit” and a history of things in the sky that never took place. [Note: The hypothesis that the speed of light increased dramatically at “creation” does not affect the fact that most light we see is merely illusionary celestial past history, because the present known speed of light appears to be uniform even up to 60,000 light-years away (as measured via the study of novas and the radioactive elements they produce and whose time of change into other elements has been detected and measured via clocks and spectrometers and in agreement with earth measurements, establishing that light speeds are also functioning at the same rate there as on earth. Also, beyond 60,000 light-years away, the fine-line constants for the speed of light are the same as we know them to be on earth. So evidence corroborates that light is presently traveling at its present speed, and that means that even a huge jump in the speed of light at “creation” does not eliminate the need for most light to be created “in transit,” because there is no evidence that light from such distant objects is still traveling at super-luminal speeds, but at normal speeds, so as each second passes more more light has to be created “in transit” to fill in the gaps between the distance from the earth to all those other objects. So most astronomical history is illusionary, including entire rings of expanding matter from distant novas, whose explosions never really took place, and light created as though it passed through even more distant gas clouds that have tempered its spectrum, but such light never really travelled through such distant gas clouds, but was created “in transit” as though it had. If we could devise telescopes capable of seeing things happening more closely on distant planets, even that history of what was going on, on such distant worlds would have to be created “in transit” and not a genuine history of what had happened on such planets.
5) The Bible is a book without error. The book of books, the most inspired collection of holy scriptures that the world has ever seen, not only inspired in some parts, but in every part, every story, every sentence, leaving all other books and practical moral wisdom composed since the beginning of writing till today in the dust so to speak.
Perhaps the “biggest” question of all is: “what are my reasons for believing (in) ‘X’?” From there we might reflect on the related question, “am I deceiving myself?” Both questions being neutral, they are applicable ‘both ways’. Whether we’re “pro” the positions Ed has illustrated above, or “con” (to use Ed as an example).