Dean Anderson

I wouldn't necessarily call it lying.

After all, according to the Bible, Adam appears to have been made as a fully grown man, not as an embryo that had to grow.

I don't see anything inherently dishonest about God hypothetically creating a fully formed universe in a "mature" state that is consistent with one that would have grown and developed naturally from a singularity-based start condition.

It is non-falsifiable, and akin to Last Thursdayism, but if it were true, then I don't see why it would make God dishonest any more than making Adam as an adult with all the appearance of having grown from a baby makes him dishonest.

ericmurphy

But why did he go to all the trouble of making the universe look like it's old? Why do we need to be able to detect quasars that only look like they're billions of light-years away? You can't even see the damned things with the naked eye. There's precious little that's more than 6,000 ly away that you can see with the naked eye. You could remove it all, and hardly anyone would even notice.

Why make rocks look, even at the subatomic level, like they're billions of years old, rather than thousand years old? It shows every hallmark of deliberate forgery.

And why did he expend all the effort on making it look like all life is descended from a common ancestor, if it's really not?

Looks like counterfeiting to me.

Dean Anderson

Because he has an Anal Retentive attention to details that no-one cares about?

I suppose that if God created the universe for us - and created it in such a way that it was consistent with what the sort of 13.5 billion year old universe that we would naturally occur in anyway would be like; that would kind of imply that God were not necessary and that there were many other universes that were natural - so he decided to create one of his own, and made it consistent with the natural ones because he wanted to create as "real" universe as possible.

Yes, I know that it is rather silly and far-fetched, but then so is any speculation on a hypothetical God's hypothetical motives...

-Jay-

Did Adam have a navel?

Obviously, God could hypothetically have done whatever he wanted. The notion that God might have made the universe look one way and then wants people to believe he made it differently than it appears (to the point of condemning people that are merely following the lead of their senses and reason) is what strikes me as the problem.

It really doesn't make him dishonest in the strict sense of the term. It does make him kind of sadistic, though.

regards,

NinJay

-Jay-

Quite. Nonetheless, there are plenty of apologists who will quite confidently assert that they have special insight into those selfsame motives. The interesting thing (to me, anyway) isn't that the apologists do that, but rather why they believe they're justified in doing so. The fact that they're proposing to understand the notionally perfect mind of God implies a very high degree of vanity - to claim that one can understand God's perfect motives implies that one is oneself perfect.

(Dean, there you go and inject logic and reason into the discussion... )

regards,

NinJay

Pappy Jack

This is the crux for me as well, Eric. We've spent thousands of years progressing to the point where we are being to unravel how 'life, the Universe and everything' works. In the past, in xtian cultures, the Bible was looked on as an explanatory tool for creation and our 'understanding' took the Bible as proper for that purpose. The evidence for god's work was seen in creation and so there was no question that god was 'testing' our faith by making the evidence we could discern contrary to biblical testament.

Now, however, we know that the biblical explanation of creation, etc is at variance with the accumulation of observed and measured evidence, which isn't really surprising as it was written by men, after all, and men with a limited grasp of the workings of nature who did their best to explain it by mechanisms that made sense to their Bronze Age knowledge and perceptions. If god exists, s/he is most likely to let the glory or his/her creation be revealed to us by endowing us with the ability to understand that creation - and, by golly, that's just what s/he's done.

The contrary viewpoint might just as well be expressed by the analogy of me building an Airfix model of an Avro Lancaster, putting it on display, sticking a 'Vickers Wellington' label on the stand and then insisting that because of this it's obviously a Vickers Wellington.

-Jay-

Now, to me, what you stated here seems almost trivially logical. (Although technically your last sentence turns on your concept of what God would do, which might be vastly different than what God would really do.)

However, this is precisely the issue that I perceive that apologists either can't or won't address. Somewhere along the line, they must either be actively taught or passively conditioned (or a combination of both...) to put the text of the Bible ahead of everything else, including mundane observation. This extends even to the point where "science" books in (some) Christian schools cite Bible verses rather than anything you normally see in a science book. (Mike Dunford over at ScienceBlogs has a good discussion on this), and $27 million monuments to this mindset get built 90 minutes up the highway from me. All this based on the notion that a collection of Bronze and Iron Age myths trump centuries of scientific inquiry. Is there anyone here that's got enough familiarity with the Christian school cirriculums (Bob Jones and A Beka are the ones that come to mind) to say if, at the younger grades, there is a specific set of lessons that conditions kids to ignore mainstream science (this would surprise me) or is it something that's more subtle and intermingled with subject matter across the board?


regards,

NinJay

Jack the Bodiless

One thing that constantly strikes me as odd:

Creationists are very fond of post-modernist "truth is relative" claptrap. Creationism and evolutionism are claimed to be merely "different interpretations of the evidence", stemming from "different presuppositions", and are somehow "equally valid".

But why are they creationists? Why, because they know the truth (or the Truth, or even the TRUTH). Whereas evilutionism is a pack of lies foisted on vulnerable children by the Evil Atheist Conspiracy, and is both unfalsifiable (and hence unscientific) and also blatantly false...

The sheer hypocrisy of it all is breathtaking. Don't they see it? Why can't they see it?

Lucretius

Don't they see it ?
Possibly not
Why can't they see it ?
Indoctrination starting at an early age coupled with the type of personality that prefers being told what to think and what to do(this is not of course confined to religious types but does seem worryingly prevalent amongst them).
A fear of questioning anything and an attitude that it is much better for someone else to do their thinking for them,that comes from a fear of being wrong or a fear of asking what might appear to be a silly question sometimes and looking ,they think ,like a fool.i.e "No-one else in Sunday School/Church/Bible Group is asking how does 2 =14 so it must just be me missing something and they will all laugh if I ask how that is so"

An inferiority complex about their own mental abilities i.e "IF the Leader of our Church says its true it must be true even in spite of the evidence ,because he is cleverer than me and he must be cleverer than me otherwise how did he get to be head of the Church".

Just some random thoughts

VoxRat

You may be right. It certainly fits with afdave's response to the 2=14 conundrum: he literally said he fell out of his chair laughing at our foolishness for raising that question. [And - accidentally? - promised to show us the error of our ways. That was over a week ago. Still waiting...]

Perhaps he forgot this isn't Bible Study class, and pretensions of vast stores of Bible-based "knowledge", and intimidation by threat of laughing at those lacking it, don't work here.