Posted by: Andrew | May 4, 2008

Is God a deceiver?

That is, is God a deceiver if the omphalos hypothesis is right? I don’t think so, for the following reasons.

Firstly, the universe only has an “apparently old” age in the sense that, when interpreted through a grid which inductively extrapolates backwards from the present, based on current period processes, we can mathematically estimate how long the processes have been running. But it is not as if the rocks have flaming messages from God (a la Douglas Adams) written on them telling us the time and date of their creation. This means that any age they appear to have is based on our inductive reasoning being applied to the objects of nature, not because the objects of nature themselves, or God on them, “tell” us their age.

Secondly, God has never promised that our inductive reasoning will always be correct. As well, we know that our inductive reasoning can often be (and has been) incorrect.

Thirdly, a deception is a falsehood communicated by an intelligent agent. But our inductive conclusions are not propositions communicated to us by God.

Fourthly, if God actually has told us how old the universe is, it is obviously wrongheaded to say that he has deceived us.

Thus I can’t see how the objection sticks. This is not to say that the hypothesis is true: if God has actually not told us the age of the earth (i.e., if non-”literal” interpretations of Genesis are exegetically correct, or if there is no divine revelation at all, or if there is no God to reveal anything), then there is probably no reason to disagree with our inductive extrapolations from current periodic processes. The truth of the hypothesis must be established apart from rebutting the above objection.

(The other objection to the omphalos hypothesis mentioned at wikipedia, that it is unfalsifiable, also fails: if it is established based on it being divine revelation, falsifying its claim to be divinely revealed would remove any reason to believe in a young earth, unless inductive reasoning could separately tell us that the earth was young. So it is falsifiable rationally and theologically, though not through empirical induction from the very things that it says cannot tell us the age of the earth.)

Posted in Apologetics, Exegesis, Philosophy, Science, Theology | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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Responses

I was just planning a post on this exact topic!

I agree with everything you wrote and would only add two things:

1) We can only assert that God has “lied” if we believe that:

a) investigation using our rational minds is a primary objective for humanity and has inherent moral weight

b) everything which can be observed has been laid out to accord perfectly with our faculties and conclusions

c) our conclusions are only true in-and-of-themselves and we are prohibited from making allowances for unobservable qualities

The whole thing rests on assumptions that God knows how we think and is somehow duty bound to make everything obvious, lest we lead ourselves astray.

2) The scriptures indicate God made Adam… as a man! So we’re given precedent for the fact that God made something in medias res. It’s not a lie if it’s been told to us in a rather straightforward manner.

By: Benjamin Allison on May 5, 2008
at 11:55 am

The argument to the idea that God is a deceiver if our natural reasoned investigation of nature (apart from Scripture) leads us astray actually has a bit of history behind it. First, thinkers began with the historic affirmation of a general revelation in creation. Then they extended that revelation to include all the new discoveries of science (heliocentrism, magnetism, etc). From that, they assumed that this revelation was of equal authority to that found in the Scriptures. Once each of these points are agreed, the argument succeeds. If either one is denied, then the argument does not succeed. Both of the assumptions are false.

By: Matthew on May 5, 2008
at 2:26 pm

Ben,

Re: 1)

As Andrew said in the original post, we can also say God has not lied if the correct exegesis of the text is “non-literal” - in other words young-earth views of the world are not a prerequisite for seeing God as truthful.

By: Dan on May 6, 2008
at 5:39 am

Dan, I’ll concede that given things like the “four corners of the earth” problem.

In the case of the Genesis account it seems that the strongest case can be made — from the Scriptures themselves — that its intention was in fact literal.

There are a few concepts I accept a priori to my interpretation that necessitate I hold that view, chiefly, that we use Scripture to interpret Scripture.

By: Benjamin Allison on May 6, 2008
at 9:25 am

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