From: gordon brown (gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 28 2003 - 14:38:44 EST
On Fri, 28 Mar 2003 igevolution@earthlink.net wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> My name is Jason Alley, and I am posting again after a long absence. My pastor and I were talking about the appearance of age argument recently, and I was telling him that to believe that God created a young creation that bore the marks of an ancient one would be deceptive, and God does not deceive. I told him that God, on the contrary, invites us to know him and seek him out through the natural world (Job, Romans 1, etc), and that this invitation would not make sense if we would arrive at wrong conclusions by so doing. My pastor then countered with an interesting comment that I had not yet considered. I was wondering if any of you had considered the following:
>
> God is good by nature, and whatever he does, if he does it, is good. God is incapable of evil actions. When God does something in our lives or in the world that we might think of as wrong, evil, or bad, we are in error. God is unable to act in this way. If we think that he has, we must remember that he is the standard of rightness and holiness. We are flawed. Whatever he does, it is, because of his nature, perfect and right. Therefore, if God did create with an appearance of age, that action is not deceptive or wrong, as it is an action of the perfectly righteous God. Even if it is deceptive, that deception is not wrong; it is righteous.
>
> What are your thoughts?
>
>
Didn't He say "Be ye holy, as I am holy." and "God, who cannot lie"? If it
is righteous for God to deceive, should we conclude that it is righteous
for us to do likewise?
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Mar 28 2003 - 14:38:44 EST