John W Burgeson wrote:
> Glenn wrote: "
> But then the question immediately arises--Is God capable of decieving us
> about the plan of salvation? oooh--that is a bad question but the
> logical
> outcome of a deceptive God."
>
> That question ONLY arises if someone makes the claim of a deceptive god.
>
> Nobody, AFAIK, makes that claim. At least not in the context of
> an origins hypothesis.
>
> Yes -- many OECs claim that YECs implicitly make the claim. But that
> OEC claim must be on the basis of an inference and -- dare I say it --
> muddy
> thinking. Maybe unimaginative thinking is a better term.
Of course nobody says "I believe in a deceptive God." But the
implications of the apparent age argument are pretty hard to distinguish in
a practical way from such a view.
We know that we can rely on regularities of basic natural processes
for inferring events for short intervals in the past. Bear tracks in the
forest are evidence for a real bear. Radiocarbon abundances (with attention
to possible variations in cosmic ray intensity &c) can be used to date
pieces of wood for a few thousand years in the past. Tree rings give
indications of real ages. In other words, nature is "truthful" up to about
6000 years ago. But according to the apparent age hypothesis, nature is
supposed to suddenly become deceptive if we try to push it past that point.
It's a pretty small step from that to the position that the one whose
creation nature is, and who is supposed to have seen that creation to be
good, is deceptive.
One response to that is, "But God has _told_ us in the Bible how old
the earth is." That depends of course on a particular way of reading
scripture, but let that pass for now. I think the force of that argument
arises from the historical circumstance that for a long time in Europe the
world was believed to be ~6000 years old on the basis of scripture, so that
the evidence of an old earth from geology came as a challenge to an accepted
view which was supposed to rest on divine authority.
But look at the matter from outside that context. Consider a
Chinese geologist who has grown up apart from any knowledge of the Christian
tradition, but who has also escaped any anti-Christian indoctrination. He
is well-trained in the natural sciences and has investigated the question of
the earth's age very thoroughly and honestly, with no anti-Christian ax to
grind, and concludes that the earth was formed ~4.5 x 10^9 years ago. Then
one day he encounters a Christian who tells him that he is a sinner, and
that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, God's agent of creation of the
entire universe, and his savior from sin and death. Our geologist is
existentially and intellectually convinced and about ready to commit his
life to Christ. Then the Christian says, "Oh, there's just one other
thing. The Bible teaches, and you have to believe, that God created the
entire universe 6000 years ago."
Now of course it's very likely that this last point would cause the
geologist to reject Christianity, thereby pointing out the relevance of Mark
9:42 to those who make a YEC position an essential component of the faith.
But suppose by the grace of God that didn't happen. What could the
geologist conclude? If he tries to use the apparent age argument to make
sense of things, he'll think something like this: "I investigated God's
good world as honestly and thoroughly as I could and concluded that it was
billions of years old. To begin with I had no preconceptions about the
matter, and was willing to consider the possibility that the geology texts
were wrong. I would have been quite content to find that the earth was only
about 10^4 years old. But all the evidence points to an age of several
billion years. And I believe that God is the creator of the world and of
its laws.
Therefore _______________________________."
& I leave you to fill in the blank.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
"Theologia naturalis delenda est!"
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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