Young-Earth Creationists Make God Out to Be a Liar

This comment was left on Facebook in response to a blog post of mine that someone shared:

• What’s especially ironic is the contrast between the young-earth creationist approaches to scripture, and to the natural world. They insist that the Bible must be literally true in every word, because God does not lie. And yet in denying the obvious evidence of the natural world, they claim that God created with the “appearance of age.” For what purpose? To deceive us, or to test our faith? Either way, by their definition, God is lying.

Faults in the Bible are easily explicable in terms of human beings having written it. It doesn’t claim to be the words of God or inerrant, and so there is no actual issue when it turns out that the Biblical authors didn’t know modern science – except for some theologies which ought to conform to such Biblical data, rather than trying to get the Bible to fit their preconceptions about what it ought to be.

But if one believes that God created the cosmos, whether instantaneously or in six days or through natural processes, then saying that the natural world is deceptive is saying that God is deceptive.

So in order to claim that the Bible is God’s words and as such perfect and always correct, young-earth creationists end up making the created order out to be, as the blog post I referred to called them, “beautiful lies told by God.” They may not admit that this is what their stance implies. But it is precisely that nonetheless.