The Lie

It is said by Evolutionary Creation advocates that if Young Earth Creationism is true, then God “lied” by making the universe appear old. In fact the “appearance of age” is one explanation some YEC use to explain the apparent age of the universe. The argument YEC makes is that if God were to create a tree, instantaneously, and someone came along moments later, the someone may have no idea the tree was only seconds old, for a “created” tree would appear to be mature. The same logic would apply for the land masses, earth and the universe itself.

But to evolutionists, Theistic Evolutionists and evolutionary creationists, this explanation imputes to God a “lie”, that he would have left clues in the universe that make it appear to be old when it is not, deceiving…well, scientists primarily… who want to assume the age of something very old can be determined by examining its properties.

It is not my purpose here to defend a particular age for the cosmos. As a conservative Christian, I am not committed to a particular age of the most distant star, or of the necessity of a precise 24 hour day in the creation of planets or land masses, but I am committed to the historicity of Adam and his fall into sin as recorded in the Genesis account. What concerns me here is logic, for this is a curious and horribly inconsistent charge made by EC advocates against YEC.

If find it stunning that EC advocates suggest that

A) God “LIED” if the universe is young when it appears to be old,

B) But there is apparently nothing deceitful about an “inspired” text that indicates absolutely nothing about the alleged irrefutable truth of common descent!

The utter absurdity of that inconsistency ought to be enough to cause any serious reader of scripture to doubt whether EC is the least bit honest with the text of scripture.

What is the greater lie?

Is it the lie latent in a subtle set of clues allegedly buried in inferences made by a few highly specialized technicians; conclusions measured in the long slow decay of radio-isotopes or measurements of the speed of light, each revealed only through sophisticated scientific methods based on philosophical assumptions about the nature of the physical universe?

Or is the greater lie laid out in common human language in story form which explicitly and repeatedly claims that human beings are descended from a single pair whose rebellion is the cause of all death and suffering?

It is often asserted by these sophisticated academics that God revealed the Genesis story to earlier pre-scientific peoples because they would not have been sophisticated enough to comprehend common descent. Really?

Were the men who lived in the age that built the pyramids really so incapable of higher level thinking that a story of creation which simply suggested all living beings came from earlier creatures would have been incomprehensible to them? Is it more credible that instead God reveals to them a story that all humans descended from a single pair?

Is there no form of story God could have told that would have communicated the essential truth of a very old universe and common descent of all life in language that these supposed simpletons could grasp?

While Genesis and the rest of the Old and New Testaments don’t speak in scientific terms, is it really a pre-modern way of thinking to think only in terms of story - specifically story that needs no connection to actual events?

The whole premise seems absurd. Pete Enns recently writes that Paul was a first-century man, so Paul’s belief that Adam was a historical figure was simply a way of thinking inherited from his culture. Enns apparently would argue that the likelihood of Adam’s nonexistence in history should in no way detract from the certainty of the resurrection or the spiritual depth of Paul’s gospel.

But would a well-educated logician like Paul agree with Enns analysis of his own writing in 1 Cor 15? Would the same Paul who in classic if-then logic said essentially that if the physical resurrection of Christ was not factual, the Christians are to be the most pitied of all people agree with Enns that using a non-historical Adam was inconsequential to his argument? Paul in that same passage paralleled Adam and Christ, stating that one man’s sin lead to death and the other man’s obedience lead to eternal life, and the central evidence of eternal life is the bodily resurrection of Christ in space and time? If Adam’s disobedience did not lead to physical death, is not the logic of Paul’s entire argument cut off at the root? Is there any rational reason to think that Paul, if he could speak to us today, would agree with Enns that the historicity of Adam is unnecessary to his argument?

And back to the issue of deception, if Christians for 20 centuries have taken the words that sin came through one man and death through sin at face value and now find that the “inspired” text means nothing of the sort, would they not feel deceived? If the reality is that human beings commit sin and die, that all of that real suffering, death through tooth and claw, the lion devouring the lamb, are part of “how God created”, when they had for centuries believed death is the result of sin, would not most every Christian prior to the age of Darwin feel they had been lied to?

So what is the great lie? Would the greater lie not be telling primitive people a fable about a perfect garden inhabited by a pristine and innocent couple who never existed that leads to a false view of who we are? Would not the greatest lie of all be blaming these humans for spoiling the garden and condemning all creation and condemning all future generations to decay and death, when in fact that decay and death are just part of God’s program to build more complex life forms?

Is that not a far greater lie than merly creating a tree, a man, or a universe that happens to look like it has been there for a while?

In fact, if God created anything instantaneously, how could it not look older than it actually was? What exactly is the alternative? How does God create a man in a single day and not have him appear old? If an omnipotent being in the recent past instantaneously created stars 10 million light years from earth, how could they not “appear” to have been there for eons of time?

Whether the universe is old or young in and of itself has little effect on how one lives his life. Believing evil and death are enemies and intruders, as scripture explicitly states, and later deciding death and struggle for survival are in fact just a part of the intended order the creator had in mind - that is a true paradigm shift. I think the honest thing to do if one truly believes the evidence clearly points to all life evolving through unguided natural processes is to become agnostic on the claims of Christianity. I see no way to reconcile Paul with Darwin. But I do see plenty to convince me the universe is created, man is unique, that the immaterial information necessary for life could not spring from inanimate nature. Once one allows the possibility of a creator, the Biblical account becomes much easier to embrace.

Accusing God of lying through is a serious thing, especially when the charge is based on such a transparently inconsistent and illogical argument, and when one then foists onto the text of the Old and New Testaments a far more damaging lie.