From: hallam@zeus02.desy.de (Phill Hallam-Baker)
Subject: Re: Young earth creationist logic NOT!
Reply-To: Hallam@zeus02.desy.de
Organization: Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, Experiment ZEUS bei HERA
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 19:32:16 GMT

In article <39EA03P761SV00@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>, jloucks@uts.amdahl.com (Jim
Loucks) writes:

|>danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock) writes:
|>>>>God almost certianly isn't a liar.
|>
|>>Jim sez (apparently): "No, Dan, God IS a liar, but that wasn't his intent."
|>
|>I don't believe the God of the Bible to be a liar. Neither do I believe
|>deception was his intent if he created everything we see with age. 
|>Should we even question God?
|>
|>>   There is not miscommunication.  You think God created a world that would
|>>convince any reasonable person that did _not_ have a particular sort of 
|>>religion that it was OLD.  This makes him a deciever; he must have known it
|>>would have that effect: so he gets credit for decieving me, at least, and,
|>at
|>>last count several million others.
|>
|>God may have known the effect, but maybe the deceiver himself, Satan,
|>is fueling mans pride, causing us to blame God for the deception.

OK, so the omnipotent creator God takes a day off, what happens? someone goes
and starts playing practical jokes! Look either God has to be Mr Big or he
isn't. If he is then he could have stopped Satan from playing tricks. Let us
consider the practical benefits of beleiving or not beleiving in evolution.

If indeed evolution is a hoax then surely God is going to forgive a minor
misunderstanding like that. It seems a bit much to call souls into existence for
the sole purpose of casting them into eternal damnation just because they have
been fooled by a rather good conjouring trick. So the rap can't be much more
than a couple of weeks in purgatory at the outside.

On the other hand even the creationists have been unable to find a single flaw
in evolution that destroys it's predictive power. Thus we may take advantage of
the fact that the trick is pretty convincing to assume that future discoveries
are more likely to agree with the theory than refute it. After all evolution is
an even better bet as far as agreement with observation goes than Oxford is for
the boat race.


|>>   For some reason you haven't even tried to explain, this deception doesn't
|>>count as deception in your mind in spite of it's rather remarkable success.
|>>I reiterate: explain why this deception isn't really deception, accept that
|>>you believe in a lying God, or accept that the earth is old.
|>
|>I don't see those two options as the only alternatives.
|>
|>>   You can't have your cake and eat it too.  The only other hypothisis I can
|>>see is that God isn't aware of or doesn't understand the consequences of his
|>>own actions. This gets back to the "asshole" hypothisis way back at the
|>>beginning of this thread that niether of us seem willing to accept.
|>
|>Maybe we shouldn't be messin' around where we're messin' around. I 

Maybe we should. Man got kicked out of the garden of Eden for eating the fruit
of the tree of knowlege (gosh does that sound slightly allegorical to you -
nahh). Since God dosen't seem to be about to let us back in to the garden at the
mo it figures that we keep the fruit of the tree of knowlege for the time
being.


|> I think we can all admit that man can be extremely
|>proud, and wouldn't intellectual pride be an extremely easy trap
|>to fall into? 

It is you that is high on intellectual pride. You think you know everything. You
think that the secret of how God created the Universe is so simple that it can
be understood by a bunch of Nomadic tribesmen 4000 years ago. Science teaches us
as much about the limits of our knowlege as anything else. None of our theories
are anything like complete.

|>Maybe God never intended for us to try to figure out
|>how old the earth is, or how he created life. But man with all his 
|>pride must know, and for this pride, God frustrates those minds. 

I am not surprised that you have dropped the pretensions to speculating on the
mind of God to claiming you know it! In my Church most folks would think that
attitude mighty close to blasphemy.

In order to maintain your certainties about the creation of the Universe you
have had to reduce God to a rather shabby deciever, if he is the liar you claim
then why should the Bible not be a lie too? In fact the Genesis parable is a
different type of truth to the literal certainty you claim, it is an allegorical
truth, a parable.


Phill Hallam-Baker
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic