> George again:
>
> "Now of course it is still possible that God did create the whole
> thing with apparent age and apparent evidence of evolution. But it is
> clear
> that God didn't _have_ to do that."
>
> Not having universal knowledge, I'd have to modify the word "clear" with
> "it seems to me."
>
> George again:
>
> "... & if God did indeed create a universe
> with not only apparent age but apparent evidence for evolution, it seems
> to
> me very hard to avoid the claim that God is "deceptive.""
>
> With that I will agree. But "very hard" is not the same as "impossible."
>
> George again:
>
> "Maybe such deception is part of the divine wisdom, but it is still
> deceptive. Perhaps it has the nature of a test, a bit like problems we
> sometimes make up for students with superfluous information to test their
> ability to get to the hard of a situation. We are trying to mislead them
> with a higher end in view, but we are still trying to mislead them."
>
> I suppose this position might be taken by a person who argues that since
> scripture is inerrant, that early Genesis tells how (and when) things
> took place, and since scripture must always trump science, then there is
> no deception involved. I think you and I can agree that arguing with such
> a person is really futile, since our point of departure is on a
> fundamental (sic) assumption.
>
It seems to me that you can't get away from the "deceptive God" idea
whichever line you take. Suppose you adopt the idea that God works through
evolution; long ages and so forth. The general idea, as I understand it is
that God subtly guides things through evolution so that human beings evolve
from atoms. Now evolution, of course, is supposed to be a random process,
where the only directing force is selection pressure. But here, we are
postulating that God has a Hand in it too, so it turns out to the outcome He
wishes, and that thereby, Adam is "created". So now what you have is the
appearance of a random process, but which is not random, but guided subtly
by God in a manner so it appears to be random. To parody Einstein's famous
quote "God does not play at dice", we find that "God plays dice most of the
time, but sometimes He cheats and gets aways with it". To me, that also
seems deceptive.
However, maybe just as in the teacher analogy given above, I don't have a
problem with "deceptive". As I argued before, the Emmaus Road experience is
deceptive, in that they are prevented from recognising Christ. Then
afterwards, they are able to reflect that their hearts burned within them on
hearing the truth about Christ, even though they didn't know who it was who
was speaking that truth. That, perhaps is what they (and we) have to learn
from the passage, that the truth convicts you.
All the best,
Iain.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 13 2001 - 18:46:06 EST