Which is incompatible with the idea of a universe created with the appearance of age.
The Bible tells us repeatedly that the heavens declare the glory and the justice of the Lord, and that we can know Him by what He has created. Well then, if He created a universe that has an appearance of immense age according to every scientific and logical test we can put to it, then either a) it is indeed 13.8 billion years old, and that gulf of time demonstrates God's eternality; or b) He is a trickster god who creates illusions for the sake of confounding those seeking the truth rather than a God of truth who cannot lie.
Let's look at it another way: The Bible is a creation of God, but one composed by human authors. The universe is God's direct creation, and no hand but His is responsible for it. If He created the universe so as to so confound honest interpretation by adding a false appearance of age, then on what basis could we assume that the Bible would be any easier to come to a right understanding of?
BenLurkin hit the nail on the head earlier in this thread. When asked if God was incapable of creating a universe with the appearance of age, he responded, "Of course God can do that. But why would He?”
Shalom
“He is a trickster god who creates illusions for the sake of confounding those seeking the truth rather than a God of truth who cannot lie.”
God has not lied. But He has allowed people to believe a lie, if they choose to do so. If someone chooses to seek the truth about God by relying on logic rather than God - if they seek truth by earning it thru their own effort - then God has no obligation to FORCE them to the truth.
Your belief on the age of the universe ASSUMES a lot of things. It assumes God created the Universe IAW your rules. It assumes all motion can be tracked back to an ultimate beginning because it ASSUMES that there is no Author.
It allows that a god might exist somewhere, but its intent is to deduce the creation of the world WITHOUT REFERENCE TO A CREATOR.
Science does not investigate history. It cannot. One cannot subject past events to repeatable experiments. Those making arguments about how the universe was created are investigating HISTORY.
And that is fine, so far as it goes. But it is an investigation that rejects the idea of a God who intervenes. All the so-called scientific investigation into origins ASSUMES no action by God. It does so because if one assumes God exists and does intervene, then ANYTHING could have happened.
But at its root lies this thought:
What should we conclude about the origin of the universe WITHOUT ANY REFERENCE TO GOD?
Thus you freak out at the idea that an all-powerful Creator God might have created a Universe into being, with motions and light traveling and a “history” built in. After all, if one DOES assume God is an Author, then there is no longer any value in your studies - you are trying to answer a meaningless question.
God has not lied, but the Bible teaches that God WILL allow men to wrap themselves in a lie once they reject Him. And since all ‘scientific investigation’ into the origin of the Universe rejects any involvement by God, it means you are trying to determine truth after rejecting God as the Answer.
It is not God who has lied. The foundation of your thought is a lie. You have decided, before starting your investigation, that it must not require any input from God. You have rejected the Creator and are worshiping the Created.
In essence, “And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people and birds and animals and reptiles.
So God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired.”
Nicely put.
I keep coming back to a trick performed at a Penn & Teller show:
Teller (with Penn’s voice narrating) walks on stage, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, smokes a few times, drops it, and crushes it out.
So what? it’s just a guy smoking.
Except it isn’t.
Teller turns 90 degrees (with Penn’s voice continuing to narrate), and proceeds to show you what happened. Instead of pulling out a cigarette, he pretends to but instead reveals the palmed cig, pretends to light it but reveals the lighter is really a small flashlight flickering, pretends to smoke but reveals he’s blowing powder, pretends to drop it but reveals he actually palms it, and pretends to crush it but reveals there’s nothing under his shoe.
Ok, cute trick.
Best, on many levels, trick I’ve seen (and I personally inspected on-stage the bullet catch trick later in the show).
So...when we see someone smoking, should we consider that perhaps they’re faking the whole thing? Of course not: we apply Occam’s Razor and conclude that if we see someone smoking, that they are in fact smoking - and NOT performing an elaborate deception, or that there’s really a Oculus Rift strapped to my head and I’m sedated in a chair and I’m watching a Virtual Reality projection of someone smoking.
We’re not living in _The_Truman_Show_. Or _Dark_City_. Or _The_Matrix_. Or any movie-like environment where if we move a little off-set the elaborate fakery will become immediately obvious. While the idea may be exciting, there is no reason to believe we are in a grand simulation just to “test our faith”.
It’s easier to believe that God DID create a 27.6 billion light year wide universe of comparably immense age which absolutely declares His eternal power & divine nature, than to accept the notion that we’re inside a concocted story which appears far more majestic than it actually is, declaring eternal power & divine nature when what actually exists is orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less than what seems to be. I’ll respect & worship a God who created a universe that led to dinosaurs flourishing & becoming fossils I find today; I’ll scoff at a “god” that instead had to make something that looks like a fossil of a long-deceased being but actually isn’t, and light from distant stars that aren’t, etc, all being just part of the back story of a fiction in which we’re being evaluated for likely eternal punishment.
Yes, maybe we’re misinterpreting our perception of reality. Fine. I can deal with that as a limitation of our small soggy brains and our 3-color eyeballs trying to perceive a universe of 10^85 bits of information and an electromagnetic spectrum “from DC to gamma rays and beyond”. Time very well may be far more bizarre than we currently understand (and I’m chewing on the consequences of the notion that far-traveling light experiences zero time on the trip). But so far what we know sensibly applies & explains much of the universe, with no indication we’re radically wrong (instead, we find we understand better than one may expect). Within our limited capabilities, we can carry out experiments in a small lab and confidently understand what happens, than apply that learning to what we see (fossils to stars) and come to sensible conclusions about the nature of God’s creation.
So yeah... God could create “an appearance of age” for something that isn’t, but why would He? Why would the grand creator of the universe make something limited and bristling with false appearances? instead of ACTUALLY creating it all with a grand explosion and following brilliantly conceived rules to culminate in, well, a few idiots arguing over the Internet?