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“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.”

There is nothing wrong with looking at how things behave and deducing what rules they adhere to. They’re not “our” rules, they’re the rules creation abides by.

There is nothing wrong with looking at the consequences of something happening and deducing the history thereof. Of course science can investigate history: we can look at how things are, look at how things behave now, and conclude the same rules governing behavior now would, given sensible starting conditions, produce things the way they are now.

I’m an engineer. I apply science to create things. I build a machine, set it in motion, and from that starting point & rules behavior emerges. I do not build the machine “mid-flight”, filling a computer’s memory with “in-motion” bits which starts with a web browser already running and showing Free Republic, I build a starting condition from which a more elaborate configuration emerges once initiated. I have no problem with the notion that God created a starting point, configured to operate according to rules, initiated it, and it ran from there to expand into a larger functioning universe in which He could interact. This makes perfect sense, as opposed to having to lay out every photon and every subatomic particle in an in-flight configuration, each including direction & momentum, with ALL of it appearing to adhere to starting conditions that _didn’t_exist_, THEN setting it all in motion - I reject that because it’s ridiculously difficult and unnecessary vs a far simpler design that, when initiated, exhibits emergent complexity ... and exhibits a greater testimony to the brilliance of its creator.

“What should we conclude about the origin of the universe WITHOUT ANY REFERENCE TO GOD?”

Indeed. What should we conclude about a god that creates a universe which looks like something it isn’t, a look WITHOUT ANY REFERENCE TO GOD? By your theory, he’s giving us a test on material designed & presented to lead us to the wrong conclusion - and will eternally punish us for not reaching the right conclusion from those deceptive presentations.

It’s like a math teacher giving this final exam:
Teacher: “What’s 1+1?”
Student: “2.”
Teacher: “Wrong! it’s 10! the question was in binary, not base-10 you idiot!”
Student: “But you never told us about binary!”
Teacher: “Too bad. Go to he11.”