What’s in the background here, not often directly recognised, is the importance of the notion of the perspicuity of Scripture to “Bible Alone” Protestants. If the Bible requires interpretation, that implies the necessity of teaching authority to preserve the correct interpretation.
Many Protestants flee from this like hellfire, so they instead prefer to paint themselves into a literalist exegesis that winds up painting God’s universe as a clever deception, ingeniously designed to fool observers who haven’t been graced with the literalist interpretation of Genesis, that Creation is billions of years old.
Many Protestants flee from this like hellfire, so they instead prefer to paint themselves into a literalist exegesis that winds up painting God’s universe as a clever deception, ingeniously designed to fool observers who haven’t been graced with the literalist interpretation of Genesis, that Creation is billions of years old.
I am afraid that you are erecting a straw man here. For one thing, the rejection of "tradition" and a reliance one sola scriptura is not the sole position of Fundamentalist Protestants, but of liberal Protestants as well. Yet I note that this is hardly ever mentioned by Catholics and Orthodox who wish to equate Biblical inerrancy with sola scriptura so that the rejection of one requires the rejection of the other.
Second, I myself do not believe in sola scriptura but accept Jewish Tradition, which you and all chr*stians reject. This means that Protestants are more consistent than their opponents, as they (at least in theory) reject "all" tradition. However, Catholics and Orthodox who have been screaming at Protestants for four hundred years are themselves the product of a rejection of Tradition two thousand years ago, rendering them hypocrites of the first water.
Third, the world is not a "deception designed to look billions of years old." It was merely created fully functional (the fruit on the trees, eg). This only constitutes "the appearance of age" to dogmatic uniformitarians who refuse to see the freshly created world any other way.