Because God would seem more the vicious jokester for writing the book of Genesis and describing the creation the way He did if He really made the universe over 15 billion years through evolution.
Well, (a) I disagree that that is the bigger joke. Even assuming the divinity of the Bible, I would regard the existence of facts and observations in the natural world (the handiwork of the Creation) to be stronger evidence for the work of God than a human-copied, edited, and transcribed account. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many for the planet? But I am still left that God has intentionally deceived me.
(b) If I reject the inerrancy of Genesis (it is divine allegory, or inspirational, or human created, or was intended by God for a specific audience of nomads 4000 years ago, or it was a amalgam of myths, etc.), then the question of trickster-ness vanishes. That seems to be the easier answer: if the facts don't fit the description, it makes more sense to reject the description than the facts.
(c) Finally, your only justification for evolution being wrong is that it disagrees with your religion? I thought the whole point of these crevo threads was to debate the natural evidence (and as the article at the top of the thread points out, the appropriateness of the subject for public schooling, among other things). You seem to have conceded that most important of points: that creationism and the rejection of evolution are entirely and exclusively based on your own personal religious views, and are not scientific questions at all, and that by extension, any person who did not share your literalist religious interpretation would have ne reason to question evolution.
If God says over and over and over that this book is His book and that He wrote it. If He says in many diffent ways that the book never contradicts itself and that believing the book is extremely important to having any relationship with Him, BUT, Genesis isn't true, that makes Him quite a huge trickster.
(b) If I reject the inerrancy of Genesis (it is divine allegory, or inspirational, or human created, or was intended by God for a specific audience of nomads 4000 years ago, or it was a amalgam of myths, etc.), then the question of trickster-ness vanishes. That seems to be the easier answer: if the facts don't fit the description, it makes more sense to reject the description than the facts.
Well, it really wouldn't vanish because the rest of the book shows Him to be a trickster for saying that the whole thing was inspired and can't contradict. If you throw out the whole book then I'd agree that the trickster thing goes away and God can just be the God who created everything how ever He wanted and didn't tell us anything about Himself. Then the whole book is worthless. I think that may be how you feel.
(c) Finally, your only justification for evolution being wrong is that it disagrees with your religion? I thought the whole point of these crevo threads was to debate the natural evidence (and as the article at the top of the thread points out, the appropriateness of the subject for public schooling, among other things). You seem to have conceded that most important of points: that creationism and the rejection of evolution are entirely and exclusively based on your own personal religious views, and are not scientific questions at all, and that by extension, any person who did not share your literalist religious interpretation would have ne reason to question evolution.
Almost. There is still a big problem with evolution other than that it doesn't work at any level. That problem is the existance of the space, time, and matter. To believe in evolution while ignoring the difficulty with why things exist is to be like children playing at a playground thinking that it has always been there and that there is no reason to consider thanking any adults for building it.