Does God Lie?

Dallas Denery’s The Devil Wins is a “history of lying from the garden of Eden to the Enlightenment.” Denery’s leading question is, Is is ever acceptable to life? and he looks at answers to this question from several angles. The book explores theologians’ treatments of the deceptions of the devil, God’s deceptiveness, and the legitimacy of human deception. In the final two chapters, Denery examines lying among non-theologians, courtiers and women in particular.

Denery isn’t convinced by the simple popular myth that lying came into its own in the early modern period, dubbed by some “the Age of Dissimulation” (6). According to this account, medieval people renounced lying in all its forms, but with the rise of the court societies of the Renaissance, deception became the very stuff of social life. He cites the Renaissance maxim, “A man does not know how to live, who does not know how to dissimulate” (7).

He acknowledges that the modern world has seen the “domestication and naturalization of mendacity,” as it changes “from being a devastating demonic disruption of the orderly world of paradise to being the source of worldly order itself” (17). But he complicates the story-line by emphasizing the contested status of lying among church fathers and medieval thinkers.

Augustine rejected the notion that God might be untruthful, and that was settled orthodoxy through the Reformation. But that isn’t the whole story. Divine deception gets caught up in questions about divine sovereignty. Nicholas of Lyra asked, If God decides that the devil should approach Eve, as He decides everything else, is He somehow involved in the deception? (64). Calvin worked through Scripture passages that indicate that God deceives and inspires deception, and concludes that God “pronounces that he deceived the false prophets, because Satan could not order a single word unless he were permitted, and not only so, but even ordered” (92; citing 1 Kings 22).

Medieval bestiaries explained how a lion “pursued by hunters, erases its tracks,” and compares this tactic to Jesus’ method of concealing “traces of his love in heaven until . . . he descended into the womb of the Virgin” (67). Deception became an issue in discussion of transubstantiation. Robert Holkot, a fourteenth-century Dominican, explored the real presence in the context of questions of deception. He concluded that God deceives not only the evil but the good, though He does it for good and beneficial reasons (83). Wyclif turned this theme into a critique of transubstantiation, arguing that “Since God chose to give us so great a gift . . . it hardly seems fitting with the splendor of his truth, that he would deliver himself to us to honor in a veil.” Our senses indicate that “the very substance of bread and wine remain after consecration, and not just their appearance,” and thus “it does not seem appropriate for the Lord of Truth to introduce such an illusion when graciously communicating so worthy a gift” (quoted, 85).

Denery brilliantly shows the centrality of this question to Descartes. Descartes worry in the Meditations is that he might be deceived by an evil deceiver, a God who deceives. He takes the classical view that God is incapable of deception. But then he has to face the biblical evidence that God does deceive; and not only biblical evidence, since it seems that even the natural world can be deceptive. If God wills all things, and nature is deceptive, is God then deceptive? Descartes attempts a halfway solution: God wills all things and does not deceive us, but from our perspective it appears that he does deceive us (101). This didn’t prevent Descartes from being attacked by theologians who followed Calvin in pointing to biblical instances of divine deception. 

From the other side, Pierre Bayle thought Descartes too cautious. Bayle argued that “the Bible includes countless stories in which God changes his mind expresses ignorance, or promises to reward or punish individuals,” but all this is, in Bayle’s words, “incompatible with supreme perfection” (98). Scripture speaks vulgarly, “as a nurse stammers with a child when she suckles” (quoted, 99). If the Bible indicates that God deceives, so much the worse for the Bible, for Bayle knows that divine deception is impossible. Descartes needed to choose whether to defend God’s absolute truthfulness or to defend the Bible. No doubt the question doesn’t have to be posed so starkly, but in early modern philosophy it was, and the question of divine deception became one of the hinge points in the demotion of biblical authority.