Deceptive God?

Like many young earth creationists, Kurt Wise (Faith, Form, and Time) argues that the world is created with the appearance of age. He creates stars whose light already reaches the earth, even though they are only an hour old; trees, not merely seeds, with tree rings.

Isn’t this a form of deception? Wise argues that it is not, and point to the analogy with miracle of the feeding of the four and five thousand: “Once the fish and loaves had been multiplied and divided so many times, something on the order of one part in four thousand to five thousand of any given fish or loaf was made of the original food. The remaining 99.9+ percent was supernaturally created. The created portion of the fish was fashioned as if it had actually come from a fish from the Sea of Galilee, and as if it has been caught, prepared, and cooked. The created portion of the bread was fashioned as if wheat had grown in some previous season and was harvested, combined with other ingredients, and baked.” None of this actually occurred, but in performing the miracle “Christ created an apparent but non-existent history” (58-9).

Other miracles have the same structure. A man lame from birth suddenly leaps and walks. Seeing him on the road the next day, one would infer a history of infant crawling, toddling, walking, running that never occurred. Turning water into wine involves creating “an apparent but non-existent history of wine-making” (59).

One is free to test out naturalistic explanations of Jesus’ miracles. But once they are accepted as miracles, then the notion of “appearance of age” or “simulated history” is inescapable. If creation is “deceptive” because it comes with the appearance of age, then Jesus too is a deceiver, as His enemies charged.

This observation leads to another: The notion that miracles or special creation is “deceptive” appears to rest on a prior assumption that the world operates by natural law. That alone, that regularity, perhaps a mechanical regularity, is true, and anything that deviates from it is false. But if a personal God orders and orchestrates the world, the regularity is the regularity of His direction and irregularities are likewise the result of His decisions and choices. That is, the charge of “deception” rests on naturalistic, implicitly a-theistic assumptions.