At one point in time I thought that because God is all powerful that the reason he couldn't lie is because even if he tried to, whatever he spoke or thought would simply come into being anyway. I never thought of God as restrained by time or ability.
But when I started looking for positive proof of God's supernatural interaction with our world, I was forced to ask myself: Can God lie?
Repeatedly in the Bible it is reiterated that God is perfect by nature and cannot lie. As I learned more and more about how the universe works, the reality points to a conclusion which is quite contradictory to the biblical account of creation.
In the Bible God makes everything in six literal days starting at evening. (There are believers who trust the day-age theory, but this is not consistent with the original verbiage.) The seventh 'yom' could be debated though.
We now know that new elements are made inside suns and from their death and, with enough time, that's how we get the elements we need for life as we know it.
We know the geological layers took longer than 6000 years to form because radiometric dating confirms volcanic lava flows much older than this. We know that evolution happens, and not just natural selection of existing traits, but the development of novel ones as well. We know that starlight has traveled more than 6,000 light years to reach earth.
As a believer my initial answer to this was that God made it this way. It's such a simple answer for someone of faith, but it raises a glaring contradiction.
If God made it the universe 6,000 years ago, or even 10,000 or a million years ago, he created it in a way which is deceptive and unnecessary. It would have taken an active decision on God's part to make everything with the kind of age we find. It would mean that if Genesis 1 is truth, then God lies.
This was my biggest problem as a believer. If God lies, what does that say about his nature? If Genesis is not absolute truth, how can we trust that all scripture is the word of God, especially considering Jesus is quoted referencing Genesis?
In order to combat this whole idea, young earth creationists have suggested that radioactive decay rates have not always been the same (no evidence for this when it comes to isotopes used for dating,) that evolution only happens on a "micro" level (without the realization that small changes over time become big changes,) and that starlight travels at, or has traveled faster than light speed or completely deny relativity.
This is how I know the Bible is not truth, because either the biblical story is one of a lying God because Genesis is false, or our universe is a deception created by God and both nullify the entire biblical story.
But when I started looking for positive proof of God's supernatural interaction with our world, I was forced to ask myself: Can God lie?
Repeatedly in the Bible it is reiterated that God is perfect by nature and cannot lie. As I learned more and more about how the universe works, the reality points to a conclusion which is quite contradictory to the biblical account of creation.
In the Bible God makes everything in six literal days starting at evening. (There are believers who trust the day-age theory, but this is not consistent with the original verbiage.) The seventh 'yom' could be debated though.
We now know that new elements are made inside suns and from their death and, with enough time, that's how we get the elements we need for life as we know it.
We know the geological layers took longer than 6000 years to form because radiometric dating confirms volcanic lava flows much older than this. We know that evolution happens, and not just natural selection of existing traits, but the development of novel ones as well. We know that starlight has traveled more than 6,000 light years to reach earth.
As a believer my initial answer to this was that God made it this way. It's such a simple answer for someone of faith, but it raises a glaring contradiction.
If God made it the universe 6,000 years ago, or even 10,000 or a million years ago, he created it in a way which is deceptive and unnecessary. It would have taken an active decision on God's part to make everything with the kind of age we find. It would mean that if Genesis 1 is truth, then God lies.
This was my biggest problem as a believer. If God lies, what does that say about his nature? If Genesis is not absolute truth, how can we trust that all scripture is the word of God, especially considering Jesus is quoted referencing Genesis?
In order to combat this whole idea, young earth creationists have suggested that radioactive decay rates have not always been the same (no evidence for this when it comes to isotopes used for dating,) that evolution only happens on a "micro" level (without the realization that small changes over time become big changes,) and that starlight travels at, or has traveled faster than light speed or completely deny relativity.
This is how I know the Bible is not truth, because either the biblical story is one of a lying God because Genesis is false, or our universe is a deception created by God and both nullify the entire biblical story.
