by DALLAS G. DENERY II
Until the Scientific Revolution, God’s power included a licence to deceive. How did science make an honest man of Him?
Anyone who has ever read the Bible knows that God can speak. Over the course of six days, God speaks the world into existence and then speaks to both Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Later he speaks to Cain and Abel, to Noah, to Abraham and many others. What sorts of things does God say? He issues commands – ‘Let there be light!’ – he lays down prohibitions – ‘Don’t eat from that tree!’ – and he asks questions, metes out punishments, offers advice, forecasts the weather, and orders an old man to kill his only son. Sometimes he says these things calmly, sometimes sarcastically, occasionally his words are filled with anger or pity or love. When God speaks people listen, but when people listen, should they always believe him? In other words, can God lie?
For over a millennium, some of the most influential theologians and philosophers debated the problem of divine deceit. Imagine that God can lie, asks the early fifth-century bishop Augustine. Imagine that God has decided to include falsehoods throughout the Bible. How would we know what parts to believe and what parts to reject? With the best of intentions, we might unknowingly condemn ourselves to eternal damnation, accepting heresies as truths, rejecting truths as heresies. The dangers of a deceiving God extended far beyond the pages of scripture. The 14th century Oxford-trained theologian John Wyclif feared that if God could lie to us, he could give us false visions, reduce reality to mere appearance and undermine all our knowledge of the world.
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To be honest, no one – except the German reformer Martin Luther in his most religiously angst-ridden moments – ever asserted that God could lie. The debate centred around the question of whether God could deceive. The distinction between lies and deceptions was never entirely clear-cut. Theologians unanimously agreed with Augustine who had asserted: ‘A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with intention of deceiving.’ Theologians also agreed with Augustine that every lie is a sin and no good intentions can ever turn sinful actions into virtuous ones. ‘Is every lie a sin?’ the Dominican Sylvester Prierias would ask in the late 15th century: ‘I answer that it is not even licit to lie for the sake of saving someone’s life, as Augustine, St Thomas, and all the theologians and canon lawyers teach.’
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