Neil de Grasse Tyson presentation about intelligent design

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

26. That too

But the blatant hypocrisy of its proponents is particularly annoying. Creationists start by saying that since God cannot lie -- indeed, they say that God is truth itself -- and since the Bible is the word of God, then everything in the Bible must be true. Thus, Genesis is an accurate description of creation. However, since they lost in the courts, they have tried to rebrand creationism as ID; which is simply deceitful. Propping up the "truth" by lying about it is hypocritical; not to mention a first rate piece of doublethink.

One of the great Christian thinkers, Augustine of Hippo, circa 410, wrote a book Contra Mendacium -- "Against Lying". In it, he considers whether one can lie in furtherance of a good cause. He says "no", for a number of reasons. The one most important to him is that since God is truth, then by lying one is dishonoring God; and he quotes Romans 6:1-3, "Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?" And, he also has the entirely practical argument that when the people who have been lied to discover that they have been lied to, then they will almost certainly doubt the goodness of the cause. After all, if the only way to support a supposedly good cause is by lying about it, then it can't be all that good in the first place.

Thus, on purely fundamentalist Christian terms, ID fails. And, of course, the universe is demonstrably more than 6000 years old.