Possible Signature of Extraordinary Intervention

Why put them in in encrypted form so as to mislead people for 2500 years until you came along to explain it to them?

So, your sub-hypothesis is that the author of Genesis wrote it with the deliberate intention of not telling anyone anything true that they didn't already know.Then two questions come to mind:First, why write it at all? What's the point? I don't write posts addressed to you telling you that your username is "andygee" and that you live in New York. You don't PM me to tell me that my username is "Dr Adequate" and that I've made a lot of posts on this forum. There is no point to communication except to tell people stuff that they don't know already.Second, this practice leads to people being falsely informed, as we know. America is knee-deep in people who think the universe is only a few thousand years old, based on their reading of Genesis and their consequent rejection of scientific evidence to the contrary.So if the author of Genesis knew what effect his writings would have on people, then his intentions were as follows:(a) Not to communicate any truth to them unless they'd already found it out without reading Genesis and knew it to be true without his help.(b) To communicate falsehoods to people which they would never have been inclined to believe unless they'd read Genesis.His intention, then, was to never help people know truths that would not otherwise be known, but often to lead them into believing falsehoods which they would not otherwise have believed.Apparently what he wanted was that reading his words would never put anyone right who might otherwise have been wrong; but he was fine with putting wrong people who might otherwise have been either right or at least neutral on the issue.Well, why didn't he want people to be right? And why did he want people to be wrong? Why did he never want to reveal truth to anyone, but wanted people to be convinced by his words of something we know to be false?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Let's take an example, an analogy. Suppose I go about telling everyone that my real name is Vnorov.Some people are deceived by me, they swear by my veracity and insist that my name is indeed Vnorov.Some people point out that this is not a real name, and that this can't be my real name. They call me a liar. They are not sure what my real name is, because all they know is that I must be lying.Then by some independent means someone discovers that my real name is "Philip".Now at that point some ingenious person (like you) might point out that if you move each letter of "Vnorov" six letters back in the alphabet, you get "Philip". My real name was encoded.But this discovery says nothing for my veracity, does it? Some people were deceived into thinking that my name was Vnorov, and other people, who weren't deceived, didn't have any idea what it was. I communicated lies to whoever thought I was truthful, and I did not communicate the truth to anyone who thought I was lying. In order to find out the truth, it was necessary to use other means.Now, your ability, after discovering that I'm really called "Philip", to find out the code I was using, doesn't mean I was truthful, does it? The people who were deceived by my claim were deceived; and the people who knew I was lying couldn't find out the truth by studying my claim. I deceived some without revealing the truth to any. All we can say is that after you found out by other means that my name was "Philip", you could figure out the system I used to lie to everyone.My having a systematic approach to lying about the letters of my name does not make me truthful, does it? The fact that you can retrospectively figure out the system by which I lied does not make me truthful, does it? I have convinced some of lies, I have convinced others that I was a liar but without telling them the truth --- and the fact that after others have revealed that I lied, and how I lied, you can subsequently figure out the system by which I lied, does not make me truthful, does it?---N.B: My real name is not in fact Philip. I lied. If you can figure out the method I used to select that lie, does that make me truthful?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, in the analogy, the code is only discovered after it is proven that Vnorov is really Philip, and so the discovery of the code does nothing to reveal Vnorov's identity.But that's hardly the point. The point is that Philip/Vnorov was not being honest.

Well not only that, it imparts what is not true. Not only is it insufficient to make an Old-Earther out of a Young-Earther, it is also quite sufficient to make a Young-Earther out of someone who would otherwise have been an Old-Earther or at least neutral on the issue. It cannot impart knowledge, but it can impart ignorance. This would be an "extraordinary" intervention in more senses than one.

I have a simpler question. If I know the truth, but deliberately write what is false, thus conveying falsehood to some and truth to no-one, is that dishonest?I have always regarded the author of Genesis as simply ignorant. But you hold out to us the prospect that he was in fact highly knowledgeable, but also deceitful and malicious. If you give him credit with one hand, you sure take it back with the other.