The basic claim of the creationists is that the fossil record is false. This, they think, lets them maintain the Bible as primary. There's a problem with that.

According to the Bible, God created the Earth. That includes all its geology. So God created mountains, oceans, strata, and fossils. The Creationists claim that he created fossils to test us, to see whether we would be foolish, or proud, enough to believe what we see. In other words, God is lying to us.

The last I checked, "Prince of Lies" was a term applied to the Devil, not God. But the problem is deeper than that. There's nothing inherently impossible in a lying Creator: after all, omnipotence certainly includes the ability to lie. But if God is a liar, then we can't believe anything He tells us. In other words, if we accept the creationist argument, it doesn't matter whether the Bible is the word of God, because we have reason to believe that the word of God need not be true. This leaves Christians in an untenable position. If God lies to humanity, the Bible provides no guidance. Maybe God wants us to seethe a calf in its mother's milk, worship idols, and work on the Sabbath, and is just telling us the opposite as a test. Wouldn't Christians be better off accepting that the Bible is about morality and Jewish history, not geology and the origins of life? (If you want to know what's wrong with the creationists' science, visit the Talk.Origins archive.)

There's a rant about cloning, or you can go back to the main page.