Consider this scenario.

Six thousand years ago God created feathered dinosaurs, which could not fly. He created birds, which could. He created creatures that resembled both: maybe some could fly, maybe they couldn't.

Then, he set things up so that millions of bits of evidence discovered by our God-given intellect, would fool us into thinking that none of that happened, that instead the earth was billions of years old, that evolution is real, and that birds almost certainly evolved from certain kinds of dinosaurs.

Dos that seem likely to you? That God would go out of His way to *trick us* into not believing His own Biblical word? If you think that's what happened, you should be prepared to explain why God is a hoaxer, and why He went to such lengths to deceive us. If it's to "test our faith," then he set reason up not as a complement to faith but as faith's enemy. How benevolent a God would that be?

Or was belief in evolution inspired by the devil? If you think so, you should remember that the devil can't do anything without God's permission because God is omnipotent. Would God make a deal with the devil?

Well, He did where Job was concerned, which raises a larger question. Do you really believe human life is a joke sprung by an all-loving God who then makes deals with the devil to test human beings (whom He knows are gullible, since He created them) in ways He knows will lead more and more of them into atheism and, for all we know, eternal punishment? What would be the point?

Is the universe just a game set up for all but Biblical literalists to lose? Or is reason (which Adam and Eve were forced to use in order to survive after The Fall) really a tool of deception and evil?

Those, it seems to me, are the choices: evolution revealed by reason or some kind of enormous cosmic hoax.

(I'm not denying that evolution as revealed by science might be guided by God - the Vatican's view, by the way - but that's not in line with Creationist or literalist thinking, which is the subject here.)

So which is it? And why?