Volume 15, Issue 2, 2013
Ramified Natural Objects
Richard Swinburne
Pages 265-270
Does God Permit Massive Deception?
This is a response to Cavin and Colombetti’s paper criticizing a claim of mine elsewhere, that God would not permit anyone to deceive the world by manufacturing evidence which made it probable that Jesus was God incarnate when that was not so. I analyze four different cases of A allowing B to hold a false belief, and I argue that only two of them constitute deception by A, one being “straightforward” deception and the other “tacit” deception. What I should have claimed earlier is that God would not deceive us (either straightforwardly or tacitly) on this matter, including doing so by permitting someone else to manufacture deceptive evidence.