Phi phenomenon

I'm going to comment on this post:

http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2014/01/on-appearance-of-age-or-putting-omph-in.html

Similarly, young earth creationists claim that God created trees with annual rings, polar ice sheets with annual layers, and coral atolls with daily band deposits for days, years, and millennia that never happened. One prominent way they do this is to suggest that when God created the stars, he also created beams of light in transit between those stars and the earth (and presumably everywhere else in the universe). Otherwise, light from stars that are more than a few thousand years away from us wouldn't have reached us yet, and so couldn't be observed.
The problem here is very much the same as with tree rings that indicate weather conditions from years that, ex hypothesi, never happened. As I wrote here, when we observe light from distant objects, we don't just observe objects, we observe events. For example, astronomers regularly observe supernovae in other galaxies, millions of light years away. Now say God created the beams of light from those galaxies in transit a few thousand years ago. In that case, the light that left those galaxies immediately upon their creation would still have a long way to go before it reaches us; what we observe is just the beam God created between these galaxies and us. So when did these supernovae take place? Are they taking place now, that is, when they are observed by us? But then in a few million years, we'll see them again when the light they produce reaches us. It seems that since the light showing a supernova taking place was created in transit, these supernovae never happened.
Now this scenario is extremely contrived or ad hoc. 

He doesn't explain why that's "extremely contrived" or ad hoc. The basic principle is that nature is cyclical. Given a periodic process, that can repeat, but barring an infinite regress, what's the starting point? Something other than the cycle must originate the first cycle. The lifecycle of stars is a good example. 

But that's not the problem I have with it: the problem I have is that it ascribes deception to God. God is painting scenes on the sky that never happened, he is manipulating the universe to make it appear differently than what it actually is. But the God of the Bible cannot lie. It's not merely that he does not (in that he's never had occasion to) or will not (in that he chooses not to) but he cannot. It is contrary to his nature.

This makes assumptions about what the world ought to be like. In particular, that things must be what they seem to be. Otherwise, the Creator is guilty of deception. 

That's an assumption which cries out for a supporting argument. Take Arthur Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Many of our gadgets would be "deceptive" to a primitive tribe. Take something as simple as a mirror. To someone who's never seen a mirror, whose never seen his own reflection, it would be bewildering to see his double. How can he be looking at himself? How can he see himself staring back at him? There are two of him!

He walks around the mirror, but there's nothing on the other side. Must be witchcraft! The mirror has taken possession of his soul! His soul is trapped inside that mirror!  

Phones, radios, and televisions would be "deceptive." You can hear those disembodied voices. You can see images of people. But where are they? 

Or take the phi phenomenon, which is the basis of motion pictures.

Or take the fact that you see lightning flash on the horizon before you hear thunder. That's because light travels faster than sound. But when the storm is overhead, lighting and thunder are simultaneous. So what's the true appearance? 

Or take a foreign language. If you don't know the language, it's gibberish to you. Two speakers can hear the same sentence, but they don't perceptive the same thing. One hears gibberish while the other discerns a meaningful statement. 

First, it seems to me that creating something that manifestly displays properties it doesn't really have would still qualify as deception (and thus as lying). 

What about color? Scientists tell us the real world is monochromatic. We perceive colored objects, but the physical objects are actually colorless. Color perception is more projective than receptive. 

In response to this, young earth proponents will often give Scriptural examples of God creating things with a false appearance of age, and then suggest that this could be true of the universe as a whole (which, incidentally, commits the fallacy of composition). 

No, that's not the fallacy of composition. If he claims that, as a matter of principle, mature creature is deceptive, then that's simply giving a counterexample. If you can cite exceptions, then that disproves the principle. You then have to judge the issue on a case-by-case basis. The point is not to prove global mature creation by extrapolating from specific instances, but to disprove the objection in principle. 

Some may think that if we deny the possibility of God creating with a false appearance of age, we are claiming that he can't speed up natural processes. But I don't claim this. God can speed up (or slow down, or change in any way he wants) the processes of nature at his discretion. My claim is merely that, if he does, the objects acted upon would bear witness to his divine intervention.

That's an interesting claim. Problem is, divine intervention can involve God preventing events as well as causing events. But in that case, the result is a nonevent. What's the evidence for a nonevent? What's the evidence for something that never happened because God intervened to preempt it?