Can God Deceive?

Although the prophet Samuel declares that “the Glory of Israel does not lie,” most medieval Christian theologians, going back to Augustine, believed that although God would not (or could not) tell outright lies, He did deceive—for instance, in telling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Only with the Scientific Revolution, argues Dallas G. Denery II, did philosophers begin to argue otherwise, and they did so in order to bolster not their religious beliefs but their rationalist ones: