It is sometimes claimed that the idea that God created the world with apparent age makes God deceptive. He creates a Young earth and yet gives it the appearance of a world that appears as if the world is billions of years old. It seems like God is in some sense tricking us.
Several problems:
i) How does that not also put an evolutionary position in the same boat? God creates us by natural selection and random mutation. He makes us in such a way that it is indistinguishable from if we evolve in an atheistic world.
ii) If we allow for the idea of a personal God that intervenes in the events of the world then it seems that we should be fine with miracles that go against regularities. Was Jesus deceiving people with his miracles? It doesn’t seem deceptive for Jesus to change water into wine or multiply loaves of bread and fish.
iii) We should also note that nothing has the appearance of age. We just have an inference from previous experiences and thoughts about natural processes. The problem is that that is not always reliable in a world of miracles. We have no reason to suspect that these processes were meant to disclose to us the age of the earth.
iv) There is also a difference between intentional deception and accidental deception. Think for a moment of a son that has moved away from his parents. His girlfriend decides to move in with him, but he doesn’t reveal that to his parents. Now, this man’s parents decided to go check out his new home. The parents happen to have the son’s spare key to his house. Suppose that the parents discovered that their son has a lot of women’s clothing in his bedroom. They infer from that that their son is a crossdresser. The son hasn’t deceived in any morally objectionable sense his parents.
Resources:
Triablogue:
“A carefully crafted illusion”
Genesis, Creation, & contemporary science
The Council:
The Council 