The earth does not appear 4.7 billion years old. So it is not at all deceptive for God to create it as it is today - he didn't make it look old. He just made it as it is. As I stated above, it only appears old IF you presuppose it is old and then interpret all the evidence to match that predetermined position. If you see it as young, it looks young. So, to a certain extent, this is correct:
However, there's a lot of evidence from many different fields of science to show that it's young also, evidence that cannot be readily explained in an old earth scenario and is generally overlooked by those who are determined to see it as old.
Take the carbon-dated dinosaur bones example I shared above. Actually
read the link. This is serious science, with analysis conducted by respected laboratories, and published at a regular scientific conference by real scientists.
However, the moment it was clear what they were saying, the paper was suppressed. Deleted from the conference webpages. Then the lab they used refused to process any more samples for them.
This is how science works. This is fundamentally why the old-earth scientists have more journal publications than the young-earth ones (which I'm just taking
@JustAGuy's word for, I haven't checked that out). Because it's almost completely impossible to publish anything that disagrees with the prevailing dogma. I know - I've published papers myself (in other areas) and have seen it everywhere.
This is how the peer-review process works. Any paper you want to publish in a prestigious journal gets sent to other well-recognised scientists in that field to look over. They recommend whether to publish, publish with amendments, completely rewrite and then consider again, or reject entirely (I've been a peer reviewer myself in my field). If the peer reviewers say it's questionable, it never sees the light of day.
In addition, when you're working at a mainstream academic institution (university etc), papers have to get past your own internal reviewers before they even get submitted to a journal. And you can't even get the time to write it unless you get someone to pay for your time to do the research, and who's going to fund that work? So you generally can't even get a paper like that written and submitted.
This process works well to maintain the quality of published work that builds on the existing accepted ideology. However, it means that anybody with a novel minority viewpoint is often shut down before it can be published. As a result, it is impossible to publish papers that support a young-earth position - they are generally rejected out of hand, however sound the science may be. This situation is so serious that CMI had to start their own scientific journal, the "Journal of Creation", as a place to actually publish this work, because it is impossible to get it published in the mainstream journals.
For the same reason, it's really difficult to publish anything that disagrees with anthropogenic global warming - because global warming (however problematic) is the prevailing dogma. So you can't get research funding to study anything else, if you do you'll struggle to get it past organisational reviewers, then even if it makes it to a journal it's unlikely to get published. So it's not just about creation, this is a fundamental flaw in the entire academic system.
The whole system is built to perpetuate the current understanding and discourage outside-the-box thinking.
Galileo would have never got his work published if this system had existed back then.
