What Is a Lie?

Or why defining a lie matters for living without moral confusion

What is lying?

While common sense intuits the answer, we still encounter situations that require a definition that fits all the data. Some cases involve innocent concealment: planning a surprise birthday party for someone does not constitute lying, even if we do not tell them about it. Others involve honest mistakes: giving someone incorrect directions amounts to an error, not a lie. Still others involve moral necessity: Corrie ten Boom’s family refused to disclose the whereabouts of Jews they were sheltering from the Nazis; in war, generals aim to conceal their troops’ movements, use feints, and launch surprise attacks.

In all these cases, we use different words than “lying” to describe someone not transparently telling another person what is true.

As life becomes more complex, we realize that sometimes, to fill out corporate forms, we necessarily have to check boxes that are logically contradictory to one another. Agents will inform us that it is fine—a problem of structure rather than substance. This is the most nitpicky of my examples, but I bring it up only because white-collar workers know the oddness of such things. Everyone knows this is not lying. Companies sometimes just need a record for their own assessment.

So what is a lie? Can we discover a definition of lying that accounts for genuine lies and non-lies that nevertheless amount to not saying what is true in a transparent way? To answer this question, we must begin with a more fundamental one: What is truth? The ancient Greeks offer a starting point.

Defining the Lie

Parmenides followed his Greek counterparts in aiming to reduce reality to its simplest explanation, in order to create a science that could account for all things. Mathematics and geology did not fit easily under something like water, fire, or air. But they did share one thing in common: they all existed. That is, they all had existence or being.

The Apostle Paul knew of this commonplace truth when he said at the Areopagus, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Life, movement, which here means what animates life, and being all flow from God, the creator of heaven and earth.

Being defines truth. To say that something is the case is to say that something is. When I say one plus one equals two, I affirm that two monads become a dyad when added together. I am stating things as they are. Verbs like is and are constitute verbal forms of the word being. To be or not to be, that is the question that defines truth from a lie.

When I say eagles fly, I define how eagles are. When I say eagles do not fly, I say what is not; I speak non-being into existence, as it were.

The doctrine of Being, or that something is what it is, precedes the definition of what truth and a lie are. A lie is an untruth, a lack of being. It bespeaks no thing because it names what is not.

Non-being defines a lie. But obviously, this cannot be the whole story. We have only discovered the most basic principle that provides us with the necessary starting place to understand what a lie is. To summarize: truth is saying what is; a lie is saying what is not.

Defining Truth as Goodness

This definition is only a starting point. The next step is to relate being with goodness. For something to be true, it must be good. In the biblical story, God creates the universe with his Word, and he calls each day of creation “good.” The last day of creation, God calls “very good” (Gen 1:31).

What God creates is good. As apostle Paul affirms: “Everything created by God is good” (1 Tim 4:4). What God creates is good. God does not create evil. So every created thing must be, by definition, good. Whatever else evil is, it must not be a created thing that God has made. Christians generally speak of evil as a corruption in our will, or as a perversion of what God originally created to be good.

What exists is good. To be is to be good. What God makes remains good. But we corrupt this goodness by our choices. As Ecclesiastes 7:29 reminds us, “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes” (KJV).

So a lie names what is not; truth names what is. And whatever exists by definition is good, because God made it to be good. Existence itself is good. Death ends bodily existence, and it is not good for that reason. Life is an ally; death is an enemy.

Creation ties goodness to life. God made life, and it was good. But the first recorded lie connects lying to death. To lie leads to death. To summarize this step: what exists is good, because God made it; therefore truth, which names what exists, participates in goodness.

The First Lie

If truth, being, and goodness are one, then lying, non-being, and evil are also one. That first lie in the garden of Eden concerned the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God had made. God forbade eating from it. And so the serpent asked, “Did God say” (Gen 3:1)? The question abstracted by itself would not be a lie; but the form of the question intends to deceive (and so lacks goodness), as becomes clear when the serpent accuses God of lying in Genesis 3:4–5.

Notice the serpent’s lie: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Everything the serpent says contains partial truths—and this is how lies often work in practice, through mixture rather than pure fabrication. Adam and Eve do die, but not immediately. Their eyes are opened, and they become like God in a very twisted way because they know the possibility of evil and not just the delight of good. The serpent spoke words that sounded true and good, but could not be either because they did not say things as they were.

And how could it be otherwise? To tell the truth means to name what is the case. And how can the truth be evil? Truth by definition names reality; and so it must be in and of itself good. It turns out that telling the truth is good because truth is good; and it is good because the truth names what is. We cannot tell the truth and not also speak of goodness. We cannot lie without lacking goodness.

Telling a lie denies what is true, and it is for this reason that we call it evil. As Genesis 3 informs us, by believing the lie of the serpent, Adam and Eve entered into death. As beings of the lie, they morally corrupted goodness, truth, and existence. And God exiled them from the tree of life, so that they might bodily realize their death (lack of being) due to their believing the lie (lack of being).

This relationship between lying and death explains the structure of sin’s relationship to death. Paul puts it this way: “Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Rom 5:12). In context, Paul thinks of Genesis 3 but includes all sin as the cause of death. That is because sin, as Augustine recognized, lacks creativity and corrupts created being. It is not per se; it is as a parasite on our will or choices.

A lie’s relationship to death parallels sin’s relationship to death. A lie speaks non-being, and it leads to non-being (death). Truth speaks being, and it leads to being (life). The soul that sins shall die, God tells us (Ezek 18:20). By contrast, we should “Seek good, not evil, that [we] may live” (Amos 5:14).

Practicing Truth

We now have three major principles to help us speak of lying:

1. A lie claims that something that is not in fact is, and all that does not exist cannot be good.

2. A lie is not truth, because truth exists, and all that exists is good.

3. A lie morally parallels death because both constitute non-being (evil); created life, by contrast, is good, and so truth names existence, which is in and of itself good.

From here, we can begin to see how to practice truth and avoid the lie. First, given the nature of a lie, we can say that it lacks goodness and created existence (it exists through our corrupted speech and will like a parasite). This explains why we intuit that birthday surprises, for example, are not of the lie; while they temporarily mislead, their intent and goal is not to lack goodness and truth. They lead to goodness (birthday party, love, etc.), which is true. The conditions for a lie do not exist.

This is also why the Bible commends Rahab’s faith for hiding the Israelite spies from those in Jericho. She deceived (Heb 11:31). Indeed, James even calls her work of protecting the spies as justifying (James 2:25). By the same token, we know that Corrie ten Boom would have been evil, had she handed over Jews hiding from Nazis, so that they might be liquidated. Both Rahab and ten Boom responded to an evil world by preserving the goodness of life through verbal misdirection.

They both did not act in a way that we might easily define as a lie, something that Jesus associates with devilic deception (John 8:44). If the devil is a liar and the father of all lies (John 8:44), then we must ask whether Rahab and ten Boom acted at the behest of their father the devil, or their Father in heaven. Are they of life or death? Their words resembled lies in form—they misdirected—but served truth in substance, preserving life and goodness.

Granted, we live in a sinful world, and so sometimes the question is not as easy as it sounds to answer. That is why I am providing principles for defining the lie here.

The lie lacks goodness, existence, and calls what is what is not. The truth contains goodness, existence, and calls what is what is. The above examples certainly misdirect and approximate one aspect of the lie; but they preserve life from death and thereby participate in goodness (since life is good; and to participate in death is not good).

A Note on Scrupulosity

Admittedly, a sinful reality like ours complicates the picture more than we like to imagine. Yet we intuit the way forward when it comes to surprise birthdays, protecting life, and more besides. Some may worry, however, about the many minor cases where perfect accuracy seems impossible.

As noted, some corporations will be so big and bloated that onboarding documents will have internal contradictions; and yet managers will tell you to sign them anyway, since policies will be updated later in the year. At other times, you will travel and fill out government forms that do not allow you to answer “accurately” but simply check a yes or no box. You will have to select one option, even if not fully accurate, since there is no other option. We all know this, and I could create a mountain of examples.

The anxious conscience may torture itself over such matters, but this anxiety itself rests on a kind of lie—the lie that human life permits mechanical perfection. It does not. If I am five-eight-and-a-half, sometimes I am 5’8” and sometimes I am 5’9”. It depends on who measures me. We should care little for perfection in mechanical measurement since, such as in height, sine both are true given our conventions. We must not torture ourselves with precise calculations in life since that is a function of calculators, not humans who speak the truth.

Conclusion

We do our best. And we make sure that all our speech preserves life, goodness, and being. We deny the lie by refusing speech that takes life, lacks goodness, and calls what is not true.

To summarize the framework developed here:

1. Being defines truth. To speak truly is to say what is; to lie is to say what is not.

2. Goodness follows being. What God creates is good; therefore what truly exists participates in goodness, and truth—which names what exists—is itself good.

3. Lying parallels death. Both constitute non-being; both oppose the life and goodness that God has made.

These basic principles of the lie underlie our moral reasoning and explain why we intuit that hiding a surprise birthday party or preserving life in war approximates aspects of the lie in form, but does not constitute the lie itself.

The question to ask in any given case is not merely “Did I say something technically inaccurate?” but rather “Does my speech serve being, goodness, and life, or does it serve non-being, evil, and death?” In answering that question, we find our way toward living in the truth.