Omphalos (book)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot is a book by Philip Gosse, written in 1857 (two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species), in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is. The reasoning parallels the reasoning that Gosse chose to explain why Adam (who would have had no mother) had a navel: Though Adam would have had no need of a navel, God gave him one anyway to give him the appearance of having a human ancestry. Thus, the name of the book, Omphalos, which means 'navel' in Greek.

Gosse's argument was that since living things had a cycle of reproduction and development, God must have created them in the act of developing, with trees having rings, and animals having skin, blood, and bones all making them appear older than they were. From any examination of a post-creation world, the world would appear to have been created in the cycle of normal processes, and would look old. No element of deception by God would be inherent in this. The book was very controversial at the time, and it has had few supporters (though it has been repopularized somewhat in recent years).

Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies and a friend of Gosse, was asked to review Gosse's book. Refusing, he wrote to Gosse:

"Shall I tell you the truth? It is best. Your book is the first that ever made me doubt [the doctrine of absolute creation], and I fear it will make hundreds do so. Your book tends to prove this - that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes God-the-Sometime-Deceiver. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in ... your newly created Adam's navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here ... I cannot ... believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."
(reproduced from Hardin, 1982).

The theory presented in the book was developed by later philosophers into what is now called the omphalos hypothesis: that the world and everything in it could have been created at any time, even mere moments ago, with even our own memories being false indications of its age.

[edit] References

  • Gosse, Philip H. Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. John Van Voorst, London, 1857. Reprinted 1998 by Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge CT, ISBN 1-881987-10-8 Reprinted (2003) in London by Routledge, with a new introduction by David Knight, ISBN 0-415-28926-2, as part of a series called The evolution debate, 1813-1870, ISBN 0-415-28922-X (set).
  • Hardin, G. (1982) Naked Emperors, Essays of a Taboo-Stalker, William Kaufmann Inc., Los Altos, CA, USA ISBN 0-86576-032-2

[edit] External links