Something happened last Thursday

Philip Henry Gosse was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, a competent naturalist and a fellow of the Royal Society. He was also an early crypto-zoologist, and included reports of sea-serpents in his natural history books. Unfortunately, Gosse was also a member of the fundamentalist Christian group known as the Plymouth Brethren. In 1857, he published what may be *the* craziest book ever written: "Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot". I recently looked through this book on-line, and quickly realized that it really is just as crackpot as usually described. In fact, it's somewhat worse!

Gosse was a creationist, and therefore believed that God miraculously created the entire universe in six days (or perhaps instantaneously). However, he was sufficiently informed about geology to realize that the world *looks* very old. Indeed, the old age of the Earth was known before Darwin proposed his theory of evolution. The Earth seems to have a long, dramatic pre-history, going back long before the events described in the Bible. Yet, the Biblical revelation in Gosse's opinion was equally clear that everything had been created at once, with no previous evolutionary history of any kind. Gosse attempted to square the circle with a "Law of Prochronism in Creation". Essentially, he claimed that God had created everything with an apparent age. Adam was created as a full-grown man, complete with a navel (omphalos), despite having no biological parents. Trees were created with their tree-rings already in place, and so on. Most of "Omphalos" contains tedious descriptions of various plants and animals, demonstrating that they have traits showing age and development. Therefore, all organisms must have had apparent age when created ex nihilo by God.

But doesn't this mean that God is a deceiver? Gosse believes not. All life is cyclical: animals are born, grow, reproduce and die, with their off-spring continuing the life-cycle. Organisms will therefore have apparent age no matter at what point in the life-cycle God chooses to create them. Gosse isn't sure whether nature as a whole is cyclical, but he doesn't rule it out. Nor does he rule out that the universe follows a kind of grand cycle. God doesn't deceive us, if we keep the cyclical character of life in mind. However, "Omphalos" is still attacked for making God a deceiver, and I don't think this is co-incidental. Gosse was *very* consistent with this hypothesis of apparent age. He claims that God created the geological column complete with fossils, fossils of organism that never actually lived! Gosse even waxes eloquent over the beauty and design of the fossils, such as ammonites, seeing them as yet another example of the divine glory. God created humans with fecal residue already present in their intestines, plants with parasites attached to them, and so on.

At one point, Gosse admits that if God had created everything ex nihilo in 1857, there would be "cities filled with swarms of men; there would be houses half-built; castles fallen into ruins; pictures on artists' easels just sketched in; wardrobes filled with half-worn garments; ships sailing over the sea; marks of birds' footsteps on the mud; skeletons whitening in the desert sands; human bodies in every stage of decay in the burial-grounds". The entire world would have a fake history, including fake memories of a fake past, despite being created just moments ago. There is apparently a parody religion on the web, known as Last Thursdayism, which lampoons this aspect of "Omphalos". If Gosse is taken seriously, the entire universe could have been created last Thursday, without us ever knowing about it!

Weirdly, Gosse hoped that his Omphalos hypothesis would be welcomed by both believers in creation and short ages, and those who regard the Earth as having a long developmental history. The latter could continue studying past ages, even if these never existed. They would be studying "ideal" time rather than real time, but even ideal time is real in the sense that all past ages exists in God's mind as part of the universal cycle (including, I suppose, the ammonites). What actually happened was, of course, that Gosse's book was met with derision and scorn by both camps, including his friends.

I found "Omphalos" fascinating, since the position taken by Gosse is a logical corollary to creationism, especially young earth creationism. Indeed, a consistent young earth creationist *must* reason like Gosse. Due to Gosse's crackpot reputation, few do so openly. However, creation must have had "apparent age", since Adam, Eve and the animals were created as adults. So, presumably, were the thistles and thorny bushes which became Adam's and Eve's lot after being thrown out of Eden. The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) at one point speculated that God may have created star-light in transit, thus creating the illusion that the universe is substantially older than 10,000 years! An echo of Philip Gosse can also be heard in Kurt Wise's notorious statement of faith: "As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand."

Of course, if Gosse (or Wise) is right, then scientific investigations of our past are essentially meaningless. This should be a problem for those who claim to represent "scientific" creationism. If science shows that the earth-crust, fossils or giant sequoias are very old, this can simply be brushed aside by references to the "Word of God". By a kind of reduction ad absurdum, Gosse's book also creates problems for the alternative position known as presuppositionalism. If the truth of a certain Bible interpretation is simply presupposed, what can stop other religious groups from presupposing *their* creation scenarios, and then violently shoe-horn the evidence to fit those presuppositions? Last Thursdayism can't be disproved on presuppositionalist grounds... Old earth creationism doesn't fare much better when seen in the light of "Omphalos". Why would God create seemingly transitional creatures ex nihilo, for instance mammal-like reptiles, if they aren't actually connected to other reptiles or mammals?

Perhaps this is why Philip Gosse's "Omphalos" have been covered up for so long. It exposes the problematic, non-scientific and even anti-scientific character of much creationism. Of course, orthodox Darwinist has its own problems, but that is another story... ;-)