The Earth created with age ("Omphalos")
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[edit] Definition
The idea that the Earth was created with age, commonly known as the Omphalos argument, is used by some Young Earth Creationists to reconcile their belief that the Earth is young with the fact that all the evidence shows that the Earth is very old. This argument was first coined in 1857 by Philip Gosse in his book Omphalos (the title is derived from the Greek word for “navel”).
The argument as originally presented by Gosse was this: any act of fiat creation must necessarily create a false illusion of the past.
Suppose for example that the book of Genesis is literal fact. Then if we were privileged enough to have a look at Eden on the seventh day, knowing what we do about nature, we should look at the trees and conclude (wrongly) that many years growth had gone into them; observing a chicken, we should infer (wrongly) that it came from an egg; observing Adam’s navel, we should suppose (wrongly) that he was born of a woman; seeing the talking snake, we should deduce (wrongly) some period of time over which it had learned to talk.
Therefore, Gosse suggests, an act of fiat creation in 4004 BC, which created organisms with the appearance of perhaps a few years or decades of biological age, might also just as well have created the Earth with billions of years of geological age.
[edit] Discussion
Gosse’s argument depends on the analogy between the fiat creation of a man and the fiat creation of a planet. An argument by analogy is never decisive, and this one is remarkably unpersuasive.
It is true that if God made a man by fiat creation, we should infer from our biological knowledge that he was older than he was, reasoning from our observation of other humans in the ordinary course of nature. Nor could God avoid this by creating Adam as a newborn baby, since a baby implies a mother, and a foregoing pregnancy. Thus far, we agree with Gosse: the fiat creation of living beings must necessarily suggest a false history.
But this problem does not apply to planets. It is quite clear that God could, if he chose, make a planet without any of those geological strata and intermediate forms and so forth that upset creationists so much; there is nothing about the definition of "planet" (as there is in the definition of “man”) which makes the appearance of a past history necessary.
Moreover, we do not infer from looking at the Earth that merely that the Earth has a history: rather, we see a very specific history confirmed by many different disciplines and techniques. This is as though God created a man together with thirty years of memories, a photo album, a scrapbook, photographs of himself as a child, a bad back, an appendectomy scar, several people who believe they’ve known him for years, a birth certificate, a bank balance, and a Social Security number.
This level of fakery is not merely a necessary and unavoidable consequence of fiat creation: it is a gross and pointless deceit. In the words of Gosse's friend and fellow-naturalist, the Reverend Charles Kingsley, when declining to review Omphalos:
- “I cannot believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."
The other obvious problem with this style of argument is that like many creationist arguments it works too well for its own good, in that it denies the possibility of any knowledge at all. Clearly if we allow the hypothesis that we are being fooled by an omnipotent being, then anything at all could be true. The world could be flat, and we deceived by God into thinking it round; the world could have been created last Thursday, with our memories and histories all complete. And the Book of Genesis could be one of those little details to give us the impression that we have a history --- for if one is going to enter into such an epistemological maelstrom, there is no reason why even the antique provenance of the book of Genesis, let alone its literal accuracy, should be preserved from the general shipwreck.
Students of the philosophy of science will notice that all such hypotheses involving an omnipotent prankster are not falsifiable: we might be looking at an authentic world, or we might be looking at a perfect fake created by a perfect fraudster; and there is no observation we could make that would tend to disprove either view. For this reason, although the Omphalos argument has been ignored by the scientists to whom it was addressed, it is often cited by philosophers as an example of a perfectly untestable hypothesis.
[edit] The publication of Omphalos remembered
In his memoir Father and Son, Philip Gosse’s son Edmund describes the reception given to Omphalos when it was published:
- “The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father's great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this--that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act of creation; it emphasized the fact that any breach in the circular course of nature could be conceived only on the supposition that the object created bore false witness to past processes, which had never taken place...
- Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. My Father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue. This 'Omphalos' of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb. It was not surprising, he admitted, that there had been experienced an ever-increasing discord between the facts which geology brings to light and the direct statements of the early chapters of 'Genesis'. Nobody was to blame for that. My Father, and my Father alone, possessed the secret of the enigma; he alone held the key which could smoothly open the lock of geological mystery. He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! atheists and Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.
- In the course of that dismal winter, as the post began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those 'thousands of thinking persons', which he had rashly assured himself of receiving. As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and geological deductions was welcomed nowhere, as Darwin continued silent, and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles Kingsley, from whom my Father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he could not 'give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie',--as all this happened or failed to happen, a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups.”
- (Edmund Gosse: Father and Son)
[edit] The Omphalos argument today
You will occasionally still come across the Omphalos argument in its original form, as in this example sent to the feedback section of the talkorigins archive:
- “When God created the Earth He created it with age, we know this because of Adam and Eve. They were not two when they were created, they were adults.”
This is clearly a descendant of Gosse’s argument, somewhat simplified. However, the argument is not much in vogue in this form among modern creationists, for they do not suffer from Gosses’ particular difficulties. Gosse, like so many of the clergymen of his era, was a naturalist, and so, unlike almost all modern creationists, he was perfectly aware that the Earth looked like it was old, and that he needed to explain this away. In the word’s of Edmund Gosse:
- “Geology certainly seemed to be true, but the Bible, which was God's word, was true. If the Bible said that all things in Heaven and Earth were created in six days, created in six days they were,--in six literal days of twenty-four hours each. The evidences of spontaneous variation of form, acting, over an immense space of time, upon ever-modifying organic structures, seemed overwhelming, but they must either be brought into line with the six-day labour of creation, or they must be rejected.” [1]
Today, of course, the evidence for an old Earth is even more overwhelming: but the average creationist doesn’t know this; nor is he even familiar with the evidence the Gosse found so overwhelming in the 1850s. So he does not need to invoke the Omphalos argument to explain away unwanted facts in geology: instead, he can get his information about geology by reading creationist pamphlets which solemnly assert that “there are no intermediate forms in the fossil record” and “no such thing as the geological column”; and similar creationist inventions.
However, there is one modern variant on Omphalos which still has some considerable vogue, which is to apply it to the astronomical evidence for an old Universe. So, for example, creationists try to explain away the fact that we can see stars billions of light years away (with light, of course, traveling the intermediate distance at a speed of one light year per year) by positing that the light was created in transit; so that if we observe an astronomical event (a supernova, say) more than about six thousand light years away, we are watching an event which didn’t actually take place.
When such a cosmological version of the Omphalos argument is put forward, it is not usually (in our experience) accompanied by Gosse’s argument from analogy with fiat creation of organisms, and this suggests that the cosmological version originated independently, though clearly it is in the same spirit.
The following line of reasoning would also seem to have affinities with the classic Omphalos argument:
- "The Fllod [sic] is not a myth, scientific evidence or not. God could have erased all the scientific evidence if He wanted to, because He is God!" [2]
