omphalos

The omphalos hypothesis was named after the title of an 1857 book, Creation (Omphalos) by Philip Henry Gosse, in which Gosse argued that in order for the world to be "functional", God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails, and navels (omphalos is Greek for "navel"), and that therefore no evidence that we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable. The idea has seen some revival in the twentieth century by some modern creationists, who have extended the argument to light that appears to originate in far-off stars and galaxies, although many other creationists reject this explanation^[1] (and also believe that Adam and Eve had no navels).^[2] Others argue against Uniformitarianism and suggest that creation was accelerated through all intermediate stages in an abbreviated period; such that an old and new earth would be indistinguishable.

Philosophical and theological background

The Omphalos hypothesis contains a powerful philosophic problem, one that troubles even those who have applied it in recent times. Since the hypothesis is based on the idea that apparent age is an illusion, it is a consistent extension to then suggest that the world could have been created as recently as minutes ago. Any memories a person has of times before this were created in situ, in exactly the same fashion that the fossils were. This idea is sometimes called "Last Thursdayism" by its opponents, as in "the world might as well have been created last Thursday."

It is important to note that the concept is unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific method — in other words, it is impossible even in principle to subject it to any form of test by reference to any empirical data because the empirical data itself is considered to have been arbitrarily created to look the way it does at every observable level of detail. This philosophical approach, extended to other areas, has serious negative implications for science as a whole, if it is to explain anything.

From a religious viewpoint, it can be interpreted as God having 'created a fake,' such as illusions of light in space of stellar explosions (supernovae) that never really happened, or volcanic mountains that were never really volcanoes in the first place and that never actually experienced erosion, and the idea that God would create appearances that are so completely deceiving to every level of detail is not consistent with most benevolent theistic theologies.

This conception has therefore drawn harsh rebuke from some theologians. Reverend Canon Brian Hebblethwaite, for example, preached against Bertrand Russell's projection of Gosse's concept:

Bertrand Russell wrote, in The Analysis of Mind: 'there is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past'. 'Human beings', posited in being five minutes ago with built-in 'memory' traces, would not be human beings. The suggestion is logically incoherent.^[3]

The basis for Hebblethwaite's objection, however, is the presumption of a God that would not deceive us about our very humanity — an unprovable presumption that the omphalos hypothesis rejects at the outset. Hebblethwaite also suggests that God necessarily had to create certain elements of the Universe in combination with the creation of man:

to be an adult human being, we have to have gone through a real process of growth and nurture and a real history of interpersonal relation in a real and specific culture. One can even suggest that it is necessary for the Creator to have fashioned us in and through a whole evolving physical universe. As, again, Austin Farrer put it, 'if God wished to make no more than any single one of us, he would need to make half a universe. And why? Because no one of us would be the creature he is, if a thousand thousand lines of converging history, both physical and personal, had not met in him. Your life or mine is but a half-sentence in the book of the world. Tear it from its place, and it cannot be read; or if it can be read, it signifies nothing'.^[4]

Gosse, however, did not assert that God deceived us, only that any act of creation of human, animal or plant would "at the instant of its creation present indubitable evidences of a previous history"^[5] in far more subtle, microscopic and unavoidable ways than the presence or absence of hair or navels. He presented it not as an hypothesis but as a law or logical necessity: any created organism must be "from the first marked with the records of a previous being".^[6] The alternative would have been a created earth where trees had no leaves or rings; birds had no feathers; animals had no skin, teeth, bones or blood.

Many Jewish answers to the age of the Universe delve slightly into the Omphalos hypothesis.

Other views on the Omphalos hypothesis

Chateaubriand wrote in defense of literal Biblical chronology in his 1802 book, Génie du christianisme (Part I Book IV Chapter V):

God might have created, and doubtless did create, the world with all the marks of antiquity and completeness which it now exhibits.

Bertrand Russell, influenced by Gosse, discussed the ramifications of such a theory in his 1921 work, The Analysis of Mind, stating:

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.

—^[7]

Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1940 work, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, describes a fictional world in which some essentially follow as a religious belief a philosophy much like Russell's discussion on the logical extreme of Gosse's theory:

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, the past none other than present memory.

—^[8]

Borges had earlier written an essay, "The Creation and P. H. Gosse" that explored the rejection of Gosse's Omphalos. Borges argued that its unpopularity stemmed from Gosse's explicit (if inadvertent) outlining of what Borges characterized as absurdities in the Genesis story.

See also

• Omphalos (book)
• Simulated reality
• Last Thursdayism
• Age of the universe
• Conflict thesis
• Antediluvian
• Sons of Noah
• 40th century BC
• History of the world
• Jewish mythology

References

External links

• Essay entitled The Rejection of "Omphalos"
• Occurrences of 'omphalos' in James Joyce's Ulysses — the term is used extensively in the first section, "Telemachus".
• Responding to skepticism

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