Omphalos (theology)

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For other senses of this word, see omphalos (disambiguation).

Part of the series on Creationism

History of creationism Creation in Genesis

Types of creationism: Creation science Intelligent design Islamic creationism Modern geocentrism Neo-Creationism Omphalos creationism Old Earth creationism Progressive creationism Theistic evolution Young Earth creationism

Controversy: Creation vs. evolution ... in public education Associated articles Teach the Controversy

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[link] (and also believe that Adam and Eve had no navels[link]).

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 perfectly reasonable to suggest that the world was created mere minutes ago. Any memories you have 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."

This view is not popular for various reasons:

1. It is unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific method;
2. It can be interpreted as God having 'created a fake', which does not sit well with most benevolent theistic theologies;
3. This philosophical approach, extended to other areas, has serious negative implications for science as a whole.

This conception has therefore drawn harsh rebuke from some theologians. Reverend Canon Brian Hebblethwaite, for example, preached that Bertrand Russell's projection of Gosse's concept to such a recent creation (discussed below), "like much of what Russell wrote and said, is nonsense. 'Human beings', posited in being five minutes ago with built-in 'memory' traces, would not be human beings. The suggestion is logically incoherent."[link] 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. Gosse 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" (Gosse, p335) 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 (p336)". 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

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.[Russell, The Analysis of Mind, 1921, page 159.]

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."[link]

Borges was also familiar with Gosse, having 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 claimed were absurdities in the Genesis story.

See also

• Omphalos (book)
• Simulated reality
• Last Thursdayism

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".

Notes

 

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