Omphalos (book)

For other uses, see Omphalos (disambiguation).

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.

Synopsis

The first three chapters of the book are a review of the geological evidence available at the time (the 1850s) which is a generally fair description. He then states his major assumptions: "I shall take for granted the two following principles:– I. The creation of matter. II the persistence of species."^[1] and adds:

If any choose to maintain, as many do, that species were gradually brought to their present maturity from humbler forms—whether by the force of appetency in individuals, or by progressive development in generations—he is welcome to his hypothesis, but I have nothing to do with it. These pages will not touch him. I believe however, there is a large preponderance of the men of science, at least in this country, who will be at one with me here.^[2]

As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Gosse had heard talk about Darwin's theory which was to be published the following year, but is here expressing the prevailing consensus that included the expressed opinions even of the geologist Charles Lyell.

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, a theory he calls prochronism. 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. He claimed "the acceptance of the principles presented in this volume, even in their fullest extent, would not, in the least degree, affect the study of scientific geology... we might still speak of the inconceivably long duration of the processes in question, provided we understand ideal instead of actual time; that the duration was projected in the mind of God, and not really existent."^[3] No element of deception by God would be inherent in this.^[4]

Gosse's main concerns in Omphalos was to bolster the principle of creation which as he saw it "is a violent irruption into the circle of nature".^[5] However, he claimed, "I wish it to be distinctly understood that I am not proving the exact or approximate antiquity of the globe we inhabit. I am not attempting to show that it has existed for no more than six thousand years."^[6] His claim was that this principle applied to creation whenever it occurred: "Don't be alarmed! I am not about to assume the moment in question was six thousand years ago, and no more; I will not rule the actual date at all; you, my geological friend, shall settle the chronology just as you please or, if you like it better, we will leave the chronological date out of the enquiry as an element not relevant to it."^[7] He even includes the year 1857 in his list of possible times.^[8]

He admits that his argument applies primarily to the organic world and that he has no expertise outside of this but points to other cyclical processes in nature: "Whether the economy of the globe is circular or not, I am not in a position to show. But its movements certainly are; and so are the movements of all the myriad worlds with which astronomy is conversant. Asteroids, planets, satellites, comets, suns—nay even the stellar universe itself—obey in their motions, the grand universal law of circularity."^[9]

Though the idea of cycles may now seem strange, there were several precedents at the time. James Hutton uses the idea and avoids being drawn into controversies about progression. Lyell refers to a cyclical process and the first edition of Vestiges of Creation contains a chapter on the Macleay system which used a cyclical approach to the classification of Chambers' "animated tribes".

Darwin is mentioned several times within the book, but always with considerable respect. Gosse had attended meetings at the Royal Society where evolutionary theory was tested by Darwin before the publication of Origin—and had even made similar observations himself about variation of species in his own studies into marine biology—and considered Darwin's reasoning scientifically sound.

Reception

The book was very controversial at the time, sold few copies and had almost no supporters. Though the publisher was able to use in advertising an extract from the Natural History Review: "We have no hesitation in pronouncing this book to be the most important and best-written that has yet appeared on the very interesting question with which it deals. We believe the logic of the book to be unanswerable, its laws fully deduced", the rest of the sentence in the review reads "and the whole, considered as a play of metaphysical subtlety, absolutely complete; and yet we venture to predict that its conclusions will not be accepted as probable by one in ten thousand readers." The reviewer concluded that Omphalos contained "idle speculations, fit only to please a philosopher in his hours of relaxation, but hardly worthy of the serious attention of any man, whether scientific or not". The geologist Joseph Beete Jukes was more scathing in a later issue: "To a man of a really serious and religious turn of mind, this treatment is far more repulsive than that even of the author of Vestiges of Creation. and the Lamarckian School".^[10]

The Rev. 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, 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 Deus quidam deceptor [‘God who is sometimes a deceiver’]. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in the one single case of your newly created scars on the pandanus trunk, 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).

For a long time, the only oblique references to the book were to be found in Father and Son, the psychological portrait of Philip Gosse by his son Edmund Gosse published in 1907. He wrote:

Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipation of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume... He offered it with a glowing gesture to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be a 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.^[11]

It was rescued from obscurity by the American biologist Stephen Jay Gould in a 1987 article entitled "Adam's Navel",^[12] which has since been republished as a mini book. He comments:

But what is so desperately wrong about Omphalos? Only this really (and perhaps paradoxically): that we can devise no way to find out whether it is wrong — or for that matter, right. Omphalos is the classical example of an utterly untestable notion, for the world will look exactly the same in all its intricate detail whether fossils and strata are prochronic or products of an extended history.^[13]

It had earlier been referred to in a short work by Jorge Luis Borges.^[14]

The theory presented in the book 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.

References

1. ^ p. 110
2. ^ p. 111
3. ^ Philip Henry Gosse (1857). Omphalos. p. 369. 
4. ^ p. 347
5. ^ p. 126
6. ^ p. 339
7. ^ p. 127
8. ^ p.352
9. ^ p. 359.
10. ^ Nat. Hist. Rev. Vol V. p32ff quoted in Ann Thwaites (2002). Glimpses of the Wonderful. Faber and Faber. p. 222. 
11. ^ Philip Gosse (1907). Father and Son. 
12. ^ Stephen Jay Gould (1987). The Flamingo's Smile. Penguin Books. 
13. ^ Stephen Jay Gould (1995). Adam's Navel. Penguin Books. 
14. ^ Borges, Jorge Luis (1964). "The Creation and PH Gosse". Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952. translated by Ruth LC Simms. University of Texas Press. pp. 22–25. ISBN 0292715498. http://books.google.com/books?id=xvycg3RMAW4C&pg=PA22. Retrieved 2008-02-27. 

• 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

External links

• Gosse, Philip H. Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. John Van Voorst, London, 1857 A complete and unabridged edition of this book is available at Google Book Search
• Ron Roizen, "The rejection of Omphalos: a note on shifts in the intellectual hierarchy of mid-nineteenth century Britain," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21:365-369, 1982.