I was reading an article published by a Dr. John Sharp from
Scotland last night and came across more commentary
on Gosse's OMPHALOS. Here are my notes and comments on that article:
Notes on OMPHALOS by Gosse, published in 1857.
The following is from a footnote to an article by Dr. Donald MacKay, as
attributed
to him in an article from the "Christian Network" apparently sited
on the Internet out of Scotland. The article comes from Dr. John Sharp
and is
taken from an address by him in October 1993.
"Certainly Gosse seems to have given his contemporaries the impression
that the creation was a debatable event a few thousand years ago
on our time scale: and in this I have no wish to defend him. BUT, with
all his faults, I think he showed more insight into the logic of the
Genesis
narrative than opponents such as Charles Kingsley, who held that on
Gosse's theory
the creator had perpetrated a deliberate falsehood by creating rocks
complete with fossils. For whatever the peculiarities of Gosse's view,
the
point apparently missed by Kingsley is that some kind of inferable past
is inevitably implicit in any ongoing system, whether with fossils or
without,
so that to speak of falsehood here is to suggest a nonexistent option.
Creation
in the biblical sense is willing into reality the whole of our
space-time,
future, present and past. If the creator in the Genesis narrative were
supposed
to make the rocks without fossils, this would not have helped, for
nothing
could have prevented the rocks from having some physically inferable
past; their
past simply would have been different and
moreover inconsistent with the rest of the created
natural history. On Kingsley's argument, pressed to its logical
conclusion,
God ought not to have created any matter at all, since even
molecules cannot help having some inferable past history."
It seems to me that MacKay's argument is persuasive. If one posits
"sudden" creation, the thing created necessarily has to show
evidences of a past (virtual) history.
Suppose I build a model airplane. Ten inches long, made of balsa wood,
glue
and paper, nobody who examines it will infer a history where it once flew
through the air and shot down enemy planes.
But I am a master craftsman, and I build it a second time, this
time using materials used in "real" airplanes. I also build it
life size, and even put on it (for realism purposes) signs of
battle. In short, I do a great job. Now when people examine it, they
necessarily must infer a virtual history for the artifact. The better
job I do, the less likely they are to see it for what it is, a
model, not a real thing.
Next I build a dog. Again, my craftsmanship is superb. Even if I cannot
give it life, those who examine it will necessarily infer a prior
history of the artifact, one which never happened. There is no way I
can build it which would not so mislead them.
When Jesus created the wine at the Cana wedding, presumably
some of the guests, perhaps most, did not see it done. Certainly
the host did not see it done, for we read his words of amazement,
not at the deed, but at the quality of the resulting beverage. Were he
a scientist, and inclined to do so, no analysis of that wine would show
anything
else than a long history of grapevine -- winepress -- beverage.
All this to say that Gosse, while his theory is strange, was a smart
cookie and had thought this thing through pretty well. That some (many?)
of his categories did not understand is too bad. One may properly fault
the theory
for being "thin," or for being untestable; that's OK. Even Gosse did
that. But do
not argue that it necessarily requires a "deceptive god" to be viable; it
does not do that.
It has been 140 years since OMPHALOS was published, and the discussions
about it (of that era) have long been consigned to dust. Still, I wonder
if Gosse defended his ideas in print elsewhere than in the book, and if
anyone of that era understood his arguments.
Burgy
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