John W Burgeson wrote:
> 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.
Burgy -
I'd like to call your attention to a point I made about this some
time ago. While this argument may have been valid in the 19th century, I
think that the development of modern cosmology completely undoes it. Big
bang cosmology and its extensions show the possibility of a development of
all material structures in terms of natural processes, and thus would have no
need of any structures with "apparent age".
This does NOT mean that science could describe _creatio ex nihilo_ in
the theological sense, for it must begin with "something" - quantum fields,
strings, or whatever, & the mathematical patterns to which they conform. But
it does mean that there need be no objects which appear to be older than they
actually are. The ages inferred by scientific means for remnants of the big
bang, galaxies, stars, atoms &c are their real ages. Kingsley may have
overreached the science of his time, but subsequent developments seem to have
vindicated this theological assertion of his: "We knew of old that God was
so wise that He could make all things; but behold, He is so much wiser than
that, that He can make all things make themselves."
Shalom,
George
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