On 01 Apr 96 18:01:59 EST you wrote:
JB>Bill Hamilton expressed well the concept that
>God might have created the physical universe, and us in it,
>with the appearance of age, then told us in Genesis
>the actual age.
>
>I've heard this called "Last Sundayism."
>
>The best defense of it (the concept) is Gosse's
>OMPHALOS, published in 1857; I have a photocopy of the book; it
>is fascinating reading. Gordon-Cromwell (?) seminary has a photocopy --
>I got it from them via interlibrary loan.
>
>The Gosse argument is, I think, irrefutable. And there is absolutely
>no way to test it (that I know).
The appearance of age argument is indeed irrefutable, just like the
schoolboy's argument that the Universe is a figment of his
imagination. The problem with the appearance of age argument is that
in arguing that the Earth appears to be 4.6 billion years old, but is
really only 10,000 years old, one could just as easily argue that it
is only 100 years old, and that God created the entire Earth in 1896,
compete with the appearance of prior history, including the Bible and
Darwin's "Origin of Species"!
For those like me who do not have access to such primary sources
:-), Gould has an interesting chapter titled "Adam's Navel"
re Gosse' Omphalos theory in "The Flamingo's Smile" (pp99-113). Some
key points:
* Gosse was no armchair theologian, but an eminent naturalist:
"Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) was the David Attenborough of his day,
Britain's finest popular narrator of nature's fascination. He wrote a
dozen books on plants and animals, lectured widely to popular
audiences, and published several technical papers on marine
invertebrates. He was also, in an age given to strong religious
feeling as a mode for expressing human passions denied vent elsewhere,
an extreme and committed fundamentalist of the Plymouth Brethren
sect." (Gould S.J., "The Flamingo's Smile", Penguin: London, 1985,
p100).
* He saw creation as God's interruption in the cycle of nature:
"Gosse began his argument with a central, but dubious, premise: All
natural processes, he declared, move endlessly round in a circle: egg
to chicken to egg, oak to acorn to oak. This, then, is the order of
all organic nature. When once we are in any portion of the course, we
find ourselves running in a circular groove, as endless as the course
of a blind horse in a mill...This is not the law of some particular
species, but of all: it pervades all classes of animals, all classes
of plants, from the queenly palm down to the protococcus, from the
monad up to man: the life of every organic being is whirling in a
ceaseless circle, to which one knows not how to assign any
commencement...The cow is as inevitable a sequence of the embryo
as the embryo is of the cow. When God creates, and Gosse entertained
not the slightest doubt that all species arose by divine fiat with no
subsequent evolution, he must break (or "erupt," as Gosse wrote)
somewhere into this ideal circle. Creation can be nothing else than a
series of irruptions into circles...." (Gould, p102)
* Such an interruption into the circle necessitates an apparent
(but not real) history:
"Wherever God enters the circle (or "places his wafer of creation," as
Gosse stated in metaphor), his initial product must bear traces of
previous stages in the circle, even if these stages had no existence
in real time. If God chooses to create humans as adults, their hair
and nails (not to mention their navels) testify to previous growth
that never occurred. Even if he decides to create us as a simple
fertilized ovum, this initial form implies a phantom mother's womb and
two nonexistent parents to pass along the fruit of inheritance...we
cannot avoid the conclusion that each organism was from the first
marked with the records of a previous being. But since creation and
previous history are inconsistent with each other; as the very idea of
the creation of an organism excludes the idea of pre-existence of that
organism, or of any part of it; it follows, that such records are
false, so far as they testify to time." (Gould, pp102-103)
* Gosse invented special terminology to describe this apparent time:
"Gosse then invented a terminology to contrast the two parts of a
circle before and after an act of creation. He labeled as
"prochronic," or occurring outside of time, those appearances of
preexistence actually fashioned by God at the moment of creation but
seeming to mark earlier stages in the circle of life. Subsequent
events occurring after creation, and unfolding in conventional time,
he called "diachronic." Adam's navel was prochronic, the 930 years of
his earthly life diachronic. Gosse devoted more than 300 pages, some
90 percent of his text, to a simple list of examples for the following
small part of his complete argument-if species arise by sudden
creation at any point in their life cycle, their initial form must
present illusory (prochronic) appearances of preexistence." (Gould,
p103)
* Gosse regarded the pre-creation prochronic fossils as just as "real"
and worthy of study, as the post-creation diachronic ones:
"Gosse could accept strata and fossils as illusory and still advocate
their study because he did not regard the prochronic part of a cycle
as any less "true" or informative than its conventional diachronic
segment. God decreed two kinds of existence-one constructed all at
once with the appearance of elapsed time, the other progressing
sequentially. Both dovetail harmoniously to form uninterrupted
circles that, in their order and majesty, give us insight into God's
thoughts and plans....As thoughts in God's mind, solidified in stone
by creation ab nihilo, strata and fossils are just as true as if they
recorded the products of conventional time. A geologist should study
them with as much care and zeal, for we learn God's ways from both his
prochronic and his diachronic objects." (Gould, p108)
* Gosse hoped that his Omphalos theory would reconcile YEC with
geology (its subtitle was "An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot":
"...Gosse offered Omphalos to practicing scientists as a helpful
resolution of potential religious conflicts, not a challenge to their
procedures or the relevance of their information....Yet readers
greeted Omphalos with disbelief, ridicule, or worse, stunned
silence...atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and
threw it away." (Gould, pp109-110)
* Such appearance of age arguments imply deception on God's part:
"Although Gosse reconciled himself to a God who would create such a
minutely detailed, illusory past, this notion was anathema to most of
his countrymen. The British are a practical, empirical people...they
tend to respect the facts of nature at face value...Prochronism was
simply too much to swallow. The Reverend Charles Kingsley, an
intellectual leader of unquestionable devotion to both God and
science, spoke for a consensus in stating that he could not "give up
the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of
geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous
and superfluous lie." And so it has gone for the argument of Omphalos
ever since. Gosse did not invent it, and a few creationists ever
since have revived it from time to time. But it has never been
welcome or popular because it violates our intuitive notion of divine
benevolence as free of devious behavior- for while Gosse saw divine
brilliance in the idea of prochronism, most people cannot shuck their
seat-of-the-pants feeling that it smacks of plain old unfairness. Our
modern American creationists reject it vehemently as imputing a
dubious moral character to God..." (Gould, pp109-110)
* Finally, Gosse's theory is, in principle, untestable:
"But what is so desperately wrong with 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. When we
realize that Omphalos must be rejected for this methodological
absurdity, not for any demonstrated factual inaccuracy, then we will
understand science as a way of knowing, and Omphalos will serve its
purpose as an intellectual foil or prod. Science is a procedure for
testing and rejecting hypotheses, not a compendium of certain
knowledge. Claims that can be proved incorrect lie within its domain
(as false statements to be sure, but as proposals that meet the
primary methodological criterion of testability). But theories that
cannot be tested in principle are not part of science. Science is
doing, not clever cogitation; we reject Omphalos as useless, not
wrong." (Gould, pp110-111).
But before we laugh off Gosse' Omphalos appearance of age
theory, he made one important point. Apart from the original
creation of the universe from out of nothing, *any* theory of
instantaneous creation implies some degree of appearance of age.
Remember what Gould said:
"Even if he decides to create us as a simple fertilized ovum, this
initial form implies a phantom mother's womb and two nonexistent
parents to pass along the fruit of inheritance" (Gould, p102)
Ramm says:
'There is one commendable feature to Gosse...namely, that God at
creation would have to make certain things appear older than they
were. Certainly in the nature miracles and healing miracles of Christ
there would be a real time and an ideal time. To obtain a calm lake
one would have to go back several hours in the course of the weather
and follow through the necessary changes from a storm to a calm. Yet
when our Lord spoke, those intervening changes were omitted. So God
in creation started Nature in a given point of a cycle." (Ramm B.
"The Christian View of Science and Scripture", Paternoster: London,
1955, p133-134).
Certainly when Jesus made extra loaves and fish and changed water into
wine, the results would have an apparent history. But the difference
here is that there was no hint of deception. Those who witnessed it
believed it to be a miracle, not a natural occurrence.
Happy Easter!
Steve
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