by John Carey
This argument, so often cited as a premier example of reason at its most perfectly and preciously ridiculous, was most seriously and comprehensively set forth by the British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse in 1857. Gosse paid proper homage to historical context in choosing a title for his volume. He named it Omphalos (Greek for navel), in Adam’s honor, and added as a subtitle: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot.
Since Omphalos is such spectacular nonsense, readers may rightly ask why I choose to discuss it at all. I do so, first of all, because its author was such a serious and fascinating man, not a hopeless crank or malcontent. Any honest passion merits our attention, if only for the oldest of stated reasons – Terence’s celebrated Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am human, and am therefore indifferent to nothing done by humans).
Philip Henry Gosse (1810–88) 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. Although his History of the British Sea-Anemones and other assorted ramblings in natural history are no longer read, Gosse retains some notoriety as the elder figure in that classical work of late Victorian self-analysis and personal exposé, his son Edmund’s wonderful account of a young boy’s struggle against a crushing religious extremism imposed by a caring and beloved parent – Father and Son.
My second reason for considering Omphalos invokes the same theme surrounding so many of these essays about nature’s small oddities: Exceptions do prove rules (prove, that is, in the sense of probe or test, not affirm). If you want to understand what ordinary folks do, one thoughtful deviant will teach you more than ten thousand solid citizens. When we grasp why Omphalos is so unacceptable (and not, by the way, for the reason usually cited), we will understand better how science and useful logic proceed. In any case, as an exercise in the anthropology of knowledge, Omphalos has no parallel – for its surpassing strangeness arose in the mind of a stolid Englishman, whose general character and cultural setting we can grasp as akin to our own, while the exotic systems of alien cultures are terra incognita both for their content and their context.
To understand Omphalos, we must begin with a paradox. The argument that strata and fossils were created all at once with the earth, and only present an illusion of elapsed time, might be easier to appreciate if its author had been an urban armchair theologian with no feelings or affection for nature’s works. But how could a keen naturalist, who had spent days, nay months, on geological excursions, and who had studied fossils hour after hour, learning their distinctions and memorizing their names, possibly be content with the prospect that these objects of his devoted attention had never existed – were, indeed, a kind of grand joke perpetrated upon us by the Lord of All?
Philip Henry Gosse was the finest descriptive naturalist of his day. His son wrote: ‘As a collector of facts and marshaller of observations, he had not a rival in that age.’ The problem lies with the usual caricature of Omphalos as an argument that God, in fashioning the earth, had consciously and elaborately lied either to test our faith or simply to indulge in some inscrutable fit of arcane humor. Gosse, so fiercely committed both to his fossils and his God, advanced an opposing interpretation that commanded us to study geology with diligence and to respect all its facts even though they had no existence in real time. When we understand why a dedicated empiricist could embrace the argument of Omphalos (‘creation with the appearance of preexistence’), only then can we understand its deeper fallacies.
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 … [In premechanized mills, horses wore blinders or, sad to say, were actually blinded, so that they would continue to walk a circular course and not attempt to move straight forward, as horses relying on visual cues tend to do.] 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 as 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. 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.
Creation can be nothing else than a series of irruptions into circles … Supposing the irruption to have been made at what part of the circle we please, and varying this condition indefinitely at will, – 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.
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 per cent 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. Let me choose just one among his numerous illustrations, both to characterize his style of argument and to present his gloriously purple prose. If God created vertebrates as adults, Gosse claimed, their teeth imply a prochronic past in patterns of wear and replacement.
Gosse leads us on an imaginary tour of life just an hour after its creation in the wilderness. He pauses at the sea-shore and scans the distant waves:
I see yonder a … terrific tyrant of the sea … It is the grisly shark. How stealthily he glides along…. Let us go and look into his mouth…. Is not this an awful array of knives and lancets? Is not this a case of surgical instruments enough to make you shudder? What would be the amputation of your leg to this row of triangular scalpels?
Yet the teeth grow in spirals, one behind the next, each waiting to take its turn as those in current use wear down and drop out:
It follows, therefore, that the teeth which we now see erect and threatening, are the successors of former ones that have passed away, and that they were once dormant like those we see behind them…. Hence we are compelled by the phenomena to infer a long past existence to this animal, which yet has been called into being within an hour.
Should we try to argue that teeth in current use are the first members of their spiral, implying no predecessors after all, Gosse replies that their state of wear indicates a pr
ochronic past. Should we propose that these initial teeth might be unmarred in a newly created shark, Gosse moves on to another example.
Away to a broader river. Here wallows and riots the huge hippopotamus. What can we make of his dentition?
All modern adult hippos possess strongly worn and beveled canines and incisors, a clear sign of active use throughout a long life. May we not, however, as for our shark, argue that a newly created hippo might have sharp and pristine front teeth? Gosse argues correctly that no hippo could work properly with teeth in such a state. A created adult hippo must contain worn teeth as witnesses of a prochronic past:
The polished surfaces of the teeth, worn away by mutual action, afford striking evidence of the lapse of time. Some one may possibly object… ‘What right have you to assume that these teeth were worn away at the moment of its creation, admitting the animal to have been created adult. May they not have been entire?’ I reply, Impossible: the Hippopotamus’s teeth would have been perfectly useless to him, except in the ground-down condition: nay, the unworn canines would have effectually prevented his jaws from closing, necessitating the keeping of the mouth wide open until the attrition was performed; long before which, of course, he would have starved. … The degree of attrition is merely a question of time…. How distinct an evidence of past action, and yet, in the case of the created individual, how illusory!
This could go on forever (it nearly does in the book), but just one more dental example. Gosse, continuing upward on the topographic trajectory of his imaginary journey, reaches an inland wood and meets Babirussa, the famous Asian pig with upper canines growing out and arching back, almost piercing the skull:
In the thickets of this nutmeg grove beside us there is a Babiroussa; let us examine him. Here he is, almost submerged in this tepid pool. Gentle swine with the circular tusk, please to open your pretty mouth!
The pig, created by God but an hour ago, obliges, thus displaying his worn molars and, particularly, the arching canines themselves, a product of long and continuous growth.
I find this part of Gosse’s argument quite satisfactory as a solution, within the boundaries of his assumptions, to that classical dilemma of reasoning (comparable in importance to angels on pinpoints and Adam’s navel): ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ Gosse’s answer: ‘Either, at God’s pleasure, with prochronic traces of the other.’ But arguments are only as good as their premises, and Gosse’s inspired nonsense fails because an alternative assumption, now accepted as undoubtedly correct, renders the question irrelevant – namely, evolution itself. Gosse’s circles do not spin around eternally; each life cycle traces an ancestry back to inorganic chemicals in a primeval ocean. If organisms arose by acts of creation ab nihilo, then Gosse’s argument about prochronic traces must be respected. But if organisms evolved to their current state, Omphalos collapses to massive irrelevance. Gosse understood this threat perfectly well and chose to meet it by abrupt dismissal. Evolution, he allowed, discredited his system, but only a fool could accept such patent nonsense and idolatry (Gosse wrote Omphalos two years before Darwin published the Origin of Species).
If any choose to maintain, as many do, that species were gradually brought to their present maturity from humbler forms … he is welcome to his hypothesis, but I have nothing to do with it. These pages will not touch him.
But Gosse then faced a second and larger difficulty: the prochronic argument may work for organisms and their life cycles, but how can it be applied to the entire earth and its fossil record – for Gosse intended Omphalos as a treatise to reconcile the earth with biblical chronology, ‘an attempt to untie the geological knot.’ His statements about prochronic parts in organisms are only meant as collateral support for the primary geological argument. And Gosse’s geological claim fails precisely because it rests upon such dubious analogy with what he recognized (since he gave it so much more space) as a much stronger argument about modern organisms.
Gosse tried valiantly to advance for the entire earth the same two premises that made his prochronic argument work for organisms. But an unwilling world rebelled against such forced reasoning and Omphalos collapsed under its own weight of illogic. Gosse first tried to argue that all geological processes, like organic life cycles, move in circles:
The problem, then, to be solved before we can certainly determine the question of analogy between the globe and the organism, is this – Is the life-history of the globe a cycle? If it is (and there are many reasons why this is probable), then I am sure prochronism must have been evident at its creation, since there is no point in a circle which does not imply previous points.
But Gosse could never document any inevitable geological cyclicity, and his argument drowned in a sea of rhetoric and biblical allusion from Ecclesiastes: ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full. Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.’
Secondly, to make fossils prochronic, Gosse had to establish an analogy so riddled with holes that it would make the most ardent mental tester shudder – embryo is to adult as fossil is to modern organism. One might admit that chickens require previous eggs, but why should a modern reptile (especially for an antievolutionist like Gosse) be necessarily linked to a previous dinosaur as part of a cosmic cycle? A python surely does not imply the ineluctable entombment of an illusory Triceratops into prochronic strata.
With this epitome of Gosse’s argument, we can resolve the paradox posed at the outset. 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.
The prochronic part is neither a joke nor a test of faith; it represents God’s obedience to his own logic, given his decision to order creation in circles. 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. The geological time scale is no more meaningful as a yardstick than as a map of God’s thoughts.
The acceptance of the principles presented in this volume … would not, in the least degree, affect the study of scientific geology. The character and order of the strata; … the successive floras and faunas; and all the other phenomena, would be facts still. They would still be, as now, legitimate subjects of examination and inquiry … 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.
Thus, 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.
His son Edmund wrote of the great hopes that Gosse held for Omphalos:
Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. My father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue. This ‘Omphalos’ of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb.
Yet readers greeted Omphalos with disbelief, ridicule, or worse, stunned silence. Edmund Gosse continued:
He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the 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.
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, ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ in Adam Smith’s famous phrase; they tend to respect the facts of nature at face value and rarely favor the complex systems of nonobvious interpretation so popular in much of continental thought. 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 and opt instead for the even more ridiculous notion that our miles of fossiliferous strata are all products of Noah’s flood and can therefore be telescoped into the literal time scale of Genesis.