Omphalos (theology)

The omphalos hypothesis was named after the title of an 1857 book, "Omphalos" by Philip Henry Gosse, in which Gosse argued that in order for the world to be "functional", God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails, and navels ("omphalos" is Greek for "navel"), and that therefore "no" evidence that we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable. The idea has seen some revival in the twentieth century by some modern creationists, who have extended the argument to light that appears to originate in far-off stars and galaxies, although many other creationists reject this explanation [ [http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/405.asp How can we see distant stars in a young universe? ] ] (and also believe that Adam and Eve had no navels). [ [http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i3/bellybutton.asp Did Adam have a belly-button? ] ]

Criticism

When did false history begin?

Though Gosse's original Omphalos hypothesis specifies a popular creation story, others have proposed that the idea does not preclude creation as recently as five minutes ago, including memories of times before this created "in situ". [David L. Wilcox, "God and Evolution:A Faith-Based Understanding", Valley Forge,PA: Judson Press, 2004, 30, ] This idea is sometimes called "Last Thursdayism" by its opponents, as in "the world might as well have been created last Thursday."The concept is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific method — in other words, it is impossible even "in principle" to subject it to any form of test by reference to any empirical data because the empirical data themselves are considered to have been arbitrarily created to look the way they do at every observable level of detail.

A deceptive creator

From a religious viewpoint, it can be interpreted as God having 'created a fake,' such as illusions of light in space of stellar explosions (supernovae) that never really happened, or volcanic mountains that were never really volcanoes in the first place and that never actually experienced erosion, and the idea that God would create appearances that are so completely deceiving to every level of detail is not consistent with most benevolent theistic theologies.

This conception has therefore drawn harsh rebuke from some theologians. Reverend Canon Brian Hebblethwaite, for example, preached against Bertrand Russell's projection of Gosse's concept: The basis for Hebblethwaite's objection, however, is the presumption of a God that would not deceive us about our very humanity — an unprovable presumption that the omphalos hypothesis rejects at the outset. Hebblethwaite also suggests that God necessarily had to create certain elements of the Universe in combination with the creation of man:

In a rebuttal of the claim that God might have implanted a false history of the age of the Universe in order to test our faith in the truth of the Torah, Rabbi Natan Slifkin, an author whose works have been banned by several Haredi rabbis for going against the tenets of the Talmud, [G. Safran, [http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/archives5765/bo/aslifkin.htm "Gedolei Yisroel Condemn Rabbi Nosson Slifkin's Books"] . Dei'ah veDibur, January 12, 2005.] writes:

quotation|God essentially created two conflicting accounts of Creation: one in nature, and one in the Torah. How can it be determined which is the real story, and which is the fake designed to mislead us? One could equally propose that it is nature which presents the real story, and that the Torah was devised by God to test us with a fake history!

One has to be able to rely on God's truthfulness if religion is to function. Or, to put it another way -- if God went to enormous lengths to convince us that the world is billions of years old, who are we to disagree? [Slifkin, p167]

Gosse, however, did not assert that God deceived us, only that any act of creation of human, animal or plant would "at the instant of its creation present indubitable evidences of a previous history" [(Gosse, p335)] in far more subtle, microscopic and unavoidable ways than the presence or absence of hair or navels. He presented it not as an hypothesis but as a law or logical necessity: any created organism must be "from the first marked with the records of a previous being". [(p336)] The alternative would have been a created earth where trees had no leaves or rings; birds had no feathers; animals had no skin, teeth, bones or blood.

A consistent creator

Many Fact|date=March 2008 Jewish answers to the age of the Universe delve slightly into the Omphalos hypothesis. In particular, Slifkin discusses the Omphalos hypothesis.

quotation|Gosse took it as a given that each animal species was created "ex nihilo" rather than having evolved. Based on that premise, he pointed out that there is no such thing as creating something at the "first stage" in an animal's existence. A cow begins life as a calf; but before that, it is a fetus, and earlier that being a fetus, it was an ovum, part of its mother. Every species is an endless cycle of life. [Slifkin, Natan. "Challenge of Creation", Zootorah 2006, page 161]

"However, careful consideration shows that the false history was most certainly "not" complete." [Slifkin, p164] Did Adam have memories of his non-existent childhood? Would he have mementos of his non-existent childhood? Would he have scars from the non-existent proverbial fall off of his non-existent proverbial tricycle? If one answers these questions with a smile and a quick nod of the head, why is it that Adam would possess a scar from his non-existent umbilical cord not being removed? "Since the false history must have necessarily been incomplete, it is difficult to argue that God should have created a false history at all." [Slifkin, p164]

Support

Chateaubriand wrote in defense of omphalism in his 1802 book, Génie du christianisme (Part I Book IV Chapter V): "God might have created, and doubtless did create, the world with all the marks of antiquity and completeness which it now exhibits."

Rabbi Davis Gottlieb supports a similar position, arguing further that the evidence for an old universe is strong [Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, "The Age of the Universe." [http://www.dovidgottlieb.com/comments/AGEOFTHEUNIVERSE.htm] ] : "The bones, artifacts, partially decayed radium, potassium-argon, uranium, the red-shifted light from space, etc. - all of it points to a greater age which nevertheless is not true."

Other formulations

Other Religions

:* "Last Thursdayism", a response to omphalism which posits that by the same logic, the world might have been created last Thursday (or by implication, on any given date and time), but with the appearance of age: people's memories, history books, fossils, light already on the way from distant stars, and so forth. It is aimed at the logic point that when this logic is permitted, it can be used to prove any "fixed date creation" schema. The first known reference is on November 5, 1992, in a post titled "Last Thursdayism proven!", responding to an apocalyptic prediction: "As everyone knows, it was predicted that the world would end last Wednesday at 10:00 PST. Since there appears to be a world in existence now, the entire universe must therefore have been recreated, complete with an apparent "history", last *Thursday*. QED." [cite newsgroup
title=Last Thursdayism proven!
author=Seanna Watson
date=1992-11-05
newsgroup=talk.origins |url=http://groups.google.co.ug/group/talk.origins/tree/browse_frm/month/1992-11/8a4b8caf71bad6f8?rnum=81&_done=%2Fgroup%2Ftalk.origins%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fmonth%2F1992-11%3F
accessdate= 2008-04-09 ] It developed on talk.origins into a satiric parody religion with a catechism [cite newsgroup
title=Church of Last Thursday FAQ
author=Micheal Keane
date=1996-08-25
newsgroup=talk.origins
id=4vovtf$[e-mail]
url=http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_thread/thread/9263b3be16d586f3
accessdate= 2007-10-08 ] ; other postings started the "heretical" splinter groups Last Wednesdayism and Last Fridayism. Another version, claiming not to be a parody, incorporates ideas from solipsism. cite web
url=http://www.last-thursday.org/questions.html
title=Last Thursday Catechism
accessdate=2008-03-06 ]

:* Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1940 work, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", describes a fictional world in which some essentially follow as a religious belief a philosophy much like Russell's discussion on the logical extreme of Gosse's theory [ [http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges_-_Tlon,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius.html#backto2 Borges - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ] ] :

::quotation|One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, the past none other than present memory.

Historical analysis

Borges had earlier written a short essay, "The Creation and P. H. Gosse" cite book
last=Borges
first=Jorge Luis
authorlink=Jorge Luis Borges
others=translated by Ruth L. C. Simms
title=Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=xvycg3RMAW4C
accessdate=2008-02-27
year=1964
publisher=University of Texas Press
isbn=0292715498
pages=22-25
chapter=The Creation and P.H. Gosse
chapterurl=http://books.google.com/books?id=xvycg3RMAW4C&pg=PA22&sig=HCEuluna5KI_O7l5QSZSt0_Shcg ] that explored the rejection of Gosse's "Omphalos". Borges argued that its unpopularity stemmed from Gosse's explicit (if inadvertent) outlining of what Borges characterized as absurdities in the Genesis story.

Formal Systems

Cellular automata

For some computer simulated cellular automata there are states that have no feasible predecessors. These are called "Garden of Eden patterns". We say a state X is a Garden of Eden pattern if there is no state Y and transition Z such that Y transitions to X by the rule Z.

Chess

Some chess patterns have no possible predecessors. Showing a particular pattern can't be reached from the standard starting position is one of the various types of Retrograde analysis.

ee also

* "Omphalos" (book)
* Simulated reality
* Age of the universe
* Conflict thesis
* Antediluvian
* Sons of Noah
* 40th century BC
* History of the world
* Jewish mythology

References

External links

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20070219011828/http://www.roizen.com/ron/omph.htm 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.]
* [http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/responding.htm Responding to skepticism]
* [http://web.archive.org/web/19990420141357/http://weber.u.washington.edu/~aexia/thursday.htm Mirror of the defunct The Church Of Last Thursdayism's webpage (stored at www.archive.org)]
* [http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_thread/thread/9263b3be16d586f3/5241e6c947f8431e Archived Usenet Post containing the FAQ of the Church of Last Thursdayism (stored by Google.com)]
* [http://www.last-thursday.org/ "Church of Last Thursday" home]