Here are some notes on Gosse which Burgy posted here in 1997. Enjoy.
Bill
To: asa@calvin.edu
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 09:11:11 -0700
Subject: Gosse
Message-ID: <19971028.091538.3302.2.johnburgeson@juno.com>
A correspondent commented (comments uploaded here with his permission)
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.
Here is more fully what Ramm said:
"Pro-Chronic, or ideal time view. In 1857 Philip Henry Gosse
published Omphalos: An attempt to Untie the Geological Knot.
Gosse was a man learned in natural history and not a simpleton nor
an arm-chair speculator. He argued that Nature is a circular process
and therefore that creation must commence somewhere in the cycle.
A building may be commenced from scratch at the foundation but
buildings do not have a cyclical existence. You cannot create an
organism from scratch. Because all organic life exists as a cycle,
creation must start somewhere in the cycle, and hence the created life
would appear as if it had already gone through the cycle up to the
point where it was created. Gosse lists as his two fundamental theses
that (i) all organic life moves in a cycle, and (ii) creation is a
violent irruption into the cycle of Nature. He asks what creation is and
answers his own question:
'[Creation] is the sudden bursting into a circle. Since there is no
one state in the course of existence, which more than any other affords
natural commencing point, whatever stage selected by the arbitrary
will of God, must be an unnatural, or rather a preter-natural,
commencing point.'
Omphalos is the Greek word for navel. Did Adam have a navel? Of
course he did, argues Gosse. He was created at a given point of the
circle of life and therefore was created as if he had gone through the
entire cycle. If God created a tree, it would have rings in it. God
could create a tree only at a point in its natural cycle. Every
object of creation has two times. That which is before time or
instantaneous in coming into existence is pro-chronic. That which
consumes time is dia-chronic. All processes during the course of the
world since its creation are dia-chronic. All things at the moment of
creation were pro-chronic. Gosse also uses the terms real time and
ideal time. At the moment of creation Adam's real time was zero-
actually he did not exist till the moment of creation. His ideal time
was, say for purposes of illustration, thirty years old. A tree in
the garden of Eden would appear fifty years old (its ideal age)
whereas it had just been created (its real time).
How does this apply to geology? It means that the real time of
he universe might be 6,000 B.C. or 10,000 B.C., whereas its ideal
time might be in millions of years. Fossils and geological processes
refer then to ideal or pro-chronic time, not to real or historical
time. Gosse is not trying to prove any specific date for creation, but he
is
trying to set a limit to what science can say. If creation is an
irruption into the cycle of Nature then we cannot reckon backward
indefinitely. Nor does this pro-chronic view of geology
interfere with the work of
the geologists. The facts of geology remain unchanged and the
geologist can do his work unhampered by the theologian. The only
word to the geologist from the theologian is to inform the geologist
that he is working with ideal and not real time.
Logically it is difficult to get around Gosse, for he claims that all
the evidence for the reality of the fossils, geologic strata, are simply
testimonies to the perfection of God's job of antiquating His
universe. Even Brewster misses this point in a most glaring example of
failing
to follow through the logic of the man he is criticising Brewster
appeals to half-digested food in fossil finds, or foetuses in fossils
as if these were real items, not ideal. If God antiquated the earth He
did a
master job in catching the cycle in situ, as it were, catching such
things as they are, just as Brewster describes them.
There is one commendable feature to Gosse, and even Brewster
admits it, 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.
The weakness of Gosse's theory is not that we can find some
indications of real time, but in the thinness of the theory. If the
earth were perfectly antiquated then it would be impossible to tell the
difference between (i) a world which actually went through long
processes of aging, and (ii) a world which was perfectly antiquated.
If the two are impossible of differentiation, common sense prefers (i)
over (ii). If we conduct our science and geology on the grounds of a
world having gone through such a process, it would be rather absurd
to affirm that it had not really gone through such a process Such a
scheme as Gosse propounds, clever as it is, is a tacit admission of
the correctness of geology. Better sense will state that the ideal time
is
the real time. If this is done Gosse offers us no basis of the
reconciliation of geology and Genesis and, therefore, we must look
elsewhere."
(Ramm B. "The Christian View of Science and Scripture",
Paternoster: London, 1955, p133-134).
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