Omphalos hypothesis

The Omphalos hypothesis is one attempt to reconcile the scientific evidence that the Earth is billions of years old with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative, which implies that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.<ref name=":0" /> It is based on the religious belief that the universe was created by a divine being, within the past six to ten thousand years (in keeping with flood geology), and that the presence of objective, verifiable evidence that the universe is older than approximately ten millennia is due to the creator introducing false evidence that makes the universe appear significantly older.

The idea was named after the title of an 1857 book, Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, in which Gosse argued that for the world to be "functional", God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with fully grown hair, fingernails, and navels<ref name="Gardner2000">Template:Cite book</ref> (ὀμφαλός omphalos is Greek for "navel"), and all living creatures with fully formed evolutionary features, etc., and that, therefore, no empirical evidence about the age of the Earth or universe can be taken as reliable.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Various supporters of Young Earth creationism have given different explanations for their belief that the universe is filled with false evidence of the universe's age,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> including a belief that some things needed to be created at a certain age for the ecosystems to function, or their belief that the creator was deliberately planting deceptive evidence.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The idea was widely rejected in the 19th century, when Gosse published his aforementioned book.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref> It saw some revival in the 20th century by some Young Earth creationists, who extended the argument to include visible light that appears to originate from far-off stars and galaxies (addressing the "starlight problem").<ref name="Rice SI">Template:Cite journal</ref>

Development of the idea

Pre-scientific sources

Stories of the beginning of human life based on the creation story in Genesis have been published for centuries. The 4th-century theologian Ephrem the Syrian described a world in which divine creation instantly produced fully grown organisms:

19th-century thinkers

By the 19th century, scientific evidence of the Earth's age had been collected, and it disagreed with a literal reading of the biblical accounts.<ref name=":0" /> This evidence was rejected by some writers at the time, such as François-René de Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand wrote in his 1802 book, Génie du christianisme (Part I Book IV Chapter V), that "God might have created, and doubtless did create, the world with all the marks of antiquity and completeness which it now exhibits." In modern times, Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb supported a similar position, saying that the objective scientific evidence for an old universe is strong, but wrong, and that the traditional Jewish calendar is correct.<ref>Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, "The Age of the Universe". "The solution to the contradiction between the age of the earth and the universe according to science and the Jewish date of 5755 years since Creation is this: the real age of the universe is 5755 years, but it has misleading evidence of greater age."</ref>

In the middle of the 19th century, the disagreement between scientific evidence about the age of the Earth and the Western religious traditions was a significant debate among intellectuals.<ref name=":0" /> Gosse published Omphalos in 1857 to explain his answer to this question. He concluded that the religious tradition was correct. Gosse began with the earlier idea that the Earth contained mature organisms at the instant they were created, and that these organisms had false signs of their development, such as hair on mammals, which grows over time.<ref name=":0" /> He extended this idea of creating a single mature organism to creating mature systems, and concluded that fossils were an artifact of the creation process and merely part of what was necessary to make creation work. Therefore, he reasoned, fossils and other signs of the Earth's age could not be used to prove its age.<ref name=":0" />

Other contemporary proposals for reconciling the stories of creation in Genesis with the scientific evidence included the interval theory or gap theory of creation, in which a large interval of time passed in between the initial creation of the universe and the beginning of the Six Days of Creation. This idea was put forward by Archbishop John Bird Sumner of Canterbury in Treatise on the Records of Creation.<ref name=":0" /> Another popular idea, promoted by the English theologian John Pye Smith, was that the Garden of Eden described the events of only one small location.<ref name=":0" /> A third proposal, by French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, held that the six "days" of the creation story were arbitrary and large ages rather than 24-hour periods.<ref name=":0" />

Theologians rejected Gosse's proposal on the grounds that it seemed to make the divine creator tell lies—either lying in the scriptures, or lying in nature.<ref name=":0" /> Scientists rejected it on the grounds that it disagreed with uniformitarianism, an explanation of geology that was widely supported at the time, and the impossibility of testing or falsifying the idea.<ref name=":0" />

Modern creationists

Some modern creationists still argue against scientific evidence in the same way. For instance, John D. Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research wrote in 1990 about the "appearance of age", saying that: "...what [God] created was functionally complete right from the start—able to fulfill the purpose for which it was created".<ref name=":1">Template:Cite book</ref>

He does not extend this idea to the geological record, preferring to believe that it was all created in the Flood, but others such as Gerald E. Aardsma go further, with his idea of "virtual history". This appears to suggest that events after the creation have changed the "virtual history" we now see, including the fossils:

CriticismsTemplate:Anchor

Beginning of false creation

Although 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.<ref>David L. Wilcox, God and Evolution: A Faith-Based Understanding, Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2004, p. 30.</ref> This idea is sometimes called Last Thursdayism by its opponents, as in "the world might as well have been created last Thursday."<ref name=":1" />

Scientifically, the concept is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific study—in other words, it is impossible to conclude the truth of the hypothesis, since it requires the empirical data itself to have been arbitrarily created to look the way it does at every observable level of detail.<ref name="Prothero">Template:Cite book</ref>

Deceptive creator

From a religious viewpoint, it can be interpreted as God having created a "fake" universe, such as illusions of light emitted from supernovae that never really happened, or volcanic mountains that were never really volcanoes in the first place and that never actually experienced erosion.

In a rebuttal of the claim that God might have implanted a false history of the age of the universe 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,<ref>G. Safran, "Gedolei Yisroel Condemn Rabbi Nosson Slifkin's Books". Template:Webarchive. Dei'ah veDibur, January 12, 2005.</ref> writes:

Similar formulations

Five-minute hypothesis

The five-minute hypothesis is a skeptical hypothesis put forth by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, that proposes that the universe sprang into existence five minutes ago from nothing, with human memory and all other signs of history included. It is a commonly used example of how one may maintain extreme philosophical skepticism with regard to memory and trust in evidentially derived historical chronology.<ref name=russell5>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Borges's Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

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:<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Borges had earlier written a short essay, "The Creation and P. H. Gosse"<ref name="borges-essay"> Template:Cite book </ref> 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.

Last Thursdayism

The satirical "Last Thursday" version likely originated in the 1990s. In the early 21st century, a "church" of "Last Thursdayism" was established as a parody of religion and tenets of faith.<ref>Church of Last Thursdayism, in Internet Archive.</ref> The church sparked lively debates online.<ref>For example, see the social network Reddit here and here, in English.</ref>

Last Thursdayism presents the Omphalos hypothesis as a parody religion,. The "Church of Last Thursdayism" website attempted to equate belief in Last Thursdayism with an actual religion, listing "tenets of faith":

See also

• "A Clockwork Origin"
• Age of the universe
• Boltzmann brain
• Christian mythology
• Conflict thesis
• Dark City (1998 film)
• Kabbalah
• Omphalos (story)
• Russell's teapot
• Strata (novel)

External links

• Mirror of the defunct "The Church Of Last Thursdayism" webpage (stored at www.archive.org)
• Archived Usenet Post containing the FAQ of "The Church of Last Thursdayism" (stored by Google.com)
• "The Church of Last Thursday" home