Editing Omphalos hypothesis (section)

=== 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 [[Hebrew calendar|Jewish calendar]] is correct.<ref>Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, [http://www.dovidgottlieb.com/comments/AGEOFTHEUNIVERSE.htm "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 religions|Western religious]] traditions was a significant debate among intellectuals.<ref name=":0" /> Gosse published ''[[Omphalos (book)|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 [[fossil]]s 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 creationism|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|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 [[Day-age creationism|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" />