Editing Omphalos hypothesis (section)

==Criticisms{{anchor|Last_Thursdayism}}==
===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 [[Falsifiability|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">{{cite book |last1=Prothero |first1=Donald R. |author-link1=Donald Prothero |title=Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters |date=November 6, 2007 |publisher=Columbia University Press |isbn=978-0-231-51142-1 |page=9 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=R2MaAwAAQBAJ&q=Omphalos%20hypothesis%20falsifiable&pg=PA9 |access-date=October 6, 2020 |language=en}}</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 [[volcano|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]], [[Natan Slifkin|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, [http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/archives5765/bo/aslifkin.htm "Gedolei Yisroel Condemn Rabbi Nosson Slifkin's Books"]. {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071229212121/http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/archives5765/bo/aslifkin.htm|date=December 29, 2007}}. Dei'ah veDibur, January 12, 2005.</ref> writes:

{{blockquote|<p>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 that presents the real story, and that the Torah was devised by God to test us with a fake history!</p><p>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?<ref name="Slifkin Slifkin 2006 p. 167">{{cite book | last=Slifkin | first=Natan | title=The Challenge of Creation: Judaism's Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution | edition=2nd |publisher=Zoo Torah | series=Torah universe | orig-year=2006 |year=2008 | isbn=978-1-933143-15-6 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cnNKtEhHJ9kC&pg=PA167 | page=167}}</ref></p>}}