Gazing at Navels

On Evangelization in an Age of Science

From the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly observed in what he made. Romans 1:20

In 1857, a British naturalist and aquarium inventor named Philip Henry Gosse published a book that attempted to reconcile science and Biblical literalism. Gosse had attended lectures by Charles Darwin and had been impressed by Darwin’s arguments (On the Origins of Species would not be published for another two years). What had bothered him was not evolution but rather the evidence for an old earth, for rocks that were hundreds of millions of years old. He saw this as the real conflict with Genesis.

Grosse’s book, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, made an argument by necessity that God deliberately created the world to look older than it is. Omphalos is the Greek word for navel, and he argued that since humans naturally have navels Adam and Eve must have had navels even though the Genesis account implies they were not born.

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Grosse sent a copy to his friend the Rev. Charles Kingsley and asked him to write a favorable review. Kingsley refused:

Shall I tell you the truth? It is best. Your book is the first that ever made me doubt, and I fear it will make hundreds do so. Your book tends to prove this — that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes Deus quidam deceptor [‘God is a certain deceiver’]. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in the one single case of your newly created scars on the pandanus trunk, your newly created Adam's navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here...I cannot...believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind.

Over a century later Stephen Jay Gould would invoke Karl Popper’s reasoning in his criticism of Omphalos:

But what is so desperately wrong about 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 [i.e. appearing to be earlier than they actually are] or products of an extended history.

Gould’s criticism of Omphalos is based on the philosophy of science, but it is Kingsley’s criticism that should have the maximum weight with believers.

Why?

Most Christians have believed that creation is good and therefore must be true.

We clearly see that the universe is 13 billion years old. We clearly see that the earth is 5 billion years old. We clearly see that life began very early in the history of the earth. We clearly see that all life today is based on the same biochemistry, which implies a common ancestor in the distant past. These are observed facts. To deny them while retaining religious faith we must ultimately accept a Creator who deceives us. A Creator who is not the God of the Bible. Therefore, the Omphalos Hypothesis must be false, if orthodox Christianity is to survive.