Philip Henry Gosse, the man who said God had put fossils in the rocks to deceive geologists, is a laughing stock of popular science. His reputation is defended here by one of the foremost modern science writers, Stephen Jay Gould. A research biologist, Gould has devoted many years to the study of the Bahamian land snail Cerion. ‘I love Cerion’‚ he has declared, ‘with all my heart and intellect.’ However, it is the clarity and originality of his scientific writing that has brought him the widest fame. Four collections of his monthly columns in Natural History magazine have been published. This is from the fourth, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1990).

The ample fig leaf served our artistic forefathers well as a botanical shield against indecent exposure for Adam and Eve, our naked parents in the primeval bliss and innocence of Eden. Yet, in many ancient paintings, foliage hides more than Adam’s genitalia; a wandering vine covers his navel as well. If modesty enjoined the genital shroud, a very different motive – mystery – placed a plant over his belly. In a theological debate more portentous than the old argument about angels on pinpoints, many earnest people of faith had wondered whether Adam had a navel.

He was, after all, not born of a woman and required no remnant of his nonexistent umbilical cord. Yet, in creating a prototype, would not God make his first man like all the rest to follow? Would God, in other words, not create with the appearance of preexistence? In the absence of definite guidance to resolve this vexatious issue, and not wishing to incur anyone’s wrath, many painters literally hedged and covered Adam’s belly.

A few centuries later, as the nascent science of geology gathered evidence for the earth’s enormous antiquity, some advocates of biblical literalism revived this old argument for our entire planet. The strata and their entombed fossils surely seem to represent a sequential record of countless years, but wouldn’t God create his earth with the appearance of preexistence? Why should we not believe that he created strata and fossils to give modern life a harmonious order by granting it a sensible (if illusory) past? As God provided Adam with a navel to stress continuity with future men, so too did he endow a pristine world with the appearance of an ordered history. Thus, the earth might be but a few thousand years old, as Genesis literally affirmed, and still record an apparent tale of untold eons.

This argument, so often cited as a premier example of reason at its most perfectly and preciously ridiculous, was most seriously and comprehensively set forth by the British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse in 1857. Gosse paid proper homage to historical context in choosing a title for his volume. He named it Omphalos (Greek for navel), in Adam’s honor, and added as a subtitle: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot.

Since Omphalos is such spectacular nonsense, readers may rightly ask why I choose to discuss it at all. I do so, first of all, because its author was such a serious and fascinating man, not a hopeless crank or malcontent. Any honest passion merits our attention, if only for the oldest of stated reasons – Terence’s celebrated Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am human, and am therefore indifferent to nothing done by humans).

Philip Henry Gosse (1810–88) 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. Although his History of the British Sea-Anemones and other assorted ramblings in natural history are no longer read, Gosse retains some notoriety as the elder figure in that classical work of late Victorian self-analysis and personal exposé, his son Edmund’s wonderful account of a young boy’s struggle against a crushing religious extremism imposed by a caring and beloved parent – Father and Son.

My second reason for considering Omphalos invokes the same theme surrounding so many of these essays about nature’s small oddities: Exceptions do prove rules (prove, that is, in the sense of probe or test, not affirm). If you want to understand what ordinary folks do, one thoughtful deviant will teach you more than ten thousand solid citizens. When we grasp why Omphalos is so unacceptable (and not, by the way, for the reason usually cited), we will understand better how science and useful logic proceed. In any case, as an exercise in the anthropology of knowledge, Omphalos has no parallel – for its surpassing strangeness arose in the mind of a stolid Englishman, whose general character and cultural setting we can grasp as akin to our own, while the exotic systems of alien cultures are terra incognita both for their content and their context.

To understand Omphalos, we must begin with a paradox. The argument that strata and fossils were created all at once with the earth, and only present an illusion of elapsed time, might be easier to appreciate if its author had been an urban armchair theologian with no feelings or affection for nature’s works. But how could a keen naturalist, who had spent days, nay months, on geological excursions, and who had studied fossils hour after hour, learning their distinctions and memorizing their names, possibly be content with the prospect that these objects of his devoted attention had never existed – were, indeed, a kind of grand joke perpetrated upon us by the Lord of All?

Philip Henry Gosse was the finest descriptive naturalist of his day. His son wrote: ‘As a collector of facts and marshaller of observations, he had not a rival in that age.’ The problem lies with the usual caricature of Omphalos as an argument that God, in fashioning the earth, had consciously and elaborately lied either to test our faith or simply to indulge in some inscrutable fit of arcane humor. Gosse, so fiercely committed both to his fossils and his God, advanced an opposing interpretation that commanded us to study geology with diligence and to respect all its facts even though they had no existence in real time. When we understand why a dedicated empiricist could embrace the argument of Omphalos (‘creation with the appearance of preexistence’), only then can we understand its deeper fallacies.

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.

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. 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.

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 per cent 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. Let me choose just one among his numerous illustrations, both to characterize his style of argument and to present his gloriously purple prose. If God created vertebrates as adults, Gosse claimed, their teeth imply a prochronic past in patterns of wear and replacement.

Gosse leads us on an imaginary tour of life just an hour after its creation in the wilderness. He pauses at the sea-shore and scans the distant waves:

Yet the teeth grow in spirals, one behind the next, each waiting to take its turn as those in current use wear down and drop out:

Should we try to argue that teeth in current use are the first members of their spiral, implying no predecessors after all, Gosse replies that their state of wear indicates a prochronic past. Should we propose that these initial teeth might be unmarred in a newly created shark, Gosse moves on to another example.

All modern adult hippos possess strongly worn and beveled canines and incisors, a clear sign of active use throughout a long life. May we not, however, as for our shark, argue that a newly created hippo might have sharp and pristine front teeth? Gosse argues correctly that no hippo could work properly with teeth in such a state. A created adult hippo must contain worn teeth as witnesses of a prochronic past:

This could go on forever (it nearly does in the book), but just one more dental example. Gosse, continuing upward on the topographic trajectory of his imaginary journey, reaches an inland wood and meets Babirussa, the famous Asian pig with upper canines growing out and arching back, almost piercing the skull:

The pig, created by God but an hour ago, obliges, thus displaying his worn molars and, particularly, the arching canines themselves, a product of long and continuous growth.

I find this part of Gosse’s argument quite satisfactory as a solution, within the boundaries of his assumptions, to that classical dilemma of reasoning (comparable in importance to angels on pinpoints and Adam’s navel): ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ Gosse’s answer: ‘Either, at God’s pleasure, with prochronic traces of the other.’ But arguments are only as good as their premises, and Gosse’s inspired nonsense fails because an alternative assumption, now accepted as undoubtedly correct, renders the question irrelevant – namely, evolution itself. Gosse’s circles do not spin around eternally; each life cycle traces an ancestry back to inorganic chemicals in a primeval ocean. If organisms arose by acts of creation ab nihilo, then Gosse’s argument about prochronic traces must be respected. But if organisms evolved to their current state, Omphalos collapses to massive irrelevance. Gosse understood this threat perfectly well and chose to meet it by abrupt dismissal. Evolution, he allowed, discredited his system, but only a fool could accept such patent nonsense and idolatry (Gosse wrote Omphalos two years before Darwin published the Origin of Species).

But Gosse then faced a second and larger difficulty: the prochronic argument may work for organisms and their life cycles, but how can it be applied to the entire earth and its fossil record – for Gosse intended Omphalos as a treatise to reconcile the earth with biblical chronology, ‘an attempt to untie the geological knot.’ His statements about prochronic parts in organisms are only meant as collateral support for the primary geological argument. And Gosse’s geological claim fails precisely because it rests upon such dubious analogy with what he recognized (since he gave it so much more space) as a much stronger argument about modern organisms.

Gosse tried valiantly to advance for the entire earth the same two premises that made his prochronic argument work for organisms. But an unwilling world rebelled against such forced reasoning and Omphalos collapsed under its own weight of illogic. Gosse first tried to argue that all geological processes, like organic life cycles, move in circles:

But Gosse could never document any inevitable geological cyclicity, and his argument drowned in a sea of rhetoric and biblical allusion from Ecclesiastes: ‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full. Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.’

Secondly, to make fossils prochronic, Gosse had to establish an analogy so riddled with holes that it would make the most ardent mental tester shudder – embryo is to adult as fossil is to modern organism. One might admit that chickens require previous eggs, but why should a modern reptile (especially for an antievolutionist like Gosse) be necessarily linked to a previous dinosaur as part of a cosmic cycle? A python surely does not imply the ineluctable entombment of an illusory Triceratops into prochronic strata.

With this epitome of Gosse’s argument, we can resolve the paradox posed at the outset. 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.

The prochronic part is neither a joke nor a test of faith; it represents God’s obedience to his own logic, given his decision to order creation in circles. 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. The geological time scale is no more meaningful as a yardstick than as a map of God’s thoughts.

Thus, 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.

His son Edmund wrote of the great hopes that Gosse held for Omphalos:

Yet readers greeted Omphalos with disbelief, ridicule, or worse, stunned silence. Edmund Gosse continued:

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, ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ in Adam Smith’s famous phrase; they tend to respect the facts of nature at face value and rarely favor the complex systems of nonobvious interpretation so popular in much of continental thought. 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 and opt instead for the even more ridiculous notion that our miles of fossiliferous strata are all products of Noah’s flood and can therefore be telescoped into the literal time scale of Genesis.

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.

Gosse’s deep error lay in his failure to appreciate this essential character of scientific reasoning. He hammered his own coffin nails by continually emphasizing that Omphalos made no practical difference – that the world would look exactly the same with a prochronic or diachronic past. (Gosse thought that this admission would make his argument acceptable to conventional geologists; he never realized that it could only lead them to reject his entire scheme as irrelevant.) ‘I do not know,’ he wrote, ‘that a single conclusion, now accepted, would need to be given up, except that of actual chronology.’

Gosse emphasized that we cannot know where God placed his wafer of creation into the cosmic circle because prochronic objects, created ab nihilo, look exactly like diachronic products of actual time. To those who argued that coprolites (fossil excrement) prove the existence of active, feeding animals in a real geological past, Gosse replied that as God would create adults with feces in their intestines, so too would he place petrified turds into his created strata. (I am not making up this example for comic effect; you will find it on page 353 of Omphalos.) Thus, with these words, Gosse sealed his fate and placed himself outside the pale of science:

Gosse was emotionally crushed by the failure of Omphalos. During the long winter evenings of his discontent, in the January cold of 1858, he sat by the fire with his eight-year-old son, trying to ward off bitter thoughts by discussing the grisly details of past and current murders. Young Edmund heard of Mrs Manning, who buried her victim in quicklime and was hanged in black satin; of Burke and Hare, the Scottish ghouls; and of the ‘carpetbag mystery,’ a sackful of neatly butchered human parts hung from a pier on Waterloo Bridge. This may not have been the most appropriate subject for an impressionable lad (Edmund was, by his own memory, ‘nearly frozen into stone with horror’), yet I take some comfort in the thought that Philip Henry Gosse, smitten with the pain of rejection for his untestable theory, could take refuge in something so unambiguously factual, so utterly concrete.