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Title: Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (The Evolutiondebate, 1813-1870) by Philip Gosse, David Knight ISBN: 0-415-28926-2 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: October, 2003 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $170.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Valued as a primary source
Comment: Grosse was apparently the first to publish the idea that God might have created the earth with the appearance of age. For this reason, and its value in understanding the history and philosophy of science, I give the book four stars. Otherwise the book was a good example of nineteenth century scientific writing: too many words, excessive examples and illustrations. There are a few very quotable lines spread throughout the text, but most of the book is redundant.

Rating: 4
Summary: Omphalos--A Meditation on the Concept of Creation ex nihilo
Comment: Philip Gosse's little book is a gem of quiet, reverent thinking by a talented biologist. He simply (and unusually, for his age) was courageous enough to ask the question, "how would the earth and all its various interconnected systems look different than they do now, if the world had been created in an instant by a single creative act?" To explore this question, he asks his contemporary young earth creationists to follow him on an imaginative journey back to the very first day of the earth's creation, and he examines the nature of various living things that he sees. Do the trees have rings? Are there seeds just now sprouting from the ground? Do Adam and Eve (and all the mammals) have hair? Teeth? Bones? Belly-buttons?

Every living thing in the world, he begins to prove, is part of an interconnected temporal system, and has a four-dimensional nature that goes to its very core. Nature cannot be created ex nihilo without creating time ex nihilo and nature's whole process "in medias res", so to speak.

This is where Gosse's meditation has been so misunderstood. His argument is that IF the world has been created out of nothing by an act of creative power, AND that event happened recently as his fellow churchmen were fond of claiming, THEN there could be no physical evidence of the point at which that creation took place. To put it crudely, the world is by nature a spinning top, and if it has been created at all, it has been created spinning, and there will be no finger-marks on it, no scars of a sudden acceleration.

Gosse's thoughts were directed at the believers of his time, and were not intended to convert skeptics. It is sad that his prejudice against Darwin and the evolutionists (which he shared with most people of his day, believing and non-believing) has been held against him.

The next step for a 21st century person of belief is to think beyond Gosse about the Big Bang.