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 (1810–1888) 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 feeling 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
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 (1810–1888) 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 feeling 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
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