Philip Henry Gosse - Omphalos

Omphalos

In the months following Emily's death, Gosse worked with remarkable diligence on a book that he may have viewed as the most important of his career. Although a failure both financially and intellectually, it is the book by which he is best remembered. Gosse believed that he had discovered a theory that might neatly resolve the seeming contradiction in the age of the earth between the evidence of God's Word and the evidence of His creation as expounded by such contemporary geologists as Charles Lyell. In 1857, two years before the publication of Charles Darwin's, Origin of Species, Gosse published Omphalos: an Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot and thereby created what has been called the Omphalos hypothesis.

In what Stephen Jay Gould has called "glorious purple prose," Gosse argued that if one assumed creation ex nihilo, there would necessarily be traces of previous existence that had never actually occurred. "Omphalos" is Greek for "navel", and Gosse argued that the first man, Adam, did not require a navel because he was never born; nevertheless he must have had one, as do all complete human beings, just as God must have created trees with rings that they never grew. Thus, Gosse argued that the fossil record—even coprolites—might also be evidence of life that had never actually existed but which may have been instantly formed by God at the moment of creation.

The general response was "as the Westminster Review put it, that Gosse's theory was 'too monstrous for belief.'" Even his friend, the novelist Charles Kingsley, wrote that he had read "no other book which so staggered and puzzled" him, that he could not believe that God had "written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind." Journalists later sniggered that God had apparently hidden fossils in the rocks to tempt geologists to infidelity.

Omphalos sold poorly and was eventually rebound with a new title, Creation, "in case the obscure one had had an effect on sales." The problem was not with the title, and in 1869 most of the edition was sold as waste paper.