Philip Gosse’s Omphalos and the Creationist Problem of Measuring Miracles

Abstract

ABSTRACT While scholars agree that young-earth creationism is problematic, divisions remain over the fundamental question of whether creationism makes testable empirical claims. The key to resolving this impasse lies in Philip Gosse's Omphalos (1857) where he argued that a miraculously created world would exactly resemble one that had formed naturally. Creationists have both adopted and contested the reasoning in Omphalos, but ultimately failed to displace Gosse's more coherent approach. Consequently, as this paper will show, the creationist framework is not only incapable of grounding testable scientific models, but entails the absurd position that much of the universe's apparent history never occurred.