Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Newman and Eckelmann include in their book a reprint of William Henry Green’s
1890 “Primeval Chronology,” an influential article which argued that there were
genealogical gaps in Genesis and thus that events such as Creation and the Flood can not
be precisely dated.
Pattle Pun, a biology professor at Wheaton College with a Ph.D. in biology from
SUNY Buffalo, similarly advocates Progressive Creationism in Evolution: Nature and
Scripture in Conflict? (1982). He argues against youngearth creationism but insists on ex
nihilo creation, describing the impossibility of “chance” macro-evolution and the
negative effects of Darwinist thinking. He favors an “intermittent day” creationism
model, or the view that the creation ‘days’ were long, overlapping ages (another variant
of the Day-Age theory). The book is an expanded version of a 1977 paper in the J. of the
ASA, and has a Foreword by Russell Mixter of the ASA, and an appendix by J. Oliver
Buswell, Jr. on the length of the creation days (Buswell, a Day-Age creationist, was
president of Wheaton College).
OMPHALOS THEORY
Philip Henry Gosse tried to accommodate belief in a literal and recent six-day
creation with the mounting scientific evidence for the earth’s enormous age with an
ingenious theory he proposed in Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot
(1857), just two years before Darwin’s Origin. Gosse was a member of the
fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren, but also a respected naturalist and marine biologist
who popularized the aquarium in England. The dilemma posed by the contradiction
between the increasing geological evidence for an ancient earth with its succession of
fossil organisms and his staunchly held fundamentalist belief in strict creationism was
agonizing for Gosse. He thought he had solved this dilemma with his “Omphalos”
theory, or “creation with appearance of age.”
Gosse argued that just as Adam was created with a belly-button (omphalos in
Greek), so too all creatures and the earth itself were created with apparent age—illusory
evidence of previous existence. God created all things in cycles of existence, said Gosse.
The living world had to be created as an ongoing process in order to function. Regardless
of what point in the cycle things were created in, there was necessarily an implication of
prior stages of that cycle. These pre-Creation stages were “prochronic” rather than real,
however; they did not exist in actual (“diachronic”) time.
It is certain that, when the Omipotent God proposed to create a given organism, the course of that organism
was present to his idea, as an ever revolving circle, without beginning and without end. He created it at
some point in the circle, and gave it thus an arbitrary beginning; but one which involved all previous
rotations of the circle, though only as an ideal, or, in another phrase, prochronic. Is it not possible—I do
not ask for more—that in like manner, the natural course of the world was projected in his idea as a perfect
whole, and that He determined to create it at some point of that course, which act, however, should involve
previous stages, though only ideal or prochronic? [1857:344]
Thus, from the moment of creation, organisms, and the earth itself, showed signs of
previous (but “prochronic”) existence.
The past conditions or stages of existence in question, can indeed be as triumphantly inferred by legitimate
deduction from the present...; they rest on the very same evidences; they are identically the same in every