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