Creationism - National Center for Science Education

made use of it. According to Millhauser (1954:74), Penn included it in his Comparative
Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies (1844; originally 1822), and Brown
borrowed it from Penn in his Reflections on Geology, Suggested by Perusal of Dr.
Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise (1838). Millhauser describes Brown’s employment of
the creation-with-appearance-of-age argument (1954:74):
God, his argument runs, could have performed the work of eras in a single moment if it had so pleased
Him; therefore inductive chronology is meaningless when matched against revelation. It is perfectly
reasonable to suppose that fossils, with all their appearance of an extended prehistory, might have been
created by divine fiat, in their present form, at the same instant as the hills wherein they lie.
George Fairholme, arguing in his General View of the Geology of Scripture that the
wonderfully harmonious and interdependent adaptations of organisms must have been
created simultaneously in order to function, and against the view that they could have
developed gradually, also insisted that rocks, as well as plants and man, were “created in
their mature and perfect forms”: i.e. with appearance of age.
We cannot for a moment suppose the first man to have been once an infant, or the first oak tree to have
sprung from an acorn, though all subsequent individuals, in both species, must now pass through these
stages. If this perfection of form is admitted, then, in the first creation of the animal and vegetable world,
are we to suppose that the mineral productions of the earth were exceptions from this rule? [1833:23]
Most creationists today are embarrassed by the bold totality of Gosse’s Omphalos
argument—see, for instance, Lorella Rouster’s “Father and Son: The Tragedy of Edmund
Gosse” (1980)—but very many continue to rely on creation with appearance of age for
specific cases of refractory evidence, at least as a subsidiary explanation. George
McCready Price, in How Did the World Begin?, presents Gosse’s Omphalos argument in
his chapter “The Cycle of Life,” even reproducing several of Gosse’s diagrams.
Following Gosse, Price argues that most organisms must have been created in their
mature form rather than at embryonic stages of their life cycles, though creation at any
point in the cycle would result in the appearance of prior stages in the cycle.
An important principle follows from these facts. Since Adam was created after all the rest of creation had
been completed, he had no personal knowledge of what had been done. He merely awoke and found
himself in a very complete and beautiful world. If at that time he had examined the various objects around
him, he might have been entirely mistaken concerning their age. [1942:84]
For Price, this is a corollary of his principle that “creation was entirely different from the
processes with which we are acquainted in the world today.” God created the world,
which inevitably exhibited “appearance of age” from the very first moment, due to the
cyclical nature of existence. We can reason about the past by extrapolating backwards in
terms of present processes, but only until we reach the moment of creation. At that point,
knowledge of present processes yields only illusory knowledge of the (non-existent) past.
In The Genesis Flood, Whitcomb and Morris reaffirm this major principle, and its
creation-with-appearance-of-age corollary. The soil must have been created as if the
rocks had “weathered” for centuries, in order to support plant life, and organisms must
have been created with an “appearance of age” (1961:232-233). In fact, Morris argues
(Morris wrote this section) that to deny creation with appearance of age is to affirm
atheism: