Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Davidheiser does not speculate whether Adam was created with a belly-button or not, but
notes that Adam and the animals were created fully developed. He continues:
We may wonder—if a tree in the Garden of Eden had been cut down, would it have shown rings of growth?
Probably so. Might not this extend to the mineral creation? Would uranium ores have shown radiogenic
end products at that time? We can only speculate, but the evolutionists do a very great deal more
speculating than Christians do. [1969:299-300]
Frederick Filby, in Creation Revealed (1964), calls Gosse’s Omphalos “that
masterpiece of logic and literature.”
With inexorable logic Gosse pursues his point through to every region of nature, from the lowest form of
life to the highest, and shows that we are no better off if we start with a seed or a babe. The scientific
evidence of an earlier stage is inevitably present. It is the old ‘hen and egg’ problem put in its most rigid
and scientific form. Gosse has been laughed at and neglected, and his general conclusion I think rightly
rejected, but in scientific knowledge, clearness of logic and humility he stands out far above many of his
critics who have failed to grasp the implication of this arguments or who have never even read his original
work. [1964:127]
Richard Korthals correctly points out that the assumption of creation with
appearance of age makes it impossible to disprove special creation (1972:150-151), and
that it is impossible to disprove the assumption as well—he obviously considers this an
argument in favor of creationism. In a thought-experiment, he imagines Adam as a
scientist, trying to determine the age of the newly-created earth. Adam cuts down a tree
and counts the growth rings. Then he calculates ages of various geological features such
as canyons, and measures ratios of radioactive substances (1972:149-150). “And so
Adam, the scientist, determines the age of the world upon which he is living—a world
which according to his reasoning, observations, calculations, and assumptions is at least 3
billion years old—yet it is a world which was created just 8 days earlier.”
In Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny, A.E. Wilder-Smith states that “the illusion of
age—lies in the very nature of creation ex nihilo” (1975:151).
In Time and Eternity, Arthur Custance ponders the classic examples: “If God
created a tree, would it have tree rings...?” (1977:32). Custance considers Moses’ staff,
which God changed into a serpent, then back into a piece of wood. Both the serpent and
the new staff, he notes, would show illusory evidence of age, since they were newlycreated.
Custance confesses that we may never know whether Adam had a belly-button
or not, stating that this cannot be determined “by our standards of logical reasoning”
(1977: 33). “God can, and does, create instantaneously upon occasion; when He does,
the event inevitably has a quality of deception about it: but it is a deception because of
the way our minds work and not because of the way God works.”
Wilbert Rusch, in The Argument: Creationism vs. Evolutionism, presents Gosse’s
Omphalos argument (though he does not name him):
The writer [Rusch himself], as a creationist, would postulate that the result of a creation was a ‘breaking
into the time cycle,’ with everything suddenly a going concern. This would imply that the earth looked as
if it had been around a long time, but actually, shortly after creation, everything was relatively young.
[1983:46]