The Nature of Science 9Science is not perfect, of course. Scientists are human, and as humans, we do make mis-
takes or may develop things that could harm us (like releasing the gases that have led to the
ozone hole, among other things). But without science, we would be back in the Dark Ages.
The next time you hear a fundamentalist preaching about the “evils of science and evolu-
tion,” think hard: Would you rather go back to a world just a century or two ago (and still
prevailing in many underdeveloped countries) when most children died before age two and
many mothers died in childbirth; where the life expectancy was very short because many
diseases were incurable; and where we had no conveniences like electricity, automobiles,
airplanes, plastics, and telephones? For better or for worse, we now live in a scientific age,
and most of us would not want to turn back time and renounce all the benefits that science
has brought us.
Belly Buttons and Testability
What did Adam and Eve never have, yet they gave two of them to each of their chil-
dren? Answer: parents.
—Old children’s riddleA classic example of an untestable theory to explain nature was the Omphalos hypothesis of
Philip Henry Gosse. He was a well-respected naturalist in early nineteenth-century England
who had written best-selling books about natural history. He was also a very devout mem-
ber of a Puritanical sect called the Plymouth Brethren. As a good naturalist, Gosse was find-
ing more and more evidence that life had evolved, but as a biblical literalist, he was obligated
to follow creationism. Gosse resolved his problems by publishing Omphalos: An Attempt to
Untie the Geological Knot in 1857, just two years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was
published. The curious term Omphalos means “belly button” or “navel” in Greek and refers
to the common theological conundrum of the day: If Adam and Eve were specially created
and did not have human parents (and therefore no umbilical cord), did they have navels or
belly buttons? Many religious artists avoided this issue by painting Adam and Eve with a
fig leaf not only over their genitalia but also over their midriffs. Gosse’s answer was yes, of
course, Adam and Eve had navels. According to Gosse, God created nature to look as if it had
a history, to look as if it had evolved, but in reality, nature was created quite recently. In order
for the world to be “functional,” God would have created the earth with mountains and can-
yons, with trees that have growth rings, and with Adam and Eve with navels. No evidence
that indicates the presumed age of the earth or events in the past can be taken at face value.
In this manner, Gosse felt that he had solved his own dilemmas about the fact that nature
appears to have evolved and that the earth was very old, and this solution allowed him to
retain his creationist beliefs.
Naturally, an idea as bizarre as this didn’t go over very well with most religious people
of the time, because it implies that God created a fake world and makes God into a deceiver,
not a benevolent deity. Gosse’s son, Edmund Gosse, wrote in Father and Son (1907:92), “He
offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. . . . But alas! Atheists and
Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it away . . . even Charles Kingsley, for
whom my father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he could not . . .
‘believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie.’ ”