10 Evolution and the Fossil Record
More importantly, it is a classic example of a completely unfalsifiable theory of the
world. No observation could ever prove it wrong, because everything looks as if it evolved,
but it was just created to look that way! As described by Martin Gardner (1952:126), “Not the
least of its remarkable virtues is that while it won not a single convert, it presented a theory
so logically perfect, and so in accordance with geologic facts that no amount of scientific
evidence will ever be able to refute it.” Some philosophers have argued that all of reality is
an illusion, and it is perfectly logical to suggest that the world was created a few minutes
ago, with everyone having memories of a past that doesn’t exist. Any memories you might
have of the past were created in your head when you were created, just as the fossils were
placed in the rocks to look as if they were from the ancient past. This idea is nicknamed “Last
Thursdayism” by the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, as in “the world might have
been created last Thursday—how would we know the difference?” Of course, this idea is just
as untestable as Gosse’s original hypothesis.
Gosse had high hopes that his ideas would resolve the growing divide between natural
history and religion, but he was ignored or ridiculed. Just two years later, Darwin’s book
came out and made his ideas irrelevant. Gosse ended up an embittered old man whose
natural history books were no longer important in a Darwinian world. His troubled later
years were vividly described by his son, whose famous biography Father and Son (1907) is
considered a classic of its genre.
One would think that such a bizarre and untestable idea, which was rejected and ridi-
culed even by the religious and devout in the days before Darwin, would never be revived.
But modern creationists have brought in their own versions of the Omphalos hypothesis.
When young-earth creationists are confronted with evidence that shows that galaxies are
millions of light-years away and that their light is just reaching us after millions of years,
they say that God created the universe as it is with the light from those galaxies already on
the way! This seems like an extreme form of pretzel logic to explain away an inconvenient
fact and salvage their cherished hypothesis.
The Omphalos story, however, raises an important point about our models of the world.
If we want them to make sense and not violate what we have learned about nature, we have
to be true to the conclusions to which nature leads us. We cannot twist and bend our expla-
nations into pretzels like the Omphalos hypothesis just to save some cherished belief. We will
discuss how some creationists have done just this by giving strange and contorted explana-
tions for things that are most simply explained by evolution.
Natural and Supernatural
For all the controversies over these issues, however, there is a basic philosophical
point on which the evolutionary biologists all agree. Some say new mechanisms have
to be introduced and others say the old mechanisms are adequate, but nobody with a
reputation to lose proposes to invoke a supernatural creator or a mystical “life force”
to help out with the difficulties. The theory in question is a theory of naturalistic evo-
lution, which means that it absolutely rules out any miraculous or supernatural inter-
vention at any point. Everything is conclusively presumed to have happened through
purely material mechanisms that are in principle accessible to scientific investigation,
whether they have yet been discovered or not.
—Phillip Johnson