I received a bad science education (I recall a teacher at one of my nonsectarian alma maters showing us a $10,000 challenge to prove evolution, IIRC from Ray Comfort). So excuse my ignorance:
I understand that Gould rejected Gosse’s omphalos because it is “utterly untestable;” it must be rejected due to “methodological absurdity, not for any
demonstrated factual inaccuracy…” But I came across an intelligent-sounding blog comment and was wondering about whether it is true or not; additional sources regarding the issues the commenter mentions would be much appreciated:
Any and all objections to the theory are countered by the claim that “this is how it was set up”. It has no requirement that any scientific evidence be explained. Since it nullifies our existing standards of truth, there is no way to either prove it or disprove it. Even if God Himself appears and tells us that this is how it is, we couldn’t be sure that this manifestation of God is not a further delusion implanted by some devil, and God meanwhile is happy with the world as it evolved.
It amounts to little more than Solipsism; you can never know that I or anyone else you meet is not just a figment of your imagination, or that you never wrote the OP but the world was created five minutes ago with the appearance that you did. It’s a dead-end epistemologically, but you are always free to believe it if you like.
The blog comment is not a particularly good critique of Gosse. The omphalos hypothesis can certainly be extended to include human genetic diversity (“That’s how God created us!”). And it’s not internally inconsistent. It’s a perfectly valid hypothesis and explains everything we observe in nature.
The problem with it is that it’s not TESTABLE. There’s no way to tell if it’s true or not because any apparent flaw can be explained away by saying “That’s just how God made things!” And, in fact, you could say exactly the same thing about the hypothesis that God created everything Last Thursday. Once you reject the idea that empirical evidence is trustworthy, it becomes impossible to justify any belief on rational grounds … even religious belief … or even obvious everyday truths like whether the sun is shining or not. It’s a very large baby that you’ve thrown out with the bathwater.
It’s an interesting commentary on the power of religious delusion that people will construct an epistemology where it is literally impossible to tell night from day in order to avoid the unpleasant truth that the real world contradicts their spiritual beliefs.
It’s in print. It was published two years before On the Origin of Species. It’s a young-earth creationist deciding to take his theory seriously and look at all the consequences of it. I think it’s the best thing you can do when someone tries to defend creationism to you. Hand them the book and tell them that this is someone at the time of Darwin who looked at all the consequences of believing in creationism. It’s actually very well argued. It doesn’t really try to disprove evolution. It just tries to take creationism as an honest theory. This is what it’s necessary to say to any creationist, that if they want to defend their theories, they have to understand the consequences.