I apologize for utilizing General Questions for overtly personal uses, but I cannot think of a better way of answering this question.
In a philosophy book I came across the following idea:
There is a possibility that the universe was created an instant ago, complete with memories. It is more likely that this is the case, since it is easier to create just the present and some incomplete memories, instead of the whole of time.
(Note that this presumes the existence of something that create the universe)
I am not interested in discussing the idea, although by all means repost it in General Debates should you feel the need. What I need to know is to which philosopher I should attribute the notion? I have included it in a presentation, and would like to give correct credit. Unfortunately, I no longer possess the book I found it in and do not wish to search random texts until I rediscover the origin.
I am hoping some of you more philosophically inclined dopers know this, and could help me out here! Thank you!
The idea in the first sentence may date from Gosse, but the argument in the second can’t.
While Gosse’s intention was to reconcile science and religion and so he mainly envisaged God creating the universe at some point in the fairly distant past, he did explicitly consider the possibility that it might have happened in the very recent past. In a passage from Omphalos that Thwaite quotes at length in her biography (p217), he considers a creation in “this present year 1857” and concludes that it’d look exactly like the current world. It’s however quite striking that he only talks about obviously physical objects and avoids the subject of the memories of individual humans.
It also appears that, while there was the tradition of arguing about Adam’s navel, Gosse may indeed have been the first to go the whole hog and imagine the entire past being created.
However, the second sentence is supposed to be an explanation of why God might do this. And the explanation is at odds with Gosse’s view, since in it there are no omissions in the “fictional” past. Also Gosse thought God had to create the past in this way for reasons of logical consistency, not because it was easier. From later in the same passage:
As I see it (obviously not omnipotent), it would be easier to just create a rapidly expanding ball of plasma rather than muck about with the present and past.
I also call foul on the assumption that the easier possibility is more likely. Unquestionably it would be easier for God to not have created the universe at all, yet we exist. As he possesses infinite power and is not constrained by time I am inclined to think that he would have created whatever he wanted, no more and no less.
If you’d like to see a fictional account of this concept, read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven. It’s been years since I read it, but as I recall, every so often the whole world changes in some random fashion (e.g., everyone’s skin color is now gray), and part of the change is that no one remembers the change: the change includes giving everyone memories of everything always being the way it is now.
Two TV movies have been made of the story. I saw the 1980 one, and liked it. I missed last year’s.
The idea is not entirely unrelated to Parmenidies’ theory that time was an illusion; that this “moment” is the only one that has ever existed and that all our memories of the past are illusory while the future will never arrive. Pleasantly frustrating, as it seems impossible to disprove.
Martin Gardner told a sad and silly story abut Gosse in his fascinating book Fades and Fallacies in the Name of Science.
As noted above, Gosse was mostly worried about the Theory of Evolution, and its refutation of a literal reading of Genesis. To his credit, he had the intellectual honesty to not merely dismiss the evidence in support of evolution. Instead, he posited that fossils were, in effect, God’s little jokes.
He set out to prove this by hiring men to dig for fossils. He figured that sooner or later they would find ones which plainly could not have been made by the remains of plants or animals, but were merely…creative designs.
And the men he paid found them–lots of them. Their were geometric patterns, religious symbols, and other remarkable finds which showed fossils to be, in effect, drawings. He didn’t get suspicious until they tried to sell him one which had his own name written out on it.
I believe that it was Dr. Bergen Evans who wrote that Gosse was, in effect, arguing that God had tried to tempt Man into the sin of being rational.
Be happy. The one done for PBS was excellent, and it also stuck pretty closely to what LeGuin had written. The recent one was indescribably stinky. I think only lieu could do it justice in that respect.
Not really - as the quote from Omphalos above shows, Gosse didn’t think God had created the past to “puzzle the philosophers”.
Whereas this story has nothing to do with Gosse and Omphalos; you’re confusing him with the much earlier Johann Beringer. (Possibly because Gardner discusses them one after the other in Fads and Fallicies.) The obvious recentish account of the hoaxing of Beringer is in the title essay of Gould’s The Lying Stones of Marrakech.