Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

"Yes! It is the strangest and saddest of books, written by the man who in the middle of the 19th century had done more than anyone else to promote a love of the seaside and its nature. He loved rockpools at least partly because they were a form of stillness in the flux of the shore. They looked like a kind of Eden to him, perfect gardens which change could never threaten. So Gosse became a kind of anti-Heraclitus: for him, in a good world, nothing flowed. All was still and perfect. God had made it like that. But what does such a man do when geology and paleontology begin to show that the history of life on Earth has indeed been a Heraclitean river, endlessly changing, vastly long, a sequence of unimaginable transformations not at all like the one week of creation in Genesis? He responds with the theory in Omphalos — a massive extension of the love of rock-pool-stillness to cover everything that had ever lived. At the moment of creation God did not make individual adult animals. Every plant and animal is dependent on a life cycle that has embedded in it the process of generation, from adult to egg, to embryo, to child to adult. And so God did not make animals; he made life cycles. Every plant and creature was made with its whole past and future implicit in it. This is the idea that lies behind the title of the book: omphalos is the Greek for navel. Even though God had made Adam whole and adult, he would have given him a navel because the cycle of life, his own generation and birth, required it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But it was not only the creatures that were made with their past and future already implicit in them; the Earth itself and all its life was made, in this one week of creation, with its past pre-enclosed in its rocks. God made the fossil record as he made the world. The first trees had rings in their timber, the first molluscs had growth lines in their shells and the first man had a navel, and so the Earth itself had all the cycles of its own immense past embedded in it. ‘It may be objected,’ Gosse wrote, ‘that, to assume the world to have been created with fossil skeletons in its crust – skeletons of animals that never really existed – is to charge the Creator with forming objects whose sole purpose was to deceive us.’ His answer was straightforward and unanswerable: ‘The law of creation supersedes the law of nature.’ God made the world with the past that was natural to it. Gosse’s own beloved wife had died soon before he made this desperate dam against change. He was alone in the world with his son Edmund. And so Omphalos is a kind of plea for stasis, for an escape from the damage and destruction of being alive."