Sep 23
From omphalism to self-awareness: round-up
A few posts that have caught my eye this last week
- Mayfly (aka Kyle Colvett) introduced me to omphalism. I’d never come across this term before, but it sounds suitable silly for people who believe the earth was created with the appearance of great age. It’s a good critical post about an exceptionally bad idea. How mad can creationists get?
- Continuing the creationist theme, Michael Pahl has a good post (although I’d express it more radically) on the popular myths of evangelicals: “creation” = “creationism” I hope he continues this as “popular myths” series. On the same topic see Chris Heard’s thoughtful reflection, and very worrying story.
- Matt Robison, a blogger new to me, has a tongue-very-firmly-in-cheek post about how to read the Bible the right way: “God wrote the Bible so you, as a Christian living in the 21st century, could get to heaven. So it’s appropriate to assume that every single thing in it was meant specifically for you”
- Duane Smith proposes the inverse bookshelf length law. I hadn’t noticed this before, but the man has a point.
- Jason at Ancient Mediterranean Musings points us to the significance of contemporary source criticism in Winnie the Pooh scholarship.
I wouldn’t normally comment in a round-up on one of my own posts, but I learnt a useful lesson this week. You never know who’s going to read what you write when you blog. I made some comments on Chilton’s and Neusner’s newish book on the Pharisees. Despite largely consisting of very good and stimulating individual essays in it (only a couple of disappointments), the book was in my humble view rather less than the sum of its parts. I was very surprised when Bruce Chilton popped up to react to the criticism with his own brusque and fairly derogatory comment. While I might have worded some things more carefully if I’d known one of its editors would read the review (and while I wished I’d made it longer), I don’t think I’d have changed the substance of what I said. But it was a salutary reminder that even when it feels like it, my blog ramblings aren’t private!
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I appreciate the recognition!
And somewhat off topic, but do you have a full RSS feed? I can’t seem to find the link anywhere on your site.
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:06 pm
The feed should be at http://www.metacatholic.co.uk/feed/
I’m afraid I just rely on my software to discover feeds for me, but I probably ought to get round to putting a link on the site.
And I really did enjoy that post of yours!
September 24th, 2007 at 1:31 am
I once commented on the stupidity of Chilton’s “Jesus” book and he did me the kindness of saying I was an idiot. We had quite a little round on Bible and Interpretation. It was great fun seeing what a real git the man is with his wild flights of imagination and his rubbish theories.
September 24th, 2007 at 2:44 am
That inverse bookshelf length law is a little worrying for those of us who pursue an interest in theology! I hope God is a worthy subject for all the ink expended on his account! (But Dawkins certainly wouldn’t think so.)
September 24th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Do spot spot Michael Pahl’s deliberate error: creation took six not seven days – unless, you count rest as the ultimate creative action, which is not a bad thought.
September 25th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
What happened to the omphalism link?
September 25th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Peter, thanks for the catch. I’m baffled by what happened to the link, but I’ve corrected it now!
September 25th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Thanks for correcting the quote. Your post now looks as if it came into being a long time ago (well, on Sunday) when in fact it was created only an hour or so ago. The wonders of modern technology allow as much digital omphalism as we want.
In fact of course the omphalism argument goes back to Philip Gosse’s 1857 book Omphalos “in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is”. Kingsley’s response to Gosse, given in the same place, shows how omphalism in fact undermines the whole concept of creation.
Mayfly claims that “The logical flaws are legion.” In fact I dispute that. The problem, as even the great logician and atheist Bertrand Russell seems to have recognised, is that there are no logical flaws in the hypothesis, and that it is in fact impossible to falsify - and of course to prove. This implies that it is not a scientific hypothesis at all. And to the extent that even mainstream creationism has to use omphalistic arguments at times, e.g. to explain some fossils, it is also not scientific. The best argument against this is simple mockery.
In fact we can take omphalism even further than the Last Thursday hypothesis. I could suggest that the universe has not yet been created at all, but my consciousness of the present is in fact only a thought process in the mind of God, concerning the reality which he is intending to create, or perhaps simply imagining and never will create. Also both unprovable and unfalsifiable, and perhaps with a longer history in religious thinking than that of omphalism.