Gosse, Philip Henry (1810–1888)

In the middle of the 19th century there emerged a serious concern about time. Ongoing discoveries in geology, paleontology, and archaeology were challenging the then-held age of our Earth, fixity of species, and recent appearance of the human animal on this planet. Rocks, fossils, and artifacts were suggesting a new worldview, in terms of pervasive change throughout time, far different from the traditional static philosophy of nature. There was a glaring discrepancy between the scientific perspective of naturalists and the biblical framework of religionists. Inevitably, a major conflict developed between facts and beliefs. The empirical evidence for evolution contradicted the story of Genesis: Is the earth millions of years old, or was it divinely created only a few thousand years ago? A resolution seemed to be impossible, especially for those fundamentalists who held to a strict and literal interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.

Philip Henry Gosse made a bold and unusual attempt to reconcile the creationism of revealed religion with the evolutionism of the earth sciences. He was a fundamentalist creationist who belonged to the Plymouth Brethren sect in Victorian England. As such, his acceptance of the Mosaic cosmogony included a rigid adherence to both the sudden creation of Adam and the later Noachian deluge, each of these two events caused by the personal God of Christianity. However, Gosse was also an avid naturalist who could not easily dismiss the overwhelming and compelling factual evidence for organic evolution. Nevertheless, he rejected outright the dynamic concepts and disturbing implications (for him) of the evolutionary perspective. Therefore, his own personal beliefs required that he somehow resolve the contradiction between evolutionist science and fundamentalist religion. Gosse presented his incredible resolution in two books, Life (1857) and Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857)

Gosse's bizarre explanation for divine creation gave priority to biblical beliefs and immediate experience, rather than to science and reason. It is an interpretation ultimately based on an essential distinction between two different modes of existence: preternatural or ideal time in the perfect and infinite mind of a personal God prior to the act of creation, and the later natural or real time of objects and events in this material world of ongoing change and evolutionary development. In short, there is a crucial difference between pro-chronic time and diachronic time. Moreover, Gosse claimed that the course of everything inorganic and organic in nature is a circle.

Gosse firmly held that both the geological column of rock strata and the paleontological record of fossil evidence were suddenly created, all at once, along with the earth's existing plants and animals (including our own species) through the [Page 616]divine act of a personal God. In fact, Gosse further argued that this planet suddenly came into existence as an ongoing world already containing a sequence of fossil remains in a series of rock layers. Consequently, rocks and fossils only suggest both an extensive natural past for the earth itself and a vast evolutionary history for all previous life forms on this planet. Briefly, due to this instant creation with its built-in geological column and fossil record, the earth only appears to be as old as the geopaleontological evidence suggests to the evolutionary naturalists; the stratigraphie layers with their fossil remains were suddenly formed merely to suggest an ancient planet and the process of organic evolution.

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