Talk:Where Adam Stood

A clarification is needed to avoid spreading misinformation and prejudice.
Philip Henry Gosse's book, Omphalos: an attempt to untie the geological knot, was published in 1857, two years prior to the 1859 publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Gosse was not attempting to reconcile the geology of Charles Lyell to a Biblical account of creation. Gosse's cosmological model bore little resemblance to the Genesis creation narrative. Gosse was not attempting to prove the antiquity of the earth or argue a case for Young Earth Creationism. In Gosse's own words:

"I will not rule the actual date at all; you, my geological friend, shall settle the chronology just as you please, or if you like it better, we will leave the chronological date out of the inquiry, as an element not relevant to it. It may have been six hundred years ago, or six thousand, or sixty times six million; let it for the present remain an indeterminate quantity. Only please remember that the day was a reality, whether we can fix it or not; it was as precise a moment as the moment in which I write this word" (Omphalos, page 127).

In another passage Gosse wrote:

"I wish it to be distinctly understood that I am not proving the exact or approximate antiquity of the globe we inhabit. I am not attempting to show that it has existed for no more than six thousand years. I wish this to be distinctly stated, because I am sure I shall meet with many opponents unfair enough, or illogical enough, to misrepresent or misunderstand my argument, and sound the trumpet of victory, because I cannot demonstrate that. All I set myself to do is to invalidate the testimony of the witness relied on for the indefinitely remote antiquity; to show that in a very large and important field of nature, evidence exactly analogous to that relied on would inevitably lead to a false conclusion, and must, therefore, be rejected, or received only contingently; received only as indicative of probability, and that only in the absence of any positive witness to the contrary (Omphalos, page 339). 2600:8801:BE26:2700:B09F:3FEF:E7EB:2AC5 (talk) 00:50, 23 June 2021 (UTC) J.J.E.