Last Thursdayism
posted on October 23, 2009
I remember a riddle book I had when I was younger had a riddle that ran something like:
A man come across two human bodies frozen in ice and instantly knows he has found Adam & Eve. How?*
The Omphalos Hypothesis is the idea that God created the world with all its signs of age and as such any evidence for the (presumed) age of the Earth/Universe cannot be considered reliable. Which leads to the idea that although the original hypothesis proposes that in Genesis God created the trees with their rings even though they’d never grown etc., creation could technically have happened anytime:
Though Gosse’s original Omphalos hypothesis specifies a popular creation story, others have proposed that the idea does not preclude creation as recently as five minutes ago, including memories of times before this created in situ. This idea is sometimes called “Last Thursdayism” by its opponents, as in “the world might as well have been created last Thursday.” The concept is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific method…
Which if you believe such things means that I may never have written this post, I was just created with the memory of doing it. Similarly you may never have read this post, you were just created with the memory of it…
*The bodies didn’t have navels – as neither Adam nor Eve were carried in a uterus they wouldn’t have had umbilical cords, though in art Adam & Eve are generally depicted with navels as apparently it looks a bit weird otherwise.
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