Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons? That question, which sounds like a joke, sat at the center of a nineteenth-century intellectual crisis as geology's principle of uniformitarianism revealed an Earth millions of years old. In 1857 the respected naturalist Philip Henry Gosse published Omphalos, Greek for navel, arguing that a newly created world must carry the appearance of age: trees with rings, rivers with canyons, humans with navels, and even fossils that were never living creatures. This episode explores that idea neutrally as intellectual history, without endorsing any belief system.

We trace the concept's roots in Ephrem the Syrian and Chateaubriand, explain why both theologians and scientists rejected Gosse's book, and compare it with rival compromises like the gap theory and day-age theory. We then follow its modern revival in the  ...