Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot is a book by
Philip Gosse, written in 1857 (two years before
Darwin's On the Origin of Species), 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. The reasoning parallels the reasoning that Gosse chose to explain why
Adam (who would have had no mother) had a navel: Though Adam would have had no need of a navel, God gave him one anyway to give him the appearance of having a human ancestry. Thus, the name of the book,
Omphalos, which means 'navel' in Greek.