Philip Henry Gosse
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Shall I tell you the truth ? It is best. Your book is the first that ever made me doubt it, and I fear it will make hundreds do so. Your book tends to prove this—that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes a Deus quidam deceptor. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in the one single case of your newly created scars on the pandanus trunk, and your newly created Adam's navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here."--Charles Kingsley cited in The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (1890) by Edmund Gosse |
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Philip Henry Gosse (April 6, 1810 – August 23, 1888) was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. Gosse is perhaps best known today as the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the immense geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation.
After his death, Gosse was caricatured as a despotic and fanatically religious father in Father and Son (1907), the literary masterpiece of his son, poet and critic Edmund Gosse.