The problem with last Thursday (thursdayism) Jack Dikian Spring 2022 Was the universe created last Thursday? The idea that the universe was created last Thursday, but with the physical appearance of being billions of years old was first introduced in the 1857 book, Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse. Last thursdayism or the Omphalos hypothesis is one attempt to reconcile the scientific evidence that the Earth is billions of years old with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative, which implies that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Thus, God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with fully grown hair, fingernails, and navels. The rest of the universe doesn’t escape the wrath of this theory for it would all have also been created last Thursday. You might argue that your memories go way beyond Thursday. Of course, this theory explicit when it says your memories are also the subject of this same creation. But if the world was created 6000 years ago with the appearance of being made billions of years ago, what is there to stop us from claiming it was made Last Thursday? Various supporters of Young Earth creationism have given different explanations for their belief that the universe is filled with false evidence of the universe's age, including a belief that some things needed to be created at a certain age for the ecosystems to function, or their belief that the creator was deliberately planting deceptive evidence. Among the many obvious problems with this hypothesis is the lack of reference to the phenomenon in the Bible. So possible value is such a theory. We, as it turns out, quite a lot. Theories such as this are both unverifiable and unfalsifiable through any conceivable scientific study. In other words, it is impossible to conclude the truth of the hypothesis, since it requires the empirical data itself to have been arbitrarily created to look the way it does at every observable level of detail. Firstly, I should note the difference between verifiability and falsifiability – they are two different things. For example, the statement "There is a unicorn" is verifiable but not falsifiable, "All unicorns are white" is falsifiable but not verifiable. Neither verifiable nor falsifiable beliefs can have pragmatic value, if they hold in most cases encountered in practice, heuristic value in developing new theories, ethical value in guiding behaviour, etc. And if something does have an impact then that impact makes it testable in some way, even if not in the narrow verifiable/falsifiable sense. I can see that an unfalsifiable belief may have some value, perhaps therapeutic or psychological. But I'm not sure there are any unfalsifiable beliefs. It would depend on how we define 'unfalsifiable'. if it means 'not demonstrably false' then there are many of them. If it means 'unfalsifiable by any means' then I'd suggest there are no such beliefs. Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses that was introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934). He proposed it as the cornerstone of a solution to both the problem