Endless Things by John Crowley

never to go out: God lives again. The next Holy Days, the same. We live in a story with a Beginning, a Middle, and an End, but within that story is another, the same, and within that one, also another, and each is bigger and longer than the previous one, and of that there is no beginning and no end.
    It was like Adam and his navel.
    He thought this, in just these words— like Adam and his navel —and without his willing it (in fact he was surprised, his attention caught, as though he'd felt a tug just then on Ariadne's thread) he remembered several things at once.
    He remembered the great book wherein the Y and a thousand other mysteries had been explained or set for him to ponder, and the entry on ADAM.
    He remembered the day when he had first arrived in the Faraway Hills, and how at a Full Moon Party by the Blackbury River he had suddenly known he would abandon his calling as a teacher of history, and try to make a living elsewhere by other means; maybe (he'd thought in the sweetness of liberation) he'd set up shop, and for a buck apiece wrangle hard questions people had that history could answer. Like the question of how, when we get to Heaven, we will know which man there is father Adam. Not a minute later a tall barefoot woman in a glowing sundress had passed him by, and he heard someone call to her. Hi, Rose .
    And he also remembered how, near the bitter end of what began at that party with that motion of his soul or head, he lay in his small house beside the same river, and Rose Ryder was with him. The hour must have been Matins, he thought: the hour of Judgment, and the hour of the perishing of the world. They were not sleeping but talking, and the subject was biblical inerrancy. Pierce had for some weeks been spending a lot of his actually pretty substantial erudition, wide if shallow, in resolving for her sake a few of the chasms between the Word and the world, at the same time as he tried to tease her into laughing off the whole stupid thing and returning into his orbit once again, and she did laugh, often enough, at his act. So this night she had said something (this was delicate archaeology, recreating that ancient black predawn, from here where he now sat in the sun) something about evolution and the evidence for it, which he said was of course indisputable, please. And she had, what, she had demurred, or said it wasn't the point anyway. And he said Don't worry, the question could be easily resolved and nothing lost, not God's omnipotence or the Bible story or the millions of years of bones and fossils, and he knew how.
    How?
    Well, he'd said, it's like Adam's navel.
    An old trick question, very old, medieval maybe. When we get to Heaven how will we be able to know which man there is Adam? We will because he'll be the one without a navel . Because he was never attached to an umbilical cord. He had no mother, came from no womb, had no history. So there it was. But no, of course he did have a history: his own grown body was a history, and so were the plants and the animals around him, the slow-forming stars he saw in the sky. The answer is (Pierce with raised forefinger explicated this) that there is no time for God, no past-present-future, he can bring the universe into existence at any moment of its history : the universe comes to be at the moment when God wills it to be, with all its previous millennia intact. Do you see? he'd said to Rose. It never existed before that moment, and after that moment it always did. And on the sixth day he makes a man of dust, and breathes life into him: and hair has already grown on his head, and teeth in his mouth, and a beard on his face, and he has a navel on his stomach, from his nonexistent life as a fetus, his ontogeny that never happened recapitulating a phylogeny ditto.
    See how useful, how neat? That whole evolution problem rendered moot, do you see? It's all okay; it's not Mere Chance. If God chose, he could take six days to do it all in, which is what the Bible says,