The idea was named after the title of an 1857 book, Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, in which Gosse argued that for the world to be "functional", God must have created the Earth with mountains and canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with fully grown hair, fingernails, and navels[2] (ὀμφαλός omphalos is Greek for "navel"), and all living creatures with fully formed evolutionary features, etc., and that, therefore, no empirical evidence about the age of the Earth or universe can be taken as reliable.
[1] It saw some revival in the 20th century by some Young Earth creationists, who extended the argument to include visible light that appears to originate from far-off stars and galaxies (addressing the "starlight problem").
In modern times, Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb supported a similar position, saying that the objective scientific evidence for an old universe is strong, but wrong, and that the traditional Jewish calendar is correct.
[1] Another popular idea, promoted by the English theologian John Pye Smith, was that the Garden of Eden described the events of only one small location.
[1] A third proposal, by French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, held that the six "days" of the creation story were arbitrary and large ages rather than 24-hour periods.
[1] Scientists rejected it on the grounds that it disagreed with uniformitarianism, an explanation of geology that was widely supported at the time, and the impossibility of testing or falsifying the idea.
This appears to suggest that events after the creation have changed the "virtual history" we now see, including the fossils: This raises one more major point of difference, the handling of the Fall.
[12] From a religious viewpoint, it can be interpreted as God having created a "fake" universe, such as illusions of light emitted from supernovae that never really happened, or volcanic mountains that were never really volcanoes in the first place and that never actually experienced erosion.