Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 24

enemy without, Price wanted to distance himself as far as possible from men
like Burnet, who told their scriptural history of the earth from their armchairs:
Their wild fancies deserve to be called travesties alike on the Bible and on
true science; and the word "diluvial" has been a term to mock at ever since.
Happy would it have been for the subsequent history of all the sciences, if the
students of the rocks had all been willing patiently to investigate the records,
and hold their fancies sternly in leash until they had gathered sufficient facts
upon which to found a true induction or generalization. (Price, 1923, 589)
This characterization persists into our generation. Fenton and Fenton, in their
popular work Giants of Geology (1952, 22), dismiss Burner's theory as "a
series of queer ideas about earth's development," and misread his mechanism
as a series of divine interventions: "Thomas Burnet thought an angry God
had used the sun's rays as a chisel to split open the crust and let the central
waters burst forth upon an unrepentant mankind." Davies (1969, 86), in his
excellent history of British geomorphology, states that the scrip- tural
geologies of Burnet and others "have always had a peculiar fascination for
historians as bizarre freaks of pseudo-science."
Science versus Religion?
The matrix that supports this canonical mischaracterization of Burnet is the
supposed conflict, or war, between science and religion. Though scholars
have argued ad, nauseam that no such dichotomy existed—that the debate, if
it expressed any primary division, separated traditionalists (mostly from the
church) and modernists (including most scientists, but always many
churchmen as well)—this appealing and simplistic notion persists.
The locus dassicus of "the warfare of science with theology" is the two-
volume work (1896) of the same name by Andrew Dickson