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contemporary standards invoked by his textbook critics. In these terms, he
clearly fails just as his detractors insist. The Sacred Theory of the Earth
contains precious few appeals to empirical information. It speaks with as
much confidence, and at comparable length, about an unobservable future as
about a confirmable past. Its arguments cite scripture as comfortably and as
often as nature. But how can we criticize Burnet for mixing science and
religion when the tax- onomy of his times recognized no such division and
didn't even possess a word for what we now call science? Burnet, who won
Newton's high praise for his treatise, was an exemplary representative of a
scholarly style valued in his own day. To be sure, that style imposed stringent
limits upon what we would now call empirical truth, but retrospective
history, with its anachronistic standards, can only lead us to devalue (and
thereby misunderstand) our predecessors-for time's arrow asserts its sway
upon human history primarily through the bias of progress and leads us to
view the past as ever more inadequate the further back we go.
I propose to treat Burnet with elementary respect, to take the logic of his
argument seriously and at face value. 1 Burnet proceeded by a method used in
our era only by Immanuel Velikovsky (among names well known).
Velikovsky began his radical, and now disproven, reconstruction of
cosmology and human history with a central premise that reversed our
current tradition of argument: suppose, for the sake of investigation, that
everything in the written documents of ancient civilizations is true. Can we
then invent a physics that would yield such results? 2 (If Joshua said that the
sun
1.I know that motives are ever so much more complex than the logic of argument. I
accept many of the arguments advanced by scholars to untangle the hidden agenda
of Burnet's conclusions-that, for example, his insistence upon resurrection only after
a future conflagration served as a weapon against religious radicals who preached
an imminent end to the world. Yet I find personal merit in taking unfamiliar past
arguments at face value and working through their logic and implications. These
exercises have taught me more about thinking in general than any explicit treatise
on principles of reasoning.
2. While all scientists now argue that the possibilities of physics set prior limits
upon what claims of the ancient texts might be historically true.
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