Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 28

stood still upon Gibeon, then something stopped the earth's rotation—the
close passage of wandering Mars or Venus in Velikovsky's reconstruction.)
Burnet began by assuming that only one document—the Bible—is unerringly
true. 3 His treatise then becomes a search for a physics of natural causes to
render these certain results of history. (Burnet, of course, differs from
Velikovsky in a fundamental way. Velikovsky took the veracity of ancient
texts only as a heuristic beginning. For Burnet, the necessary concordance of
God's words and works established harmony between physics and scripture
as necessary a priori.)
Within this constraint of concordance, Burnet followed a strategy that placed
him among the rationalists ("good guys" for the future development of
science, if we must follow Western-movie scenarios of retrospective history).
As the centerpiece of his logic, Burnet insists again and again that the earth's
scripturally specified history will be adequately explained only when we
identify natural causes for the entire panoply of biblical events. Moreover, he
urges, in apparent conflicts (they cannot be real) between reason and
revelation, choose reason first and then untangle the true meaning of
revelation:
'Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of scripture in disputes about
the natural world, in opposition to reason; lest time, which brings all things to
light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture
to assert. . . We are not to suppose that any truth concerning the natural world
can be an enemy to religion; for truth cannot be an enemy to truth, God is not
divided against himself. (16)
3. This commitment led Burnet into arguments that we, with different assumptions,
might regard as the height of folly—that, for example, Noah's flood must have been
truly global, not merely local, because Noah would not have built an ark, but simply
fled to safety in a neighboring land, if the entire earth had not been drowned.