Geology Reference
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Burnet strenuously attacked those who would take the easy road and call
upon miraculous intervention whenever a difficult problem presented itself to
physics-for such a strategy cancels reason as a guide and explains nothing by
its effortless way of resolving everything. In rejecting a miraculous creation
of extra water to solve the central problem that motivated his entire treatise—
how could the earth drown in its limited supply of water?—Burnet invoked
the same metaphor later used by Lyell against the catastrophists: easy and
hard ways to untie the Gordian knot. "They say in short, that God Almighty
created waters on purpose to make the deluge, and then annihilated them
again when the deluge was to cease; And this, in a few words, is the whole
account of the business. This is to cut the knot when we cannot loose it" (33).
Likewise, for the second greatest strain on physical credulity, a worldwide
conflagration, Burnet again insists that ordinary properties of fire must do the
job: "Fire is the instrument, or the executive power, and hath no more force
given it, than what it hath naturally" (271).
Burnet's basic position has been advanced by nearly every theistic scientist
since the Newtonian revolution: God made it right the first time. He ordained
the laws of nature to yield an appropriate history; he needn't intervene later to
patch and fix an imperfect cosmos by miraculous alteration of his own laws.
In a striking passage, Burnet invokes the standard metaphor of clockwork to
illustrate this primary principle of science—the invariance of natural laws in
space and time.
We think him a better artist that makes a clock that strikes regularly at every
hour from the springs and wheels which he puts in the work, than he that hath
so made his clock that he must put his finger to it every hour to make it
strike: and if one should contrive a piece of clock-work so that it should beat
all the hours, and make all its motions regularly for such a time, and that time
being come, upon a signal given, or a spring touched, it should of its own
accord fall all to pieces; would not
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