Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 43

as the same planet doth from itself, in different periods of its duration. We do
not seem to inhabit the same world that our first fore-fathers did, nor scarce
to be the same race of men" (140).
What features of the earth compel us to explain it by narrative?
In seeking criteria to argue that a current state demands explanation as a
product of history, Burnet occasionally invokes the evidence of direct
observation: "If one should assert that such an one has lived from all eternity,
and I could bring witnesses that knew him a sucking child, and others that
remembered him a school-boy, I think it would be fair proof, that the man
was not eternal."
But only rarely can we observe enough change directly, for ancient
(particularly antediluvian) texts do not exist, and witnesses are mute. We
must therefore seek a criterion of inference from present states or the
surviving artifacts of a different past.
Burnet champions the same resolution that Darwin would invoke 150 years
later as he struggled to interpret the shapes of organisms as products of
history. 6 Darwin gave his answer in paradoxical form: history lies revealed in
the quirks and imperfections of modern structures. Evolved perfection covers
the tracks of its own formation. Optimal designs may develop historically,
but they may also be created ab nihilo by a wise designer. What Darwin
advanced for the bodies of organisms, Burnet applied to the form of the earth.
The current earth is a ruin, "shapeless and ill-figured" (112). But a ruin can
only be a wreck of something once whole, in short a product of history. The
earth's current form makes sense only as one stage of a developing pageant:
There appearing nothing of order or any regular design in its parts, it seems
reasonable to believe that it was not the work of nature, according to her first
intention, or according to the first model that was drawn in measure and
proportion, by the line
6. I do not make this comparison to praise Burnet because he anticipated a later
hero, but only to maintain that fine thinkers face similar problems across the
centuries and often apply the same rules of fruitful reason.