Today, an old geologist faces modern science. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Stephen Jay Gould writes
about the great lurch in perception that stretched
earth's age from a few thousand years to several
billion. He calls it the discovery of deep time. He
tells about a geological theorist named Thomas
Burnet. Textbook writers have treated Burnet badly.
They're very quick to make yesterday look like
nothing more than ignorance of today's knowledge.
Burnet wrote an important geological treatise
during the 1680s. He called it Sacred Theory
of the Earth. His Bible-based earth begins
as chaotic void. He shows how it congealed into a
perfect sphere -- the home of Eden. He details
rational means by which the Great Flood ruined that
perfect earth when it left in its wake continents,
mountains, seas, and general disorder. At the
second coming, Burnet's earth is burned by fire. It
reverts to spherical perfection and is finally made
into a star at judgment day.
That's pretty hard for us to take seriously. So we
paint Burnet as a misguided biblical literalist.
Writers have spoken of his "romantic and
unprofitable labors," of "wild fancies that deserve
to be called travesties!" One even said flatly that
his writings were the sort of stuff we sweep out of
stables.
In fact, Burnet exchanged long letters with Isaac
Newton. They agreed on the substance of Burnet's
Sacred Theory. They argued only over details. It
was Newton, not Burnet, who suggested we get around
logical problems by assuming that God kept changing
the rules of natural law during the Creation.
Burnet stayed away from that sort of thing. We find
a comment that's remarkable for its time in his
work. He says:
'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 [reveal that what we]
made scripture to assert [was false.]
A new observational science had grown up
around Burnet. Now scientists had to go where the
nontechnical language of the Old Testament was never
meant to go. They had to accommodate hard
observations. That's what Burnet and Newton struggled
to do. A century later scientists realized that the
Bible gave them a different kind of information
altogether. And they went on to face the fact that
earth was almost incomprehensibly old.
When they did that, modern scientists overlooked
the pioneering nature of Burnet's attempts to model
geological time. They rewrote history to match
knowledge that they'd never been forced to
question. They dishonored the inventive minds of an
earlier age when they forgot the terrible limits of
their own imperfect attempts to explain the things
they saw.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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