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principle for three reasons: (1) he was an ordained minister by primary profession (thereby illustrating NOMA if he truly kept these worlds distinct); (2) his theory has become an unfair source of ridicule under the fallacious notion that science must be at war with religion; and (3) he upheld the primacy of science in a particularly forceful way (and with even more clarity than his friend Isaac Newton, as we shall see on this page ). Recognizing the primacy of science in its proper magisterium, Burnet urges his readers not to assert a scriptural interpretation contrary to a scientific discovery, but to reexamine scripture instead—for science rules the magisterium of factual truth about nature:
    ’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 assert.
    In a lovely passage equating an independent magisterium for science with a maximally exalted concept of God, Burnet develops a striking metaphor for contrasting explanations of the earth’s destruction in Noah’s flood: do we not have greater admiration for a machine that performs all its appointed tasks (both regular and catastrophic) by natural laws operating on a set of initial parts, than for a device that putters along well enough in a basic mode, but requires a special visit from its inventor for anything more complex:
    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 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 this be looked upon as a piece of greater art, than if the workman came at thattime prefixed, and with a great hammer beat it into pieces?
    As a professional clergyman and a leading scientist, Burnet practiced in both magisteria, and kept them separate. He allocated the entire natural world to science, but he also knew that this style of inquiry could not adjudicate issues beyond the power of factual information to illuminate, and in realms where questions of natural law do not arise. Using an image from his own century (we would define the boundaries differently today), Burnet grants the entire history of the earth to science, but recognizes that any time before the creation of matter, and any history after the Last Judgment, cannot be encompassed within the magisterium of natural knowledge:
    Whatsoever concerns this sublunary world in the whole extent of its duration, from the Chaos to the last period, this I believe Providence hath made us capable to understand … On either hand is Eternity, before the World and after, which is without [that is, outside of] our reach: But that little spot of ground that lies betwixt those two great oceans, this we are to cultivate, this we are masters of, herein we are to exercise our thoughts [and] to understand.
    I may be reading too much into Burnet’s words, but do I not detect a preference, or at least a great fondness, for the factuality of science when, in the chronological narrative of his
Sacred Theory of the Earth
, Burnet must bid adieu to reason as his guide, as he passes from the factually knowable history of an earth fully governed by natural law to a radically different future at the Last Judgment, when God will institute a new order, and can therefore only inform us (if at all) through the revelation of his words? Burnet speaks to the muse of science:
    Farewell then, dear friend, I must take another guide: and leave you here, as Moses upon Mount Pisgah, only to look into that land, which you cannot enter. I acknowledge