In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715) constructed a geological history in which he proposed various natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it. The biblical Chaos in Burnet’s history was a mass of particles which separated into an inner core surrounded by a watery abyss enclosed within a uniform outer crust. The Deluge was caused by the crust breaking and descending into the abyss, the event giving the Earth its present terraqueous and mountainous form. The Conflagration will be brought about by volcanic eruptions, subterraneous combustions, and fiery meteors. This will reduce the Earth to a second chaos, from which a new Earth will form in a manner similar to the first. The new Earth will be home to the Kingdom of Christ during the Millennium, after which it will burn again, leave the vortex of the Sun, and become a star.

Burnet’s appeal to natural causes to explain biblical events traditionally conceived as miracles was highly controversial and attracted much negative attention. Yet Burnet had principled – and in his view eminently pious – reasons for prioritising natural causes over direct divine intervention. These reasons were derived essentially from an anti-voluntarist theology, according to which God’s will is restricted by his wisdom and goodness, a view Burnet inherited from the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians with whom he was closely associated during his early years at Cambridge and later life in London. Crucially, for Burnet, it was contrary to God’s wisdom to intervene in the world if his will can be executed via natural causes. Burnet’s anti-voluntarism also dictated the kinds of miracles he did appeal to. For in his view, if natural causes are insufficient, it is more in keeping with God’s wisdom to use the ministry of angels than to intervene directly in nature.

Burnet’s contemporaries, as well as some recent historians, have interpreted Burnet’s preference for naturalistic explanations as an essentially Cartesian principle, the Theory more generally having drawn heavily on Descartes’s cosmology and wider natural philosophy. On this reading, Burnet adhered to a Cartesian style of explanation in which there was no place for miracles. On the interpretation offered here, however, Burnet’s motivations were quite un-Cartesian. First, Descartes had espoused a radical form of theological voluntarism according to which the very nature of wisdom and goodness depend entirely on God’s completely free will. Second, Burnet’s and Descartes’s views of providence were based on distinct attributes of God, and these attributes had quite different implications regarding the place of miracles in the providential order

Anti-voluntarism, natural providence and miracles in Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth by Thomas Rossetter.