“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 to assert … We are not to suppose that any truth concerning the natural world can be an enemy to religion; for truth cannot be an enemy to truth, God is not divided against himself.”

—  Thomas Burnet

The Sacred Theory of the Earth, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 32; ellipsis Gould's.

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