Thomas Burnet was born at Croft near Darlington in 1635.
12 Facts About Thomas Burnet
2.
Thomas Burnet took employment travelling with Lord Wiltshire, son of Charles Paulet, 6th Marquess of Winchester, and through Tillotson as tutor to Lord Ossory, grandson of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde.
3.
Thomas Burnet took part in the resistance offered to James II's attempt to make Andrew Popham a pensioner of the Charterhouse.
4.
Thomas Burnet's best known work is his Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth.
5.
Thomas Burnet calculated the amount of water on Earth's surface, stating there was not enough to account for the Flood.
6.
Thomas Burnet was to some extent influenced by Descartes who had written on the creation of the earth in Principia philosophiae, and was criticised on those grounds by Roger North.
7.
The heterodox views of Isaac La Peyrere included the idea that the Flood was not universal; Thomas Burnet's theory was at least in part intended to answer him on that point.
8.
Thomas Burnet's system had its novel features, as well as those such as the four classical elements that were very traditional: an initially ovoid Earth, a Paradise before the Flood that was always in the spring season, and rivers flowing from the poles to the Equator.
9.
Herbert Croft published criticism of the book in 1685, in particular accusing Thomas Burnet of following the Second Epistle of Peter rather than the Book of Genesis.
10.
Newton even wrote to Thomas Burnet, suggesting the possibility that when God created the Earth, the days were longer.
11.
Thomas Burnet tightly held the belief that God created the world and all its processes perfectly from the start.
12.
Thomas Burnet is quoted at the beginning of the 1817 edition of his The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.