The famed and framed astronomer/inventor/mathematician/philosopher Galileo Galilei liked to repeat this quip he picked up from a Vatican librarian of his day. Sadly, the truth of it didn’t reach high enough into the heavens of the Vatican to protect Galileo during his lifetime.

The uneasy relationship between science and the church that crystallized in the Galileo affair continues to this day. In his time, the matter came down to whether earth or sun was the center of the universe and which rotated ’round the other. The church guarded all knowledge, looking to the Bible for verity and science to verify.

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When the Bible speaks of the earth having been fixed by God upon its foundations, not to be moved forever (Ps. 104:5), the church took that for revealed astronomical truth rather than poetical. Same thing about the sun’s course from east to west in the sky, and how it was halted for one hour in the book of Joshua. Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe fit nicely with these Biblical texts. It just wasn’t the truth.

Galileo believed the Bible addresses the most important truths and gets them right. Like the truth about who the Creator is, rather than how he created. Like the truth about how we get to heaven, rather than where heaven is. Theology more than astronomy.

“I believe,” said the heavenly-minded Christian, “that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation, such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves… Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.” (Quoted by Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love [Penguin, 2000], p.65.)

Debates today over creation and evolution might find help from Galileo’s approach. As a scientist, he would probe the mechanics of nature; as a Christian, he would not forget that nature is the creation of a Creator.

When science claims to be the sole font of wisdom, it errs as much as the church did with Galileo. Science and religion can learn from one another and should work hand in hand toward the glory of God and the enlightenment of humankind.