Top Highlights

• Advocates of creationism in the 20th century took the opposite approach to Paine’s. For them, the word of God as revealed in the Bible was the most reliable form of knowledge and anything that seemed to contradict their interpretation of scripture had to be rejected.
• John Hedley Brooke’s classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991).
• In Rome on 22 June 1633 an elderly man was found guilty by the Catholic Inquisition of rendering himself ‘vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture’.
• The guilty man was the 70-year-old Florentine philosopher Galileo Galilei,
• It is hardly surprising that this humiliation of the most celebrated scientific thinker of his day by the Catholic Inquisition on the grounds of his beliefs about astronomy and their contradiction of the Bible should have been interpreted by some as evidence of an inevitable conflict between science and religion.