What Galileo said about the conflict

between science and religion

God wrote two books, The Book of Scriptures and The Book of Nature.

The first is about how to get to heaven, and the second is about how heaven (including its earthly version) works.

God is infallible, so there can be no conflict between the two books.

Humans are fallible, and inclined to make errors of interpretation.

If there appears to be a conflict between the Book of Scriptures and the Book of Nature, that is, between religion and science, the source is this:

Humans have made mistakes in their interpretation of the Book of Scriptures. 

I got the above information from my brother, who got it from a teacher who specializes in the changes in thought in the 16th and 17th centuries.

As you probably know, Galileo was in big trouble with the Church because of his idea that the earth moves around the sun. This was in conflict with certain interpretations of the Bible and other historical statements.

Many powerful authorities in the Church thought that the Sun must go around the earth because Man, God's creation, must be the center of the universe.

Galileo got very pushy and mounted a big campaign (within the Church), forcing the issue, and insisting he was right and everybody else was wrong. Furthermore, he didn't have evidence for everything he was maintaining. (We had this a short time later.) He had the best theory, but it had some imperfections, and some realized this.

Galileo was threatened with torture if he did not say the sun moves. Eventually he did say this, but by then many, many people were convinced he was right in the first place (even if not absolutely right) because the evidence was overwhelming that his theory was a better one than the Church's official theory. But even his theory underwent modifications as we got more evidence. That's how science works. It is a self-correcting system. The Church has recently apologized for its treatment of Galileo.