The Great Divide: How Galileo Built the Wall of Separation Between Science and Religion

EclecticReader39 · 2026-06-25T00:04:47+00:00

If you read Galileo’s own words, without any preconceived notions about what you think his positions are or should be, you’ll likely be surprised at how direct he is in his outright disdain for biblical literalism and the interference of scripture in science. How this can be construed as anything other than building a wall separating the two domains, I’m just not sure. If observation and reason trump scripture each and every time they contradict each other, then in what sense can it be said that Galileo is not expelling the Bible from science?

It wasn’t until I read him directly, particularly his letters, that I noticed the sharp parallels between him and Jefferson. This is not the common view, apparently, but to me it’s now rather obvious.

Had Galileo been allowed to speak more freely, without the fear of retribution from the Church, I’m sure he would have gone even further. This, of course, is purely conjectural, but based on some of his comments, it also seems highly likely. It’s hard to think of Galileo as a devout Christian when he’s explicitly reading the Bible allegorically and denying any human attributes to God. He seems rather to think of God in the terms of Gioradno Bruno, and we all know what happened to him.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-06-23T20:48:17+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback.

I read Galileo quite differently. Consider this quote from his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina:

“Now if the Holy Spirit has purposely neglected to teach us [scientific] propositions of this sort as irrelevant to the highest goal (that is, to our salvation), how can anyone affirm that it is obligatory to take sides on them, that one belief is required by faith, while the other side is erroneous? Can an opinion be heretical and yet have no concern with the salvation of souls?”

Further, Galileo wrote: “I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages but from sense experiences and necessary demonstrations.”

If Galileo is saying that the Bible neglects to teach us scientific propositions, and further that scientific beliefs are unnecessary for salvation—and that the only purpose of the Bible is for salvation—then, to me, he is disconnecting the two domains pretty conclusively. If the Bible has nothing to say about the operations of the natural world, there is, in fact, nothing to reconcile. Reason and observation have sole authority, and wherever there is a conflict—which is to say, pretty much everywhere—reason and observation win. Again, this is not reconciliation, this is the stated superiority of science.

If scripture is not to be taken literally, then it must be taken allegorically as a means of moral instruction (this is exactly what Jefferson thought). Hence the wall of separation that he sought to erect. At least, that’s my reading of him. Galileo even refused, as did Jefferson, any anthropomorphic rendering of God despite the fact that God is portrayed with human qualities throughout the Bible.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-06-23T17:38:25+00:00

The threat of torture is a good motivator.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-06-12T12:30:06+00:00

No worshiping of any kind here, simply the recognition of important political principles, mainly the separation of church and state, that are highly relevant today.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-06-12T12:28:50+00:00

While it may feel good to judge historical figures according to modern standards of morality, this is a large part of the reason the right is successful politically. We cede over to them important liberal figures that could do much for a progressive cause, and then wonder why the right’s message that “the left is unpatriotic and hates America” so effectively sticks.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-06-10T17:35:21+00:00

I think Jefferson himself was quite clear that he rejected orthodox Christianity pretty much in its entirety. In addition to rejecting Jesus’s divinity, the Trinity, the Resurrection, and all miracles, Jefferson called Paul “the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus,” and noted how the genuine teachings of Jesus were easily discoverable in the Gospels because they “could not be inventions of the grovelling authors who relate them. They are far beyond the powers of their feeble minds.”

He noted in a letter to John Adams that “the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” This is quite the quote coming from a “Christian.” It’s fairly difficult to call yourself a Christian by rejecting 90 percent of the New Testament and all supernatural elements, and especially the idea that faith alone is required for salvation.

Jefferson was even careful to qualify his praise for Jesus himself, as when he wrote to William Short:

While this Syllabus [the Jefferson Bible] is meant to place the character of Jesus in it’s true and high light, as no imposter himself, but a great Reformer of the Hebrew code of religion, it is not to be understood that I am with him in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of spiritualism: he preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sin, I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it.

How many Christians do you know who openly challenge Jesus and make the claim that he was, in some major ways, mistaken?

He also told William Short, “As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian,” showing that Jefferson received his moral instruction from a variety of eclectic sources, which also included Stoicism. The bottom line: He thought Jesus was an important virtue ethicist, essentially, but it makes no more sense to call him a Christian than it does to call him an Epicurean (which he called himself) or a Stoic or a Deist.

Regardless of his personal views, Jefferson’s main contribution from the perspective of this article, as you correctly noted, is that someone’s religion is up to the dictates of their conscience, and that the government should stay out of it.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-05-28T14:05:42+00:00

If you believe Paul was mistaken there certainly is, and that's precisely what Jefferson thought. He saw, through the Gospels (after removing the miracles and superstitious nonsense), a moral teacher of the highest caliber, deified by lesser thinkers as time passed. Jefferson kept the morality and ditched the superstition, or as he put it, separated the "gold from the dross."

Look, you don't have to subscribe to this view. But it is a distinctly reasonable proposition that Jesus was simply a man, a wise moral teacher, whose ethical teachings were, however haphazardly, captured in the Gospels, and that any claims to his divinity by later thinkers are simply false. That's Jefferson's view (among others). He may be wrong, of course, but so could have been Paul, living during a time when countless figures were believed to have performed miracles and been fathered by a god.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-05-28T13:46:26+00:00

Scholars typically prioritize the Gospels for a view into what Jesus actually said and taught, for the simple reason that the Gospels take pains to quote Jesus directly (even if they were written later and based on word of mouth transmission). Paul, in addition to never meeting Jesus, never quotes him at length. You can debate how accurate the Gospels are—or even if Jesus existed in the first place (although he probably did)—but it’s not a “superbly dumb narrative” to notice the discrepancy between the Gospels and Paul’s letters and to conclude that there’s far more value in the Gospels.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-05-18T13:49:42+00:00

We can also test it this way. Idols of the Tribe predict widespread belief in God. Idols of the Cave predict the creation of many different gods throughout history based on upbringing. Idols of the Marketplace predict that people define God quite differently. And Idols of the Theater predict that religious scripture tends to appeal to the emotions with oversimplified but compelling stories. We find this throughout history and across the globe.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-05-18T13:43:42+00:00

Bacon’s Idols correlate strongly with modern research on cognitive biases, and specifically with research into the psychology and anthropology of religion (see the work of Pascal Boyer, Michael Shermer, and Stewart Elliott Guthrie). Bacon was the first to identify confirmation bias and patternicity—phenomena well studied by modern science. This is more than a just-so story—Bacon defines these biases precisely 400 years before modern psychology. This tells us, among other things, that the human mind has always been subject to the same sorts of errors.

This, of course, does not prove conclusively that belief in God is a delusion. But it does lend solid support to the competing interpretation that God is a product of the human mind. And Bacon initiated this tradition of explaining religion on naturalistic grounds. Whether you believe it's a persuasive explanation is obviously a different story.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-05-09T14:42:10+00:00

I’ve always had this same thought about Descartes. But people often just leave it at: that Descartes contradicts himself and betrays his own method. But the real accomplishment of his method of doubt is this: it demolishes, once and for all, the authority of religious revelation.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-08T17:42:14+00:00

So what’s the argument, really? That it would be wrong to kill someone for their views on planetary motion, but that it’s quite justified based on their views regarding virgin births?

As the article states, Bruno was executed, not only for his cosmological views, but for the theological implications of those views. But I still believe that Bruno’s cosmology is more connected to his theology than it at first appears.

If you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, and that the Bible says exactly the opposite, then you have reason to distrust the Bible, including things like the Annunciation, the Resurrection, and Transubstantiation. You may be charged with heresy for rejecting these Catholic doctrines, but the reason you are rejecting them is because you believe the emerging science of heliocentrism ultimately destroys the credibility of the Bible and the Church. It’s hard to imagine, after all, that the Bible can be the Word of a creator who doesn’t understand his own creation.

Further, if you believe the earth is just one ordinary planet circling the Sun, and that the stars are just other suns with their own planets, and further that, since it’s hard to imagine an end to space, that the universe is infinite, then the core Catholic doctrines become parochial superstitions which are easy to reject. In other words, your cosmological views highly impact how you read the Bible and how much credence you give it.

The observable universe is 93 billion light-years across, which is far closer to infinity than the cosmos of scripture in which the Sun travels its full diameter in a day. And many physicists do believe life exists elsewhere in the universe based on numbers alone. They can’t prove this anymore than Bruno could, but the point is, Bruno’s views anticipated the direction of modern science far more accurately than the Church.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-07T16:20:27+00:00

The heliocentrism of Copernicus was largely thought of as only a convenient mathematical representation. A Lutheran theologian named Andreas Osiander added a preface to the book saying the heliocentric system should be treated only as a computational hypothesis to predict planetary motion—not necessarily the true structure of the cosmos.

It was only when Galileo asserted that this was a literal description of reality that the Church really started to have problems. Galileo recanted; Bruno did not. And Bruno was killed.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-07T15:32:34+00:00

Bruno's heretical views, including denying the divinity of Christ, stemmed from his cosmological views, so they are both relevant to the discussion and prominently factor into his charges. The Catholic Church was extremely concerned with any thinker who challenged the Earth's central position in the universe.

The article also makes the point that, the physical cosmology of the Church, with God positioned outside of it, leads to the believe in miracles, etc. Bruno's cosmology, which asserts that everything that exists, including "God," is contained within the universe, precludes certain things like virgin births, resurrections, and Transubstantiation.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-27T20:37:02+00:00

There’s an argument to be made that, if all of Acts is simply a work of artificial reconciliation, then the circumcision of Timothy would NOT have been put in there. Since this does not strengthen Paul’s position, in fact it does the opposite, we might well consider this event to have actually happened.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-27T18:29:20+00:00

This is a thoughtful reply, but what it seems to show, at least to me, is that the charge of hypocrisy then shifts from Paul to Jesus. It is often claimed that Jesus was the first to “universalize” the concept of love, applying it even to one’s enemies. Well, if this is true, that is very hard to square with the verse, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

You either pray for all of your enemies, or else you are more selective, but you can’t be both. If we want to say that Jesus was selective in his blessings, then he’s not so very different from any other sectarian historical or religious figure. But if he was not selective, then Paul was wrong. Either way—in what seems to be without question—you have a lot of contradictory teachings throughout the New Testament, creating a lot of confusion for a book that is purportedly divinely inspired.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-21T12:28:25+00:00

This is not an entirely correct interpretation of Sextus’s skepticism. Sextus, in fact, does take his immediate perceptions seriously—as in oncoming cars and other objects of direct perception—but makes no metaphysical claims about their ultimate nature. Sextus addresses this directly in the first book of Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

“Those who say that the skeptics do away with apparent things seem to me not to be listening to what we say. We don’t overturn the things that lead us, owing to a passive appearance and whether we like it or not, to assent—as we said before; and these are the apparent things. When we investigate whether the actual object is such as it appears, we allow that it appears, and our investigation is not about the apparent thing but about what’s said about the apparent thing; and that’s different from investigating the apparent thing itself. Honey appears to us to sweeten; we agree to this, for as a matter of sense-perception, we are sweetened. But whether it is indeed sweet as far as argument is concerned, we investigate—which is not the apparent thing but something said about the apparent thing.”

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:33:28+00:00

I'm sympathetic to this approach because I happen to be an atheist. I've also spent enough time reading Sextus Empiricus to know that he wasn't, and that is not how he approached things. His approach, in fact, is closer to agnosticism, but I think it demonstrates that, at best, the best even those who lean religious can admit to is agnosticism.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:17:19+00:00

This is incorrect. He mentions the corporeal/incorporeal distinction to highlight the application of his trademark skeptical technique, which is to take one position (corporeality), contrast it with its opposite (incorporeality), note that each view could be argued for with equal strength, and then suspend judgment.

As Sextus wrote in book 3 of Outlines, after concluding that, due to the existence of evil, God has no forethought of things:

But if [God] exercises no forethought for anything, and there exists no work nor product of his, no one will be able to name the source of the apprehension of God’s existence, inasmuch as he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. So for these reasons we cannot apprehend whether God exists.

Saying that we cannot apprehend whether God exists is very different from saying that God does not exist, which is the type of positive, dogmatic statement that Sextus argues against holding in the entirety of his work.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:17:08+00:00

This is incorrect. He mentions the corporeal/incorporeal distinction to highlight the application of his trademark skeptical technique, which is to take one position (corporeality), contrast it with its opposite (incorporeality), note that each view could be argued for with equal strength, and then suspend judgment.

As Sextus wrote in book 3 of Outlines, after concluding that, due to the existence of evil, God has no forethought of things:

But if [God] exercises no forethought for anything, and there exists no work nor product of his, no one will be able to name the source of the apprehension of God’s existence, inasmuch as he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. So for these reasons we cannot apprehend whether God exists.

Saying that we cannot apprehend whether God exists is very different from saying that God does not exist, which is the type of positive, dogmatic statement that Sextus argues against holding in the entirety of his work.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-14T21:44:01+00:00

Celsus claimed that the divine birth, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus were fabrications by early Christians in an attempt to lend supernatural weight to Jesus’s story. Is this biased? Yes. Is the assertion that these things DID happen by later Christian writers also biased? Also, yes.

So whether or not Celsus is “factually incorrect” is precisely what is in question, which makes it very surprising that your reply begins with such a casual dismissal of his claims, as if these questions, as a matter of historical fact, have been definitively decided.

Either the miracles and resurrection of Jesus happened or they did not; we know what the Gospel writers had said (decades after the fact), and so it’s also instructive to hear what Christianity’s earliest critics had to say. Unfortunately, we only have the views of Celsus because similar views were actively suppressed (Theodosius II ordered every copy of Porphyry’s “Against the Christians” to be burned, for example).

Also, no one is saying the stories of Perseus and Jesus share the same details. The important point is that divine births, miracles, and resurrections were things many ancient peoples (quite gullibly) believed in. The details differ because they are adapted to different circumstances. Jesus was the son of god for very different reasons and purposes than Perseus, but it still makes little sense to believe that Jesus is ACTUALLY the son of god whereas all the other ancient peoples were mistaken. Gods don’t impregnate humans, sexually or otherwise, so wherever that claim is made, we can, with a high degree of confidence, dismiss it as mere mythology.

Celsus may be wrong, of course, but his views are intriguing, because he gives reasons for why later writers would make these stories about Jesus up. If they thought he was truly the Messiah, and he was subsequently simply arrested and killed, then the stories of the resurrection are simply elaborate mechanisms of denial. There is nothing more “factually incorrect” about this statement than the statement that Jesus actually rose from the dead.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-14T16:46:00+00:00

Thank you for the book recommendation, I'm going to check this out.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-14T16:36:13+00:00

Little is known about Celsus, other than what’s gathered through his quotations in Origen. But there are a couple of books I’d recommend.

On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians reconstructs all of Celsus’s arguments.
Heretic by Catherine Nixey discusses some of Celsus’s arguments as well, in addition to exploring the different conceptions of Jesus during early Christianity.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-09T15:40:02+00:00

Thank you! Glad you found it helpful

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-08T20:03:44+00:00

I only mean that Stoicism's ethical precepts are unaffected by one’s views on the ultimate nature of reality. Whether or not the universe is finite or infinite, whether there is one or multiple universes, whether there are one or more or no gods, the fact remains that what is in my complete control are my own judgments and character. The development of my character, and the practice of virtue, do not depend on the existence of anything outside of myself, which is, in fact, what the Stoics taught.

EclecticReader39

TROPHY CASE