On the other hand, what had science done for religion? Simply this:
Copernicus, escaping persecution only by death; Giordano Bruno,
burned alive as a monster of impiety; Galileo, imprisoned and
humiliated as the worst of misbelievers; Kepler, accused of
"throwing Christ's kingdom into confusion with his silly fancies";
Newton, bitterly attacked for "dethroning Providence," gave to
religion stronger foundations and more ennobling conceptions.
Under the old system, that princely astronomer, Alphonso of
Castile, seeing the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic theory, yet knowing
no other, startled Europe with the blasphemy that, if he had been
present at creation, he could have suggested a better order of the
heavenly bodies. Under the new system, Kepler, filled with a
religious spirit, exclaimed, "I do think the thoughts of God." The
difference in religious spirit between these two men marks the
conquest made in this long struggle by Science for Religion.[168]
Nothing is more unjust than to cast especial blame for all this
resistance to science upon the Roman Church.
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