In our generation the myth that faith and science are incompatible – meaning that no intelligent person should believe in God – has been pushed hard by atheists and secularists alike.
I don’t suppose secularists take kindly to the idea of having a patron saint, but if they did, they might well choose Galileo. He seems to have become the go-to scientific victim if you want to prove how mean, unreasonable and obscurantist the Catholic Church was, and to the present-day atheists, obviously is.
Unhappily the papers on Galileo’s trial by the Inquisition were first released just as the debate about Darwin and evolution was hotting up. This helped feed the misleading myth that faith and science were at odds. But as with so many things, scrape away the spin and the reality looks very different. Behind the rhetoric we find a number of discoveries that surprise the average 21st-century critic of the Church.
