He was threatened by torture. A man of seventy, in very bad health, and faced with the most appalling of trials, Galileo was informed, if he was lying about his health, and if he is found fit to travel, he is to be sent "in custody, bound, and in irons," to Rome. As Fahie shows, and any man may verify in the documents, no account of Galileo's whereabouts from June 21st to June 24th was available. The evidence is consistent with view that he was put in the dungeons. The video also emphasizes that Galileo was condemned on account of heresy - he meddled with religion and did not provide evidence to support his proposal. Whether it is true or false, the evidence of a conflict between science and religion remains. The Church condemned, not merely the person of Galileo, but the truth that the earth revolved around the sun. .
Around the same period although slightly earlier, Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and scientist, was executed by the Catholic Church for his beliefs. Bruno not only supported the heliocentric system, he was one of the first to argue the existence of an infinite universe. In the book Ash Wednesday Supper, Bruno even speculated other worlds and inhabitants. Bruno had no secure place in either Protestant or Roman Catholic religious communities. He carried out his long fight against terrible odds. His ideas had no place for the greater conception of a supreme and infinite being. As a result he was kept a prisoner for over seven years and in 1600 was burned at stake with his tongue tied in a knot. In the video it is mentioned that his death was due to his blasphemy against the Church. Yet all his books and papers were condemned and still are at the Vatican.
According to Allan Sandage, a Research Staff Astronomer Emeritus at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, "science cosmology is not a religion." The argument of creationism versus the Big Bang theory is the topic of his essay in this book.
