David Wilson is an historian of science at Iowa State University. He feels that to best discuss history of science and religion, avoid those two words, which “carry the emotional baggage of modern controversies.” (See also book 7.)

This academic article will be of interest to anyone who has read “Galileo’s Daughter” - a book about Galileo’s life from his daughter’s perspective that I enjoyed but chose not to review. David Wilson’s analysis is quite interesting and may be different from those of a physicist. He focuses on how Galileo tried to use religion to convince the Catholic Church he was only doing God’s will by describing why the idea that our Sun, not the Earth, is at the center of our solar system. But, of course, the Catholic Church always plays its trump card when anyone publicly disagrees with its ideas, so Galileo was put under house arrest for the rest of his life. This short article is well worth reading because of the valid insights of Wilson's different perspective on how to view this well-known conflict between unyielding religious doctrine and a remarkable, for Galileo's time, new physics paradigm.