“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
— Galileo Galilei
Galileo wrote this in his 1615 letter to Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, defending the compatibility of science and Scripture. He argued that God gave humans reason precisely so they would use it to understand the natural world. The Church banned the letter.
I was the eldest of six children in Pisa. My father was a musician and cloth trader who taught me to question authority and test ideas for myself. I studied medicine because he told me to, then dropped it for mathematics because I could not stop thinking about how things fall. I built telescopes, pointed them at the sky, and saw what no one had seen: moons orbiting Jupiter, mountains on the Moon, phases of Venus. Everything I found contradicted what the Church taught. I published it anyway. The Inquisition put me on trial at sixty-nine and forced me to recant on my knees.