This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France.
The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime. Some historians wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. “It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did.
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