The Historic Conflict of Religion and Science-printing

Carl Sagan, an avowedly unabashed Jewish atheist and planetary scientist, speaks to Galileo Galilei's historic astronomic and scientific conflict with the Roman Catholic Church whereby Galileo was ignominiously placed under house arrest on April 22, 1633 for the rest of his life after a Church conviction for his heresy during the Period of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition began 1478. The Spanish conversion or expulsion of Jews in their Catholic midst began 1492, the year of the Reconquista and Columbus setting sail. The Italian ( Roman ) Inquisition began 1542.

Pope John Paul II and The Pontifical Academy of Sciences however exonerated Galileo Galilei in 1992, thus finally ending their 359 years of ignominious behaviour towards this esteemed mathematician, astronomer and scientist whom Albert Einstein once termed "Galileo ... is the father of modern physics -- indeed of modern science".