Yet Galileo, far from being an atheist, was driven by his deep inner conviction that the Creator, who had “endowed us with senses, reason and intellect,” intended us not to “forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”6 Galileo held that the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the “language of mathematics”7 and that the “human mind is a work of God’s and one of the most excellent.”8
