"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths." - Bertrand Russell

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On Part 2 of July's edition of the BBC History Magazine podcast, historian Christopher Lewis on the popular myth that no one believed the Bible was literal truth until the American fundamentalists in the early 20th century (i.e. one reason why Galileo fell foul of the Church):

"In the course of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, that is, through the 16th century, and the rejection of the Roman Catholic Church by large numbers of people, especially in Northern Europe, the followers of Luther and then the followers of Calvin.

One of the main ideals that they upheld was a return to the Bible as being the source of Christian truth whereas the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages had had a much more flexible, shall we say, sort of approach to what was involved in Christian religion, which was not just exclusively dependent upon the Bible as the one and only source of Christian Revelation, but also saw the Church itself as something which had, over the centuries, had been an ongoing source of Christian teaching and wisdom.

So, in the 16th Century with the Reformation, the Bible, and that meant, inevitably to begin with at least a literal interpretation of the Bible, became very important to the Reformed Churches and in the course of the Counter Reformation, which was the Catholic Church's efforts to respond to the Reformation, it meant that the Catholic Church too was increasingly pushed towards taking a very literal approach to the interpretation of the Bible.

So that meant that Galileo's discoveries, as far as the Catholic Church in Italy was concerned, came at a time when there was an increasing preoccupation with the exact literal interpretation of the Bible, or insistence upon the literal truth of the Bible as being not just some sort of moral-spiritual truth, but as being the literal, physical truth

So if the Bible says that the Earth is stationary, as it sort of inevitably does in passing from time to time, whereas once in the Middle Ages indeed that would've been regarded as being something that wouldn't necessarily have been the literal truth but would've just been how the Word of God was presented to people at the time in terms they can understand

Come the late 16th and early 17th century, the Catholic Church, the theologians of the Catholic Church were insisting much more dogmatically, if you like, that if the Bible said something was true then that was the Physical Truth and you couldn't get around it by pretending that it was just an allegory or just written in terms that people understood at the time.

So Galileo, and more broadly in some respects you might say, scientific thinking of the time was unfortunately going in the opposite direction to what was that the Catholic Church was going in at the time"