Galileo and the problem of creation

Galileo and the Problem of Creation uncovers a side of Galileo that few readers know: the thinker who set out to explain how God shaped the architecture of the cosmos. Through careful historical contextualisation — ranging from Renaissance debates on gravity to philosophical readings of Genesis — this book reveals how Galileo’s scientific imagination was forged within a rich and contested intellectual world.
Tracing Galileo’s ideas from his early writings on motion to the Dialogue and the Two New Sciences, this study shows that he developed multiple cosmogonies — first geocentric, then heliocentric — as part of a bold attempt to unite terrestrial and celestial physics. Rather than grounding his science in metaphysics or theology, Galileo treated the structure of the cosmos as a problem of natural philosophy, to be solved through demonstration, mathematics, and experience.
Far from abstract speculation, Galileo’s engagement with the order of creation illuminates a distinctive dimension of his thought — one that enriches our understanding of his approach to nature and its laws.