[Michael Chui]

From "A History of God", pp288-90.

After the Reformation, people had become anxious about Christianity in a new way. Like "the witch" (or, indeed, "the anarchist" or "the communist"), "the atheist" was the projection of a buried anxiety. It reflected a hidden worry about the faith and could be used as a shock tactic to frighten the godly and encourage them in virtue.

...
The term "atheist" was an insult. Nobody would have dreamed of calling himself an atheist. It was not yet a badge to be worn with pride. Yet during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people in the West would cultivate an attitude that would make the denial of God's existence not only possible but desirable. They would find support for their views in science. Yet the God of the Reformers could be seen to favor the new science. Because they believe in the absolute sovereignty of God, Luther and Calvin had both rejected Aristotle's view of nature as having intrinsic powers of its own. They believed that nature was as passive as the Christian, who could only accept the gift of salvation from God and could do nothing for himself. Calvin had explicitly commended the scientific study of the natural world in which the invisible God had made himself known. There could be no conflict between science and scripture: God had adapted himself to our human limitations in the Bible, just as a skillful speaker adjusts his thought and speech to the capacity of his audience. The account of Creation, Calvin believed, was an example of balbutive (baby talk), which accommodated complex and mysterious processes to the mentality of simple poeple so that everybody could have faith in God. It was not to be taken literally.

The Roman Catholic Church had not always been as open-minded, however. In 1530 the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had completed his treatise "De revolutionibus", which claimed that the sun was the center of the universe. It was published shortly before his death in 1543 and placed by the Church on the Index of Proscribed Books. In 1613 the Pisan mathematician Galileo Galilei claimed that the telescope he had invented proved that Copernicus's system was correct. His case became a cause celebre: summoned before the Inquisition, Galileo was commanded to retract his scientific creed and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment. Not all Catholics agreed with this decision, but the Roman Catholic Church was as instinctively opposed to change as any other institution at this period when the conservative spirit prevailed. What made the Church different was that it had the power to enforce its opposition and was a smoothly running machine that had become horribly efficient in imposing intellectual conformity. Inevitably the condemnation of Galileo inhibited scientific study in Catholic countries, even though many distinguished scientists of the early period such as Marin Mersenne, Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal remained loyal to their Catholic faith. ....One fact emerges, however, that is important in our story: the Roman Catholic Church did not condemn the heliocentric theory because it endangered belief in God the Creator but because it contradicted the word of God in scripture.

This also disturbed many Protestants at the time of Galileo's trial. Neither Luther nor Calvin had condemned Copernicus, but Luther's associate Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) rejected the idea of the earth's motion around the sun because it was in conflict with certain passages of the Bible. This was not just as Protestant concern. After the Council of Trent, Catholics had developed a new enthusiasm for their own Scripture: the Vulgate, St. Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible. ....In the past, as we have seen, some rationalists and mystics had gone out of their way to depart from a literal reading of the Bible and the Koran in favor of a deliberately symbolic interpretation. Now Protestants and Catholics had both begun to put their faith in an entirely literal understanding of scripture. The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus might not have disturbed Ismailis, Sufis, Kabbalists or hesychasts, but they did pose problems for those Catholics and Protestants who had embraced the new literalism.

...
At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims that heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual, sophisticated churchmen such as Bellarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location. When Kabbalists were reinterpreting the biblical account of creation in a deliberately symbolic manner and warning their disciples not to take this mythology literally, Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail. This would make the traditional religious mythology vulnerable to the new science and would eventually make it impossible for many people to believe in God at all.

Does this make things a little more clear?

Religion is vulnerable to science if it pretends to be science. The key example, above, is Bellarmine, who argued that Hell was located at the center of the earth "by natural reason" because that's the farthest place from the heavens.

Science is vulnerable to religion if it pretends to be religion. The key example, today, of course, is popular psychology, which attempts to blend statistics, chemistry, and anecdote into a cheap novelette for self-help.