In my conversations, some have doubted that what a person specifically believes about Genesis matters. Many believers take a casual approach to the text today and cannot imagine that martyrdom has ever been joined to Genesis. Jesus perhaps, but not Genesis. To the contrary: it has carried sufficient gravity to not only execute dissenters, but to do so with leading figures, as an example. There can be little doubt what fate would have befallen Galileo had he not recanted.

From “Parallel Worlds”:

The mixture of science, religion, and philosophy is indeed a potent brew, so volatile that the great philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 in the streets of Rome for refusing to repudiate his belief that there were an infinite number of planets in the heavens, harboring an infinite number of living beings.

Galileo’s and Bruno’s sin was not that they dared to divine the laws of the heavens; their true sin was that they dethroned humanity from its exalted place at the center of the universe.

It would take over 350 years, until 1992, for the Vatican to issue a belated apology to Galileo. No apology was ever issued to Bruno.