The struggle is nothing new
The question of tension between scientific study and religious commitment is examined through two historic examples: the impact of Aristotelian physics on thirteenth-century Europe, and the motion of the Earth argued by Copernicus and Galileo. Aristotelian physics was constructed from ideas around change, form, and substance, which together implied the physical universe must have existed into the infinite past. This conflicted with religious ideas about time itself having been brought into being in the finite past. Bonaventure wished to reject Aristotelian science, but others such as Averroes and Aquinas adopted a more nuanced view, in which the meaning of statements is to be drawn with reference to their context. Something similar happened in the resolution of the seventeenth-century dispute about Earth’s motion. From the perspective of Einstein’s General Relativity, statements about motion, including accelerated motion, are never absolute but always relative to frame of reference.