Before Galileo pointed his telescope at the night sky, the universe already had an order.

In Part 1 of Religion in the Courts: Galileo, Scopes and Dover, Judge Stephen J. Sfekas begins with the ancient and medieval ideas that shaped how educated Europeans understood the cosmos. From Genesis and Joshua to Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Islamic scholarship, and the universities of medieval Europe, this episode traces the long history of a world with Earth at its center.

But that world was not simply “religion against science.” It was a carefully built structure of scripture, philosophy, mathematics, observation, and tradition. And by the time Copernicus proposed a sun-centered universe, that structure was beginning to strain.

This opening episode sets the stage for Galileo’s conflict by asking a deeper question: what happens when a ci ...