I wasn't that Galileo had said this. I have used this same argument on these threads whenever someone argues that some Bible stores are parables, and some phrases are figures of speech, and the difference is obvious.
I agree, and the test is whether the literal reading is in conformity with fact. When the literal reading is contrary to fact, then the story is a parable.
My personal opinion, which doesn't seem to be widespread, is the that the Bible's primary function is to promote thinking about morality, not to teach science and history.
I wasn't [aware] that Galileo had said this.
FWIW js1138, Christians believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God and so a person like me -- who, like Galileo, has a "religious temperament" from childhood (even though, unlike Galileo, I did not receive any formal religious instruction as a child, or even later in life, for that matter -- and am still "unchurched," as it were) has absolutely zero expectation or anxiety that science will ever falsify anything in it. And so far, science hasn't.
The point is (IMHO) the Bible ought not to be read literally -- for you are right, it is written in figurative and allegorical language. But at bottom, such figures, parables, and allegories -- not to mention the positive statements that God makes in it (as for instance, in Genesis) are founded in God's Truth. As Francis Schaffer has said, "God tells us truly -- but not exhaustively." God does not lie.
God's language plays on many different levels in the Holy Scriptures. But you will never find one single self-contradition in it.
IMHO, Galileo is right: The "book of the Universe" is God's "other" book that calls us to truth -- the truth of the natural world He created. We glorify the Lord by looking into this book and trying to grasp and understand its language. My deep interest in science finds its motivation here, just as for Galileo. (Of course, I could never in a million years aspire to his genius, his sheer creative love....)
Yes of course, js, you are exactly right: the Bible is NOT a scientific textbook!!! And also right that it does teach "morality." But more than that, its main purpose, it seems to me, is to lay out the divine dynamics of the great hierarchy of Being -- God-Man-Nature(World)-Society -- for the purpose of bringing God and man into intimate communication and relationship. The order of the personal soul is fundamental to the good order of society, and of man's responsible relations with the natural world. Or at least that is my belief.
As for whether the Bible teaches history or not, I think the Jews would insist that it does. Many of the accounts of the Old and New Testaments have been independently corroborrated by some of the human race's earliest historians (e.g., Herodotus), who were neither Jews nor Christians.