Renegade. Heretic. Enemy of the church.

These are descriptions that have for centuries haunted the legacy of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, who spent a great deal of his life in the late- 16th and early-17th centuries gathering evidence for the unpopular sun-centered universe theory.

But acclaimed author Dava Sobel, who has spent years researching Galileo’s life and work, told an audience of more than 300 Thursday night at Kansas University that Galileo’s stance on the hierarchy between science and religion has been widely misunderstood, especially by the Catholic church, which eventually tried Galileo for heresy and forced him to dismiss the theory he’d worked so hard to prove.

Sobel discovered, while conducting research for her book “Galileo’s Daughter,” that Galileo, himself a Catholic, actually was quite devoted to his religion.

“I, in fact, think Galileo would be horrified to know that he was considered the point at which science and religion went their separate ways,” Sobel said during her address, which was part of KU’s Hall Center Humanities Lecture Series.

Sobel said she had stumbled upon her realization about Galileo’s religious ardor quite by accident. While conducting research for another book, “Longitude,” Sobel read a treatise on longitude and clockmaking that Galileo had written. It contained a letter to Galileo from his daughter, Virginia, who changed her name to Maria Celeste when Galileo placed her in a convent at age 13.

“How could Galileo, the great renegade, enemy of the church, have a daughter who was a nun?” Sobel said. “It made me think, in a moment, that everything I thought about Galileo probably was wrong.”

Sobel went on to discover that a collection of 124 surviving letters to Galileo from his daughter existed, published only in Italian. They became the core of her book that chronicles a devotion between father and daughter and Maria Celeste’s support for her father’s scientific quests, which she recognized were not attempts to fly in the face of the church’s teachings.

Galileo attended church, believed that God created the universe and simultaneously believed that God endowed human beings with the intelligence to investigate its inner workings, Sobel said, citing a well-known quote by Galileo: “The Bible shows us the way to go to Heaven, but not the way the heavens go.”

But despite his best efforts at explaining his position and providing evidence to back it up, the church refused to acknowledge Galileo’s work. He eventually was forced to abjure his beliefs, which some have seen as an act of cowardice, Sobel said.

“I disagree,” she said. “His work was aimed at explicating the glory of God’s creation. If he had refused to abjure, what would that have gained him?”