Something I discovered when I started reading theology was that if there is any simple, slogan level statement that can be made about religion (such as, religion is the search for goodness/truth/holiness), chances are that the first year exam will have a question like "Religion is often said to be X. Examine the ways in which this statement is wrong."
There’s also likely to be a question on the lines of “State briefly seven proofs of the existence of God and for each one summarise in a paragraph why it fails.”
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Coming at this from the other side: up until very recently, organised religion did also claim to explain “How Things Work”.
The idea that scripture might be scientifically fallible was virtually unmentionable before Galileo, and contested long beyond that point. The Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina was revolutionary.
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Add Aristotle. Galileo’s problem wasn’t with the Scriptures - Genesis is utterly vague on the subject - but with the Church’s adoption of Aristotle as the source of secular knowledge.
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An unholy brew of classical nonsense from across the Mediterranean, blended and delivered courtesy of old Uncle Albertus.
Some of Gal’s troubles were purely scriptural, though; most obviously, the Joshua X argument.
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