During a time of building respect for science and attacking religion, Galileo became an icon of intellectual freedom and rationalism, in opposition to religion. In particular, the historical work of Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, in his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (1896), presented the powerful image of Galileo as a primary hero in the long struggle (or "warfare") of enlightened science vs. benighted religion. His Chapter 3 on Galileo is entitled "The War on Galileo", and is followed by sections on other "hostility" and "persecutions" and "silencing", nonetheless to be followed ultimately by "The Retreat of the Church after its Victory over Galileo" and "The Final Victory of Science." Thus Galileo became an early and central martyr-hero of science, in an ultimately triumphalist story. Today the mythology of Galileo's resistance is still invoked to illustrate the historical "lesson" that truths are resisted or that heroic scientists persevere in the face of persecution.

The image of Galileo fighting Authority and oppression continues to have mythic power. It has some remarkably recent sources, such as the plays of the highly influential German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Here is historian Roslynn Haynes, in her book From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature [1994], on Brecht's mid-20th century plays:

"Brecht's Leben des Galilei [Life of Galileo] is the best-known of the works based on a historical scientist. Brecht was writing the first version in 1938-39 in Denmark, where he was exiled from Nazi Germany because of his communist sympathies. When news of the splitting of the uranium atom by Otto Hahn reached him, he was moved to dramatize, in the life of Galileo, the problems confronting German scientists, especially physicists, who were being required to work on the construction of the atomic bomb. This first version of the play is a strongly anti-fascist statement, essentially positive in its attitude towards scientists. Brecht himself said that Galileo is portrayed as "an intellectually heroic figure who fights for progress, who deliberately introduces a new age of scientific truth."19 The main thrust of the drama is the heroic struggle of scientists against authority, symbolized in the play by the Catholic church. Brecht was concerned, however, to emphasize that the church was only one of many authorities, its twentieth-century counterpart being, obviously, totalitarian governments. He wrote: "The Church functions...simply as Authority.... It would be highly dangerous, particularly nowadays, to treat a matter like Galileo's fight for freedom of research as a religious one; for thereby attention would be most unhappily deflected from present-day reactionary authorities of a totally unecclesiastical kind" (342). Thus Galileo becomes Brech'ts symbol for the noble scientists trapped in Nazi Germany. Temporarily he succumbs to the threat of torture and publicly denies what he knows to be scientific truth (in the play, the Copernican theory...) , but later he retunrs to his research in secret and smuggles his work across the frontier. Despite his other failings, the Galileo ofthis version is ultimately heroic in the cause of science. In order to continue his research he cheats, risks any danger, including the plague, and recants solely in order to be able to finish the Discorsi. The play was not performed until 1943, in Zurich, and it was not produced in the United States until 1947.  . . ."  [p. 301-302]

But the modern dismay with science, given its awesome destructive possibilities, and the worry that scientists have evaded their ethical responsibilities, also found representation in Galileo by Brecht:

"One of the most influential, though necessarily oblique, treatments of the German physicists working on the bomb was Bertolt Brecht's second version (1947) of his Life of Galileo. This modification of his 1938-30 version was written in the United States after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Brecht wrote in his introduction: "Overnight the biography of the founder of the new system of physics read differently. The infernal effect of the Great Bomb placed the conflict between Galileo and the authorities of his day in a new, sharper light." Unlike his earlier Galileo, the courageous rebel against represive authority, this revised Galileo stands as the prototype of the amoral scientist pursuing research without concern for its consequences. For Brecht, the scientific discoveries do not compensate for the crime against society. . . ." [p. 248]

Galileo continues to be a potent image reflecting societal concerns about the freedom and power and responsibility of intellectual exploration and challenge.