It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle.

Giorgio de Santillana attributed this remark to the Dialogue in The Crime of Galileo (1955), but it does not appear there. A vaguely similar exchange appears in the Fourth Day of the Dialogue, when Salviati asks Simplicio why he resorts to a miracle to explain the tides, if they might be explained from movement of the earth. However, the specific wording comes instead from Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, where he states that the presence of wild animals on distant islands after the Deluge put Augustine of Hippo "to the refuge of a miracle," referring in turn to The City of God XVI.7.