Years spent studying the history of mathematics have led me to believe/know that the above mentioned were religious people. You see mathematics has always been akin to philosophy in the eyes of mathematicians. Newton's great work the Principia has a full title of Principles of Natural Philosophy. Gallileo's only error (for his own welfare) was to say that the universe did not revolve around the earth. In saying this he effecitively said man is not the center of the universe and therefore man is not the sole reason the universe exists.
Descartes actually stopped exploring maths and became a priest or something, The Bernoulli brothers gave credit to a lot of their theories as being from God's world, they only uncovered them.
Even the Platonic order in ancient Greece echoed veiws that the universe was run mathematically, like a machine by a set of rules that were layed down in the very foundation of the universe.
The first real person to say ... Hang on! All the maths actually disproves that God exists was Bertrand Russell in the early part of this century.
The greatest mathematician this century ever knew was a bloke called Paul Erdis. When he was presented with a particularly beautiful proof he used to say that it came "Straight from the book". He believed that God has a book with all the simple, proper truths in it. Him saying that about your proof was the highest honour in mathematics! I really recommend his life story called "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" as a fascinating read.
Until the 1800s mathematics was held back, at a level below what was accepted by the Greeks, by religion and its attitude on 'the hand of God' influencing all things.
Sorry I've prattled on a bit there haven't I!? But I could go on into the works of Fibbinaci, Euler, Leibniz, Raphson, Fermat and many others and go on for hours about the effect that religion and religious beliefs damaged their work.
A small thing to note ... most of the advances in mathematics (and this is still true today) have been necessitated by the need to understand principles that can be applied to contemporary weapons. Newton revolutionised artillery with his theories of motion and helped make the British Empire what it became.
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