Galileo was the first.

That's ridiculous.

As for theology and metallurgy, it's not clear what they have to do with it.

I suppose the religious nuts are right, if it wasn't for the abject failure of religion and belief in deities to produce useful results, there would never have been any motivation to count money, for instance. Metallurgy has always driven science and technology since the advent of agriculture. Before then it was stone working. Before that it was presumably sticks and stones. My position is that living conscious entities at all evolutionary levels engage in a process that models what we modern humans call 'scientific methods'. At the most basic animal level it's something like : should I move closer to it, or farther away from it. Should I eat it, or should I reject it. Plants probably have different priorities.

Man was mining, refining and forging metal long before the advent of the scientific era of the renaissance. Just because we have little remaining records of the accomplishments of the ancients, doesn't mean they didn't accomplish anything scientifically. It's just that the record is poor. But the archaeological record remains, and is indisputable. Galileo certainly wasn't the first. There is no first in evolution. There is just change. Your position is that of absolutism and creationism. Not that it's entirely a bad position, but nowadays we know a little bit about duality and its occurrence in nature - relativism and evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy