[Rigelian]

That said, the "church fathers" who condemned Galileo were not condeming without reason. Their challenge was that his data was simply not rigourous enough to overthrow the overwhelmingly accepted science of the era, which indicated that the earth was indeed the centre of the universe. If his data had only been massaged the right way, it might have even been convincing (however, this is not to say that the other scientists/church fathers would have accepted or denied the data - that would be so hypothetical that it would only amount to hopeful interpretation or even slander either way).

You are saying that Galileos theories were rejected on scientific grounds? Not so; they were rejected because if accepted as literally true they would have contradicted already-stated church doctrine. The church was quite prepared to allow Galileos methods to be used in navigational charts etc, as long as they were only viewed as mathematical constructs that conveniently reached accurate conclusions.

It did happen later, that someone (his name eludes me at the moment) did massage the data in an approriate way. By attaching said Galilean data to eliptical orbits rather than Galileo's circular orbits, did the concept of a helio-centric solar system finally make good scientific sense. Until that point, helio-certrism was accepted on the basis of a faith that the simpler (though unsubstantiated) system was more likely to be correct. Note: this is not an Occam's razor arguement, because Occam's says that "all things being equal, the simplest Version is likely the more accurate". In this case, the simplest Version was not equal, because the math was way to difficult preceding the elipse.

But even with the complication of the elliptical orbit (and the oribit of the earth is not dramatically elliptical) the heliocentric explanation was way superior to the alternatives. Take the retrograde motion of Mars for example; this is easily explained by the Earth 'catching' up Mars because of our shorter orbital period. Previous explanations had required ludicrously-contrived and complex scenarios with multiple interconnected spheres and who knows what else. The heliocentric explanation certainly did meet the Occams razor test there.

Galileo provides us with another analogy (taken from the Dava Sobel book). When Galileo did his experiment with a heavy and light ball dropped from a tower, there was of course a slight difference in the time taken to fall, the heavier ball taking slightly less time. Galileo correctly attributed this to air resistance. What frustrated him at the time was that his doubters, who had predicted the heavy ball falling several times faster than the lighter, siezed upon this small difference as disproving Galileo entirely. I put it to you that the elliptical/circular orbits fall into this Category. Incidentally I think it was Kepler who got it right in the end.

Though Galileos support of the Copernical heliocentric theory is well-publicised, what was just as significant was his discovery of moons around Jupiter. This had massive theological implications, because of the distinction between the 'pure' heavens (with planets, stars etc) and the 'base' earth.

The real conflict was between the old world view, based on argument from authority, and Galileos groundbreaking approach which placed the EVIDENCE above all other considerations. This is why he is regarded as the father of modern science. Today it seems ludicrous to us that noone had (for example) thought to test whether heavy and light objects would fall at the same rate. It was just too intuitively obvious to them to even question it.

There is a play by Bertold Brecht about the life of Galileo, in which a group of church elders arrive at his house to debate his theories. Regardless of the (dubious) historical accuracy of this, the key scene is where Galileo is begging the churchmen to just look through his telescope and see the moons of Jupiter for themselves. They refuse, preferring to sit down and have a theological debate about the perfect spheres or some such. This actually gets a laugh from the audience - how could they be so stupid? But it is a superb illustration of this complete shift in perspective.

In the modern scientific system, if a theory is contradicted by the evidence then it is WRONG. Simply wrong. No matter that Plato or Aristotle (or Newton or Einstein for that matter) believed it to be true. The argument from authority is back where it came from, and where it belongs - in the realm of superstition and religion.