That’s just the thing, though. For all the hoopla people have made over it, Galileo was not eventually demonstrated correct, for the very simple reason that he was factually wrong.
Yes, the Sun is the center of the solar system, not the Earth. But that’s not what he was teaching. He was teaching that the Copernican model of orbital dynamics was literally correct, and it isn’t. It got heliocentrism right, but a lot of other important details wrong, and Galileo was teaching that not only was this incorrect model literally true, but that it also had scriptural support. (Which means he truly was a heretic, by the definition being applied there.) At his trial, he was offered the chance to produce scientific evidence to prove his position, but he couldn’t actually do that, because his position could not be proven by scientific evidence due to being factually incorrect.
That’s just the thing, though. For all the hoopla people have made over it, Galileo was not eventually demonstrated correct, for the very simple reason that he was factually wrong.
Yes, the Sun is the center of the solar system, not the Earth. But that’s not what he was teaching. He was teaching that the Copernican model of orbital dynamics was literally correct, and it isn’t. It got heliocentrism right, but a lot of other important details wrong, and Galileo was teaching that not only was this incorrect model literally true, but that it also had scriptural support. (Which means he truly was a heretic, by the definition being applied there.) At his trial, he was offered the chance to produce scientific evidence to prove his position, but he couldn’t actually do that, because his position could not be proven by scientific evidence due to being factually incorrect.