What i have learnt while taking a quick look back at the history of the cosmology (starting with Thomas Aquinas) is how much of what Galileo theorised/discovered (including his mechanics) was a direct assault on the Aristotelian model. And how important Aquinas' justification of a Biblical-Aristotelian narrative was for the Papacy's political arguments. The church, he argued, had priority over the state.
Galileo's insistence on scientific observation demonstrating the Copernican model - and turning many assumptions of the Aristotelian view to dust - was an arrow pointed directly at the heart of papal authority.
Kepler's use of Tycho's observations to justify the mathematics of planetary orbits took the world away from epicycles and into the realm of ellipses.
Science by observation pushed the established cosmology aside - not immediately, but inexorably.
But what Galileo changed profoundly was the sense that the Church was a bona fide scientific organisation. Galileo challenged Aquinas natural order. The way the earth-centric model was preserved was by silencing those who disputed it. The heliocentric model survived Galileo's house arrest. Science progressed. But mostly beyond the reach of papal authority.
Galileo revealed the truth of Papal teaching. It was designed to promote, rather than contest, a particular truth. Whereas science is defined by the second part of its sequence - provisional hypotheses founded atop supportive observations and where measurement is possible, mathematics, followed by attempted disproofs and/or the discovery of environmental limitations, leading to fresh hypotheses. It is the capacity to change to accommodate new evidence which makes science so powerful.
Islamic societies today still impose restrictions of the type the West long ago set aside. Culturally, a significant proportion of Moslems respond to things they find offensive using violence.
I say this because it is better to confront problems than to pretend they don't exist. Perhaps we want to seem nice and in doing so, we think the man with the sharp knife will be nice back. Tell that to Alan Henning.
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