GP is taking into account the larger picture and discussion of Galileo's ideas. The Inquisition was sicced on Galileo and the justification was that his ideas contradicted the Bible. But the actual prosecution was also motivated by Galileo's obstreperousness. Guy was difficult and he challenged the Church's authority in weird ways (not always intentionally). In particular, he was seen to have attacked one of his main supporters, who happened to be the Pope.
Exactly. Galileo was originally on very good terms with the pope. Then the pope asked him to write a book comparing heliocentric and geocentric ideas from a neutral perspective. Galileo instead wrote a book ridiculing geocentrism, and had some things the pope said repeated by a character called "Simplico" ("Fool"). He insulted the pope, and that's where the trouble really started.
Well to be honest if antivaxer asked a doctor to compare vaccines to essential oils you would probably do the same, or flat earther asked you to compare theory of flat earth vs cube earth vs geoid earth.
Although one could expect trouble when that patron was basically the most powerful person at that time.
The big difference in your comparison is that vaccines and the roundness of the Earth are very well established with overwhelming evidence supporting them. The heliocentric solar system was not well established at that time. That's what the whole discussion was about.
Copernicus' book had been published in 1543. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633. That would be like someone in 2043 being convicted of heresy for saying that DNA has a double helical structure.
Parallax, predicted by the heliocentric model, was only observed in 1806. Until then, its apparent absence was a strong argument against heliocentrism. (We just didn't know that stars are so far away.)
DNA structure is not a very good analogue because here we already had the X-ray image, and the question was to find a molecular structure that matched the data.
Also, the discovery of DNA fulfilled a prediction by Darwin's theory of evolution: that there had to be a mechanism by which traits were passed on to the next generation. It's something that made sense within the paradigm of the time, and it fit the observations.
Heliocentrism made sense on some level, but not on another, and it didn't fit the observations of the time. Only when Kepler made a model that fit observations, and Newton's theory of gravity explained why it had to be that way, did heliocentrism made scientific sense and was geocentrism obviously wrong.
It is not about evidence, it is about sure you are about your argument, and as it was stated below - Galileo wasn't the first one to propose heliocentricism.
But at the time, without robust mathematical concepts of inertia, forces, etc there were some reasonable arguments against heliocentrism. Plus, Galileo ignored Kepler's elliptical orbits, which are closer to reality.
I think it's more fair to say that he contradicted their "interpretation" of the bible at the time. Even Catholic church doesn't maintain those old beliefs any more.
> He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Ecclesiastes 1:5 (NIV):
> The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
A literal interpretation of the bible has the earth standing still while the sun moves. Of course you can interpret any text any way you like, and if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.
True, but the catholic church did not base their worldview purely on a literal reading of the bible. This was the case for protestants ("sola scriptura"), but the catholic church often favored allegorical readings and did not consider the bible the only authority on truth.
> if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.
Some have even gone so far as to claim that the stuff in the book didn't actually happen but the book can be read as an allegory of something or other!
As the people you are arguing against are 16th century clergy, you can't really convince them of anything - they are long dead. The best one can do is try to understand how they were thinking.
Most protestants aren't a fan of an excessively literal interpretation either. Modern biblical literalism, where an overly literal interpretation trumps even common sense and observation, is a fairly recent invention (late 18th century, I think), and I, as a Christian, consider it the largest threat to Christianity today. And a heresy, I suppose; it doesn't do justice to what the bible is actually trying to tell us, and focuses only on superficial, nonsensical interpretations that often end up contradictory.
