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V_V comments on The Galileo affair: who was on the side of rationality? - Less Wrong
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Are you sure you are not attacking a strawman/nut picking? I mean, there are certainly people who believe that, but is it really a representative position among atheists (*)?
(* Here I assume we are talking about atheists who don't partecipate to a secular/political religion, as these ones lend towards fanaticism, therefore I suppose they are more likely to hold false and inflammatory beliefs as long as they support their ideology and demonize competing ideologies)
So why don't the Sun and the planets fall on the Earth?
In the Aristotelic model you still needed a distinction between terrestial mechanics, ruling the sublunary sphere where gravity but also friction, drag, decay, and all kinds of irreversible processes occur, and celestial mechanics, ruling the celestial spheres, where everything moves like clockwork rather than "falling down" without any apparent energy source and doesn't show any signs of decay and irreversibility that 17th century people could have observed with instruments of their time.
Before Newton unified terrestial and celestial mechanics, you needed to keep them separate whether you were using a geocentric or a heliocentric model. You still needed a sublunary sphere sphere around the Earth where things slow down and fall and break and decay on their way towards the End of Time, while God and the Angels watch us from their perfect and immutable Heaven.
Neither the geocentric nor the heliocentric model had an advantage in terms of explanatory power here.
If the earth has a sublunary sphere, that suggests the earth is 'special', which is certainly more parsimonious in a geocentric universe. Also why doesn't earth's sublunary sphere cause it to fall into the sun?
Either way the Earth has to be special.
Because nobody figured out that the Sun had gravity before Newton.
This is certainly a valid concern. I have mostly only anecdotal evidence based on my personal experience, but I've seen these views held by a large number of people, even otherwise intelligent people. For example, a geography professor I know was feeling sure that Galilei was burned at the stake. Another point which hints me strongly is that I've even heard this view from committed Catholics who were ashamed by what their church did in the past.
Also, I linked an article (http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/533/copernicus-galileo-and-the-church-science-in-a-religious-world) which is a proponent of this view, and I've seen this argument coming up plenty of times in discussions about arguments against theism.
However, I don't have any real studies about the percentage of people who hold this view. This is why I also included a poll, and based on the results, there are some people here (who I think are well-read and intelligent, otherwise they would not be visiting this site much less paying attention to the articles) who do or did have such views.
If I remember Aristotle well, he did propose two fundamental kinds of motion, a linear and a circular one. So far as I know, Aristotle wasn't a monotheist, and the Greek gods were not described as omnipotent. However, my knowledge here is limited, I would need to read more from Aristotle to be capable of discussing this topic further.