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Evan_Gaensbauer comments on The Galileo affair: who was on the side of rationality? - Less Wrong
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This is an essay which I or others could use to claim the study of history is fraught with problems. However, it's only popular history that poses the problems. It's from other books on history that you yourself were able to relay this information to LessWrong. I'm curious what are heuristics for identifying better sources for studying history, i.e., to identify signals among the noise of historical sources.
I don't live in the United States, so I'm unaware of how much a threat Young Earth Creationists pose to the teaching of proper scientific knowledge in schools there. I've read enough headlines of school boards stacked with Creationists trying to alter policy of what's taught to merit concern. However, I agree the concern seems overblown, as I doubt it's taken root as much as the alarmism of New Atheists would lead one to believe.
This essay has changed my mind. Unless I forget, I will not use the argument of the Catholic Church suppressing heliocentrism as an argument of how the Catholic Church then and now suppresses science in general.
I think you may be underestimating what Val is not mentioning. Galileo's Dialogue that Val focuses on so exclusively was not published for another 15 years after Copernicanism was banned (de jure at least).
We have to strike a balance between not overgeneralizing, when the Catholic church did include good scientists, and also not over-dividing, when the Catholic church as an organization was very anti-scientific in its approach to heliocentrism.
I was never claiming that the Catholic Church was always right, I was only talking about some very heavy biases a lot of people have in this topic.. One of the articles I linked (http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1402/1402.6168.pdf) deals specifically with the importance and weight of the ban you mentioned.
You seem to say this a lot in the comments. I'm not sure whether you're obliquely agreeing that the Catholic church's sum effect was antiscientific in the case of heliocentrism, or whether you're just trying to dodge the issue.