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imuli comments on The Galileo affair: who was on the side of rationality? - Less Wrong
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Galileo was eventually demonstrated correct. Were there trials where the church was eventually demonstrated correct?
Yes, not quite a trial but the condemnations at the University of Paris. In every statement falsifiable among them, the church was eventually correct, e.g., the universe isn't infinitely old, vacuum exists, astrology is bunk.
If the OP is right then Galileo was wrong in a lot of arguments he made.
A broken clock may be right twice a day, but you still shouldn't use it to tell time.
This is not a test as to whether we should judge the truth by what the church condemns, but rather for the OP's thesis that they are/were not specifically opposing the progress of truth on an object level.
I think we might both be misunderstanding each other? I thought your post was implying that the most important thing was that Galileo's theory was empirically confirmed and the church's falsified, I then intended to imply that someone could have a correct theory through blind luck while still being unscientific/irrational. (I don't know enough relevant history to have much of an opinion on the specific case of Galileo, I'm just pointing out the meta-level rule.)
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.