[rafcavallaro]

I agree - the blog post says that for a time the evidence could support either view but this is false. Galileo discovered (there's that pesky novel factual evidence) that Venus showed ALL phases - new, crescent, gibbous, and full - which conclusively proved that the Ptolemaic model was false. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Venus.2C_Saturn...

[isotropy]

Except that the blog post says "for a long time the available facts were equally explained by geostationary or geomobile models". This is a correct statement. If you reread the whole Wikipedia section you cited, you'll see that the hybrid Tychonic model, in its geostationary form, also could produce phases of Venus, and that some scientists of the time moved to it based on that evidence.

You inadvertently prove the point of the entire essay, which is that we all oversimplify and distort our stories of the past to serve our modern purposes. If you oppose religion because you think science and facts, however inconvenient, should be our guides, don't you have even more obligation than religious folks to avoid this kind of mistake?

[rafcavallaro]

The key point is the word "equally" - the observation that Venus showed ALL phases, not just some, required significant modification to the Ptolemaic model - when one model must jump through hoops to explain new data it is not facts being "equally" explained by both models.

[kijin]

The Ptolemaic model was not conclusively proven to be false until parallax was verified. Every discovery before parallax could be accommodated by some or other variation of the Ptolemaic model, and such variations did in fact proliferate in geocentrism's desperate final years.

Sure, the more random variations they came up with, the less credible the Ptolemaic model became. Occam's razor and whatnot. But the conclusive blow came much later than you might expect. Parallax was only verified in the 19th century, long after most scientists already gave up on geocentrism.