Scientists, intellectuals and those generally predisposed against organized religion railed against the resistance of the church and other conservatives to the notion that the Sun, not Earth, was the center of our solar system. That resistance remains the basis of criticism that the church and conservatives are “anti-scientific.”
What a difference a few centuries makes.
Now, the church and conservatives are advocating restraint against the wholesale reordering of world societies — and the economic and social upheaval it will cause — around the generally unproven notion that there is such a thing as “man-made global warming.”
Now, it is the so-called scientists and intellectuals who advocate “green” everything with dire predictions (whose deadlines are constantly revised) of the melting of polar ice caps, submerged Caribbean islands, and the images of hapless polar bears with no ice to call home. Apocalyptic language, it seems, is not the sole province of religious types. Then again, the “blind faith” frequently ridiculed by intellectual culture seems now to be held by those worshiping at a green altar.
With revelations that green science may, in fact, have intentionally manipulated data in order to promote its agenda, it would seem that they are the ones now insisting that the earth is the center of the universe.
Perhaps this is the Copernican revolution in reverse.