Despite the Church’s condemnation, the scientific evidence supporting the heliocentric model continued to accumulate, especially as the field of astronomy advanced. With the work of later scientists, particularly Isaac Newton, the heliocentric model became firmly established as the accurate description of the solar system. Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski. Science doesn't know everything• Argument from incredulity• Argument from silence• Toupee fallacy• Appeal to censorship• Science was wrong before• Holmesian fallacy• Argument from omniscience• Willful ignorance• Argument from ignorance• You get the most flak when you're over the target" is a pseudo-logical gambit, a favorite of Internet argument used as a substitute for rational rebuttal. Its intention, of course, is to prove that a hopelessly-irrational woo proposition must be right because opponents are taking the trouble to criticize it. The popularity of this fallacious way of thinking is one major reason why real scientists are often reluctant to debate creationists. One of the things that seems to come up quite often, not really part of the Galileo Gambit but tossed around in, if I may be so bold, complementary fashion are the tales of deathbed recantations. "Pasteur recanted on his deathbed! Germ theory is false." It boggles my mind that twits that make such statements don't understand that it wouldn't have mattered if Louis had traveled far and wide for months before he died loudly proclaiming he'd been wrong.

Roberts variously claims that the United Nations is trying to impose world government on us through climate policy, and that CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are corrupt institutions that, one presumes, have fabricated the climate extremes that we increasingly observe all over the world.Premise: A is in set S1 Premise: A is in set S2 Premise: B is also in set S2 Conclusion: Therefore, B is in set S1. You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training. - Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus. Why the Prime Minister would employ such flawed logic, and contradict scientific research, is puzzling. Galileo It is freakishly common among creationists and global warming denialists alike against the evil scientific consensus. Examples include:

Galileo’s Vindication Was Based on Evidence: Galileo’s ideas, particularly his support for heliocentrism (the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around), were eventually accepted not because he was ridiculed, but because there was strong evidence supporting his views. Abetz does not have expertise in medical research, so why did he give Dr Lanfranchi’s views similar or more weight than those of most doctors, including the Australian Medical Association’s president Brian Owler, who say there is no clear link between abortion and breast cancer?That was about the time the Apple II first became available. It was more of a toy than a must-have device; my family did not get a computer until 1982. It was a Commodore 64, the hot home computer of the day because it had 64 kB of RAM, four times as much as any competing product. (More evidence that Gates' comment about 640K being enough for anybody made sense at the time.) The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine. - Ernst Rutherford, 1933

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then in a surprisingly high number of cases it turns out you're still wrong. Galileo’s support for the heliocentric model brought him into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, which, at the time, endorsed the geocentric model because it was believed to be consistent with certain Biblical passages. The Church considered the heliocentric view heretical, as it seemed to challenge the Scriptures and the long-standing theological views of the universe. Some call it the Galileo gambit (although in actuality Galileo is probably a bad example for pseudoscientists to use, given that he was persecuted by the Church, and not by his fellow scientists). Others call it the Semmelweis gambit. Whatever you call this particular gambit, I always like to note in response that history is indeed full of tales of the lone scientist working in spite of his peers and flying in the face of the doctrines of the day in his or her field of study. No doubt there are still a fair number of such scientists today. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon your point of view), the vast majority of them turn out to be utterly wrong. They disappear into the mists of history, leaving not even a footnote in the grand history of science (although they might leave behind some crappy articles in the peer-reviewed scientific literature). As Shermer so correctly put it in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in improving his or her critical thinking skills):

What’s wrong with this tactic

It did not matter why. There are two tides a day. Anyone living on the Atlantic seaboard can look out the window and see them. I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors lied, than that stones fell from the sky. - Thomas Jefferson, 1807 on hearing an eyewitness report of falling meteorites. Pauling said, "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.", according to Dan Schechtman (who got a Nobel for discovering the phenomenon in 2011) .