What major scientific concepts throughout history have been attacked by the religious (usually Christian) groups at the time, only to later have them accept the scientific discovery’s validity due to overwhelming evidence.
The obvious example is Gallileo’s defence of heliocentrism, and I think in the future the current evolution vs. ID debate will go this way as well (either that, or religious groups will have grown so stubborn as to denounce any science advances whatsoever).
Are there other examples of major religions realizing the errors of their scientific attacks and crossing the line?
Let me clarify my question, though. You won’t find any modern Christians who think the sun revolves around the earth. As adamant as the church once was, it’s become absolutely accepted. The religious dogma that had Galileo under house arrest had lots of bite with its bark, and now it has no teeth at all.
ID isn’t quite there yet. There are several churches who refuse to believe the science. I do believe this issue will be to Christians in the year 3000 what we see that heliocentrism was to Galileo’s contemporaries.
I’m just curious if there are other examples of religious groups doing that kind of turn around.
I think you may find if you check into the Catholic Church vs. Galileo bit, it’s not quite as one-sided as it may seem. To be sure, the Cardinal in question was throwing his weight around rather vehemently, and in the Italy of the time, that had some practical effect on Galileo’s life. But by the same token, it was not that Galileo was advancing Copernican astronomy that was the problem, but that he was asserting it, not as a theory explaining the observations, but as absolute fact on a par with divine revelation. (To really get the impact of the problem, you have to put on the mindsets of the key players – not an easy task for the average modern.)
In general, contrafactual assertions regarding nature founded in the Bible are nearly always a 20th Century phenomenon – though there are some clear forerunners of it. But the “Bible as inerrant in every detail” phenomenon is actually in general a meme that has spread within living memory.