C. S. Lewis's book The Discarded Image is about how to understand and how not to misunderstand medieval literature. In some parts he explicitly contrasts medieval with modern culture. In one of those he writes about the transition from Ptolemaic astronomy to heliocentric theories.
He asserts that the replacement of the former by the latter did not result from empirical discoveries that could not be explained within the Ptolemaic theory, but rather from the discovery that observations could be explained with fewer complications in the heliocentric theory.
Was he right?
quote from Lewis's book:
The old astronomy was not, in any exact sense, 'refuted' by the telescope. The scarred surface of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter can, if one wants, be fitted into a geocentric scheme. Even the enormous, and enormously different, distances of the stars can be accomodated if you are prepared to make their 'sphere', the stellatum, of a vast thickness. The old scheme, 'with Centric and Eccentric scribl'd o're', had been tinkered a good deal to keep up with observations. How far, by endless tinkerings, it could have kept up with them till even now, I do not know. But the human mind will not long endure such ever-increasing complications if once it has seen that some simpler conception can 'save the appearances'. Neither theological prejudice nor vested interests can permanently keep in favour a Model which is seen to be grossly uneconomical. The new astronomy triumphed not because the case for the old became desperate, but because the new was a better tool; once this was grasped, our ingrained conviction that Nature herself is thrifty did the rest.
