"But you cite Galileo's house arrest, which actually happened more or less for that reason. There was no problem with his proposing a theory about planetary motion, but he insisted on saying it was true, rather than provisional, which at the time it actually was."

I'd be grateful for a link to this. I can't find it. We have to be slightly careful here to distinguish unassailably true phenomena from the theories that set out to explain them. I've been castigated so many times here for saying that evolution is true, which of course it is, as true as the fact that my left leg is next to my right leg. But the theory of evolution by natural selection, the explanation of evolution, will never be true, because scientific explanations, or theories, are never claimed to be true, for the reason that they must always be susceptible to new evidence that may lead to revision.