Although one could expect trouble when that patron was basically the most powerful person at that time.
DNA structure is not a very good analogue because here we already had the X-ray image, and the question was to find a molecular structure that matched the data.
Heliocentrism made sense on some level, but not on another, and it didn't fit the observations of the time. Only when Kepler made a model that fit observations, and Newton's theory of gravity explained why it had to be that way, did heliocentrism made scientific sense and was geocentrism obviously wrong.
> He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Ecclesiastes 1:5 (NIV):
> The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
A literal interpretation of the bible has the earth standing still while the sun moves. Of course you can interpret any text any way you like, and if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.
> if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.
Some have even gone so far as to claim that the stuff in the book didn't actually happen but the book can be read as an allegory of something or other!
As the people you are arguing against are 16th century clergy, you can't really convince them of anything - they are long dead. The best one can do is try to understand how they were thinking.