Dennis Gorelik

It turns out that some scientists played dirty while trying to discredit religious resistance to their discoveries.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
The myth of the flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages in Europe saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.

During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among the educated was almost nonexistent
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The 19th century was a period in which the perception of an antagonism between religion and science was especially strong. The disputes surrounding the Darwinian revolution contributed to the birth of the conflict thesis, a view of history according to which any interaction between religion and science would almost inevitably lead to open hostility, with religion usually taking the part of the aggressor against new scientific ideas.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis
The "conflict thesis" proposes that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science and that the relationship between religion and science inevitably leads to public hostility. Although the thesis still existed in popular imagination as of 2002, historians of science do not support the original form of the thesis, since it has been discredited.
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