It might have been a matter of taste in the 17th century. The Church was willing to accept a model where the sun goes around the earth, and the planets around the sun. This model agreed with observations, and was in good taste as well, as it avoided the problem of why it doesn't feel like we're in motion, and why we don't get flung off the earth.
Then Newton came along and blew all of the models out of the water. Nobody's at the center of the universe [0]. A single theory of gravity models both planetary motion and why we don't get flung off the earth. And we can "feel" the rotation of the earth by experiments which came along later such as Foucault's pendulum and the Coriolis force.
[0] A puzzle I like to taunt my friends with: The earth is in fact equidistant from the edges of the observable universe in all directions, so we must be in the center after all. ;-)
I think "there is no center" and "where you put the center is a matter of taste" are more or less equivalent. And if you're confronted with a pencil and paper and asked to draw the solar system, the latter is more useful.
Then Newton came along and blew all of the models out of the water. Nobody's at the center of the universe [0]. A single theory of gravity models both planetary motion and why we don't get flung off the earth. And we can "feel" the rotation of the earth by experiments which came along later such as Foucault's pendulum and the Coriolis force.
[0] A puzzle I like to taunt my friends with: The earth is in fact equidistant from the edges of the observable universe in all directions, so we must be in the center after all. ;-)