Was the geocentric view of the universe ever a well established scientific theory?
Yes, the geocentric theory was the leading theory of the structure of the universe until Copernicus. Others in this thread have discussed some of the philosophical reasons behind it; however, it was indeed fully scientific because it provided a model that made correct predictions of future observations. The heliocentric system, of course, makes better predictions of more kinds of observations, but most of these were not available until Galileo. Furthermore, there was strong scientific evidence against heliocentrism. Before the telescope there was only one possible experiment that could discrimiate between geocentrism and heliocentrism: the parallax of the stars, and the results of this experiment always favored the geocentric model. Lack of parallax was a fully scientific falsification of heliocentrism, and until Galileo’s observations of the moons of Jupiter and phases of Venus was more than ample scientific justification for not switching over.
