...the one belief that you are claiming to be totally useless in this thread (the belief in the christian God) is the very one that enabled scientific inquiry to start.
I think you may be missing something here.
You can trace science from early Greece and Rome but most of that line died with the Roman Empire. Science survived in Arab countries, and was imported into Sicily and Spain from those countries. The Black Death slowed things down.
There is a good article at Wikipedia. It includes this:
quote:
In 1348, the Black Death and other disasters sealed a sudden end to the previous period of massive philosophic and scientific development. Yet, the rediscovery of ancient texts was improved after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West. Meanwhile, the introduction of printing was to have great effect on European society. The facilitated dissemination of the printed word democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas. New ideas also helped to influence the development of European science at this point: not least the introduction of Algebra. These developments paved the way for the Scientific Revolution, which may also be understood as a resumption of the process of scientific change, halted at the start of the Black Death.
Based on this it could be argued that Christianity was only accidentally involved in propagating science; more accurately you could argue that it preserved literacy through some very tough times, but that literacy was for religious purposes more than secular purposes.
In fact, real progress in the sciences has only become possible in the last few centuries, in the west at least, because of the printing press and the wonderful fact that we no longer have to kowtow to the local religious authorities.
Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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