A strong case can be made that the outlook the West developed thanks to Christianity contributed towards the advancement of Science more than any other religion might have done.

* There’s the general optimism Christianity encourages.

* The belief , largely absent in other faiths, that God made created the universe in a rationally ordered way that would in principle be accessible to human logic. Think you’ve made this point in some of your earlier blogs.

* Also there’s the way Christianity engendered a world view that lent itself much more readily to the advanced analyses that supports much of our science. The classical consciousness was all about the sensuously present here and now. In arts like sculpture this was a great advantage, experts have agreed that the finest Greek statues have a beauty beyond the ability of our best artists to equal. But in math, the classically mind set was a great handicap. Their geometry was strictly bound to constructions that their craftsmen could construct, or at the very most to what was optically realisable. There’s great significance in the Legend that tells Hippasus , who first published the mysteries of irrational numbers, which can’t be properly represented by the draftsman line, was murdered at sea. Our complex and hyper complex number systems would never have had a chance of becoming mainstream in Classical Science, they would have been felt as irreconcilably alien.

Western Christianity on the other hand was from the beginning pulled towards the infinite. In architecture you can see this tendency most clearly in our soaring Spires and the high vaulted Cathedral ceilings.

In Math, it freed us from the sense bondage of classical thought and opened up concepts like the function which would have been unrealisablein the classical world view, but which in our hands have been fundamental to the advanced analyses needed to for the Science that’s shaped the modern world.

A detailed treatment of the role Christianity played in the West’s success can be found in the Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (2005) which Beast fans might enjoy as like his blogs its both popularly accessible and very well referenced.