According to James Hannam it was. I say Bullshit, BioLogos. In case you don't know, Biologos promotes the idea that evolutionary biology is true, but that God (Jesus, not Thor, Yahweh, Mithra, or any of the other thousands of gods) is behind it.
He mentions that we recognize the contributions of the Greeks and Muslims, which we do. But he says they were often wrong. Okay, so were many Christians of the period. In fact, some Christians today perform faith healing which doesn't work, while others perform exorcisms. We can discuss Galen of Pergamum, but we need not go back that far in history. Open thine eyes, imbecile.
No educated person thinks that "religion held back science at every opportunity". That's absurd. But religion is not science and it's not history. So it doesn't help those pursuits which are based on facts.
Some Christians pursued science, others fought it. Those who pursued it, could have done so without any knowledge of Christianity, and those who fought it largely did so due to religious bias, though other factors could contribute like power.
People in that part of the world traveled and spread word of what was going on in each region. Science evolved as each group learned from another.
The early scientists were natural philosophers who decided to understand the world by studying nature. Most of those folks were originally religious and used their sacred texts to guide their studies. If the sacred texts had sufficient information in them, there would be no need to study nature. It soon became apparent though that nature didn't agree with the sacred texts. The guides weren't guiding, they were misleading. It wasn't long before it was obvious that they were wrong.
A religion based on the sacred texts (Christianity for example) is wrong.
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