The specific theological commitments of Latin Christianity created preconditions for the scientific program that weren't present in other sophisticated civilizations that should have produced modern science by materialist-diffusionist logic but didn't. China had more advanced technology than Europe for most of the medieval period — Needham's multi-volume documentation of this is overwhelming — but didn't produce the scientific revolution. Islamic civilization preserved and extended Greek mathematics and astronomy at a higher level than the Latin West for centuries, produced genuine giants like Ibn al-Haytham and al-Biruni, and then didn't continue the trajectory. Why?

The specific Christian theological contribution was probably the doctrine of creation ex nihilo combined with divine voluntarism. If God created the world freely from nothing, the world didn't have to be the way it is — it's contingent, not necessary. Which means you cannot deduce its structure from first principles the way Aristotle thought you could. You have to look. Empirical investigation becomes theologically mandated because the world's order is God's free choice, not logical necessity. This is Francis Bacon's explicit argument. It's Galileo's implicit argument. The idea that nature is a book written by God in the language of mathematics — Galileo's actual phrase — is a theological claim that motivates the mathematical physics program.

Add to this the monasteries as knowledge-preservation and transmission infrastructure, the university system as an ecclesiastical invention, the specific Scholastic tradition of rational disputation as a method for resolving contradictory authorities — all of these are Christian institutional contributions without which the Renaissance recovery of Greek learning doesn't happen on the timeline it did.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5856404&forum_id=2),#49812886)