alt Hacker NewsA huge surprise to the ancient Greeks, who outlined the concept of reason centuries before Christianity appeared, and invented a fair amount of math and the foundations of empiricism while they were at it.
In fact Christianity halted scientific progress in the West for around a millennium. Before the Renaissance rediscovered Greek philosophy, the Christian world operated on hierarchy, rhetoric, scholasticism, and violence.
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The ancient Greeks had the opportunity to invent the steam engine, but didn't. They had the beginnings of steam power, but slaves were cheaper.
They did. But they never developed it into science in the modern sense.
They had a universe in which the gods did random things for random reasons. That didn't lead them to expect a rational basis for the construction of the whole universe, and so they never investigated in the way that early modern science did.
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All of those things predate Christianity.
Well maybe not scholasticism.