I've finished reading James Hannam's book God's Philosophers, which I'll probably start blogging about next month. But in the meantime I'm overdue to comment on a much screwier exchange on the same subject online. I'll do that now, to whet your appetite for my discussion of Hannam's much more careful and informative treatment.
Mike Flynn (in "The Age of Unreason") levels many correct and valid criticisms of Jim Walker's wildly erroneous "The Myth of Christianity Founding Modern Science and Medicine (And the Hole Left by the Christian Dark Ages)" (and that despite the fact that I'm sympathetic to Walker's point, and even make the same argument, albeit correctly, in the forthcoming anthology The Christian Delusion, about which I'll blog as soon as I've seen the galleys). Walker responded to Flynn's critique ("Mike Flynn Discovers the Dark Ages"), this time getting a lot more right (particularly in his discussion of technology), but he still gets enough wrong (or still makes too many claims with greater certainty than is warranted), that I can't recommend it. That aside, both Flynn and Walker's main essays are shot through with so many mistakes of fact they can only miseducate, and thus have no value (even worse than no value, since reading them will only spread their error further). So I don't recommend reading either. Here I'm going to try and correct the damage by dispelling the myths Flynn repeats.
In a past thread I've been having a lengthy and interesting discussion with a neopagan about the nature of Taoism, paganism, and supernaturalism. In the course of which, the issue of humanity's future came up. Much was said, but it eventually boiled down to this: some think I and many other atheists are too optimistic about the future. I made the point that the past three hundred years have displayed a steady pace of overall progress in social, scientific, and technological progress, which shows no signs of abating.
Here I will give a reply in two parts, the second much longer than the first, so those who just want the short of it will know where to stop, while those who want to fully hear me out on this can go on to the rest.
Previously on my blog (Experimental History) I joked a bit about Lynn White's historical revisionism, which I noted in later comments appears "in several publications beginning as early as 1945 but most famously in Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962)." My old friend Bede got annoyed and wrote a reply (Stirrups, Horse Harnesses and Richard Carrier). As I often find among my critics, (almost) half of what he says is wrong, and the other half is irrelevant to what I actually said. But all this does afford a cool opportunity to talk about ancient history. So here goes.
On another blog last month I was asked by some friends to comment on a thread about Christianity's role in the progress of science. Other things were being discussed there, such as whether Martin Luther was a despicable ass or an admirable genius, which I didn't comment on because I know too little about the matter to add anything worthwhile. But the history of science is my Ph.D. field, so I could comment on that with some authority. And I did. What follows is expanded and adapted from what I said, and completely supercedes my comments there as far as I'm concerned. Don't worry, though. My blog isn't always going to be about the history of science.
It is becoming popular now to claim Christianity "responsible" for the scientific revolution (Stark, Jaki, etc.). 
My dissertation will refute much of that thesis, in about two chapters altogether. But we need to keep distinct the claim that Christianity did not actively oppose science (which is sometimes true, depending on how you define "oppose") and the claim that Christianity was necessary for the scientific revolution (which is certainly not true), as well as various claims in the middle--like "Christianity wasn't necessary, but helped," which again depends on how you define "helped"; or "all theologies can find a compatible incentive towards science, and Christianity is a theology like any other," which is true, depending on how you define "Christianity" and "theology"; and so on. Likewise "our concept of science is an outgrowth of Christian theology" is no more true than "our concept of science is an outgrowth of pagan theology." Modern science grew up in a Christian context, but only by re-embracing ancient scientific values against the grain of the original Christian mindset. In turn, those ancient scientific values grew up in a pagan context. As with Christianity, that's not causality, it's just circumstance.
However, in all this the one claim that cannot be sustained is that Christianity "encouraged" science. Had that been the case, then there would not have been almost a thousand years (from roughly 300 to 1250 AD) of absolutely zero significant advances in science (excepting a very few and relatively minor contributions by Hindus and Muslims), in contrast with the previous thousand years (from roughly 400 BC to 300 AD), which witnessed incredible advances in the sciences in continuous succession every century, culminating in theorists whose ideas and findings came tantalizingly close to the scientific revolution in the 2nd century AD (namely, but not only, Galen and Ptolemy). You can't propose a cause that failed to have an effect despite being constantly in place for a thousand years, especially when in its absence science had made far more progress. Science picked up again in the 1200's precisely where the ancients had left off, by rediscovering their findings, methods, and epistemic values and continuing the process they had begun.
