theology has no buisiness in science what so ever.
I would tend to agree, but just as in my first response within this thread, there is a rather important caveat, given the intellectual history and traditions of "Western" culture, whence the origins of modern science come. This is not to denigrate the intellectual achievements of other cultures, as there are many (e.g., the work
Aṣṭādhyāyī, a comprehensive grammatical analysis written in Sanskrit long before even Aristotle, a Chinese text which included methods of solving systems of equations the West would have to wait over a millenia to match, the Middle Eastern origins of Algebra and the classical texts preserved only thanks to the Islamic empire, etc.). Yet however much the "founders" of the modern scientific enterprise benifited from, or could have benefited from, the achievements of other cultures, modern science can only be directly traced to its Western founders.
However, theology may be very much the reason that those like Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Kant, Laplace etc. were able to "found" modern science (understood as a belief that the cosmos operated according to particular laws such that systematic investigation was even possible, let alone useful, in that repeated measurements and mathematical models enabled one to both predict the behaviour of some system or phenomenon and to describe the mechanics/structure underlying physical reality) while other cultures, despite developing sophisticated approaches to particular issues, never generalized these into a comprehensive endeavour comparable to early modern science.
It takes more than brilliance, ingenuity, and curiosity for any society produce what we call the scientific method. Individuals endowed with such traits have come and gone everywhere throughout the ages, sometimes contributing a great deal to what we might now interpret in the light of science. However, at its core, science requires a particular worldview: the cosmos has a particular "order" and "structure" which not only can be discovered, but
should. After several centuries of largely undoing the accomplishments of Greece and Rome (not to mention trailing behind other cultures), the Catholic church went from merely ensuring that at least some texts which concerned philosophy were preserved and studied (even many written by non-Christians) to founding the modern university and encouraging the study of God's universe largely in order to understand His works and "know the mind of God". Naturely, of course, the impetus created friction pretty early on (Galileo), but for the most part the achievements of the scholastics were transformed into the origins of modern science not simply through discovery or genius, but because philosophy and theology were at the same time inseperable and provided a framework in which scientific inquiry made sense.
In
The Problem of China Betrand Russell expresses both a certain regret and perplexity regarding the "failure" of China to match the scientific progress of the "West", as in China there was no Christianity to stand in the way of science. His solution was mainly to attribute this to certain brilliant Western thinkers, yet this is inadequate both because the Chinese certainly did not lack of brilliant minds and because it doesn't explain why the brilliant minds Russell praised were able to achieve what they did in spite of Christianity.
The sociology of religion (and indeed the research of social psychology/sociology in general) provide a better explanation. Throughout history, many cultures have believed that the cosmos is more or less unchanging; an eternal constant such that what was is and what will be was already. For others, the concept of a creator whose creation (the universe) was ordered and (more importantly) knowable never developed. Instead the idea, that the creation of God could be no more understood through reason and discovery than could God, and likewise should not or could not be conceptualized as rational without limiting God's power, either remained or developed.
Nothing intrinsic in Christianity made the advent of science inevitable, anymore than anything intrinsic in other worldviews ensured it would not develop. Christianity developed out of Judaism, which provided the omniscient, omnipotent Creator concept Plato lacked (making his cosmological model flawed or at least incomplete), and the interchange between converted intellectuals, who had studied both their pagan and Jewish forebears, combined theology and philosophy in a manner that made linking religion, cosmology, and the product of Greco-Roman philosophical thought a feat achieved with an ease that even Julian (who, unlike Plato, had at his disposal all that the Christian apologists did) could not compete with. The religion of the Roman empire, despite its diversity, had for too long seperated cultic practice and their
mythoi from philosophy.
So even when the Roman empire dissolved, and no imperial power existed which could, like Constantine all the way to Theodosius II, integrate laws of state with the laws of the Church, and only a small fraction remained of Greco-Roman intellectual achievements preserved in monasteries, the explicit use and even sanction granted by Christian apologists of pagan & Jewish philosophical works made it far easier for these to be incorporated into scholastic study. Meanwhile, the Islamic empire which had done far more to preserve and to build on Greco-Roman thought, lacked that foundational relationship and concentrated far more than did Christians on continuing a jurisprudence approach to "knowing God" through His his texts.
As a result, when countries began to emerge out from the squabbling little fiefdoms of a would-be Europe, the learning and study left the confines of the scattered monasteries and (in part because of the need for an "learned" clergy) the universities appeared, both the philosophical framework and the cosmological worldview existed in which scientific discovery could fit, at least for a time. The unification of a single Creator, the teleology which developed after the endtimes never came, and the rationality and order which had begun before Jesus was born and indelibly stamped into Christian thought by (at the very least) the Johannine
logos, all led to the gradual transformation of Scholasticism into what Plato's Socrates had so ardently denied he practiced: natural science.
Just as Newton, who was more concerned with biblical study than physics, is usually counted among the first modern scientists (as is, for that matter, Descartes), so too is Thomas Aquinas demoted to the rank of scholastic, yet in both cases the lines are not so clear, because the program and approach did not appear out of thin air. The early scientists and late scholastics shared both a worldview and an intellectual tradition. Most important, though, was that these included a rational "mind" of God and an ordered cosmos which required reason and investigation in order that God be known.
Without that theology, we wouldn't have Descartes, Newton, Liebniz, etc., at all.