I just want to poke my head up (in expectation of getting it shot off), and point out that saying that all the great scientists of the middle ages and renaissance were believers isn’t saying as much as you might think when it was literally illegal to be an atheist.
Yeah, people who were able to publish works which moved scientific thought forward were going to be, publicly, at least plausibly theistic, because if they expressed personal atheism, then they were going to have a whole bunch of other problems to deal with.
Can we at least settle on the proposition that science and religion are to large extent orthogonal?
And that there’s a really big bias going on: claiming the existence of medieval scientists who were professed (Christians/Jews/Muslims) doesn’t really say a lot when almost all of everyone in Europe and the MENA was an active member of one those religions, because they would literally be persecuted and forced to recant or be killed if not?
