Yes, because I would argue (Foucault has entered the chat, sorry folks) that it’s ultimately about power, not about faith. If the church (or a king, prince, sultan, etc) thought that a particular field would be beneficial to them, then, they absolutely endorse and condone. If it was seen as a threat for whatever reason (contradicting a widely accepting church teaching for example, at a time when the church was not just a church, but a structure of real violence based political power), then you could end up in jail for printing it. As long as we have centralized centers of power, this kind of thing is going to happen, and it does not matter if that center is religiously oriented or secular.
they do… and of course, I think the development of the modern field fo history drove a lot of how we view that, too. The overly central focus on empires, states, great men, often via the lens of conflict, with the nation-state being the inevitable historical conclusion led many historians of the 19th and early 20th century to self-select for those narratives. It made conflict seem like the primary, if not only engine of history. Even Marx fell into that pattern of thinking. While he certainly expanded who we think about when we think about historical actors, he still made conflict the center piece of his narrative. Just of a different kind, that wasn’t always about violent conflict…
And that doesn’t mean that they were all just pretending for the authorities either. It’s still relatively true… and of course, no one said ALL. Not a one of us said all. It doesn’t undercut the reality that (once again) plenty of people of faith are also scientists. 
I’m sorry, but it’s a historically problematic proposition to say that people only professed faith because of fear of death. Was that true for some… of course! But people have all sorts of reasons for what they do, some of which isn’t just driven by fear. And ultimately, we can only really go with what is in the sources. Unless we have contradicting sources on an issue like whether or not someone is truly faithful, it makes sense to accept them at their word if we have it written down somehow. And of course, we absolutely need to interrogate that source, too. Something from their own hands, that was obviously not forced by some outside force, maybe a diary discussing a point of theology, or their relationship to their faith, will be a stronger source than something written by someone else, maybe seeing them at church one day… There is no singular experience to draw from. But we do know the churches of Europe and the religious centers of Islam in the MENA played a substantial role in the development of modern scientific fields. I’m not sure anyone can say otherwise…
Right. The church absolutely had a hand in the development of modern science. They were not just standing in the way of progress yelling stop… But for some, the teleological narrative is a hard one to shake. And the idea of going from a demon-haunted world to a secular, rational one is quite a compelling narrative that helps us to feel superior to people in the past…But history just… isn’t progressive in the way people imagine. All we can really say is that things change, and historians dig into the reasons for those changes and seek to understand it and to share that with the public and to argue about it…
