I never said they did.
I’m not even attempting to say “there were people of faith and people of science, and they were different people.” Most people of science were people of faith, because most people were people of faith. But that didn’t happen in an epistomological vacuum either. Faith was socially enforced, and faith was legally enforced (or at least the public performance of it), and there were legal consequences for being orthodox insufficiently well, and we have lots and lots of instances of people being publicly unorthodox in various ways –whether from conviction, from ignorance, or from apathy – and getting punished for it, from local social opprobrium up to execution.
So, yes, pretty much everyone was a person of faith, and indications are that most people were sincere in it. But given the context, saying “all these people were people of faith” doesn’t actually prove much, in a Bayesian sense. It’s the null hypothesis for medieval life.
Also, while I wouldn’t say that the Church was opposed to the idea of scientific progress in theory, in practice what they liked was engineering progress. Remember, the establishment of the Church had systems, set up over centuries in various places, dedicated to finding deviations from orthodoxy and stamping it out: the priest was supposed to be guiding his parish, the bishop doing visitations on the churches and chapels, the archbishop calling the bishops in for ecclesiastic courts and synods, etc. There was a lot of room in that process for someone to err on the side of “I don’t get it, it’s probably heresy”, and the best case was for the idea (and the proponent) to end up pleading their case to a court or a synod, and that was a political matter as much as a theological one. Explanations of fact were OK, that’s how bestiaries and natural histories worked. But as soon as you started getting into the why instead of the how, you risked bumping into some heresy or other, and the only way to find out whether a new idea was heretical or not was to run it up the chain and see whether, ultimately, the Pope and the college of Cardinals agreed with it or not.
I suppose the point of the argument there was that the Church wasn’t necessarily an opponent of science on any theological basis, but the politics of it tended to the delicate.
