Sure, but you kind of rolled it out like a gotcha… 
I think we’re all aware that there were legal and social ramification for not carrying the orthodoxy of the day, because that’s true, even today (even if our orthodoxies might differ from what was in the past). So, yeah, much like capitalism shapes scientific endeavor’s today, a certain relationship to religious organizations shaped it then…
Again, which no one said…
Much like centers of power today, yeah, which are related to capitalism and its needs. It’s why when the state has been pulling back funding for university funding (at least in the states and western Europe), corporations are filling in the gaps. I know that much of the time of tenured profs in the sciences (and in the humanities, too) is spent working on funding grants, and more and more of those are coming from private funding, not from the NSF (National Science foundation, if you’re not familiar - humanities fields have a similar org run by the government the National Endowment for the humanties), but from private corporations. That will inevitably shape the nature of the scientific inquiry… It’s why you see computer science programs growing so rapidly lately…
Well, sure, but that’s always true. Especially during the post-Columbian period, when all this new information is flooding in that seemed to contradict or at least call into question knowledge already established. All these new people, animals, foods, etc… New centers of power emerged because of the New World and the wealth found there.
But I think maybe, we’re largely in agreement here? The relationship between science and religion isn’t necessarily at odds, but developed along a particular historical process that isn’t so black and white as the narrative often is told (science supplanting religion as the primary purveyor of knowledge about the truth of the world). And that power and politics play something of a central role in how all this played out. Honestly, the whole idea of faith and science being firmly in contradiction and science-based people all being atheists, and religious people rejecting science, just… doesn’t hold up under historical scrutiny. It’s a much messier and complicated picture and religion being “dead” is not really what’s going on with this…
