What if christianity never existed ?

[bennyboy]

The monks would not have created the university system in the middle ages that was the forerunner to modern western science and perhaps there would be no modern liberal atheism.

Maybe.

But it is primarily the re-emergence of Latin texts secreted away by the church, and of Greek texts returning to Italy after the fall of Constantinople, that made the West the center of the emergence of science as we know it: it certainly wasn't advances in Christian thought.  There are a LOT of things that could have gone down differently, and you could say that things would have turned out differently if ANY of them hadn't happened.