Do you think religion is holding society back?

[SteveII]

I doubt that discussing christian scientists and their contributions is going to help your case...but sure, let;s take a slice.

What of newton, and his physics?  How about Gregor Mendel, a monk who described the laws of inheritance - the beginning of genetics? Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy?  Darwin....purportedly a christian (or at least that's what christians like to tell us as though we will suddenly convert).  All of them living in the "conducive" atmosphere of christian hegemony.

What do christers think of their combined works?  What is the conducive response of jesusism to these men and their godly endeavor?  Denial.

Physics tells us that magic book is a collection of fairy tales and just so stories. Genetics, that were are evolved..not created.  Taxonomy shows our relationship to all other life, and natural selection provides the mechanism by which we all became what we are.  What, however, would the christers then or now...think about the modern synthesis?  The same thing, in both cases.....and it aint "conducive".  I'm glad that you've stopped burning people alive and ransacking libraries...but I suspect that has more to do with your ability than your desires.

Not quite what I was arguing...my only post in this thread before your comment said "Christianity was instrumental in the early progress of modern science". You just provided support for that claim so I will move on to your other assertion. 

Setting aside the fact that physics can not tell us anything about the NT miracles, the rest is just a straw man writ large. You are turning a small minority's opinion on evolution (one tiny segment of science in fact) into a sweeping conclusion that Christianity opposing science. Entirely disingenuous. I bet even most atheists would stumble over themselves to distance themselves from this nonsense.

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SteveII

...Show me where the actual policy of the church was to curtail scientific discovery--

For the 17th century church to have a recognisable policy regarding science they would first have to acknowledge the existence of science. They didn't, how could they? The church didn't reject Galileo's proposals because of some flaw in his calculations, the church didn't have the remotest idea what he was talking about. The collective mindset of the church was completely polarized, you are either for us or against us. At the first hint of a proposal being in conflict with scripture, all debate ends, the old 'repent or burn' now becomes 'retract or burn'.

or in the absence of that, show me where a series of organized events were unmistakably designed to do so. <...>

Well they did take great delight in this sort of thing:

Exactly what scientist did who burn and for what reason? Please...I want to know. 

Ugh. Atheist...always blindly following any stupid argument they hear to support their case. The supposed conflict between science and religion is a recent invention. 

Reference: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_an..._1210-1277
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis

Selections from the latter article above:

The "conflict thesis" is a historiographical approach in the history of science which maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science and that the relationship between religion and science inevitably leads to public hostility. The thesis retains support among some scientists and in the public,[1] while most historians of science do not support the original strict form of the thesis.

In the mid to late 1800s - The scientist John William Draper and the writer Andrew Dickson White were the most influential exponents of the conflict thesis between religion and science. [Pretty much started the myth]

Historians of science today have moved away from a conflict model, which is based mainly on two historical episodes (those involving Galileo and Darwin) in favor of a "complexity" model, because religious figures took positions on both sides of each dispute and there was no overall aim by any party involved in discrediting religion.[17] Biologist Stephen Jay Gould said: "White's and Draper's accounts of the actual interaction between science and religion in Western history do not differ greatly. Both tell a tale of bright progress continually sparked by science. And both develop and use the same myths to support their narrative, the flat-earth legend prominently among them".[18] In a summary of the historiography of the conflict thesis, Colin A. Russell, the former President of Christians in Science, said that "Draper takes such liberty with history, perpetuating legends as fact that he is rightly avoided today in serious historical study. The same is nearly as true of White, though his prominent apparatus of prolific footnotes may create a misleading impression of meticulous scholarship".[19]

In Science & Religion, Gary Ferngren proposes a complex relationship between religion and science:

While some historians had always regarded the Draper-White thesis as oversimplifying and distorting a complex relationship, in the late twentieth century it underwent a more systematic reevaluation. The result is the growing recognition among historians of science that the relationship of religion and science has been much more positive than is sometimes thought. Although popular images of controversy continue to exemplify the supposed hostility of Christianity to new scientific theories, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. If Galileo and the Scopes trial come to mind as examples of conflict, they were the exceptions rather than the rule.[20]

and last but not least...(my bold so you don't miss it)

Some modern historians of science (such as Peter Barker, Bernard R. Goldstein, and Crosbie Smith) propose that scientific discoveries - such as Kepler's laws of planetary motion in the 17th century, and the reformulation of physics in terms of energy, in the 19th century - were driven by religion.[21] Religious organizations and clerics figure prominently in the broad histories of science, until the professionalization of the scientific enterprise, in the 19th century, led to tensions between scholars taking religious and secular approaches to nature.[22] Even the prominent examples of religion's apparent conflict with science, the Galileo affair (1614) and the Scopes trial (1925), were not pure instances of conflict between science and religion, but included personal and political facts in the development of each conflict.[23]