Is God a logical contradiction?

[Anomalocaris]

Religion can’t invent or innovate, but it can motivate people to do so.  This is all any human institution or ideology can possibly do to contribute to increasing the rate of innovation or invention.

Religion can certainly motivate people to high level of innovation and invention when such innovation directly serve to aggrandize itself,  such as advancements in architectural engineering to facilitate more awe inspiring cathedrals.  

Religion can also indirectly motivate people to higher level of innovation and invention when it’s doctrine promotes diligence, studiousness, and reflection, as it did early Muslim era, and in parts of Protestant world after the reformation.

Where religion falls down is in its Bronze Age origin of its foundational myths, and its life or death stake in preventing the transparent baselessness of myth from being exposed as fictional.   So religion must limit human endeavor to broaden and deepen its understanding of how reality works if it were to not be revealed as a self-aggrandizing fabrication.   This limitation it must place on the scope of collective human understanding of the world also deny humanity of the inventions and innovation based on such understanding.

Because human understanding of reality is deepening and broadening all the time, while the fundamental basis of religious legitimacy remains rooted in the same past age in which it was fabricated, the farther time moves forward, the more widespread and extensive must the effort of religion to block further depending and  deepen our knowledge base, so the more would religion act as a force that attempts to,subvert the very basis of further inventions and innovations.

The funny thing is for 99% of Christain history they were playing catch up with the ancient world

That is a considerable exaggeration.  Even in parts of the Christian world that had to climb out of the deep hole left by the collapse of Roman Empire, it would be hard to argue they had not largely caught up and surpassed the ancient world by the beginning of the 18th century.   That would mean the western Christian world only spent of 70% of its history playing catch up.

But you forget during much of the time when the western Christians were playing catch, the majority of the world’s Christians and the center of gravity of the Christian world, was in fact in the east in the Byzantine world.   Byzantium wasn’t exactly playing catch up with the classical world.   It was playing out the long slow eclipse of the ancient world itself.
You forget the Byzantine world, which for most of the   It is arguable the Byzantine world represented the slow motion death of the late classical world rather than The degree to which Christianity is responsible for the deep hole from which Chris