>Belief in monsters and gods on a mountain top or magic didn't create the advanced technology we know today. If anything, those things HURT the progress of science and technology.

Eh, not precisely true, at least, if one is willing to consider alchemy a part of what might be considered belief in "magic". Alchemy was a surprisingly common practice among mystically-minded and wealthier Europeans, and much of what was done as a part of alchemical practice affected later chemistry.

Further, I think that particular dogmas that were incorporated into theistic religions, or the institutions of those religions, might have hurt the progress of science. Despite this, I think that a fairly good argument might be made that belief in God (the judeo-christian one), Allah, a god, or the gods influenced the progress of science positively, and such beliefs may have even been the progenitors of the kind of thinking that produced the scientific method itself. The method has its roots in western philosophy, and at one time was really considered simply "natural philosophy". The scientific way of learning about the world was forged and honed largely by Christians like Boyle, Bacon, Newton, Galileo, and Pascal; and other believers, who may have been Christians, but were perhaps only deists, including Locke, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant.

Those are the men who are largely responsible for what we now call the scientific method, and if you read what they wrote, it is amazing how much their ideas about what God (or god) was like affected their search for 'the laws that govern the universe'. Much of the motivation to discover such laws, and the belief that such laws existed and were knowable, were based on the beliefs of these men about the nature and character of God, either through their own thoughts, or their meditations on the thought of previous philosophers like Averroes, Aquinas, William of Ockham, Maimonides, John Duns Scotus, and Abelard, who in turn incorporated the very beginnings of western philosophical thought from influential Greek thinkers like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and the Stoics, all of whom were believers in the gods (or at least, a god).

One need not delve deeply at all to see how explicitly and importantly connected the ideas attributed to these thinkers are with their ideas about and belief in God, or the god, the 'prime mover'. While there have been a few thinkers in the western tradition who were athiests, notably Hume, and for all practical purposes, Spinoza and Epicurus, these formidable thinkers were notable because of their exceptional unbelief. Belief in god or the gods, or especially God, seems to have been extremely common to, important to, and most tellingly, influential on the thought of the philosophers who developed the pattern of inquiry that we now call the scientific method. It certainly does not seem to be the case that belief in the "gods on a mountain top" caused a hindrance of the development of science; instead, it seems that such belief was the very bedrock of science's assumptions, the impetus for its practice, and the basis for the belief that such efforts would be, ultimately, successful.

frum