It does speak well of Christianity, however, that it coexists with a science-oriented society. There are certainly tensions, as the evolution threads will demonstrate, but it's a whole lot better environment for science than Islam.
Agree. Science is Aristotle. The unique contribution of the Christian church is that the church was open enough to thought and debate to produce thinkers who liked Aristotle, assimilated him, and went on. This says more about the CONFIDENCE LEVEL of the church than anything else, as opposed to, say, Islam. And this confidence level rises and falls along with her closeness to Jesus, who eschewed all coercion in the certainty He was living the truth and that truth, lived, will conquer all hostile thought.
The caricature of the entire church as a closed society, squashing all dissension, is largely a modern fiction.
This is not to defend the Galileo moments, of course. As the church's SPIRITUAL VITALITY diminishes she becomes INTELLECTUALLY oppressive, much like a short man bullies.
So science is Aristotle's brain, flourishing in the freedom that the Gospel engenders.
The problem with science and the Greeks and Romans is that they didn't like to get their hands dirty and their idea, expressed to varying degrees, that matter was itself somehow tainted. Both the Greeks and the Romans had significant technological innovations which remained basically stillborn until about 1000AD. It took the Judeo/Christian view that both matter and physical labor were good because God had made the world and had pronounced the results "good" together with the monastic tradition of physical labor and intellectual pursuits to provide the context within which modern science and technology truly took off. The next big impetus came with the Reformation. Northern Europe was freed further from the Roman and Greek attitudes toward work and physical labor entrenched in the Catholic church/Roman society and had a significantly greater track record of both scientific and technological development.