But the reason the West has flourished technologically is not because it has abandoned religion in favor of secularism, but because its first universal religion had dogmatized the rationality of the universe and man's ability to know it. Skepticism is a constant companion of secularism, and a skeptic can hardly do science if he doubts his own ability to know anything outside himself.
JasonC has written a very interesting interpretation of history on this thread. For instance:
The paradox must be fully faced. The [rejected] Islamic philosophy that thought relatively highly of the powers of human reason and opposed skepticism, and which relied heavily on Aristotle (and some Platonic notions), was in the west incorporated into -church- doctrine, into Acquinas. Which the later forces were reacting -against-.The secularizing skeptics (like Hobbes and Hume) were -opposing- that doctrine in the Enlightenment, not endorsing it. They were effectively saying, scholastic philosophy cannot really know about such things, and its pretences that it does are vain. And the Protestants were also opposing it, though for somewhat different reasons. They argued that the church had put falliable human reasoning where it didn't belong and thus distorted scripture, and drew the conclusion that literalism was a safer policy to ensure orthodoxy.