Actually, I don’t think Christianity as a whole had ant conflict with science. The problem with Galileo, for example, was not his opinion the earth and the sun - which he was not the first one to think in any case - but that he used this to support his particular cosmological outlook, which was one that no longer considered man to be the crown of creation. So it’s not science per se, except in the case of a few American fundamentalists, but the philosophical or world view espoused by scientists who abandon the Judeo-Chrisitan or even Greco-Roman philosophical basis.
When Christianity had a firm philosophical foundation,it could deal with this, but unfirtunately the destruction of Christian knowledge and tradition , combined with the rejection of Western thought by the educational world, left both churches and secular humanists with no way to combat the distortion and misuse of science.
I don’t think Christianity had the kind of conflict with science that has been asserted by anti-religious types. The Galileo episode is a good example. In fact I wouldn’t call it a conflict so much as a latent susceptibility. It was inevitable that science would cause a crisis for religion. It changed the way people saw the world and opened up huge new areas of human effectiveness. It literally put humanity in a new place. You don’t get a massive shift like that without an accompanying crisis. Twentieth century socialism represents the low point of that crisis.
I don’t fault Christianity for getting knocked around a bit and I have no doubt that it will find its legs again, for the simple reason that God is real and Christianity has the best bead on reality. It’s a steel sharpening steel thing and science has given Christianity an opportunity to further refine itself.
But all that aside, I think you make a really interesting point about losing not just the Judeo-Christian but also the Greco-Roman philosophical basis, and that this has left even our secular humanists defenseless against the misuse of science. What is it that the Greco-Roman view possesses that could have defended against the misuse of science if it had been intact?