Gar

The reason the Greeks did so much in terms of science and philosophy is because their religion was very objective. Gods were more or less only natural forces portrayed as humans, and were usually indiferent to the affairs of mortals.

There was very little magic in Greek mythology (the only two characters who used magic, Circe and Medea, weren't even Greek). Whenever the gods did something, there was always an explaination.

For example, the godess Athena was born in Zeus's head. One day Zeus had a headache, so he had Hephestus crack his head open to see what was the matter, and out popped Athena. Of course, the explaination doesn't make much sense, but the important thing is that there IS an explaination and they didn't just say that Athena was brought into being mysteriously.

Most importantly, there was no holy book in Greek religion. I'm sure you can figure out why that was important.

Gar

The ancient Greeks failed to make the leap to modern science because:

1. The Greeks were initially only city states, and even through the hellenistic period always lacked unity.

2. The Classical period only lasted for a couple of hundred years. Although they did not do a whole lot of experimenting, they did enough theorizing to keep the rest of the world busy building off of those ideas up to the present day.

Heathen Dawn

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Christian religiosity retarded science as much as Greek religiosity did. The only conclusion one can draw is: church-state separation is good for science.

Science today is free de jure; but de facto it is locked inside a naturalistic vault, so that any hypothesis for intelligent design or animism is kept out (I don't advocate ID, I just consider it a possibility; my prime working hypothesis is animism).

lpetrich

Bede was being extremely selective; he ignored the counterevidence I had presented. Consider what would have happened during most of the last 2000 years to someone who proposed that the Bible ought to be banned from some ideal city because it contains lots of bad examples. Plato did essentially that in his Republic -- and he got away with it.

Christianity has had a long history of much worse intolerance than Greco-Roman paganism ever had; nowadays it is much more wimpified than formerly, when people would have vicious fights over issues like homoousia vs. homoiousia.