Yesterday I was watching the third part of Adventures in English, a documentary about the English language. There was an interesting section about how initially English Bibles (translated by John Wycliff) were forbidden by the Catholic Church and smuggled into the country from France. Years later William Tindale produced another version, and though he himself was burned at the stake in Antwerp, the king of Britain 'legalized' his Bible a year later. Common people could now read the Bible themselves (used to be available in Latin only) and that's what started a whole new phase for Christianity in Britain, and in a sense a new religion. So what exactly is "the church" that's being discussed in this thread?
Regarding science: the heliocentric model of the universe, understanding planets to be spheres and stars to be like our sun, was known to whoever composed the Rig Veda and texts from more or less the same era. In the Puranas ("histories") you'll find sections on Sankhya ("counting"), which resembles chemistry and physics, and descriptions of the anu, which is very similar to our conception of atoms. They also had highly developed mathematics. Descriptions of the relative distance between different dvipas ("islands") as described in the Bhagavata Purana turn out to match very closely our modern calculations for the distances between the different planets within our solar system. In other words, where the Puranic texts talk about islands on a flat disk, they are talking about planets floating around (as if islands in space...) in our more or less flat solar system. Ancient ayurvedic texts also discussed surgery, which means people must have cut open dead bodies to study the organs: a scientific method. So I think the scientific approach has been part of humankind from very early on, and will always resurface when it gets the chance. We just went through a rather unscientific phase during the Dark Ages.