Will fundamentalism destroy scientific inquiry & progress among Christian nations?
I don’t think it will destroy it, people get too much benefit. When a family member dies of diabetes, you get a strong desire to promote diabetes research. What it can do is slow it down. When students learn crap instead of science (such as ‘Intelligent design’), they are less prepared to enter scientific fields. It won’t completely eliminate the student pool, but it reduces it. So we get reduced scientific progress here and more of the research goes to foreign contries (Asia is the big player here).
Fundamentalism has always tried to depress scientific inquiry. For example during the “dark ages” in Christian Europe. It now is trying repeatedly to favor “creationism” over evolutionary discoveries. It is true that among Muslim nations scientific advances, even the arts and philosophy, are stagnating. But it wasn’t always so. Many centuries ago Muslim scholars gathered to discuss science as well as exploratory discoveries.
