J&M pointing out an argument often heard from apologists of various stripes, even to this day. The claim is that because many of our ancestors who started to practice the scientific method, albeit in simplistic ways, were theists that somehow reflects on the veracity of theism. The implication in the West is that the Enlightenment and the subsequent scientific revolution couldn't of happened without Islamic or Christian monks doing astronomy, this is kind of correct but not for the reasons claimed (i.e. that theism is vindicated) the real reason this statement is true is that scientists (being Humans) need to have ancestors and those ancestors were probably Christian, Jews or Islamic (because everyone was!), simple as that.
The real truth of history is that pretty much every advance in knowledge and science has been made in the teeth of opposition from the incumbent faith based constituents, wherever they may have been and whatever they may have believed. At the end of the day, this debate is not about truth or what is in fact real, it's about power and parochialism and the very apish trait that the people with it will do almost anything to keep it, including the invention of hypothetical regimes of eternal torment for those of us that don't believe a word of it and won't play ball with the shamen or the ingroup.
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