Modern science came out of religion. To believe that they are in direct opposition is unbelievably narrow.
Galileo studied at the University of Pisa, which was created by Papal edict. He wanted to enter the priesthood when he was young.
In medieval times the Islamic world used to be quite keen on science and progress as well. It's only in modern times that Islam has become increasingly conservative and backwards (as in Salafism, which quite literally as about wanting society to be like it was in the day when Muhammad still lived) again.
Without the church, there would have been far less research (mostly happened within the church, mostly by order of the Vatican), we would have wiped out the scientific knowledge several times in history (mostly, but not exclusively during revolutions, when monasteries saved entire libraries containing scientific knowledge), and scientists have been explicitly wiped out as a matter of state policy several times, when again the church saved large numbers of them.
And that's ignoring that, even today, a university that doesn't originate within the catholic church, or is even still part of it (like my alma mater) is still not very common. Even today, at least organizationally, very significant amounts of scientific research still happen within the catholic church (as in the boss of the boss of the boss of the boss of the scientist is the pope). Today.
Honorable mentions go to several ecclesiastical orders, most famously the Jesuit priests.
Sadly, Christianity is the exception here. While, yes, most religions had their priests do some form of scientific research, most religions wiped out the scientific knowledge they amassed, rather than protecting and safeguarding it, famously the burning of the great library of Alexandria by one of the main sources of islam, caliph Omar (who for instance is the source of sharia, as in the law system called sharia) [1]
In my opinion this happens because in most religions there is no separation of church and state, like Christianity first had because of it's fights with the Roman Empire. This meant that the church could continue when the empire split, fell or otherwise had issues (and could remain popular when the state failed, as states inevitably seem to do), that the Catholic church had a constant and functional international organization from AD 200-300 onwards or so, and it remained functional and separate from states until ... well it's still going, isn't it ? And even today, neither faithful nor atheists would say that the catholic church is the state, anywhere except perhaps Vatican city (and even there, it's mostly the Italian and Swiss state). In most religions, when a revolution happened, the revolution was as much against the religion as it was against the state, meaning the priests were the first to get their heads chopped off and books burned. This is not to say that Christian priests escaped that fate every time, but often they did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...
You would have to prove that such curious people didn't gravitate towards the church instead of other place because _they were already_ financing such research, meaning, that the research wouldn't have happened in another place/group if the church didn't exist.
The best place to do science is one which takes nothing for granted, in which people is free to doubt event their own existence if their ratinalizations lead them to believe so; that's pretty much the opposite of religion and the church, where there is a bunch of dubious "facts" that cannot be doubt, such as "There is a God, God is smart, There was Jesus, He made some miracles".
The other thing is that each single scientist that the Church killed may have discovered something even bigger had they not been killed, perhaps setting back science for decades or even centuries; and an even worse outcome was fear, because they inserted fear from then on in all researches of the same subject, for example I wouldn't have dare to say the earth gravitates around the sun the years after Galileo was killed; so you would have to "calculate" if what they did for science was bigger than what they did against it.
There were and are plenty of places beyond the reach of the church, and whilst I wouldn't go so far to say research didn't happen at all there, there was far, far less. The more fundamental the research, the less of it happened. There was a distinct tendency for research to be military related outside of the church.
Even so the main problem with research outside of the church wasn't so much whether it happened or not, but only very few cultures managed to keep the knowledge over time, never mind kept teaching the knowledge over time (not a single atheist culture did so successfully, despite many attempts, the Greek philosophers' culture got lucky because it was embraced by the church, and even among the original philosophers most were not atheists). You could say that only Christian/western civilization, and to a much lesser but nonzero extent Islamic culture (although that was mainly preserved in Christian monasteries as well). When science is not preserved, it cannot be built up, which means it never gets to be really advanced.
What makes these religions special is their resiliency (atheism has been shown by history to be seriously lacking in resiliency), combined with the freedom that existed within them. Firstly, science doesn't happen if it's not tolerated. Secondly, a culture that doesn't stay alive cannot build up scientific knowledge over time. Either will prevent significant scientific development. Scientific research doesn't help anyone if it's destroyed every time a harvest fails, which was the more common case, and such an environment means the knowledge doesn't stay alive, and can't be built upon. Christianity did not just not destroy Greek and Roman philosophy and science, but embraced, preserved and taught it, adding on to it over the centuries until eventually it accelerated. Islam, while it never tolerated muslim scientists to any great extent, had the dhimma system, where they let large groups of non-muslims contribute to society through trade, and this left mostly non-muslim groups that practiced science alive, some important ones as slaves to a court somewhere, who managed to get the knowledge back into the west where the church preserved it. But importantly: science in islamic lands died out. The communities teaching science to their kids dwindled to nothing. All traces of it, and certainly the teaching of it, disappeared from all islamic lands.
Keep in mind that Christians certainly destroyed all scientific knowledge in parts of the world on a regular basis (every century or so). What kept Christian science alive is that the church, and in particular monks, would re-divide the knowledge back into the areas where it got destroyed. The most famous example of this work is the painstaking copying of entire libraries by hand, and sending them to other monasteries.
I think given history there's an extremely solid case there would be no modern science without the church, or at the very least, it'd have taken millenia more to get there.
What scientists get taught in school is only a very tiny part of the equation that got us to modern science, and frankly, doesn't appear to be a very important part.