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_...