I would avoid the use of the term "Dark Ages". It has always been a loaded term (popular with those who had or have an ax to grind against the Church, like Protestants and Enlightenment propagandists) and characterizes our own ignorance better than the time period itself. The Renaissance itself is better understood as a development of the Middle Ages. The continuity and interplay of cultural currents during the Middle Ages/Renaissance are far more interesting than the simplistic, boring, and tendentious presentation we're often taught in school (Middle Ages = bad, backwards, ignorant; Renaissance = good, progressive, enlightened). For example, while empirical science saw a development during the Renaissance, it depended on prior intellectual of the Scholastic period, itself marked by a good deal of philosophical rigor, for lack of a better term (a rigor unjustly mocked by Protestants, surviving to this day in expressions involving the number of angels on the head of a pin). Whatever the merits of the Renaissance and faults of the Middle Ages, philosophically, the Renaissance falls short of the Middle Ages.