Isn't a huge amount of our understanding of the stars Zoroastrianism in nature? Even the bible talks about the "Wise Men of the East" who look up to the stars for mysterious signs. Those Zoroastrianists were Persian/Iraq/Iranian (country boarders weren't setup like today).
In the House of Wisdom / Baghdad, medieval scholars standardized upon the concepts of Arabic Numerals (likely from India, but the mathematicians who decided this was a good idea were in Baghdad), as well as Algebra... among many other feats of mathematics and science. Finally, the ratios of the movements of the Earth / Sun (aka: the Year and Month cycle) were prediced centuries before the Gregorian Calendar in the west. Its far more likely that Pope Gregory borrowed the math from the East to establish the Gregorian Calendar.
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The Catholics are certainly responsible for a lot of science and mathematics. In particular, Catholics were keepers of literacy, books, and communication through the dark age.
But while Catholics were merely "maintaining" knowledge from the Roman era, the Muslim world was actually advancing it forward. The Western Dark Ages were coinciding with the Muslim Golden Age of science and wisdom. The benefits of which we have etched into our Western languages forever: Algebra, Admiral, Alchemy, Alcohol are all "obviously Arabic" with the signature "Al"... as well as other math concepts like Average, Azimuth.
Catholics wouldn't take over as the "world center of science" until a few centuries later, when the Mongols wreck the centers of Islamic knowledge and then the Ottomans wreck the centers of Greek/Byzantine knowledge. The refugee crisis from Constantinople led to a huge number of scientists entering the Italian City-states and led to the renaissance.
The Persian kingdoms also had another advantage: a huge amount of science advancement came in from China. The Persian scientists were learning from (translated) Greek works like Euclid while also experimenting with Gunpowder and other concepts from the far-East, while importing number systems from India. Its just where the science was happening for quite a few centuries.
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IIRC, it was the Ottomans who advanced into Gunpowder weapons first (unless you count the Mongols/Chinese using gunpowder siegecraft vs the Persians. But rocket-arrows aren't quite the same thing as guns... Fire Lances are weird... IMO not quite a gun yet). The metallurgy of the Muslim's "Damascus Steel" is a legend that holds even through today... demonstrating a metallurgical advantage above the European powers.
Crusaders in shining armor were mowed down by Ottoman cannons and even guns. The technological gap of the 1400s was utterly huge. Yeah Europe is about to have a golden age of its own but Europe isn't exactly the paragon of scientific values yet.