But that is what *every* culture does: it takes what was known before and adds to it.
The Islamic thinkers made *huge* advances. To the point that now we think of many of those advances as trivial. But they weren't. For example, the concept of a number line is now taught to kindergartners. But it was clearly NOT a part of Greek, Egyptian or Babylonian mathematics. In fact, just the opposite: geometry and number theory were seen as very distinct areas with no cross-over.
One of the ways you can tell a true genius is that some topic was difficult to impossible before them and taught in basic courses after. By this standard, there were many Islamic mathematicians that were geniuses.
In the area of cubic equations, the Islamic mathematicians again went well beyond what anyone had done before. One of the best ALSO wrote poetry and may even be known to you: Omar Kayyam.
Roman Catholicism is the version of Christianity that chose which books would be included in the Bible. It was also the version that decided that the divinity of Jesus was central to Christianity. Remember that the main contender for early Catholicism was Arianism. And the Arians did NOT believe that Jesus was actually human.
The difficulties happened long before that. Galileo, if anything, represented the beginning of science in Europe. Because of the Protestant revolution, Galileo's ideas were able to spread, even though they were not allowed to spread in Catholic areas. of course, the Protestants also had issues: most of the 'witch burnings' were from Protestant areas, not Catholic ones. And Calvin was not exactly a wonderful leader of Geneva.
Galileo was at the beginning of the 1600's. Newton was later 1600's to early 1700's. Plenty of other advances were made during the 1600's, including an early steam engine.
It's also the case that Catholic Europe was much more tolerant of new ideas before the Black Plague went through. During the 12th and 13th centuries, in particular, the Catholic universities were places of great intellectual striving. Many basic concepts, such as inertia and the idea that theory should be able to agree with observation, were developed at that time. But, that was also *after* the re-introduction of Greek ideas by the translation of Islamic texts after the crusades and the reconquest of Spain.
