pre-modern Christians (Euro ones at least, Byzantines took empiricism seriously) were obviously an obstacle to progress in many important ways, like the 1000 year gap between Galen's anatomy studies and early Italian enlightenment scholars who started doing dissections again. But that's not only because of the superstructure of their ideology. It was the material conditions of slavery/early feudalism having little need for the training and development of a professional expert scientist class who might argue against authority to cast light on the material world.

Scientists were unable to critique their ancient Greek/Latin medical textbooks because they were practically considered the "word of god" by their financially supporting royalty and church leadership. Like the modern PMC, these priests scoffed at the idea of conflicting with The Experts whose intellectual traditions were passed down or were imported from other countries. It's ironic that these woke twitter radlibs are soyfacing over Christians parroting Arabic science, since medieval priest-scientists were trained to credulously believe any well-written books they read, even if they're from scholars who rarely did empirical research like dissecting actual humans and not a rabbit

this is my favorite reply:

I did a full master's thesis on eye surgeries in 6th century France and trust me. It was very much not a dark time for Europe

...to be honest I focused more on the religious and cultural implications of ocular diseases, eye surgery and medicine than on the actual lived practice of practitioners and patients

"nooo the dark age isn't real!!!" - PMC dork who did not cast light on dorks who were also not casting light