China, a polytheistic/non-theistic culture in those times, being the progenitor of many fundamental technologies, even while ultimately failing to propagate many of those technologies, is a good example.

If the intelligentsia are focused on climbing fruitless political ladders steeped in theology versus scientific endeavors, you have less progress overall.

Yeah that's seems silly, all religions tend to stunt scientific growth as they keep large swathes of people from being curious about why certain things happen and just "why?" in general.

Yeah, but polytheistic approaches at least allow for diversity of thought. Like the hermetic philosophies that influenced alchemy. Monotheism (the enforced kind) really stunted philosophy.

Religion provided a rules based framework on how the world works, it might have been absurd (from a modern viewpoint) and has largely outgrown it's purpose but humanity had to start somewhere and it's hard to imagine modern scientific method could had been developed without the foundation by built medieval theologians.