I think that Christian apologists will object to your characterization of early Christianity as rejecting curiosity, empiricism, and progress.

Of course. They even object to calling the Dark Ages bad. Or saying Christianity was pro-slavery for 1700 years. Or that Christians actually fought women’s suffrage. Or pretty much any true thing that shows Christianity has been majority bad throughout history.

They can’t handle the truth.

I’ve even seen some such apologists defend the later Middle Ages in Europe as some sort of Golden Age of Free Inquiry, claiming that nobody was ever persecuted for heretical scientific ideas, for instance. But I once saw someone claim that a common way of presenting far-out ideas was to present them as purely hypothetical. That is what Copernicus’s friend Osiander did to Copernicus’s magnum opus. Galileo, however, didn’t want to be adding disclaimers to his discussions of heliocentrism stating that heliocentrism was purely hypothetical. Though he made a valiant effort to get the Church to consider heliocentrism a legitimate hypothesis, he failed.

Probably but there is considerable debate over it. I haven’t explored further.

Thanks again. One more question: who is Revelation 3:9 referring to? Gentile Christians?

Note that I never say theists can’t be scientists. To the contrary, in Christian Delusion I point out that most of the great pagan scientists were theists. Rather, Christianity was hostile to the scientific values of paganism until it rediscovered and reintegrated those pagan values (from reading and acceding to pagan literature on the point). So Christianity had to be re-paganized to become genuinely pro-science. And that is precisely what happened in the Renaissance that paved the way for the Scientific Revolution, which Newton represents the culmination of. And that is why the Scientific Revolution did not occur until that had happened, and thus why it took over a thousand years to get back on track. Thanks to Christian hostility to scientific values.

Scholarship on the role of valuing curiosity etc. is cited in my chapter on this in Christian Delusion.

As to the rest:

Logic is a prerequisite for science but not sufficient for it, in just the same way higher cognition is a prerequisite for science but not sufficient for it. Many an anti-scientific religious worldview is perfectly logical. And embraced by beings possessed of higher cognition.

But in a fundamental sense, Occam’s Razor is empirical. Because it is a fact about epistemic probabilities, which are empirical probabilities: Proving History, index, “Ockham’s Razor.” But even more fundamentally, this is actually reductively true of all math and logic: Sense and Goodness without God II.3.2, pp. 53-54, cf. Proving History, Axiom 4, pp. 23-26. Indeed, all axioms on which all math is based are only believed true insofar as they are verified empirically, they cannot be verified deductively. This is also true of all logic, which reduces to a single law, the law of non-contradiction, which is believed because of observation, as explained in the preceding two books, and also in my Critique of Reppert on the ontology of logic. Thus all deduction reduces to empirical authority (which is one of the most important discoveries in the philosophy of math and logic of the last hundred years, e.g. Gödel), and those who reject empirical authority are often anti-logic (e.g. the recent Christian attack on set theory).

Likewise the validity of induction. It is used because it is observed to work, while non-inductive methods are observed not to work; a Bayesian probability results, and Bayesian probabilities are epistemic probabilities, i.e. empirical probabilities. And contrary to your assumption, Bayesian proofs of induction are deductive, and would not commit either of the fallacies you cite (one can also avoid Gödel by using a Willard-validated Peano arithmetic for your probabilities when building a Bayesian proof). But even these proofs remain empirical at the base level: the cognition of properly basic beliefs (Epistemological Endgame). Only those who recognize that are guaranteed of avoiding the pitfalls of hyper-rationalism (and anti-empirical deployments of logic).

It must be said that science depends on a non-empirical principle: simplicity or Occam’s Razor. Consider fitting a curve through some points. For many fitting functions, if one has enough parameters, one will always be able to fit it. Yet we prefer functions with relatively few parameters, and functions that have simple forms or that are derived from some theory.

Then there’s the question of the validity of induction. Might that also be considered a non-empirical principle? A problem with induction is that if treated as a form of deduction, it’s a fallacy: Affirming the Consequent and Denying the Antecedent. Or at least so it seems. I don’t think that any philosopher has succeeded in deriving induction from deduction.

There are only two kinds of “liberal believers,” those who don’t really believe in god with any fervor (who would not be covered by my statement) and those who do. For the latter, the answer to your question is yes. They base their moral beliefs on it and endeavor to enact those beliefs politically or socially. I covered this two paragraphs later:

Not all delusions are equally dangerous, of course. There are friendlier delusions, more tolerant theologies and ideologies. I can get along with many a theist or dogmatist because of that. But these still enable those worse. And they are not themselves free of harm, and are still to be criticized for that. For a good survey of the dangers of even liberal and tolerant religions (and any comparable nonrational or non-evidence-based ideologies), just see chapters four through seven of Greta Christina’s book Why Are You Atheists So Angry.