The Church's rediscovery of ancient Greek protoscience and philosophy did predate the Scientific Revolution, but it had the same effect. It was the independence and obvious progress of godless Greco-Roman thought that challenged the Church, and the Church answered it not by sticking to its theological guns but by trying to out-think the ancient secularists, and to co-opt their naturalism and logic. The result was Scholastic, systematic, metaphysical theology which turned God into an object or a substance and which was thus consistent with atheism.

As Kronman shows in Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, Aristotle's "God" was part of his naturalism, being just the universe's intelligibility, not a transcendent creator or divine person.