[tjradcliffe]

The creation of science depended on a large number of random factors, from Judeic monotheism (or something like it) to the disasters of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and even (plausibly) the English Civil War and its aftermath. Those random accidents--including the founding of universities in the late Middle Ages--created a set of conditions where people with the brains to create science were given access to institutions that let them think and investigate at the same time when they had both the social freedom and the technological capacity to publish their work, and the freedom to engage in institutional innovation to create things like the Royal Society, whose founding should be considered the final act in the birth of modern science: once it existed, it would be extremely hard not to get something like science going.

So on this view, the reason why science happened here and not there was the same reason why hominids with the capacity for general, tool-using, representational intelligence and language happened in Africa and not the Americas: such developments depend on a confluence of multiple unlikely factors and as such are very unlikely to happen at all, much less multiple times. If science hadn't been created in Western Europe in the 1600's it might never have happened. It only looks inevitable because it did.