Retarding intellectual development and scientific progress until religion, ethics, and morality can “catch up” is a shell game.
It is the responsibility of religion, ethics, and morality to advance and grow enough to remain applicable to a culture that is defined and created by intellectual and scientific development (and this is a world containing cultures who are profoundly defined and created by intellectual and scientific development).
History is littered with dead religions who failed to recognize that.
History is also littered with corpses, because the only tool that religion, ethics, and morality seem to be able to wield in a desperate attempt to retard intellectual and scientific development is killing people. Which doesn’t really look good on the resume of religion, ethics, or morality. We probably should work on that resume a bit.
We are a technological society. Our morals and ethics and religion will either catch up and remain sufficiently flexible to accommodate that, or our morals and ethics and religion will be replaced by morals, ethics, and religions that are. In fact, this is already happening — because there are moral, ethical, and religious structures out there in the world that happily embrace technological advancement.
It’s not a sink-or-swim situation. It’s a swim-or-find-yourself-as-irrelevant-as-voodoo-dolls situation.