[gcruse]

You're confusing natural theology with worship.

I was quoting from the article where he says --

"behind the fog is a divinity that we, through our faith, might worship."

The fact that a scientist infers an intelligent designer or intelligent orderer from his reason and observation does not imply said scientist has truncated inquiry--- just the opposite.

If we accepted that ID's 'irreducible complexity' of the eye precluded its having evolved, that it was created in the form we see before us, the entire line of research into the eye's development would be seen as unscientific and any medical benefits that might have arisen from the research would be lost.

who wrote with remarkable intellectual integrity in praising the historical benefits


Cultural benefits of religion aren't validations of the religion's beliefs. Mormonism produces exemplary behavior among its adherents, but not many outside the religion believe there were gold plates or magical translating lenses involved in writing the Book of Mormon.

[mjolnir]

Read Murray-— the “cultural benefit” he’s talking about is the benefit to the culture of science.

While you’re at it, you might re-read the line of Gilder that you quote. When he says “behind the fog is a divinity” he is inferring an intelligence behind the order of the universe-— just as Einstein did.

That the divinity is one to be worshiped is where his faith comes in. In other words, he and Einstein agree that there is a logos in nature from which an ordering intelligence may be reasonably inferred. Ever the rationalist (NOT an empiricist, despite his early admiration of Ernst Mach), Einstein denies that a personal God may be so inferred-— and Gilder does not disagree-— that is why Gilder invokes faith at that point.

Your notion of irreducible complexity, which you confuse for spontaneous generation and refers to the limits of natural selection rather than evolution in any case, is beside the point. The fact that the inference that the universe is rationally ordered and therefore amenable to discovery through the use of reason has been a boon to science has been historically documented by William Wallace, Pierre Duhem, Charles Murray and Rodney Stark among others.