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.
“That the divinity is one to be worshiped is where his faith comes in.”
That’s the nub, isn’t it? Because the physical world seems to be understandable by our brains, never mind that this breaks down at the level of quantum mechanics, we assume something like us must have engineered it. I find this wholly unpersuasive but even if I believed it, it is too far big a leap to think the engineer can read my thoughts, make impossible things happen, and answer my pleas by changing the course of events. This is not to even address the problem of who engineered the engineer.