Sure they were, but as Carl Sagan said, "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." And this way of thinking is antithetical to the way of thinking that faith is based on.
I once was reading a book on the history of science that was published shortly after Darwin's books on evolution came out. This history book discussed how many people thought that Darwin's ideas were meant to do away with God. This, the author claimed, was not the case: just because we have better understanding of how the world works does not mean that it is any less or more the result of a purposeful creation. It simply means that we understand more about how it functions.
Its just that, I doubt it is limited to just religion and politics... When dug deeper and when looked across a person's behavior across different aspects, most people seem very inconsistent.
true consistency in idea/ideal and action...hmm...I would say that is an incredibly tough thing to achieve and probably impractical from many perspectives.
The second way is a political conflict, like Galileo having to say that the Earth was the centre of the solar system. Stem-cell research being discouraged in the States, and a number of other issues faith/the religious have with areas science reaches into.
Another thing this article is saying is that religion and faith as a way of discovering or deciding on truth and morality are waning as we move into the future.
Says who? How does my belief that God intervenes by the Holy Spirit, say, slow down science. I'm trying to think of a mechanism. [Getting OT] Why is it a bad thing to slow down science - what objective moral law requires that scientific enquiry proceeds quickly without thorough inspection or introspection?
Certainly many of the greatest "Western" scientific thinkers were inspired by God and the concept that knowledge of the creation leads to knowledge/understanding of the creator has been probably the greatest single driver of scientific discovery in the last couple of millennia [speculative I know].
Galileo had to do nothing of the sort. The church felt there was not enough evidence to confirm Galileo's findings (research funded by the Church) and so intervened to prevent publication. Ironically he was sort of wrong, we can choose any point as a centre no reference point is any more valid than any other. It is equally right to say the Universe revolves around one point as it is to say that of any other.
Stem-cell research is an interesting question but one I know little about. I suspect that the variance in attitudes within the Church, say, is little different to that outside it's corpus. I think the stop here is around agreed moral values WRT human life as opposed specific beliefs.
Finally, I'd like to see these figures showing that there are less people than previously ["waning"] that carry out religious practices or use faith in questioning morality. The ascendency of irreligion, for example, does not required the decline of religious behaviour. It sounds like propaganda - I'd be happy to be proved wrong either way but I suspect population studies will bear out that religious practice (faith is currently impossible to measure IMO) is not growing as quickly as it has in the past. Indeed it is possibly growing more slowly than global population growth.
It is like me updating Firefox and then don't brother to upgrade everything else. As a result, Firefox work and play in a sub-optimal environment.
Quite some time ago I read somewhere.... that the mark of intelligence of a person is how well he can function while simultaneously holding conflicting viewpoints on an issue..... I would have to agree with it.... it probably goes towards explaining some of the somehow in your statement.