>The type of thinking in the lab is not the type of thinking done in church.
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.