Of course you can cherry pick famous scientists from the past to support your point, especially when it's an historical fact that theism was the default for centuries.

But this is a straightforwardly transparent attempt at apologetics. It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals.

Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism.

The usual argument at this point is a No True Scotsman. All those other religions do these things. Never the claimant's own.

But for every Pope Leo - who seems like an unusually decent example - there are five Kenneth Copelands, and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires.

Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel.

Community in practice should be wider than that.

There's some extra stress involved in finding your own way, especially in a culture of forced competition.

But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.