It's mathematical...

These researchers should read some American religious history. What they describe has a very long tradition, and reflects an inner contradiction of protestant theology, which is doomed by its separation of faith and reason to swing pendulum-like from Calvinism to naturalism and universalism. For instance, the Unitarian movement started in the early XIX century among New England Calvinist Puritans, and within a couple of generations became, guess what: a moralistic, therapeutic deism!