I wanted to respond to your post, but I don't remember how to get your post transferred to my reply field (it has been over a year since I've done it--I know it's a simple process, would you enlighten me on the method, please?).
Anyway, I agree with a lot of what you have to say, but I predict that we'll have to part company over the issue of how science is perceived. You wrote:
Science deals with what is. Religion deals with what comes after . . . As long as this separation is understood and maintained, there is no conflict. Many people, some on this board, hold beliefs in God fully compatible with evolution.
One of the problems is that of intentionally failing to be forthright about weaknesses of favored theories in textbooks. For example, open up any public high school Biology textbook in the origin of life chapter (and beyond), and you'll see language that would lead one to believe,
Not that we see evidence that leads us to believe (and here it is) that life has a natural tendency to come into being on its own, but, rather, that we should believe that life came into existence on its own (because we must assume that only physical matter exists, and no supernatural force). "What's wrong with that?" you say. There's a difference between science dealing with what is, and the assumption of life coming into being on its own. (I think that creationists who believe in evolution are victims of philosophers, who may also be scientists, who have convinced them that evolution is not just factual, but true. So, if one believes that the universe didn't just pop into existence on its own, and if evolution is true, God must have used evolution to create, and not some other means that naturalists are uncomfortable with . . . but that is at least as compatable with the observable facts as are naturalistic tenets.) To modify your claim a bit, I believe that, yes, science deals with what is, and religion deals with what comes after; however, "science" can be manipulated philosophically by presently-seated sociological forces that promote the religion of naturalism under the banner of science, and so, in a similar way that religion does not only deal with what comes after (but also deals with what is), "science" can go way beyond "what is" to cause people to believe things that are no more substatiated or provable than the "what comes after" interest of religion. If public school textbooks, "nats-ic" TV documentaries, etc., were promoting straight science, I wouldn't have much of a problem--but that's not what's going on.