[sweetjazz]

I agree that there are a large number of religious believers, for example many Protestants, who seek to find evidence for their claims. Their arguments run along the lines of: x is documented in the Bible; there is reason to believe the Bible is an accurate account of events of Jesus' time; it is not possible (or a weaker variant: replace possible with plausible) that Jesus was not resurrected given that x happened. For example, x might be the appearance of Jesus to the apostles after he was crucified.

Surely that reasoning is confused. (The argument given suggests that the Bible is inaccurate in detail x because resurrection is impossible, not the other way around, since our available reasons for believing resurrection is impossible are much stronger than our reasons to believe that the Bible is an accurate account of what took place in Jesus' time.)

But many Christians, especially Catholics (as distinguished from the official teachings of the Catholic Church) and liberal Protestants, don't believe the Bible to be inerrant and admit that the parts of the Bible they believe in are based on faith. They assert that once this faith is had, one can come to a highly reasonable view of the world. This is different from what you are asserting (because their beliefs are not claimed to be highly reasonable based solely on outside evidence and arguments). Moreover, they assert that this faith is reasonable, that things could have transpired as they believe them to have.

The main objection to this line of though is that it's hard to jibe that assertion with their presumed belief that the world is governed by certain physical laws that are constant in time. This is one reason for the conflict between religion and science; ultimately religion can accept that today science is what it is. But in order to make religious faith consistent, it is often necessary (or at the very least convenient) to posit that God intervened in the world at certain historical moments and defied the scientific laws that otherwise govern us.

I suspect that it is this belief that most scientists reject and one reason that they tend not to be religious. While the claim is possible, it goes against what science is supposed to accomplish. If scientific laws are capable of exceptions for divine purposes, their usefulness for prediction diminishes. (E.g. The sun will rise tomorrow, unless there happens to be a divine reason for it not to.) OTOH, people who are not passionate about science may admit that the claim that God "changed the rules" for certain events (and further that he still does, depending on one's beliefs regarding transubstantiation) is a bit odd, but are unlikely to be deeply troubled by it. They are simply not invested in the project of science and find it easy to weaken the scope of what science can accomplish (on a practical level, no science is affected, but on a philosophical level, all science is affected).

I suspect this is why scientists are likely to reject religion more than any other group. The divide between religion and science, it seems to me, is over the uniformity and constancy of the laws of nature through all time. While there is a certain aestehetically unpleasing aspect to rejecting the constancy of the laws of nature, given that we have so much inductive evidence that they are indeed constant, it's a quite delicate and subtle matter, and I find it hard to be as critical of people who do so than I do of people who use rather silly reasoning such as that outlined at the beginning of this post.