I basically agree, but with two caveats:
[1] Adherents of any religion probably make the same claim about their own beliefs. I don't think Hindus or Buddhists or anyone else would claim to hold the beliefs they do on the strength of their explanatory power about the physical world, but of their 'spiritual'--and social-- significance.
[2] Why are some Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalists so insistent that one must accept Biblical accounts of the physical world (e.g. creation in six days, global deluge, &c.) literally, and that to fail to do so undermines the spiritual and moral teachings of the Old Testament. And it isn't just an OT issue. One of the Americans I particularly admire is Thomas Jefferson. He was a strong adherent to the ethical teachings of Jesus, but as a rationalist rejected the supernatural elements of the Biblical accounts (he edited a version of the NT from which miraculous elements were removed on the grounds they defied credibility). Whether one agrees or disagrees with this particular endeavour (it is, in any event, rather singular), it strikes me as at least a valid approach. No matter how the world came to be, murder is a moral evil. If Noah never existed, rape would still be evil. Jefferson held that Christ's ethical teachings were compelling whether or not he ever walked on water or raised the dead. But we have all certainly seen fundamentalists of a number of religions who would regard Jefferson as a dangerous heretic on these grounds.
It is not a valid approact to Christianity, because Jesus Himself made His miracles a central component of His teachings. If you remove all the Supernatural from Christianity you don't have Christianity anymore.
The problem is too long to go into here in detail, but the difficulty is that "by definition" miracles are rare, AND "break the rules"; and since they are done by supernatural agents they are non-testable. This means that just when the empirical approach would be most useful, it is inapplicable.
And because of that, science cannot distinguish between competing supernatural claims using its own methods. So, in the interests of logical consistency (from the outside, no one creed can occupy a "favored status") the only thing to do is to reject them all.
And that's the problem. The scientific method is a way of minimizing errors--"false positives". But I see no way of correcting for the possibility of rejecting things which may happen to be true, but don't have tangible, TESTABLE evidence behind them. (BTW, the reason this doesn't matter for ordinary everyday events, is that the laws of nature 'guarantee' uniformity, even in those situations where you can't directly test the materials...but again, miracles by definition claim to be exceptions, so this approach is a bad fit.)
Cheers!
Well, Buddha did teach one truth about the nature of the physical universe that is considered a bedrock of the religion-- the fact that nothing in the physical universe is static. And unless the steady-state theory has been reinstated while I wasn't paying attention, I'd say Buddha was correct.