That's simply not true. Kenneth Miller of Brown University is quite open about being a devout Catholic, yet he's published dozens of articles in peer-reviwed journals and his high school and college biology textbooks are some of the most frequently used in the country. Every single member of the pope's Pontifical Academy of sciences is a theistic evolutionist, and yet they're all members of mainstream scientific organizations and/or on the faculty of major universities. There are also several respected evolutionary biologists who happen to be evangelicals, but you'll forgive me if I do not remember their names since I'm neither a Protestant nor a biologist.
The intelligent design folks start with either a theistic premise or an extraterrestrial premise for example.
That's just not true. They claim that a dispassionate examination of the evidence will lead one to conclude that an intelligence of some sort, either God or aliens, had to design life. Of course they are wrong, but they most emphatically do not start off with a theistic premise.
My arguement is with those scientists who assume that anything that is tautologous or not testable is always necessarily false.
Most scientists do not make this assumption.
Good science in the objective sence indeed deals only with the evidence before it...though the problematic part is to interpret the data into a form that can be systematically organized and interpreted meaningfully. In the end, SUBJECTIVE BIAS chooses the shape in which data is organized into hypotheses which can be tested and verified.
I see you have been influenced by postmodernism. Strange, for a conservative. It's usually the left that launches into this sort of nonsense.
Please tell me, what "subjective bias" causes biologists to infer evolution and common descent from the genetic, embyological, and palentological data?
One sees data and one makes a guess as to what it means, then tries to test to see if that guess is verifiable. Yet two people a creationist and an evolution may take that data and approach it from two separte angles. Bias shapes the testing so that outcomes while divergent, may in fact be plausible if the methodology used is rigorous and scientific. Yet the creationist, operating from pre-existing bias(A Rationalistic approach) is told that modern science doesn't approve of a path of inquiry which proceeds from tautology and there-fore his work is supposedly meaningless rubbish, despite a methodical testable approach(other than the tautology) to his work.
The materialist scientist operatiing from a bias that all we can ever know is what is inferred(inductive reasoning) from that which testable, repeatable, measurable, seen tasted, touched.(the materialist approach). This bias tends to look at the tautologous in the negative, not in the neutral as real Reason would demand. There-fore morality and religion, drawn from speculations of tautology, is viewed with at best scepticism and worse down right hostility.
An example would be the fight over embryonic stem cell research...many scientists don't understand why religious folk would be so up in arms, the bias being that the science is only going to "benefit" men, "benefit" according to the utilitarian biases of the scientists in question. The bias of the religious folk, meanwhile, views this research as leading eventually to a Hitlerian type political reality in which a man's only worth is the value the state places on him, and when he is deemed worthless, he is eliminated!
Science tries to eliminate subjective bias in its methodology, and that to its great credit. In the end, though we must all follow that great Socratic credo..."To thine own self be true" I would add "and be honest about the fact that you are being honest with yourself!" in everthing you do!