He is trying to see if it passes the smell test as a religion. For many - maybe not you, but many - it does.
There is no mystery about what distinguishes science from religion. Religion uses two methods that science does not -- revelation and faith. I suppose I have to define those terms now, or the creationists will be screaming that "it takes more faith to believe in evolution ... " . Okay:
Revelation is the receipt of information in some kind of miraculous transmission, which information comes from a spiritual domain of existence to which we don't have access. The "usual" revelation is from a deity to a prophet. Often the prophet is on a mountaintop when the revelation happens, but this seems to vary from religion to religion.So science and religion can't be identical, because they use a very different set of intellectual methods. Science, for example, uses experimentation, which often results in the abandonment of a previously held belief. This is something that religion never does.Faith is the belief in something (often it's a belief in the validity of the message which some prophet has obtained through revelation), notwithstanding the absence of evidence or logical proof for the thing being believed. (And an article of faith, being arbitrary, can easily be distinguished from the axioms of necessity which are embraced by science, such as logic, free will, the validity of sensory evidence, etc.)