You can’t have good science without good instruments.  Microscopes, telescopes, supercolliders, you name it.  Only with well collaborated instruments can you crunch the data and make empirical claims.

With religion you’re basically taking away the instruments while still making empirical claims.  Unless you call the “instrument” the Bible (actually meaning your interpretation of the Bible).  What ends up happening is people’s intuition becomes the instrument (“God” is guiding them).  Sometimes this works for the best but other times it can be destructive.  Looking for “God” is like stressing an instrument beyond its ability to detect anything useful (like setting a microscope to a resolving power higher than its range).  What happens is all that gets detected is noise and then you are left trying to discern some pattern in all the noise like a picnicker trying to find shapes in clouds.

This is a serious issue for me as I was raised an Evangelical Christian and was taught to find God’s “leading”.  God led me lots of places, most of them not good.  I could cherry pick and say only the good places where from God but why would you bother asking God something if you were going to say only the things he said you agreed with actually came from him.