>But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things.

No. This is CATEGORICALLY WRONG. There are tons of instances of religion making claims on Knowable things. You make the statement yourself about clay and adam and eve. There is ZERO dichotomy between knowable and unknowable things in the category of religion.

What you're talking about is how some people try to reconcile the contradiction. They try to believe a subset of things Science makes no claim about. However THIS IS NOT the premise of RELIGION, it is your personal premise. The overwhelming majority of people and religions believe in things that contradict with things that are knowable.

Additionally EVEN if you choose to define religion as the belief of things that are unknowable (which is not true) there's STILL a problem with contradiction. The contradiction is different religions make different claims that conflict with each other. Because that "domain" has no evidence the claims are random and arbitrary and easily contradict each other.

>Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science.

No it is the SAME domain. The domain is reality as we know it. Again this is categorically wrong. You may personally try to reconcile the contradiction by adjusting your domain and definitions but the global definition of religion and science as we know it operate on the domain of ALL of reality.

>A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

See. You state there is a contradiction above, at the same time you claim that there isn't one as if there's two definitions of religion. Your personal definition and a global definition. If the above applies to the definition of religion, then none of your claims are true.

>However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

You have to also realize that what is unknowable is a MOVING target. Many people have held your philosophy of merging science and religion be dividing reality into two subsets of knowable things and unknowable things. Then they make absolute statements on things that are unknowable like the earth is the center of the solar system. See the problem here? At one point in time the centrality of the solar system was a thing that was just as mysterious as the nature of god.

When science advanced and the unknowable becomes known. The religion changes. It makes an absolute statement then it renegs that statement. If religion is suppose to make ABSOLUTE claims about realiy, then the fact that science will constantly cause religion to reneg those ABSOLUTE claims displays a fundamental incompatibility.

One of the last questions about reality is whether their is a deity. It is only currently unknowable, but may be knowable in the future.

One thing I've noticed as that people of your type still believe in some sort of soul or afterlife. This sort of thing is actually knowable and already contradicted by science and basic logic.