Great! My only defense is that I tend to have very little time to post - and what started as casual disagreement turned into something I wanted to see through.
Speaking of, I still disagree - and more specifically I'll say that both are epistemic communities, engaged in epistemic debates, using agreed upon epistemic practices and techniques for members of those communities.
Again, just because you (and I!) have problems with those epistemic practices is no reason to describe their debates as foundationally different. Unless I'm wrong, you and others in the thread have argued that the debates - on the basis of the forms and types of evidence being mobilized - are problematic compared to those in science. If we're talking about the evidence as the problem, we're talking about epistemology, not controversy.
While my core point here is (admittedly!) relatively tiny and pedantic, the argument here highlights what I see as the bigger problem, which is that many atheists are willing to count the lived messiness of epistemic communities against the religious, while they raise science to be some gleaming, monolithic, purely logical practice. It's not, making shared knowledge is messy, and saying so does not make science any less legitimate.