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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Belief in Belief - Less Wrong
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Your observation and orthonormal's observations are correct: religious people often expect and claim that evidence for God is impossible. This is because when they say he exists, they mean existence in a different sense than what you think of.
It's Gould's separate magisteria. Physical materialism rejects the separate magisteria, and I'm convinced that it is self-consistent in doing so. However, dualists do believe in the separate magisteria and you cannot try to interpret their beliefs in the context of monism -- it just comes out ridiculous.
Religious people who have assimilated the ideas of separate magisteria think that the religious fundamentalists who expect there could be evidence of God, and actually expect science to conform to 'true' religious belief are kind of crazy.
Ironically, physical materialists seem to have more affinity for and focus much more on the theistic beliefs of the latter (crazy) group. I don't know what fraction of believers comprise each group (I do know that the fraction of bible literalists increases substantially as you move further south in the United States) but my impression is that the separate magisteria set are much more concerned with rationality and self-consistency, so you're more or less ignoring the group that would listen to you and which you could have an interesting (albeit frustrating) conversation with.
I'll go back and read 'belief in belief', but I don't think you have a good interpretation of the people who expect no evidence of God.
It is not possible to interpret "separate magisteria" as different kinds of stuff, one "empirical" and one "non-empirical". What they are, rather, is different rules of thinking. For example, prayer can often help and never hurt in individual cases, but have no effect in the aggregate (e.g. when surveys are performed). There's no consistent model that has this attribute, but you can have a rule for thinking about this "separate magisterium" which says, "I'll say that it works and doesn't hurt in individual cases, but when someone tries to survey the aggregate, I won't expect positive experimental results, because it's not in the magisterium of things that get positive experimental results".
Mostly, "separate magisterium" is the classical Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. It can't be defined consistently. Mostly it means "Stop asking me those annoying questions!"
This division, needless to say, exists in the map, not in the territory.
I agree. Dualism is simply incoherent within the empirical framework.
It also explains why they don't expect a CO_2 detector to work or have any relevance.
If, in quantum mechanics, we can say that something doesn't happen unless it's observed, why can't we say that prayer works only if it isn't observed (in the aggregate)? They seem equally mysterious claims to me.
Indeed, certain interpretations of quantum mechanics (for example, non-local action at a distance) point to dualism. You don't even need to be quite so exotic: spontaneous particle creation in a vacuum would be evidence that X isn't closed or complete. These are real and interesting problems at the interface of science and philosophy. It doesn't minimize physical materialism to acknowledge this.
(I keep saying that I agree that dualism is incoherent -- likewise I think that some interpretations of quantum mechanics and the existence of any truly random processes would be incoherent as well for equivalent reasons. )