I find fundamentalist views embarrassingly childlike and simplistic too, lox, so no argument there. Many religiously minded people, however, are not fundamentalists and have no problem embracing the scientific viewpoint which is based, as you say, strictly on observation (and the observer's interpretation of what he has observed). Many religiously minded people have a concept of a God who (or which) created a complex and beautiful Universe precisely through the very mechanisms and natural laws which science is busy observing and trying to understand.

Therefore, I see no necessary or inevitable conflict between religion and science, providing the understanding of a religious person is not itself childish and unrealistic.

But that's not really what I was getting at. What I was getting at was that science arises out of a somewhat different attitude or pursuit than mysticism does. Science attempts to discover how things occur or by what process, while religions are driven more than anything else by a concern over ethics and meaning. Therein, I think, lies the crucial difference. They're engaged in fairly separate searches.

(not that scientists can't be concerned about ethics...they can) (and not that religions can't be concerned about observation and understanding of natural processes...they are).

The Edenic myth has a number of interesting possible interpretations. I think we would have to go back there with a time machine and talk to the people who first came up with it to be totally sure what they were trying to say, and whether it had anything to do with sex or not. It's most likely a symbolic parable, and it may be a parable on several different levels.