well, that's all nice that you have such a clear 'two magisterium' approach to the world, but frankly, most textbooks on evolution do contain an 'early evolution' chapter discussing abiotic/biotic transitions. Not too many that I know of include panspermia, let alone recommend it, either.

It doesn't take too much scratching, in fact, to look at the sociobiologists' work on the evolution of ethics, morality, religion, and so on, to find life scientists trying to sort out the meaning of life via their mechanistic models. In short, evolutionary biology as a field does tend to trod heavy on what you call religious turf, by virtue of the claims of the practitioners. I'm not saying that there is anything inherently selfish, immoral, or anti-religious in the pursuit of science - in fact, people can pursue it with strong religious assumptions, pursue it selflessly, or apply the strictest ethics to their science. These are all possible and do not always go together. However, observation of evolutionary biologists frequently exposes the motivation of the practitioners as unveiling questions of broad application to morals, ethics and the meaning of life - not bad questions, at all.