the mere fact that someone has a religious agenda

... does not discredit everything thing they have to say about science. When Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation (did I blogpost this before?), his motivation might have been to undermine Lamarkian evolution, which he (as a believing Catholic) saw as opposed to revelation. But Pasteur went about this by producing a repeatable experiment, so that even those who did not share his faith could verify his claim.