they do not have to be at odds it just depends on how you look at them...religion can indeed be experimented on...death is its experiment.
as an aspiring scientist you should be keenly aware that not having proof doesnt disprove a theory, so why do you believe that there is no God when you have no proof?
not proving the null does not prove the alternative...so what is your proof that God doesnt exist?
They definitely are at odds. There is far more to religion than death, though that is a big part of why many people are religious, because they're scared of obliteration. Religions attempts to argue why we were created, what the supreme force is in the universe, and so on.
Without any support or evidence, we have no basis for a theory. Theory attempts to explain natural phenomena (evolution, Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, relativity, etc) and is refined or thrown out when necessary.
The explanation of nature by the design of a God seemed plausible thousands of years ago when it was proposed, but we have moved much further in our knowledge, and by careful experiment and deduction found out many more things than were immediately apparent. Based on what we know now the ideas of religion seem just too provincial and simple to explain the vast phenomena we have observed.
We cannot yet prove or disprove any sort of God, but with the laws we have so far deduced, we have not needed a God hypothesis to explain anything.