That's a reasonable defense of atheism, as far as it goes. Certainly, science is our most reliable kind of knowledge, and epistemology is an analysis of how knowledge is produced and evaluated.

But who says religious people are supposed to have knowledge of divine matters? Again, this is missing the point. The move here is to drag the religious person onto the naturalist's ground, to beg the question, and to obtain an easy victory for the secularist.

But there's a common middle ground, which is our human existential predicament. Obviously, if we assume we ought to have empirical knowledge, religion is inferior to science and to philosophy. So there would be no contest. But that starts from a scientistic conception of religion.

Religion is better understood as a kind of practice that responds to our existential predicament as mortal, fallible, internally conflicted beings. Indeed, as Algis Uzdavinys shows, ancient philosophy was likewise tied to the practices of wisdom and of purifying the self for the sake of generating mystical experiences.

To say that theists make exceptions of themselves when it comes to evaluating the unreliability of their claims is to presume the priority of the naturalist's epistemic standards. But that's question-begging. The only standard or middle ground that doesn't beg the question here is existentialism. What we should do is compare naturalism or secular humanism with theistic, faith-based religions as responses to our existential situation. Which response is admirable, honourable, obsolete, or disgraceful in non-empirical, moral, or aesthetic terms?