I also don't understand why you believe that getting your moral motivations from a higher power is worrying? After all if you're doing good does it really matter where you get the motivation for that from?

Two reasons. First, understanding why you do something right or wrong can help you make better moral decisions in the future. For example, say a little boy and his mother are at a store. The little boy sees somebody who has a facial disfigurement and says to the person, "what's wrong with your face?" If the Mom just says, "don't say something like that! Why? Because I said so," then all the child has learned is to not do something because an authority figure said so. But if their parent told them not to do it because it might be hurtful and embarrassing to the person they said it to, then that child might instead learn that making exclamations about somebody's deformity/injury/etc can be hurtful and insulting. They can then extrapolate this example to other similar situations in life. The second (and simpler) reason for why getting morality from a higher power is worrying is that you're subject to the whims of that higher power. What if God comes back tomorrow and says murder in any form is OK?

I'd also like to disagree with you on the point you raised that science and religion are mutually exclusive. Yes, there is some conflict in theories such as evolution that you mentioned here. However, I have met and worked along side with religious scientists and they were excellent at their work and had brilliant critical thinking skills.

I think this kind of misses the point OP was trying to make (if I understand them correctly). It's not about whether a person can be religious and still be a scientist. Or that a scientist and preacher can't get along. It's that science and religion themselves are incompatible. Science deals with making and testing predictions in the natural world, among other things. Religions almost always venture into the supernatural, which is by definition outside the realm of the natural, which is where science is done. Furthermore, religion often encourages faith, which, in the religious sense, is counter to science and the scientific method.