Roughly 500 years back, the science-versus-religion debate took a special turn in the West because of the existence of a monopolistic doctrinal religion that made the pivotal mistake of meddling in empirical matters of fact. The Church’s meddling provided science historians with a long, official list of pronouncements about cosmology and biology, supposedly carrying the warrant of divine revelation, and all proven wrong. Every time the Church has offered an account of how the world behaves that conflicts with science, science has proven it wrong.
And the conflict goes beyond the reliability of the respective bodies of empirical data. Science is a self-correcting system of gathering information whereas religion rests on the suspension of skeptical methods of inquiry. Science has shown religion to be flawed as a reliable method of gathering information about the world.
But religious concepts take up the resources of mental systems that would be there, even were there no religion. Religion is a likely thing given our cognitive dispositions. In contrast, scientific activity is unnatural. Acquiring a scientific database and scientific literacy or sophistication is far more difficult than assuming the representations of religion.
What makes scientific knowledge-gathering special is is not just its departure from intuition or faith, but also the special kind of communication it requires. Scientific progress draws on novel motivational systems, its value misunderstood or belatedly recognized and it some “New Age” quarters, scorned. In other words, scientific activity is both cognitively and socially unlikely, which is why it has only been developed by a small number of people, in a small number of places, for what is only a miniscule part of our evolutionary history.