I reject your sweeping statement "science has spent the last 1.5 centuries presenting itself as a counterpoint to religion."
Science is a process of trying to explain why things as they are and to predict how things will behave in the future. Many (in ye olden days nearly all) scientists have been religious. There is a conflict only when the two come to different explanations of the same thing. That conflict wasn't the goal of science, unlike what you seem to imply.
I don’t think I was implying that science intended to reject religion. I don’t think it matters what the scientific community intended though. Currently, science socially functions as a rejection of religion regardless of what the leaders of the scientific community think or say, and that social function results a bias against subconscious issues for the reason I explained in my other comments.
The reasons why science functions that way are probably way too long and complicated to list (and probably are the result politics more than anything else), but you can’t tell me that that’s not true. The majority of the world think that science and religion are clashing forces, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> The majority of the world think that science and religion are clashing forces, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That is really a broad claim. Science isn't one thing and religion isn't one thing. Both are clouds of ideas/claims/customs and there is some overlap. I'd argue that most of the time there is no conflict at all and most people don't perceive it as a "clash".
There will always be people who will say that we shouldn't have invented airplanes -- God would have given us wings if he wanted man to fly, but they are in the minority. Most of the time, there is a news item that "science" has invented a battery anode that results in a battery with 20% more capacity and people cheer it and don't think it stepped on God's toes. Religious people will say that God wishes for us to not eat meat on certain days and nobody looks to science to see if that is true or not.
Stephen Jay Gould was famous for his "non-overlapping magisteria" claim [1] -- which I'm arguing is true most of the time, but also see that Gould was painting way too broadly as there certainly are cases where the two are in conflict.
Science is a process of trying to explain why things as they are and to predict how things will behave in the future. Many (in ye olden days nearly all) scientists have been religious. There is a conflict only when the two come to different explanations of the same thing. That conflict wasn't the goal of science, unlike what you seem to imply.