For the past 500 years, science has gradually peeled back superstition to reveal how the world actually seems to operate. We may not have have Truth, but we have a pretty good estimation of it, we think.
As a result of the phenomenal success of science, everyone wants to use it to sell their products. Infomercials show people in lab-coats explaining very glitzy "scientific-looking" graphical animations. Edgar Cayce and various other psychics, mediums, and UFO-chasers have used scientific sounding jargon to make their opinions sound reasonable. I.D. advocates and other creationists use scientific terminology in non-scientific ways to attempt to mislead the unwary.
But with all the hoopla there are at least two roles that religion can actually play in science.
1) religion can serve as inspiration to people to discover God's creation.
2) religion might give people raw ideas that can then be tested. I don't mean this in the sense of testing religious ideas - which, being a strict falsificationist, I consider nonsensical. I mean in the sense of generating new ideas.
However, it's important to understand that science is more than just inspiration and imagination. Both of those things are important, but they aren't defining features of science. There are lots of inspired and imaginative people in the world who are not scientists. There are always have been.
Like it or not, science is a kind of Underwriter. When we say an idea is scientific, we are saying that it has been through a deliberate process of testing and has a certain "fitness for use," if you will.
The value of science to society at large is that the results, while often in error, are nevertheless on average far more dependable than those obtained by other means. People can trust the results of science - not perfectly, but usually more than other kinds of results.
Some religions are able to adapt and accept this subsidiary role in the process, while still maintaining a primary role in areas like ethics. Other religions have to force science (as a human activity) into submission, by claiming it supports their claims, because their faith has to be ultimate in all respects.
The fundamental conflict is that science is an attempt to discover reality, while religion is an attempt to define it. But reality doesn't care about our definitions.
