Science and Religion Conflict Is a Modern Invention
The narrative that science and religion are natural enemies is not a discovery of the Enlightenment but a polemical construction that ignores the actual history of how science developed often under explicitly theistic motivation.
"Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver." C.S. Lewis, summarizing A.N. Whitehead
John Lennox documents how the founders of modern science Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Maxwell did not experience belief in a Creator as an obstacle to investigation but as its primary motivation. The conviction that the universe is orderly, that it follows intelligible laws, that it can be understood by rational minds all of this rested on the theological premise that a rational God had created a rational universe. Melvin Calvin, Nobel laureate in biochemistry, traced this conviction to "a basic notion discovered 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and enunciated first in the Western world by the ancient Hebrews: namely that the universe is governed by a single God."
The supposed counter-example of al-Ghazali "killing Islamic science" popularized by Neil deGrasse Tyson is historically false. As Frank Griffel's scholarship shows, al-Ghazali did not reject causation or scientific investigation. He argued that while God's "habit" is to allow certain effects to follow particular causes, this regularity is sustained by God's will rather than by metaphysical necessity. Far from killing science, al-Ghazali's framework is compatible with empirical investigation it simply refuses to grant nature autonomous, self-sustaining causal power independent of God. Post-Ghazali Islamic civilization produced centuries of scientific work in astronomy, optics, medicine, and mathematics.
The real conflict is not between science and religion but between philosophical naturalism and theism and naturalism is itself a metaphysical commitment brought to science, not something entailed by science. As Lennox puts it, "statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science."
Takeaway: The "conflict thesis" between science and religion is not a finding of history but a story told by one side of a philosophical argument.
See also: Faith Is Not Opposed to Reason | Atheism Is Not the Default Position | The Ghazalian Synthesis Balanced Reason and Revelation