The idea that science and religion are in perpetual conflict is no longer taken seriously by any major historian of science, despite its popularity in the late nineteenth century. One of the last remaining bastions of atheism survives only at the popular level-namely, the myth that an atheistic, fact-based science is permanently at war with a faith-based religion. Not only is this caricature clearly untrue in the present day, but historical scholarship has now determined it to be misleading and inaccurate in the past. Yet the myth still lives on in popular atheist writings, undisturbed by the findings of scholars. At least in the minds of some atheist propagandists, science is the supreme champion of atheism. - Alister McGarth, The Twilight of Atheism (page 87)
I've understood science to be looking into how things work and then doing things with those discoveries.
Update: I've just found this link that argues against the chapter that I just quoted above. The author Dan J. Bye says they were: "Infuriated by McGrath’s distortions of atheism and its history, and by the generally dreadful quality of the scholarship on display in Twilight of atheism"
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