The more we rely on science in everyday life the more we come to understand that taking extraordinary claims on faith is worthless and that the only reason to trust in things is by testing them with reliable methods.
Even with very simple things like buying a new phone or watching a new movie you can now wait until millions of others have bought that phone or saw that movie and can see if it's any good. It's very different from the past where you maybe had two or three wise persons in your social circle that you trusted and that you went to for advice, or maybe the newspaper or the store clerk and they all believed in god.
Also, the more religion is forced to move beliefs and ancient writings into the "it's symbolical" category, the less relevant they become.
Further, religions can no longer cover up the mistakes of those in power, because technology empowers the individual and this results in many people leaving because they lose faith in their leaders and in organized religion in general.
As far as science goes, it doesn't really care about religion, it only cares about finding facts and finding the best explanation for those facts. So this conflict is pretty much one-sided.
Religion likes to attack science for not having all the answers, like "why are we here" and stuff like that. But think about it. If you had two persons to go to for advice, and one would claim to know everything about everything, and the other would acknowledge that there are limits to what he knew and that even the knowledge he had could be open to change, whom would be more trustworthy?
Now you've not yet made the decision on who to trust more but you talk with these two persons and start asking a lot of questions about how they know so much.. and one of them shows you a book and tells you that all the answers are from that one book and that he understands the complicated things written in there because he talks with an invisible being in his head, while the other can explain for each answer that he knows how he found out about it through repeated experiments and can even demonstrate these experiments to you? Who would be me trustworthy?
After all this talk you go to person X and tell him that you doubt one of the things that he told you, because you saw that it wasn't true from your own experiences. Now person X tells you that you are wrong and that what you saw is wrong and he says if you keep telling people about it, his invisible friend in his head will kill you and maybe even torture you for eternity in a lake of fire.
You go to the other guy and tell him that he's wrong and he says "well great, that's the only way that we can learn more about the universe" and he goes with you and wants to see and understand why exactly he's wrong. After you've convinced him, he tells everyone else about what he learned from you and he encourages you to come back again if you find something else that wasn't right.
Who is more trustworthy, do you think?
