It is assumed in the mainstream of Western culture that the epistemological nature of everything pertaining to scientific matters is directly provable and that everything pertaining to any religion, including the existence of an uncaused cause, is utterly unverifiable. Not only are the two able to intersect in miscellaneous ways that are not always understood by the typical admirer of each, but almost no one examines the philosophical foundations of either with a truly rationalistic approach. Which ideas are logically possible, logically provable, or evidentially supportable usually never gets brought up in any thorough sort of way. As a consequence, the conceptual overlap between various scientific and religious possibilities and the shared epistemological problems with outright belief in the full systems of either one are unaddressed.
There are scientific and theistic or religious ideas--no, not all theistic ideas are religious in nature--that are compatible and scientific and theistic or religious ideas that are logically exclusive. An example of the former is that scientific evidence for a universe with a finite past is logically consistent with the notion that a deity created matter and time. An example of the latter would be a hypothetical religion that says fire does not exist conflicting with the sensory experiences with fire that almost anyone could easily have. Of course, there are many types of concepts related to various scientific models and religions that could be used as examples of either kind, but no examples are actually needed to understand that some religions most certainly do not contradict some scientific ideas, whether those scientific stances have been abandoned by modern culture or not.
Scientific and religious epistemologies ironically share similar standing: neither of them moves far past conceptual analysis and mere evidential support, as neither the existence of God nor the existence of the material world is in any way self-evident, much less obvious prior to a rationalistic grasp of very specific logical facts. Yes, both can be proven to exist, but there is only a single way to prove that either is actually something that exists (for the uncaused cause, se here [1]; for the material world, see here [2]). People who have a subjective, shallow infatuation with the pathetic assumption that science proves anything beyond perceptions tend to object to this, but it is an important and logically verifiable truth all the same.
Logical and introspective facts are the only facts that are truly obvious in themselves. Neither science nor religion has any self-evidence whatsoever and neither aspect of philosophy is as foundational as sheer logic--on an epistemological or metaphysical level. This does not mean that science or religion are therefore philosophically unimportant, even though a religion that is true is tied to values and scientific ideas are amoral and thus are automatically less important even if true, as a universe that has no value is meaningless by default! What it means is that both scientific and religious ideas that do not already overlap with logical and metaphysical truths that are fully proven are probabilistic at best and thus ultimately unprovable. The parts of each that cannot be proven with pure logicality (which pertains more to which concepts related to each are logically possible) can only be supported with evidences.
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