Well the two do coexist. The coexistence is not always comfortable, though. A workaday scientist can go about his/her work in a perfectly objective way, yet, in a sort of separate mental existence, believe in God. I think that such people are barking mad, but I cheerfully admit that it need not compromise their work in science. It is at the outer limits of science, where scientific ethos starts to mingle with speculation (and why not - we're human beings, not Mr Spocks), that conflict becomes a potential issue. The most important thing is that the scientist, in his or her field of endeavour, always remembers that scientific advance relies totally on evidence (and shut up, God Squad, because you don't know what I mean by "evidence"). The experience of the last few hundred years is that conflict at these outer limits is always caused by religion's neurosis (if only we could ask Galileo). The one thing that religion can't stand is that science is closing in on it all the time. Nothing in nature is beyond scientific explanation (we might not always be quite there yet, but we're closing in). And the more we can explain, the more religion had better shuffle uncomfortably from one buttock to the other.