Even if we put aside the sharp, high-profile encounters between, say, creation scientists and geologists, or fundamentalists and evolutionary biologists, the situation is still contentious even in a university setting. And even if we put the discussion in a university setting that admits a place for the scholarly study of religion, such as Loyola University Chicago, the topic still causes arguments. The relation of modern science and religion has been a hot topic throughout the 20th century. It looks as if the issue will remain intense in the 21st. When you get to the infinitely small world of subatomic particle physics, or the infinitely large world of astrophysics, or the long ago of the evolutionary biologist or geologist, some strange and unexpected things seem to happen.
Particles come into existence out of nothing.
Some physicists have speculated that there are more than three or four dimensions to reality with 11 or 12 dimensions and with alternate worlds. Evolutionary biologists say that our existence probably occurred more out of a series of random mutations from a common ancestor. Ordinary images and language about the world get stretched to the breaking point with such notions as superstrings, charmed and bottom quarks, and the mutation-selection balance. At the very least, many of our assumptions about the way the everyday world really works become questionable. At the same time, there remains a lurking sense, or at least a hope, that all of it must somehow fit together and make ordered sense to the human mind.