I'm not really talking about one scientific theory replacing religion - like the theory of evolution or gravity or atoms. I'm talking more when you put them together.
Still as you write, one doesn't have to exclude the other in a direct sense. You can think of scientific theories as big pyramids where every building block is a publication, experiment, thesis or discovery that helps build up the theory itself. Similarly, religion could be seen as big pyramids with other building blocks like the idea that God created the earth so and so long ago, the world was flooded and Noah built an ark, bad people go to hell, good people go to heaven and so on.
You can't believe that the world was made 6000 years ago and believe that it's billions of years old at the same time. You have to choose between them and at that level, scientific ideas may exclude religious ideas or vice versa. To relate this to my pyramid metaphor, scientific ideas can remove building blocks from the religion pyramids.
When this goes on over some period of time, your religion pyramid becomes smaller and smaller. To use an extreme example, maybe "God created the universe" is the only building block that's left. If the bible is so full of things you no longer believe in, you might start to question the validity of all it's teachings - but you may not. On average, I think people do and so more science and more education means less religion.
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Originally Posted by Neapolitan
The same thing could be said of Christianity, "most people only have a rough idea what Christianity is and many don't know or are even wrong about it." But for those who understand it have no need to replace science. The theist can appreciate the discoveries of science as revealing the mysteries of the universe God created.
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Religion is deeply personal and I think every christian out there defines it for themselves. There's an X number of churches out there who do things differently and most religious people would accept that the bible is inconsistent with reality so you have to pick and choose what you want to believe in. They believe in different things and some accept science while others refute it.
If every scientist out there could just define for themselves what the different scientific theories really mean, then science wouldn't really work.