I don't think religion has anything to do with it. Statistics and increasing entropy. Now, where you go from there might take you to religion, and so I'd argue that modern science often has arguably more to do with the religion of atheism than with reason since it's mostly based on certain axioms. I'm not saying we can't derive science off of theories, but as long as the bases are only asserted, you can derive proofs to come to any conclusions and speaking up about this seems to quickly get you disqualified in academia.