There are a number of important and relevant conversations historically stretching back to the pre-Socratics which play a foundational role in how we have come to understand the so-called debate between science and religion.
Space, here, will only allow a gesture in this direction, but the earliest substance of the discussion centered around metaphysical and epistemic questions. That is, the pre-Socratics and in even a more sophisticated and systematic way Plato and Aristotle looked at these seminal questions and that sent us down our way on the path where we find ourselves.
For example, Plato and Aristotle were interested in questions of: A) metaphysics (issues related to being and existence and of perception and reality, among others); And B) they also spent a great deal of time reflecting on epistemology, that is, reflecting on questions about how we come to know and the proper way to know (whatever is to be known). In this latter case beginning with the pre-Socratics but also advanced by Plato and Aristotle two major camps on how these questions were to be answered were formed.
One camp tended to advocate the position that we come to know and know things by thinking about it. This school of thought came to be known in epistemology as rationalism. The other main school of thought argued that knowing whatever is to be known came by means of our sensory and cognitive faculties and that came to be known as epistemic empiricism. 
Jumping from the classical period past the medieval discussion of these things to the modern period in philosophy, we see beginning with Descartes, the fortunes of the camps pitching back and forth between the rationalists and empiricists. These classical readings of Renes Descartes, John Locke, Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, and finally Kant have shaped the general contours of the current received tradition. And if one wants to understand why we look on science and religion as we do for the most part in the west, we would do well to carefully follow that exchange.
Here are some resources to get some background on that:
Introduction: Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Rationalism
- Continental Rationalism
- Catholic Encyclopedia - Rationalism
- Britannica - Rationalism
- The Radical Academy - Rationalism
- Wikepedia - Rationalism
Empiricism