What Western scientist first hypothesized the "Big Bang"? Go ahead and look at the Wikipedia article on the subject -- you won't find the answer there. (Heck, I just found out myself.)

Georges LeMaitre (1894-1966) showed that religion and science -- or at least physics -- did not have to be incompatible. LeMaitre, born in Belgium, was a monsignor in the Catholic church.

He was fascinated by physics and studied Einstein's laws of gravitation, published in 1915. He deduced that if Einstein's theory were true (and there had been good evidence for it since 1919), it meant the universe must be expanding. In 1927, the year he got his PhD from MIT, LeMaitre proposed this theory, in which he stated that the expanding universe was the same in all directions -- the same laws applied, and its composition was the same -- but it was not static. He had no data to prove this, so many scientists ignored it. (Another scientist, Soviet Aleksandr Friedmann, had come to the same conclusion independently, a few years earlier.) Even Einstein was reluctant to endorse this extension of his theory of general relativity. [1]

As mentioned previously, Einstein was busy fiddling with the "cosmological constant" because he was appalled at the idea the universe might have had a beginning. The very idea provoked similar disgust throughout the scientific community, who opposed it vigorously.

That same year [LeMaitre] talked with Einstein in Brussels, but the latter, unimpressed, said, “Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.” It was Einstein’s own grasp of physics, however, that soon came under fire. In 1929 Edwin Hubble’s systematic observations of other galaxies confirmed the red shift....

Most scientists who read Lemaitre’s paper accepted that the universe was expanding, at least in the present era, but they resisted the implication that the universe had a beginning. They were used to the idea that time had gone on forever... Eddington himself wrote in the English journal Nature that the notion of a beginning of the world was “repugnant.” ....

After Arthur Eddington died in 1944, Cambridge University became a center of opposition to Lemaitre’s theory of the Big Bang. In fact, it was Fred Hoyle, an astronomer at Cambridge, who sarcastically coined the term “Big Bang.” Hoyle and others favored an approach to the history of the universe known as the “Steady State” in which hydrogen atoms were continuously created and gradually coalesced into gas clouds, which then formed stars. [2]

Einstein eventually came to respect LeMaitre's work, and Cambridge finally gave in after Penzias and Wilson discovered the "ringing sound" left by the shock of the universe's first day.

It's true that sometimes religion and science are in conflict. What most people don't remember is that atheism and materialism are also religions which sometimes attract dogmatic and inflexible followers.