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One interesting, if not sharply dear and/ or consistent, answer is R. G. Collingwoood's.

Wiki MarkupIt is set forth most directly and explicitly in his brief essay, "Religion, Science, and Philosophy" (in _Faith_ _& Reason_: 89-92). Actually, the topic of this essay is the "quarrel between religion and science," the source of which, Collingwoood says, is that "religion has in the past tried to usurp, in certain respects, the place of science, and science has retaliated, in more recent times, by trying to usurp the place of religion" (89). This quarrel, he argues, "is based on sheer confusion of thought, first perhaps arising in the heads of the champions of religion, and now chiefly observable among the champions of science" (90). "\[T\]he business of good science is to be scientific, and the business of good religion is to be religious; and to recommend a religion because it is in accordance with, or verified by, or derived from science is just as silly as to recommend a scientific theory because it is consecrated by religion. In both cases, the proposed criterion is wildly irrelevant" (90). "But people never make mistakes without a reason; and in this case the reason is that they have not dearly thought out the relation of religion on the one hand, and of science on the other, to that central and most obscure activity of the human mind which is called philosophy." And then the sentence: "Philosophy is the knowledge of ultimate reality" (91). Both religion and science, Collingwoood continues,  \\ 

are just enough concerned with ultimate reality to facilitate a hasty identification of both with philosophy and therefore with each other. And if they are both identical with philosophy and therefore with each other, it follows that there must be war to the knife between them, because they are trying to do the same work and trying to do it with different tools, in different ways, with inevitably different results. Certainly the God of religion is ultimate reality; but in religion we seek not to grasp this reality in an act of knowledge, but to achieve a living unity with it, consciously adoring it and enjoying it in the act of adoration. And certainly, the Nature of science is ultimate reality; but in science we are analyzing it, dissecting it into features each of which is by itself an abstraction, a fiction of scientific understanding. The living unity of the object of religion is in science dismembered and scattered broadcast into an infinity of particles. Now both these methods of approaching the  ultimate reality are possible and, so far as they go, valid; more, they are both necessary; and without practicing them both, no human mind can approach reality at all. But there is something else we can do to reality, something that is neither religion nor science but philosophy: we can know it, not in its fragments, as the scientist knows, but in its wholeness; yet not living in its wholeness only as we do in religion, but knowing ourselves as living in it and it as living in ourselves. And in this knowledge, which is philosophy, we see for the first time that religion is not philosophy and that science is not philosophy, but that each is a necessary part of that life which, when it comes to reflect upon itself, recognizes itself as the life of philosophy (91). 

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