Hume discussed this
There is an element of faith to science, and there are very good arguments that science's base assumptions are no more provable than religion's. In certain ways, science IS a religion, at least in terms of the provability of certain fundamental principles that guide it.
Hume's discussion of this centered on the faith that the sun would rise in the morning. Simply put, one day that article of faith will be false... one day, the sun will not rise. However, his argument in favour of following that article of faith is that one HAS to act as if it is true, even though at one time it will not be true, for doing otherwise prevents anyone from being capable of doing anything. Science basically works in the same way.
That said, there is a huge gulf between the articles of faith of science and the articles of faith of religion. Both are ultimately appeals to authority, but the nature of the authority in question is quite different. The authority appealed to in the case of religion is the received word of God, filtered via a human being, be it Abraham, Moses, Jesus/Paul, or Mohammed; in short, from voices in their head. The authority appealed to in science is the observable results of testing, done by many independent observers in many independent tests.
Science and Religion discuss very different things. The idea that the received word of God from a very small list of individual human beings has relevance to the received word of nature from many independent tests of nature from human beings discuss the same areas is false at best.
Science has nothing to say about an immortal soul, or reincarnation, or what have you. It is simply not provable in the field of science, so therefore science has nothing to say about it. Science cannot be used to either prove or disprove the fundamental tenets of faith that make up religion (which is a very small list by the way; "immortal essence" and "the next life is more important that this one" are the most basic tenets of any belief system that can be legitimately be called a religion). Conversely, religion doesn't really have much to say about the facts of nature as revealed by science, the wishes of the zealots notwithstanding.
