I can't see for the life of me how an attempt to understand the universe, which I believe comes from God, can alienate us from God.
Nothing we learn about the universe threatens our faith. It only enriches it.
If I have a fundamental belief that the universe is created by God, then I also come to the belief that that universe reflects God, it gives me some knowledge of Him. Obviously, therefore, the more I know of the universe is, the more enriched my limited knowledge of God is.
Neither of us can come to either a knowledge of God, or a denial of God by our scientific research.
The Copernican revolution was actually a contribution to the life of the church, the development of our view of ourselves in terms of the Universe, and therefore our view of God, et cetera. But, that took centuries, and struggles, and conflicts before that happened.
Science is and should be seen as "completely neutral" on the issue of the theistic or atheistic implications of scientific results.
The nature of God is something that is of serious interest to believers, to theologians, and to philosophers. And yet we can't come to the nature of God, unless we also have some knowledge of the nature of the universe as having come from God.
The Christian church has a long history of gradually absorbing scientific perspectives and new discoveries. It seems to me that, in fact, that has been one of the strengths of Christianity - it has ultimately had great flexibility in absorbing new information about the world that we get from science.
Doing science is not inherently incompatible with religious faith.
The whole dimension of religious belief requires transcendence, it requires going beyond what you can establish rationally.
I have never come to know God, to see God, to believe in God through doing science. He's not the conclusion of some sort of process of my personal scientific investigation.
My answer to someone who is in contrast with me - by not seeing God in the scientific data - is that you don't see God in the scientific data because you're not me. I have other experiences than you have, that bring me to look at this data as enriching my experience of God.
However the great successes of science - Galileo's telescopic observations, Newton's law of gravity, etc - all of this great success caused people to sort of say, what if we could establish religion on that same successful basis? What if we could have a good rational foundation for religious belief. What if religion could be sort of like science. Of course, that can't be.
People tend not to disassociate the technological issues from pure scientific research, so that science sometimes gets a bad name for things that science doesn't deserve having a bad name for.
I think today the church faces a very real challenge in not repeating the errors of the past, in sort of a stand off, a fear of science.
I think that anybody who thinks science is going to explain everything in biological systems, or in physical cosmology, et cetera, is actually mistaken, because I think within science - if correctly understood - those claims are not being made.
Being a scientist helps to support both my life as a Jesuit and my belief in God.
I hope I'm not giving the impression of an ivory tower science, but for me science is an attempt to understand, it's an attempt to understand the universe.
The technological overflow from scientific research has brought scientific research this bad name about carrying an irresponsibility and an alienation from God - because scientific research has led to things like the atom bomb, it's led to problems with depletion of ozone in the Earth's atmosphere, or at least it's revealed those problems.
Because God is reflected in the world in which me made, in some sense, my scientific investigation has always supported my belief in God in a very real sense. It helps me to pray better.
The knowledge of God, the belief in God, is what I call an a-rational process. It's not rational - it doesn't proceed by scientific investigation - but it's not irrational because it doesn't contradict my reasoning process. It goes beyond it.
God gave me the gift of faith. I don't mean that in any miraculous sense, I mean through the parents who educated me, through the brothers and sisters I grew up with, the schools I went to, there was this influence upon me which was the faith, in the concrete. I accepted it, I questioned it, I grew up with it, and in the end, as a mature adult, I continue to accept it.
Christianity has always had sort of an ability to absorb the developments in science. But, it's always done it very slowly.
There are many people who do view scientific research as alienating from religion and from God, and when so many people do, there must be some reason for it.
In a very real sense my science does inform my knowledge of God. If you would allow me to say that we never know God, because if I claim that I know God, I know something other than God, because God is not knowable, he is unknowable. So we have to approach it in that sense first, that my knowledge of God is always limited.
