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.
George CoyneThere are dimensions to me that are not just the thinking person, but the person who is much richer, the person who has other emotional experiences, psychological experiences, these experiences also enrich me.
George CoyneI 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.
George CoyneHowever 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.
George CoyneThe whole dimension of religious belief requires transcendence, it requires going beyond what you can establish rationally.
George CoyneIn 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.
George Coyne