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.

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.

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.

The whole dimension of religious belief requires transcendence, it requires going beyond what you can establish rationally.

I don't use scientific data as a foundation for believing in God - I use it as an enrichment of my knowledge of God.

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.

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.