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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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