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.

Scientists in general tend to have what I would call a bit of hubris that the public do not necessarily understand. So scientists some times make claims that are misunderstood by the public.

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.

Nothing we learn about the universe threatens our faith. It only enriches 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 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.