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"Did God create the universe?" asked the Rev. George Coyne, a Jesuit priest, in the semiannual Beggs Lecture on Science, Spirituality and Society Nov. Answering his own question, Coyne, the McDevitt Professor of Religious Philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., admitted, "I don't know." A former director of the Vatican Observatory, Coyne said the universe, at 13.8 billion years old, is a perpetually evolving continuum, home to hundreds of billions of galaxies thousands of light-years across that contain hundreds of billions of stars. Only 13.6 billion years after it came into existence did sentient creatures emerge to ponder its origins. "As we look out in space, we're looking back in time," Coyne said in his talk, "The Dance of the Fertile Universe: An Interplay of Science and Religion." "What we want to do is look into our galaxy and see where we came from." Coyne argued that human understanding of what exists was contingent on biased, individual perception. "We never see anything as it is, but as it was," he said. Noting that it's worthwhile to appreciate the wonders that lie beneath the universe's complexities, Coyne said, "In [our] planetary system we [are] this little grain of sand.
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