Colin Humphreys, Ph.D ｜ COFAS 2021

When my younger daughter was eight years old, my father gave her a book for her birthday called Great Men of History, and on each page it described a famous character in history. So one page was Christopher Columbus, another was Alexander the Great, another was Julius Caesar, and another page was Jesus Christ. And in the front of the book it had an index, and it listed all the people in the book, and it gave their dates of birth and death. Against Jesus it said, born 4 BC, died AD 30. And my eight-year-old daughter turned to me and said, Daddy, why is it we know the dates of birth and death of all these other people, but not for Jesus? Was he a real character? And I said, well, yes, of course he was. And then later that week, it was Sunday, and I was at church, it was Easter time, and the pastor was reading from Luke's gospel, the story of the crucifixion, and he got to the phrase where it said, the sun was darkened, and then it says, for the sun was eclipsed. I sat there in the congregation thinking, gosh, if there really was an eclipse of the sun on the evening of the crucifixion, then we can retrocalculate these issues in astronomy, and we can know when Jesus died. And so I started to investigate that, the story is actually quite complicated, but in fact, it turns out there was a lunar eclipse on the evening of the crucifixion. And it also turns out that at the birth of Christ, Matthew's gospel says of a special star called the Star of Bethlehem, and I got involved in dating these. And so I believe Jesus was born in 4 BC, and I believe he was crucified in AD 33. But I've used science to help understand the Bible. And also what's important here is I think that God planned that Jesus would come into the world at a certain place in a certain time, and he also planned in the creation of the universe, there would be a comet at his birth, and a lunar eclipse at his death. These were cosmic events. And let me just tell you a story that happened quite recently when I had a new Chinese research student. And in the morning, the first day he was there, in the morning I told him his project. In the afternoon, there was this knock on the door, he came in and stood in front of my desk. And he said, I am told you believe in God. And I said, you sound surprised. He said, it's impossible. So he was a rather forward Chinese research student. And I said, why do you think it's impossible? He said, because in China, we're told if you're a scientist, you cannot believe in God. And I said, would it surprise you to know that some top scientists believe in God? And he said, I find that very hard to believe. I had him a bookshelf, a book called Real Faith, Real Science. And I said, can I lend you this book, because every chapter is written by a famous scientist. So I lent him this book, and he came away, and he was then really open to becoming a Christian, because famous scientists believe in God. And I think that's an important message. You can be a scientist, you can also be a Christian.