“Can a practicing scientist also be a Christian?”

featuring UCLA Computer Science faculty Dr. George Varghese and Dr. Harry Xu

Friday August 13, 7pm (Pacific)

Dr. George Varghese (Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science, UCLA)

Dr. Harry Xu (Associate Professor of Computer Science, UCLA)

With rapid advances in virtually every corner of science, human being’s expectation of what science can produce has never been so high today. As a result, many modern-day people think of Christianity as an ancient religion that is anti-science and/or superstition, and that only people who are old, weak, or without education would believe in. Does Christianity really conflict with modern science? Is it the case that well-educated people do not believe in Christianity?

The presentation will be given in English, and translated by Dr. Xu into Mandarin. This is a great opportunity to also invite Mandarin-speakers to an event that explores the issue of science and faith.

There is no cost, but attendees must register here in order to receive the active link.  


Attendees do not have to be professors, students or academics. The talks will be recorded and posted on YouTube. 



Dr. George Varghese is the Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science, UCLA)has spent 30 years conducting research on making the Internet faster and more reliable. To recognize his technical contributions, George was elevated to a member of U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2017 as well as a member of U.S. National Academy of Invention in 2020. He is also a Fellow of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has received a series of recognitions in his career, including Lifetime Achievement Award of ACM SIGCOMM and Kobayashi Award of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE). Dr. Varghese gave a talk at Veritas Forum discussion at MIT on Faith and Success titled “What Drives you” in 2014. On 8/13, Dr. Varghese will share his thoughts on science and faith, which will hopefully shed new light on how these two seemingly unrelated areas can be connected.

Dr. Harry Xu is a tenured associate professor in Computer Science department of UCLA. He is leading a team of dozens of researchers working on various problems in computer systems, including artificial intelligence systems, cloud systems, and programming languages. His research has been supported by U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. National Science Foundation, Google, Alibaba, Microsoft. Harry’s team has received various awards from academia and industry, including the 2018 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, which is awarded each year to a junior researcher that has made promising contributions to the field of object orientation. In this talk, Dr. Xu will explain some of the core principles in Christianity in light of recent advances in computer science.

Both professors are members of the Faculty Fellowship at UCLA, which invites a distinguished scientist to discuss science and faith each year. The most recent of these discussions was a talk given by MIT Professor Rosalind Picard in April 2021,  titled “Technology, Emotion and God”, also translated into Chinese by Christian Mission magazine in August 2021.