As we reflect on the Christmas story, this episode of Real Science Radio offers a thought-provoking journey into the celestial phenomena recorded in the Bible. Electrical engineer and astronomy enthusiast Gil Buller explains the astronomical activity that aligns with the nativity story, revealing the harmony between biblical narratives and the universe’s choreographed dance. Tune in for an inspiring exploration of faith and science.
Hi, this is Bob Enyart. At Real Science Radio, we have a great science store. You can get great science materials from us online, realscienceradio.com. Click on the store or by calling us 1-800-8ENYART. DVDs from Illustra Media, The Privileged Planet, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, and Darwin’s Dilemma. And then there are the two fabulous DVDs from Dr. Carl Werner on Evolution, the Grand Experiment, Living Fossils, you’ll want to see those. And then Spike Pissarro’s What You Aren’t Being Told About Astronomy. And then there’s Bob DeBates and Evolutionist, Dr. Eugenie Scott on DVD. We also have our debate on the age of the earth. And finally, my favorite science book, In the Beginning by Dr. Walt Brown. Just call us at 800-8N-YARTS or check out our online store in the science department, either at kgov.com or realscienceradio.com.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome to Real Science Radio. As we spend time with our families to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior please enjoy this Real Science Radio holiday classic. May the coming year bring you and your family the joy and peace of Jesus Christ. Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune into Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 01 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keepin’ it real!
SPEAKER 02 :
And I was so excited to find out that at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CU on the Boulder campus, there is a program at their planetarium titled The Astronomical Star of Bethlehem. So we looked into it, and it turns out that Gil Buller is the author of the program, The Astronomical Star of Bethlehem. And what in the world? At CU in Boulder, a Christian program honoring the birth of the creator of the universe as our Savior, Jesus Christ. Well, what an honor that we have in studio. Gil, welcome to Bob and Garrett Live.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, thank you very much. I’m excited to be here.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s such a thrill. Let’s talk this through because the Bible says that the Magi from the east saw a star and then they traveled and then it came to rest over Bethlehem. Could you tell us what does the Bible say and what does this all mean? And then we’ll get into the particulars of what astronomy can tell us about the star of Bethlehem.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, the star from the story in Matthew has some rather peculiar behavior. When does a star ever stand over a place where someone is? Stars do that every night, if you will. Right. But why would one be so unique that it would get attention in Matthew’s account like that? Mm-hmm. Well, there’s an ancient tradition that says that the wise men saw the star reflected in the water of David’s well when they arrived in Bethlehem. Now, in the program, I demonstrate how this is totally plausible. The event that I highlight as the star that they saw in the east and then the star that stood over the place where the young child was happens to be a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. Wow. Ten months, five days separated. Two conjunctions, the same astronomical phenomenon. The Greek word that Matthew uses is aster. It’s much more general than our word star. The word aster refers to almost anything that you see in the sky. It could be a lightning or a strange cloud formation.
SPEAKER 02 :
And that’s where we get, of course, astronomy and that room. And even disaster is where we get. Disaster. Right. From the stars, a fear that, you know, who knows? Comets, asteroids, meteorites, showers.
SPEAKER 03 :
Comets were always considered omens of evil. Right. and catastrophe. In fact, the Chinese called them room stars because they looked at it as sweeping out the old order and making way for the new.
SPEAKER 02 :
And even catastrophe is Esther in there. Right. Okay. So in your presentation, you end up giving a series of dates of conjunctions. And I don’t want to get you off on the track that you’re on, but I’ll just point out one thing. We made this DVD back in the 1990s. We aired it in 80 cities. And there was a date that we highlighted, which was September 14, 3 B.C., with a conjunction of Jupiter and Regulus. And in your presentation now, I was using software that was published in the 1980s. And we confirmed its validity in the 90s. And sure enough, the software you’re using today, which is more modern than what I had, gives us the same date for that particular conjunction. Because we’re doing what Johann Kepler did, who was the Christian creationist, young Earth creationist, who gave us the laws of modern astronomy, the three laws of planetary motion.
SPEAKER 03 :
He gave us the solar-centric model of the solar system.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, with Copernicus and Johann Kepler explaining that the planets move in an ellipse and all that. Right. So great. And then he actually began to calculate backwards to determine what was the star of Bethlehem. So his efforts and your software and my software, it’s all based on the same orbital mechanics. That’s correct. And we could actually know what the night sky looked like to the magi before they left on their journey and at the time of Christ’s birth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Because of the regularity that God has built into the solar system. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 02 :
And as Kepler said, we’re thinking God’s thoughts after him. Yes. Because look at this. The planets move the way God intended them to move, which is also what Isaac Newton said. And that Descartes was wrong when he thought the solar system just formed naturally by a condensing nebula, a gas cloud. And Isaac Newton said, no, gravity would not cause this formation of the planets and the sun. Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
However God did it, he did it. Right. And it’s got his fingerprints all over it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And the Star of Bethlehem program just is just absolutely littered with God’s fingerprints. Wow. I highlight a list of nine events that form a mirror symmetrical image list that’s mirror symmetrical. Wow. That happens in one calendar year.
SPEAKER 02 :
In one year. So the first thing on the list is… Is also repeated as the last. As the last. So Mercury in a conjunction with Regulus. Now, some people… I went to public school. I didn’t even know what a conjunction was until I was an adult. Well, I explain all of that in my program. Well, I know, but for the audience. And we can’t see the beautiful ceiling of the planetarium right here. We’re on radio.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So what’s that conjunction?
SPEAKER 03 :
Even for all of my audiences, I go through the basic astronomical concepts that we need as we go through the study. Yes. And I define a conjunction, and that is when a star and a planet or a couple of planets share the same celestial longitude in close proximity. All right, now that’s way too complicated for me.
SPEAKER 02 :
So in other words, when it looks like they touch.
SPEAKER 03 :
When they get close together, maybe as far as the moon apart. Okay. Anything that close or maybe even a little further apart, several degrees, wherein two planets are several degrees within several degrees of each other.
SPEAKER 02 :
When it looks like they’re coming together, like they are talking to each other or something. Right, right.
SPEAKER 03 :
When they’re coming together for a meeting.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, for a meeting. And by the way, Gil Buller, you are an electrical engineer, right? I’m retired. Your specialty was semiconductors?
SPEAKER 03 :
Semiconductor modeling. Well, that’s just great. Oh, that was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Telling the engineers how far they could push the process when they designed chips.
SPEAKER 02 :
And you retired what year?
SPEAKER 1 :
2001.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. So that’s a decade ago. Yep. Would you say they’ve pushed it further since then? It’s astounding.
SPEAKER 03 :
I was glad to retire because I couldn’t keep up with technology anymore. My brain was slowing down.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s so stunning.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, it is. And since I was a kid, I have been absolutely fascinated with astronomy, just enchanted with planetaria. So I decided after I retired, I was going to study this thing about the Star of Bethlehem. And it blew my socks off. Absolutely blew my socks off.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, New York City’s Museum of Nature and Science, they’ve got a famous planetarium. Hanging planetarium? Growing up as a kid, we’d go there. And then more recently, I went to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis in Kentucky. They have their creation museum. And what a beautiful digital projector, the whole bit. It’s just gorgeous. Have you been there?
SPEAKER 03 :
No, I’d love to go. I heard Jason Lyle speak a couple of years ago.
SPEAKER 02 :
Dr. Jason Lyle has been on the show. He has his PhD in astrophysics from CU. Right. So does he know about your program? I’m not sure. Whoa. Well, we’re going to have to let him know about it because what you have come up with here, this mirror image in Hebrew poetry, it’s called a parallelism, but it’s an inverted parallelism where the first matches the last. Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s a very similar structure as you see in Psalm 19. Because there, the first half of the psalm speaks about astronomical. Astronomy. And uses literary terms.
SPEAKER 02 :
Words about grammar and language. Right. Whereas the second half.
SPEAKER 03 :
Second half talks about literary concepts. The word of God. The word of God, literary concepts, and uses astronomical terms.
SPEAKER 02 :
That is just stunning right there. If the audience can put on their thinking caps and realize what Gil Bullard just said, Psalm 19 that talks about the heavens declare the glory of God. The first half of the psalm is about the heavens, astronomy, but it uses literary terms. The second half is about the word of God, but it uses astronomical terms. Yes. That shows the cohesiveness of the psalm.
SPEAKER 03 :
And if you look in the detailed structure of the outline, it’s got that listing of A, B, B, A kind of structure as well.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s a form of poetry. Yes. Like couplets, where you’ll have two lines that sort of make the same point or contrasting points, then two more lines and two more lines. But sometimes if it’s an inverted Hebrew parallelism… The first and the last go together, and then the second and the second and the last, and you come to the center. Right. And the center could be, for example, the birth of Christ. Right. And so you’re saying that not only does the Bible contain parallelisms and inverted parallelisms, but so do the motions of the heavens.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. It’s God’s fingerprint.
SPEAKER 02 :
I think you’re the first person to observe this, Gil, because I’ve been reading about this. D. James Kennedy did a great job with how God wrote the message of salvation in the stars. Yes. Bullinger, E.W. Bullinger, one of my favorite authors, wrote a book called The Witness of the Stars. Yes. I have the book. You have the book.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Tremendous book. But I have not seen in 20 years of studying the Star of Bethlehem, I have not seen anyone recognize that there are a series of conjunctions in a single calendar year that are a parallelism in this inverted mirror image like you’re pointing out.
SPEAKER 03 :
I have not seen it in any of the references I have found either. So this is… I just decided when I saw some of this going on, I said, well, let’s see what’s going on before and after.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
So I just started looking with my astronomy program. Everything happens in the constellation of Leo except the central event, which occurs in the constellation of Virgo. In Virgo.
SPEAKER 02 :
In Virgo because it’s Virgo, the Virgin. The Virgin. And the three constellations that go with… virgo right one of them is coma the child yes and this is ancient the desired one the desired one so why would the virgin have a child normally a virgin wouldn’t have a child right but here it is and leo the lion the bible presents the messiah as the lion of the tribe of judah the lion is the king of right the animal kingdom the lion is the king
SPEAKER 03 :
The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh come.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s Genesis chapter 49, a prophecy by Jacob over Judah. And that the Messiah would come through the tribe of Judah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right. And the scepter, who carries the scepter? The king. And what star is there right between the front paws of Leo the lion? Regulus. Regulus. Melech in Hebrew. The king.
SPEAKER 02 :
Melech is the king.
SPEAKER 03 :
In Hebrew.
SPEAKER 02 :
In Hebrew. And this is Regulus. Of course, the title Regulus, even today from the Latin, we realize is king. The royal one. Yeah, the interregnum. Right. Right. And then Jupiter. How about the name Jupiter?
SPEAKER 03 :
Jupiter in Hebrew is tzedek. Tzedek, which means righteousness. Righteousness. If you put Melech and Tzedek together, you get Melchizedek, king of righteousness.
SPEAKER 02 :
King of righteousness. And Melchizedek was in the book of Genesis, even though there turns out to be a priestly tribe in Israel from Abraham, the Levitical tribe, the sons of Aaron. There was a greater priesthood, Melchizedek, who was a type of Christ, and his beginnings are evolved from everlasting in a sense. And so pointing to Christ, the king of righteousness, this conjunction.
SPEAKER 03 :
What did Melchizedek do when he met Abraham? He brought bread and wine.
SPEAKER 02 :
Bread and wine symbolizing the body and blood of Christ. The sacrifice. He came. He was born. He came in the flesh in order to give up his life so that we could be forgiven of our sins.
SPEAKER 03 :
And Melchizedek served communion to Abraham.
SPEAKER 02 :
He did. Wow. And so Abraham tithed to Melchizedek, showing that the priesthood of Christ is even greater than the Levitical priesthood.
SPEAKER 03 :
And as part of the Star of Bethlehem program, tzedek, righteousness, Jupiter, actually forms a circle above throughout the winter and spring of 3-2 BC. Jupiter draws a circle above Regulus.
SPEAKER 1 :
Hmm.
SPEAKER 03 :
I call that righteousness crowning the king. Wow. Righteousness crowning the king. And that started in the eastern sky early in the morning, was the first one of those conjunctions of Jupiter and Regulus. And then they proceed earlier and earlier through the night, leading the wise men westward toward Jerusalem.
SPEAKER 02 :
So that what we read in the Bible actually can be shown to have its foundation in real astronomy. Absolutely. The actual movement of the planets against the backdrop of the stars.
SPEAKER 03 :
The Lord has given us the tools that we can now go back and verify the accuracy of God’s word in describing what the star was. Mm-hmm. And I think, although it’s only my suggestion, I can’t prove it rigorously, but as far as we can, this reproduces all of the characteristics that are described by Matthew of the star in the story of the wise men coming to see the young child, Jesus. Oh, wow. Now, it’s interesting. Matthew uses the word padion in the Greek, which means young child, whereas Luke uses the word brephos, which means infant. So Matthew is saying that Jesus was a toddler when the wise men came, not an infant in the manger.
SPEAKER 02 :
Let me ask you this, Gil. When you have noticed that there’s a dozen events… that these conjunctions in this one calendar year and they form a mirror image Have you attempted to calculate how often do these things happen? What’s the likelihood of this?
SPEAKER 03 :
This list of events that I highlight in my program, just the two Jupiter-Venus conjunctions that are second and second last item in the list, the repetition rate or period interval for that to happen in a period of 10 months, 5 days, That happens only once every 1.2 million years.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh my, so just this, just the B and B prime. B and B prime. The second and the second to the last events happening in a calendar year. would only happen once every million years. We know that the universe and the earth is young, as described in the Bible. In other words, just those two things happening in a calendar year happened only once in history.
SPEAKER 03 :
And then we’ve got this mirror image of nine events. Four in the beginning and four in the end around the Virgo configuration that is described in Revelation chapter 12, the great sign in heaven, the woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet. Mm-hmm. For all of these to occur in one calendar year and in mirror order, mirror image order, even if you grant that the universe may be 13, 15 billion years old, it would still be a once in the life of the universe.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Wow. So that the creator of the universe… recognizing that if Adam and Eve sin, he’s going to come to earth to provide for our forgiveness. If we trust in him, if we humble ourselves, he set up the orbit of the planets to announce his birth at the proper time. Absolutely.
SPEAKER 03 :
In the fullness of time, God sent forth his son born of a virgin.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Now, there’s a DVD that was produced by Stephen Vodano, which is called The Star of Bethlehem. And if I recall, I got a wonderful note from Stephen some time ago thanking us for producing our program on The Star of Bethlehem back in the 90s, which motivated him. So we really have three resources we could recommend to our listeners.
SPEAKER 03 :
There’s another one, a DVD put out by Barry Setterfield, who is an Australian astronomer who is… director of the observatory at Grants Pass, Oregon. He has done a DVD as well on the Star of Bethlehem.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. So there’s that. There’s Stephen Vodano’s The Star of Bethlehem that you get online from us here at Bob and Yart Live, KGOV, KGOV.com, or just call us, 800-8N-YARTS. 800-836-9278. You could get the planet stars in the Bible. And that shows you the night sky over Jerusalem. So these are all different resources people could use. And then next year, come next year, you’re ready. And you could share this DVD with your friends and family. And you could use this information during the year as you tell people about the Lord and the signs in the heavens. And, of course, the scriptures and the prophecies pointing toward the Messiah. So, Gil, you said that when you were young, you were fascinated by this story of a star, of this unusual behavior. Could you describe that a little bit more?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I was wondering, you know, how does a star stand over a place? And how does it disappear and then reappear? Things like that. And all of it fits together. And I demonstrate how it’s so absolutely logical in the program. Because in other words… To use the world’s equipment to do some pre-evangelism.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
To get people to thinking the Bible is, even when it sounds way off base and wacko, it’s right on target.
SPEAKER 02 :
It sounds way off base because I had these same thoughts as a kid. that you had. But it didn’t impress upon me the importance of resolving it like maybe it did to you until I was an adult.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, me either. I didn’t take the time to really research it until I retired.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, all right. So we have a similar story. But I thought, what does it mean that they saw the star in the east? And then what does it mean when they were there and the star appeared And I thought, is this a supernatural star that God created and then months later created again? And it didn’t seem right because everybody would see it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Herod would see it. Herod would have known about it. Everybody in Israel would know. Right. But these magi, they’re also astronomers, which is typical.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I believe they got information from Daniel.
SPEAKER 02 :
From Daniel, absolutely.
SPEAKER 03 :
I bring that out in my program.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, and we mention that in our DVD, Planet Stars in the Bible. We mention the book of Daniel and the tie-in.
SPEAKER 03 :
Persian court records that have been excavated indicate that Daniel had a young student named Zoroaster. Whoa. He founded the religion that was the state religion of the Parthian Empire, of which the Magoi, or the wise men, were some of the kingmakers in that empire. Wow. And being hereditary priests of the religion that Zoroaster founded, they would have undoubtedly had information that had been handed down from Daniel.
SPEAKER 02 :
And there’s again the Aster and Zoroastrianism to this day. And Daniel’s crucial role… in the history of that part of the world. And then God used him to forecast the coming centuries, four centuries, until the coming of the Messiah.
SPEAKER 03 :
And when Christ rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he expected the Jewish authorities to recognize the day. The day. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. That psalm refers to Palm Sunday. Wow. That was the day the Lord had created. Wow. And they didn’t recognize him.
SPEAKER 02 :
And Gil, there is so much evidence for all this. We have just completed in our Sunday night Bible studies, a verse by verse study of the book of Daniel. We have that also. I know I’m mentioning our materials because that’s how we stay online and on the air as people get these and they support our radio program. But we have the Book of Daniel. People could download it just automatically, audio MP3, or get a CD from us or a DVD series of the Book of Daniel. And boy, do we go into these. fascinating prophecies about the coming of the Messiah in print, in writing, and even translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek centuries before Christ. And so the world is filled with evidence for the Creator, but now you show that so are the heavens filled with evidence.
SPEAKER 03 :
Now, I think Daniel, God used Daniel because Daniel had no heirs. And I think God used Daniel in his fabulous riches to And the gifts of the wise men were his estate that he had put in trust with the Magoi, told them to keep them in trust until the Messiah came and deliver them to his Messiah. So back 500 years before Christ was born, God was already preparing Jesus’ college fund. Wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
So that when the Magi are in the east, they see the conjunction, speaking of the coming king of righteousness, and they head off to Judea because the Hebrew prophets said that in Bethlehem would come the eternal one.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right, right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So they get to Bethlehem, and here again is the conjunction telling them that they have arrived at the right place, the right day, the right night, and they find the child Jesus.
SPEAKER 03 :
Bethlehem was a small town, and once the star confirmed it, that they were at the right place. They looked for the child. They would have had only a few questions to find where is this young child.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Gil Buller, thank you so much. Hi, this is Bob Enyart. At Real Science Radio, we have a great science store. You can get great science materials from us, DVDs, debates, books, online, realscienceradio.com. Click on the store or by calling us 1-800-8-ENYART. So here’s a list of what you can get. DVDs from Illustra Media that we carry, The Privileged Planet, Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Darwin’s Dilemma. And then there are the two fabulous DVDs from Dr. Carl Werner on Evolution, the Grand Experiment, Living Fossils. You’ll want to see those. And then Spike Pissarro, formerly with the U.S. Military Space Program, What You Aren’t Being Told About Astronomy. And then there’s the BEL Debates, Bob Debates an Evolutionist, Dr. Eugenie Scott on DVD, and a book, Does God Exist? Bob Enyart Debates Atheist Zaketh, a Psychologist. We also have two DVDs on our seminar, Does God Exist? And then Mount St. Helens, the Explosive Evidence for Catastrophe. We also have our debate on the Age of the Earth, where I got to debate a mathematician from CU up in Boulder and a geophysicist on this MP3 CD. And finally, my favorite science book, In the Beginning, by Dr. Walt Brown. Just call us at 800-8N-YARTS, 800-836-9278, or check out our online store in the science department, either at kgov.com or realscienceradio.com.
