Bevan Baas

I grew up in the Los Angeles area in a Christian family attending church regularly and considered myself to be a Christian from as far back as I can remember. In the fall of my Junior year of high school a friend invited me to hear a speaker who encouraged us to live lives consistent with our beliefs if we were Christians. It made a big impact on me and I decided the following day that I *did* want to choose the Christian life and to try to live consistently, so I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and made my faith my own. The years since that time have generally been filled with typical spiritual growth and struggles. One notable turning point was near the end of my time in graduate school when I entered a period of what I would call spiritual dryness when I stopped attending church and didn't feel like I was missing much. How I came out of this phase is a long story but in essence it took a new view of the Bible and where I fit in--that stories in the Bible weren't there primarily to help me with my problems, but were instead there to explain answers to the most important questions of life. Another notable event for me was when my wife was diagnosed with a serious cancer in 2019. I realized there was a difference between my head-knowledge of death and what happens next, and how it felt in my heart when things were no longer theoretical. Thankfully the cancer appears to have been caught in time. Through that period and the subsequent checkups, God has graciously given me a stronger conviction of His existence, the truth of the Gospel, and knowledge that I was created by God and am not simply a collection of molecules that happened to come together in some un-designed process. A series of thoughts I keep coming back to is this: How could our universe come into being on its own without God? *Maybe* I could believe a universe could evolve life on its own, but how could it be that I--the person I am that inhabits my body--possibly end up in this universe without God making it happen? The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that I actually know deep inside that there is a God--I believe this is what Romans 1:19-20 is talking about. The fragility of my existence is terrifying but the conviction that I was created and saved by a loving God is the greatest possible comfort for that day when I take my last breath. More than anything when that day comes I hope to hear my God and Savior say "well done good and faithful servant."

My Life

Favorite Quote

Christians are not perfect, just forgiven

Friends describe me

A truth-based person, sometimes to a fault 🙁 🙂

My hobbies

Spending time with my wife and kids, and fixing the house. I used to have many more hobbies in my single days... 🙂

Fantasy dinner guests

Apostle Paul, any of the 11 disciples, Lazarus, Clarence "Bud" Anderson, Tim Keller, Albert Einstein, C. S. Lewis

Best advice I ever received

Only 3 things are eternal: God, His Word, and people. If you aren't spending time on one of these, you're spending time on things that will never last.

My undergrad alma mater

Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

In college I drove

Fiat 124 Sport Spider convertible

If I weren't a professor, I would

probably work in a silicon valley startup (again)

Favorite movies

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, anything with Jackie Chan

Favorite city

Kirribilli, Australia

My latest accomplishment

Got the kids to bed in under 30 minutes

Current Research

Architectures, applications, and designs of high-performance and low-power processor array chips