MTP 39: Micah Green, Part 1, on why every professor wants to be a Gandalf, walking through seasons of doubt, and why God doesn't do miracles willy-nilly

Dr. Micah Green is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M. He received his PhD at MIT and studied early Christian history at Harvard. 

Micah shares his journey of faith, the challenges he faced during his academic career, and how he reconciles his scientific background with his Christian beliefs. He reflects on personal experiences, including his favorite movies, embarrassing moments in college, and significant turning points in his spiritual growth. The discussion also delves into the relationship between science and faith, addressing common misconceptions and the role of miracles in a scientific context.

Read about Micah on MeetTheProf.com: https://meettheprof.com/view/professors/entry/micah-green/

Email Micah at: micah.green@tamu.edu

Watch Meet The Prof on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@MeetTheProfOfficial/videos

Listen on Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meet-the-prof-with-shane-and-spence/id1733311320

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/6kizp6klascdMj1nqaj6LD

Find over 500 Christian Professors on MeetTheProf.com:
https://meettheprof.com/

Get free resources for answering questions about God at:
https://www.everystudent.com/

College students, follow us on Instagram and send us a question(s) for Christian professors by DM here:
https://www.instagram.com/meettheprofofficial/

If you’d like to financially support our Faculty Commons ministry, you can do so online at https://give.cru.org/0424344

Transcript

Shane (00:00)
Hey everyone and welcome to Meet the Prof. My name is Shane and my friend Spence and I interview Christian professors with the questions we get from college students in order to encourage Christ-centered conversations on the college campus. We're so glad you're here. Thanks for listening and or watching and you get to hear or see our interview now with Dr. Micah Green. Micah is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M, and he got his degree at Texas Tech.

and then went on and got his PhD at MIT and actually did some studies in early Christian history at Harvard University. He shares a lot about his own struggles asking questions and then wrestling over his journey and finding answers. And I think with his background, he has so many resources to offer. So I think this will be encouraging to all of us. And I know that we were really encouraged by it. So before we get started, if you would please remember to click on

like, subscribe, follow, whatever's there on your app that you're listening or watching this to, that would be awesome. And so without further ado, now here is our interview with Dr. Micah Green.

Shane (01:13)
Well, Dr. Green, this is such a privilege having you on the podcast now. Tell us some of even what classes you teach.

Micah Green (01:23)
So I normally teach junior level chemical engineering classes at Texas A&M. I really like teaching juniors. usually, they've gotten to the point where they're like.

We really want to do this. This is not up in the air anymore. And it also means I can I can treat them with an attitude of confidence. You're going to make it. It's going to be OK. Some of these will be hard, but I have every confidence in you. It makes for a really good relationship with students. One other nice thing is I usually teach juniors in the fall and the spring, so I end up having a lot of the same students who are able to build a relationship to know each other really well. It can be large. I mean, that can be difficult at a large university, but to actually get to know students to the point where you can

Shane (01:59)
That's double the time.

Micah Green (02:02)
a letter for them that they trust you and you trust them is really valuable.

Shane (02:06)
is so valuable for a student. No kidding. Hey, one of the ways I love to learn about people is the movies they like. And I'm curious, what are your favorite movies?

Micah Green (02:18)
Well, the movie that strikes deepest at my heart is certainly the very first Lord of the Rings movie. I think for many reasons, I love Lord of the Rings. I love Tolkien anyway. I had a season of...

Shane (02:26)
Okay.

Micah Green (02:33)
out in my first year of grad school where I was really just doubting and wondering if God was really there. And one of the things that helped bring me out of that season of doubt was I started reading a lot of Tolkien and I thought, you know, the world would be a lot more boring and drab and gray if there was no mind behind it. When I look at the world, it seems to be more of a narrative, more of what I see in Tolkien. And so anyway, that really hit me hard and

You know, every professor, you know, in their heart, they really want to be a Gandalf. And so if you can, if you can be Gandalf to one student, that's really valuable. So that's the movie that first jumps to my mind. Another movie that jumps to my mind is the very first How to Train Your Dragon movie. There's a lot of like loving in that movie. The boy in the movie reminds me of my son. The love that the boy has for his dragon reminds me of the way my children act with my dog. Like, anyway, there's a lot of.

Shane (03:20)
Okay.

Micah Green (03:32)
lot of sweet moments in that movie. So

Shane (03:34)
That movie has a fantastic soundtrack too. We listened to that movie, the soundtrack to it in Iceland, driving around. It was like the perfect background music to that. I need to listen.

Micah Green (03:37)
It really does.

Yes,

Well, you ran Iceland and yeah, that's very appropriate. That's

Shane (03:47)
That,

So Dr. Green, so one of my favorite questions to ask for all professors is.

Micah Green (03:48)
Well, we can appreciate that.

Shane (03:55)
What was an embarrassing moment for you when you were a college student?

Micah Green (03:59)
Sure. Well, I can tell you what scene first jumps in my mind when you ask that question. I was a first year graduate student. I had moved to Boston and encountered my first cold Boston winter. I'm from West Texas where we do get snow, but the snow disappears after three days. In Boston, the snow is there to stay. So I walked to the grocery store from my dorm and it was cold and I had gotten some groceries and so I'm walking back.

you know, across the parking lot toward my dorm and it was icy and I slipped. Like, whoa, bam, and I fell on my back and I just thought like, that hurt. I hope no one saw that. And then a moment later, boom, it turned out I had slung all of my groceries straight into the air, high into the air and I had fallen down, had no dignity and then my groceries landed on me and I had even less dignity. So there you go. That's the most embarrassing moment.

Shane (04:44)
then they fell on you.

That most embarrassing moment is not that bad. I want to assure you, like we have, we've heard worse on this podcast. So you must be a pretty together sort of guy. Well, I read on your profile that you had the benefit of a good Christian parents raised in a Christian home, knew Christ at a young age.

And I love that testimony because so often we hear the super dramatic ones, you know, about like I was a drug dealer and then I saw a light on the side of the road and whatnot. But I love yours. Tell me a little bit about the high points in your spiritual growth though. As a guy who was raised in the church, I'm sure you still had turning points. Tell me a little bit about those turning points.

Micah Green (05:35)
Yeah, I really did. So I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition. And if you're a Southern Baptist, you've got to pray the prayer at some point. And I prayed the prayer when I was seven. And it was a very intense emotional experience. remember exactly what it was because it was my mom's birthday.

And so my mom always thought it was special that that was kind of my spiritual thing. I'm baptized not too long after. But then as a teenager, I did have those moments of like, is this something I really believe or is this just what I was raised to believe? Do I want to own this? And I'll never forget, 

I went on a long road trip with my father when I was about 15. We drove from my home in West Texas to Denver. There was a Promise Keepers rally there. Some of may remember the Promise Keepers from the 1990s. The Promise Keepers made a big impact on my church. There were a lot of men in my church who, they basically told everyone in the church, I have been passive in leading my family. I have been passive in pursuing the Lord and I want to change. But made like a big difference in my church. I was pretty astounded by that.

Shane (06:21)
Yeah.

Micah Green (06:35)
So then I went with my dad, we went with a bunch of other guys from my church, we went to this Promise Keepers rally. It was in the Denver Bronco Stadium. And if you hear 70,000 men singing, holy, holy, holy, pretty powerful. And I got to hear more of my dad's testimony. He wasn't raised as a believer. He had much more of the dramatic conversion that you were talking about. It kind of set the template for me of what does it mean to be a man?

being a godly man, being self-sacrificial, having a servant heart, that's what really makes you a man. so that really hit me big time. The other thing that happened on that trip is my dad brought up, he brought a bunch of tapes or CDs, I can't remember which one, of R.C. Sproul teaching. And R.C. Sproul was teaching on the life of Martin Luther.

I had no idea about what happened between the end of the book of Acts and my own birth. And so to hear about believers who had come before me and like the idea that he took risks, he did things, he wrote things, he translated things that affect my life today, it gave me a real love for church history and a sense of continuity that I had never had before. So age 15, that was a big one. I mentioned a moment ago, had a season of that when I was like 22, 23 during my first year of grad school.

Shane (07:28)
Yeah.

Micah Green (07:51)
Basically that was, you know, trying to face up to the problem of if you're in a, if you move to a pretty secular environment, then your plausibility structures change. The thing that you used to think was plausible, all of a sudden seems less plausible. And I started thinking, what if all my materialist friends are right? And I'm just atoms and I'm just a biochemical soup. That means after I die, bam, I'll stop existing.

Shane (08:00)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Micah Green (08:14)
So that's pretty terrifying. And I got consumed with this thought. I that's horrible. I don't want that to be true. I don't want that to be true. I must be, my religious belief must be out of wish fulfillment. I want it to be true. I don't want atheism to be true. And so that really messed me up and I lost a lot of sleep and this feeling of like, I can't do anything about it. Several things led me out of that. Like I said, reading Tolkien brought me out of it.

Shane (08:16)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Green (08:39)
Getting out of the cold, dark Boston winter into the beautiful Boston spring effect, I mean, it affects our mood. We'd like to think that we're little logic bots and that we're all just very rational, but actually our environment, our community, the weather, all those things affect what we find possible. So being plugged into a Christian community was healthy for me. It got me out of that spiral that I had been in. And I started reading a lot more in apologetics. I started realizing, hey man, if I'm just a biochemical soup, I'm not really rational.

Shane (08:53)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Green (09:08)
I'm also not really moral. There is no moral. tells you what should happen. Science tells you what does happen. doesn't say what should happen. There are no moral real statements, you know, no real moral norms. And then finally, the one that I couldn't get over is I thought my computer is not conscious, right? But if materialism is right, then I'm just a meat computer. I'm not conscious. But then I thought like.

Shane (09:13)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Green (09:33)
I'm pretty sure I'm conscious. I'm experiencing that right now. And so this idea that materialism forces you to believe things that you cannot believe, like that really pulled me out of that season of despair and doubt and really gave me a renewed appreciation for my faith and for what the field of apologetics can do for you. So those are kind of the big moments. I guess one thing I would say for your audience, by the way, is that...

Shane (09:36)
Ha

So I want to keep, this is fascinating.

Micah Green (10:01)
I work with college students, I can't tell you how many times I'll meet a college student who's had the same kind of sequence I did, like became a believer, you know, age seven or something, kind of owned their faith a little more as a teenager. Then they get to college and then they're like, now I believe. And so they may even have this moment of like, don't even know if I was a Christian before, but now I believe. They may have that sequence happen, you know, multiple times between the ages of 10 and 25. And they're always like, was I not even a Christian before right now? And I always tell them, look, you...

Shane (10:30)
Hmm.

Micah Green (10:31)
You're not obligated to be able to tell your own spiritual autobiography accurately. Like nobody can. We don't know what the Lord's doing in our hearts. So that feeling of, you know, of...

Shane (10:39)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Green (10:44)
of repent and turn to follow Jesus every day. That's an everyday thing. That's not just a one-time event that you try to put on the calendar. That's everyday and that's normal. So I feel like I'm frequently trying to tell college students like, it's okay, this feeling of like renewed, now I see what God's doing. Like we should experience that our entire lives.

Shane (11:04)
So you talked a little bit about this intersection of science and faith. You know, you, you were, you were living in the world of facts and provability and those sorts of things. How did you start to reconcile that with your belief system? Was that ever a problem for you? How did you deal with it?

Micah Green (11:23)
Yeah, so when we think about the relationship between science and faith,

think there are big picture problems and then little picture problems or detailed problems. So it's more important to talk about the big picture. Science has been so successful that sometimes we start thinking that science is like actually the only way of getting at truth. And that belief is called scientism. Science is the only way to truth.

And the funny thing about scientism, science is the only way to truth is that it's self-contradictory because that statement, science is the only way to truth, can't be proven by science. So think we have to be honest and say, science is good at the things it's good at, but it can't get you everywhere, right? Science can't ever speak to questions of morality. It can't get to your fundamental questions about why does the universe make sense?

Why does the universe follow ordinary mathematical laws? Why do I have a mind that's able to understand those ordinary mathematical laws that underlie the universe? Science can't answer any of those questions. Those are assumptions. And one thing that I find to be really, really comforting is the fact that those assumptions, the universe is orderly. It follows regular mathematical laws.

Shane (12:32)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Green (12:38)
My brain can figure out the way those laws work. My brain can figure out the way the universe works so that I can predict what will happen and use my understanding of science to help other people. Like those are the assumptions we have to make. Those are all assumptions that are very much at home in a Christian worldview.

And that's actually why almost all of the early scientists were Christian. They would say things like, God has made the universe in such a way that we think his thoughts after him and we are seeing the way God put the universe together and we glorify God when we do science. So I think at a big picture level, the idea that science and faith are opposed is really not true at all. A Christian worldview is a beautiful home and foundation for science. So that's, I think, the headline.

Shane (12:57)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Micah Green (13:22)
Sometimes people will ask like, what about this miracle? What about that thing? Scientists usually don't like the idea of miracles because it's a break in the natural universe. And they think, it's like a violation of the laws of physics. We can't allow for miracles. So I always use the illustration. This goes back to C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis said, if you were playing pool, let's say you and I were playing

Shane (13:35)
Yeah.

Micah Green (13:50)
pool Shane and I'm about to hit the ball and I say, man, the laws of physics say if I hit the ball at this angle with that much force, it's going to go off that wall and into the corner pocket. Physics says it must happen. And then I hit the ball and you grab the ball before it can hit the wall. Did we disprove physics? No. It's just when I did my calculations, I made an assumption that nothing outside the table would change anything. And that assumption was wrong in this case because you did reach outside the table and you changed something.

Shane (14:15)
Yeah.

Micah Green (14:18)
That's ultimately what a miracle is, is God reaches in and changes something. Now scientists are like, I don't like the idea that God's gonna reach in and change something. Does that mean God is going to capriciously, randomly like mess up my experiment? We think that those kind of things sometimes, like what's going on? Like I can't allow the idea of God reaching in and changing something. That's when we as Christians can say, we don't believe in that kind of God.

Shane (14:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Micah Green (14:41)
The Christian God is not capricious. He doesn't reach into the world and mess things up for no reason. He only does miracles in a religious context for a religious reason. Even Jesus, when Jesus heals the paralytic, he says, so that you may know the Son of Man has the authority to forgive sins, pick up your bed and walk. The point of the miracle is to attest to who Jesus is.

Shane (14:57)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Green (15:02)
So God doesn't do miracles willy-nilly. He's not gonna mess up your experiment tomorrow or make one of your socks disappear out of the dryer. He's not that kind of God you know. And so that's why you can believe in God who does act in the world and do miracles, but still be a scientist at the same time.

Shane (15:12)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Shane (15:17)
One thing I love about doing these podcasts is I hear some stuff I've never heard before. And in that case, I have never heard anyone describe miracles from that angle, giving some defense even for miracles. So so appreciate Dr. Green. And this was just part one. I apologize for the audio quality. We had some internet problems. So that's why it sounded like there was a pushing pause back and forth.

So we were really encouraged with the next part of this interview, so stay tuned for next week. And before we go, if you will remember to like or subscribe. And if you are a Christian professor and you'd be interested in sharing some of your own spiritual journey, then please go to meettheprof.com and it's real easy to create a profile there. If you're a college student and you would like to ask a Christian professor questions,

find us on Instagram and you could leave us a DM for any question you want. And hopefully we can get it on the show. We like more and more questions. And if you are at all interested in supporting this ministry financially, thank you for that. And you can give online at give.cru.org, that's C-R-U, /0 42 43 44. And so until next time, we pray that this will be an encouragement to you to have a.

Christ-centered conversation on your college campus.