MTP 60: Jonathan Boreyko Part 1 on Why Your Kid’s College Years Matter, Faith, Fluids and Grade Anxiety

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Jonathan Boreyko, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech. Jonathan shares his journey from a works-based "moralistic therapeutic deism" to a vibrant faith in Christ sparked by a Bible study in Romans. He discusses teaching thermodynamics with a theological twist, guiding students through conversations about truth, and using C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man to frame knowledge under objective morality. We also hear some hilarious classroom moments and how a water polo teammate helped transform his spiritual life.

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Contact Jonathan Boreyko at:
boreyko@vt.edu

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Transcript

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Hi professors, my name is Ashley Davis and I'm a junior at UNCW studying Business Administration and a concentration of Marketing Strategy. And I wanted to come on here and ask how do you guys show love and grace within the classroom when having open discussions with students in regards to hard conversations and even areas such as science, where, God created science that comes across as loving and not judgmental. Well, Jonathan, welcome to Meet the Prof. It's so good to have you with us and you're the first Virginia Tech professor we've had on the podcast. How you doing today? I didn't know that. It's a pleasure to be your first Hokie, and I slept nine hours last night, which is unheard of, so I'm doing phenomenal. Nine hours. Wow. no telling the answers you're going to come up with with that kind of sleep. Yeah. Well, Spence, also, it's good to have you thanks again for helping with uh the chat and audience coming in. How you doing, Spence? I'm doing great. And all our audience there, uh if you could just say hello in the chat and drop in questions in there. Great. Jonathan, what are Virginia Tech students like? Yeah, I think it's really fun being a professor at Virginia Tech because the students are really genuine and they just seem really earnest. My favorite example is I've had over 50 undergraduate students publish papers with me doing research, whereas in a lot of places, like, you know, it's more of a grad student postdoc thing to do like the higher level publishing. So I just think they're really kind of fearless at just wanting to learn how to do things for the first time. They help each other out. I think we have one of the highest retention rates of any undergraduate student body, if I recall. So yeah, I think this is a really a sense of humility and togetherness that tech students tend to have that I think uh makes it kind of a special place to work at. That's a joy to teach students like that. It is. It's been great. So how did you get to Virginia tech? ah So I married a southern girl, so I had to apply to someplace that was below the Mason-Dixon line. ah And so Virginia Tech was as far north as I could go. It's a little cold for her liking, but she's trying to be flexible. And we're from North Carolina, so it's just kind of one state up north, but it feels a lot colder because you're in the mountains, right? So I think it's like 10 degrees colder here on average than it is in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in Durham, which is where we're from, so. yeah. Awesome. Hey, you have a pretty, uh, heavy Meet The Prof profile too. I mean, you've got some heavy hitters on there. was struck by the Abolition of Man being one of your favorite books by CS Lewis. ah mentioned that. So actually, I led a book discussion group on that at Virginia Tech through a ministry called the uh Bradley Study Center. It's a place for Christian study center on campus. uh What makes it distinct from a typical Christian ministry is it's meant for professors and students uh simultaneously. It's not just a student ministry. And so I've really benefited from leading a study on that with some students. And all of us just kind of wrestling together with um the importance of having transcendence and ultimate meaning and morality in life, like objective meaning, objective morality, because the whole point of that book is if you try to take away objective morality and say there is no one truth, there is no one real right or wrong, then in the end, all you have left is power, right? Like all that's left is power and people are gonna wield information and wield even education to basically try to... hoard and abuse their own power, which is a very scary kind of dystopian ah thought to think that even knowledge itself, the university itself, or the internet uh web of knowledge itself could just be nothing more than power games if you take truth and right or wrong away from it. And so I think ah the students and faculty at the Bradley Center want to try to bring Christ back into the university to work out how do we still celebrate and enjoy knowledge, but ground it under objective truth, under God, under the fact that there is a right or wrong, so that we're using that knowledge to have a sense of awe for the world, to try to help others in a humanitarian way, and not just kind of flatten ourselves out into like people cranking out papers to build a CV and accrue power, right? So I think that book really hits home for a lot of the things a lot of us are concerned about. of wanting life to be more than power struggles. We want to see truth and beauty incorporated back into the research and the work that we're doing. That's great. You know what strikes me? That book was written what? 60 years ago now? Something like that? And we're still struggling with this moral relativism thing. I think C.S. Lewis was a century ahead of his time, right? Because he was concerned about using information to wield power, but he was talking about radio. I mean, he didn't even know about the social media stuff, the internet, uh the internet sites and all of that. So yeah, he was just really quite a prophet and an amazing thinker. So it's an old book, but somehow it seems like it was written last year. That's remarkable. Thanks for plugging that. think we could all benefit from some sage wisdom on this moral relativism issue that we're all facing still. Definitely. Well, and you know that even though we have this podcast to be Christ-centered and we're encouraging Christ-centered conversations that we also like having a little bit of fun. we want to start, and I'll make this open for you to apply either way, oh tell us what is the most embarrassing moment you ever had as either a college student or as a college professor? Yeah, I've had many. I'll give a couple as a professor. So a fun fact about me was my wife and I had five kids born all while I was on tenure track, which is the most busiest time of someone's early career. And so to say I was frazzled from time to time would be an understatement. I was almost always coming into my work pretty late and then having to leave early, you always behind on things it seems like. And so multiple times I would come dashing into my own class that I was the teacher of. you know, several minutes late and that was kind of embarrassing to be late to your own class. I didn't like that. But it seemed to happen at least once or twice every semester when I had a newborn. And then I think another fun embarrassing, embarrassing moment was I had a typo in my class notes one day when I was teaching my fluids class to like 70 undergraduates. And because of my typo, I could only solve this one problem if it turned out that saltwater was lighter than freshwater. And so I give them the solution and I explain how that means that, okay, now we know the salt water is lighter than fresh water. And they're all looking at me baffled, like not wanting to correct you, but they're like, wait a minute, that doesn't, like that doesn't. I had one raise his hand like, but professor, like, but then why is it easier to float in the Dead Sea where it's so salty? Like, doesn't that mean that the salt water is heavier so you can float better? And I was like, it would seem to, wouldn't it? I don't think I know what I'm talking about today. So that led to like a two minute, you know, deep dive back over my notes until I found the typo and the density value and I apologize to everyone. So yeah, so here's me a fluids professor telling people salt water is lighter. That was also kind of embarrassing. great. And those students probably felt like you were a lot more approachable after that. You know, I think that's a good point is, it's really important for students to know that professors are also dumb-dumb sometimes and make silly mistakes, right? Because it's so healthy to say, don't know, or I was wrong, or I'm not sure what's going on. Let's look at the notes together and just kind of pause for a bit. I think that humility and that willingness to be wrong or even be foolish is really healthy for cultivating a sense of learning and curiosity. Because if you can't be wrong, you can't make mistakes. And if you can't make mistakes, then you can't take risks in life, right? And if you don't take risks, you're not really going to discover something important in research if you're afraid to take risks, right? That's why, you know, um the Soviet Union didn't win the space race or the nuclear race because, you know, I heard stories of if a nuclear scientist did a test detonation of a hydrogen bomb and it didn't go well, they just shot the guy who was in charge, right? And so if you have that level of pressure and can't make a mistake kind of mindset burdening you, it's really going to cripple your ability to be creative and to be a free, you know, be free in how you think about things. Yeah, I think that's a great point that we should actually celebrate the fact that I was telling them that that saltwater was lighter and they have a laugh about it later. Definitely, definitely has a great story. Well, so I would love to dive in some now with about your spiritual journey. So you had a dramatic conversion experience when you were in college. while you're sharing that while I'm asking this, I want to invite the audience again during any part of this to put any questions you have in the chat. And oh we'd love to interact with you if you have questions for Jonathan too. But will you tell us some about that conversion story? Yeah, sure. So I grew up a progressive slash nominal Christian, I guess you could say, and I didn't know the term, but Wikipedia taught me about this, this term that I think was me to a T is called moralistic therapeutic deism. Have you ever heard that term before? Yeah. So I'll say it one more time because it is a mouthful. Moralistic therapeutic deism, or you could say MTD for short. And I find this fascinating because there was this guy, Christian Smith, he's a sociologist. He interviewed over 3,000 teenagers in the early 2000s. And he basically realized that the faith that they were describing didn't check any classical box. Like it wasn't, that's not really Christianity, but it's also not really atheism or agnosticism either. Like, what is this thing? So he kind of collected all the common strands that they were all saying. And he coined this term to describe like the common denominator of how they were describing their faith life. So the moralistic part means it was more about what I did to be a good person than about what God has done, right? That's the moralistic part. was very kind of works based, self-righteous for sure. The therapeutic part was it was more about making me feel good about myself and my good deeds or how great I was as opposed to like genuinely being about glorifying God or you know, loving others above myself, right? So that's the therapeutic part is it makes you feel good about yourself, that you're a good person in your eyes. And then the deism part is kind of like, you know, lots of ways would go to God or I would never think it was important to evangelize or say Christ is the only way because that's too narrow. So that kind of like really fuzzy, all paths lead to Rome sort of sense of God is where the deism is kind of starting to replace the theism, if that makes sense. And so it turns out this is actually right now the most common religion in America, but nobody who believes it even knows that's what they believe, right? In their minds, myself included, that basically was Christianity because that was the air I was breathing implicitly, and I never was really given the gospel in a way that I could comprehend that would kind of deprogram me from that air that I breathed. So that was kind of my go-to. this MTD approach to life until I was in college. ah When I was in college, I didn't go to church on my own because, you know, um it just wasn't that important to me anymore. If I'm a good person, church was kind of like this fuzzy secondary thing, where if you're busy, like, what's the point, right? Because if I'm good, if I'm good and just need God's sprinkles every now and then, I guess like church wasn't really that important of a thing for me anymore. But I also kind of recognized that I was hitting into a wall. with this MTD approach because I was having to basically um suppress things about myself that didn't seem so good, right? Like if I was gonna be brutally honest, I was doing things that I wasn't proud about, then I was kind of being selfish and very grade-centric, self-centric in how I was going about my college life. I wasn't connecting well with my community there. I was almost entirely thinking about and bragging about how busy and stressed I was with classes and wanting to get good grades. I was kind of a very hollow and uh isolated person. was kind of gradually realizing once I was entering into this kind of early adulthood phase of college and I didn't really like it, but I didn't really know what else to do about it. um And so then by God's providence, uh I tried a club water polo team just for fun to try something new and stay in shape. It was actually kind of funny because it was a coed club water polo team. But at my college, there were no varsity men's teams, like it was just the club team. So we had to play the men varsity team for other colleges. So there's this one game I'll never forget, it was like high comedy. We had to play the Yale men's varsity water polo team as a club led team who barely knew how to play, some of us, myself especially. And I think the final score was 22 to 2. And the only two goals we scored. We had this giant bear of a guy who was our goalie, and he got so mad at the offense constantly turning the ball over and not even getting it across to the other side of the pool, that he just hucked the ball across the entire pool twice and happened to score that way. Because our offense couldn't even get it halfway across the pool without getting it stolen. But anyway, so that was just kind of a fun side story there with just how inept we were compared to these varsity teams. But anyway, by God's grace, uh the only believer on the team who was also one of the only believers in my entire college because I went to Trinity College. It's a very small, very secular private school in uh Hartford, Connecticut in New England. So there are probably 10 or 15 Christians in the entire college. Like that's how small and how secular that place was. um And by God's providence, one of those few believers was on my water polo team. He was the captain of the team actually. And I think you could kind of tell I was this kind of anxious, isolated kind of a ball of stress. Like I think he was picking up on that. And Tita's very graciously invited me to the only men's Bible study on campus after a few weeks of me being on his team and being kind of lonely and just like, you know, at end of my rope, I was like, yeah, why not? that I haven't been to church in a couple of years. I've never done a Bible study before actually like outside of Sunday school. So I was kind of curious what that would look like for adults to do that outside of a church context. And so it happened to be on the book of Romans. And I kind of had to just get shocked by the fact that I was 19 years old and didn't even know what the Bible was saying about the gospel or about grace, even though I was raised in a church. um By Romans three, I was like, this is not anything at all like what I thought it meant to be a Christian or how God. saw me or what it would even mean to be a good person or get into heaven. Like this is kind of the exact opposite of what I thought I was supposed to be doing. So I was frankly just kind of stunned. So Romans 1, Romans 2, I was just kind of stunned. And then by Romans 3, we read the verses. I have them printed out so I can read it too if that's okay. It was Romans 3, 20 through 22, where it says, therefore, no one will be declared righteous in God's by the works of the law. Rather, through the law, we become conscious of our sin. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. Romans 3, 20-22. So this just turned my MTD totally upside down and it shattered it on its head, right? Because it was saying not only can't I be a good person on my own, but even trying to kind of just ah reveals how unrighteous and how sinful I really am, which was kind of what I was starting to realize, but I was trying to suppress it by being isolated, right? And then this notion of, you don't have to do that because actually Christ was righteous for you and he already gave it to you if you want it. Like no strings attached, doesn't matter what you do today or in the past or tomorrow, like it's yours. No one had ever... said that to me before, at least in a way that actually connected or was like so explicit, the way that Paul is so explicit about it in Romans. And so just by that third week of the Bible study, I completely renounced my kind of wishy-washy MTD type faith and became a Bible-believing Christian, like almost virtually overnight. And then I read the entire Bible in like, I think a month and a half. So it was kind of like a real blur of like figuring out. How do you rewire your entire brain and heart to completely re-center your nature, your notion of reality being from, it's all about you being good to like feel good about yourself, to like blowing that up to smithereens and saying, it's all about what Christ did that I can't do. And now I'm just going to receive that with a sense of awe and gratitude and have joy from there as like a free person. So just kind of like blowing up my life and having this new center that I was just kind of scrambling feverishly to like, you know, learn how to put myself around this new thing that I had never been aware of before. m It's fascinating. And so what is something that changed in your life after that? Um, I think one of the biggest things was I had pretty severe grade anxiety. Uh, I was kind of like the Hermione Granger type where if a test was being passed around, I was having like my notes out studying until the last possible second, the test was like going onto my desk. So, uh, one huge change was in just, think one or two months, my, my academic like grade anxiety went from like a, you know, almost a hundred out of a hundred. almost a zero. Like I would have literally zero stress of any sort taking tests. If I was doing homework, I wouldn't procrastinate anymore because I was like, well, I'll just do each day's work as it comes and trust in God because I'm already saved and I'm already loved, right? So I could just kind of trust in God, like just take each day on its own. Today's worries are enough for today. You're not going to get anything worrying about tomorrow. Your identity is already secure. And the funniest thing about it was when I stopped having any stress over my academics, I got better grades in harder classes, right? And so just that inversion of the gospel, when you stop making it about you, when you stop worrying, when you start acting out of love and joy and passion, you do a lot better anyway. Like your works get better. And it's that great inversion that nobody can explain to you until you just experience it yourself, right? um And then I the other big change also was just because I wasn't so anxious about grades anymore, I could take a lot more time to enjoy community, find some other Christian friends, and just in general, start to open up and realize life is more than just being in survival mode or trying to project being a good person. So I got a lot more social, I got lot less nervous, and I got much better grades when I stopped worrying about grades. Mm-hmm. Mm. Wow. and noticeable, visible change. That's amazing. Yeah, it was very fast, but I'm also learning uh your faith life is kind of like a Russian doll. So the outer layer or two opened up really fast because I was just hit over the head with it. But then as you get older, you find, there was these layers inside of that you couldn't even uh become aware of until you shed those outer layers. Right. So it was very fast. But I want to also emphasize to like the younger students listening, I didn't have it all figured out right away either that there were deeper layers to my self-righteousness. to my insecurity, to my stubbornness that I didn't really even see until, you know, I'm in charge of multiple students in my lab now. And I've got five kids and a wife who require me to become way even less selfish than I thought was possible, right? And kind of reveal my own sin to me in completely new ways. So it was a fast change, but I'm still changing right now. And so when I shed the seventh layer that I'm shedding right now, there'll be an eighth layer inside of that. I wasn't aware of, right? So I think that it's really painful on some level, but I think it's also a fun part of sanctification is you get to keep shedding more and more layers of your old ways, your selfish ways, and you keep filling in blind spots very slowly by God's grace to get to see more of the gospel picture that he actually wants you to live by. Well, that would... that Paul, who wrote most of the Bible, was still struggling with it, Romans 7, when he says, you know, I know what I want to do, but I don't do it. That which I hate is what I still do. He's still going to have to shed those layers. I love how you put that. That's fantastic. Yeah. blow up fights with his own Christian peers as he goes around the world, right? So even Paul had to keep struggling with his own sin and the sins of others. It's never a finished story. Mm. hope you get to share that with your students. Do you get to get this deep with students on a regular basis? That's an interesting question. I think not in the way I just said it to you all, ah but I do try to have creative and more indirect ways to talk about those sorts of things in a more general sense. It's really tricky because when you're over someone, like in a classroom or in a laboratory, there is a power imbalance, right? Where it can become a little thorny to explicitly start evangelizing to somebody who you know is probably not a believer. Because if you're also in charge of that person's, you know, kind of grade or even like, you know, their graduate degree, that can lead to like a bit of a tough context and like, how honest can they be to push back if I'm over them and saying, I believe this. So it's really tricky. I think it is important to be bold in your faith and not shy away from having conversations whenever they organically come up. But I guess what I'm saying is I've learned to not like kind of force or explicitly jam into uh inorganic situations, some kind of disagreement and, well, here's why you should be a Christian. So I'm trying to get better at the non-confrontational, indirect ways to guide people who I think are curious about God, to guide them toward Christ in a very gentle way. Just one example that the pictures on the wall behind me, um lots of students come in and realize, oh, this is not the kind of guy who just wants to put all of his awards on his wall. Like he has a family, a big family, like, you Mormon? No, I'm not Mormon. But you know, just, just little cues like that, that I'm not just my CV or my awards or my papers, that I see myself as a kind of whole bodied human that has other humans that I'm connected to and responsible for. And maybe that I think, it's just kind of like unconsciously encourages students, well, they can be a whole person too. They can have someone. And their life they care about too and leave the lab early on Friday, right? So um I think that's one way that I do it. And then I think my favorite way is whenever I go to a conference, I always schedule one or two extra days with my students to go on adventures together. It could be hiking the Great Wall together in China. uh It could be, had a conference in Hong Kong last summer where my students were pretty athletic. So we all went adventure hiking on cliffs and rainforest together. ah We went skiing on the Matterhorn in Switzerland. after a conference one winter. And I think it's in, we do group hikes if there's somebody graduating. ah I think it's in those kind of more informal settings where people just start talking about life anyway, right? And it's in those moments if it does come up that I'll seize any chance to kind of just mention, well, yeah, actually, you know, everything that I have in my life going for me came from finding Christ and from the lightness and the joy and the passion that he gave me. through loving me upfront and kind of securing my identity. And that's why I'm not nervous doing research or trying hard things that might be scary to people. So yeah, I think it's those more informal organic moments where those talks tend to come out and I can help mentor and disciple students who are either already Christian or who are agnostic but kind of want to know what the something more is in life beyond their work. Hmm. I appreciate you explaining that, because I think this would be uh not only encouraging for students now who are listening to be able to hear some things you might not say in the classroom, but m you've said some things that I think will encourage other faculty who struggle with this uh reality uh of, I have authority over my students and how much can I share Christ with them? uh Are there any other examples of creative ways you've found to even let your students know that you are a believer? Yeah, yeah. So I think my favorite one is when I teach my fluids class, I have to teach anyway, the first and second laws of thermodynamics. And so I'll try to make it pretty simple for the non-physicist out there. But the first law is just that basically mass and energy are always conserved. You can't create or destroy anything. uh Energy is always the same net amount that it always was. It can change forms, but you can't create energy out of nothing. Right? And the second law... is just basically you always lose in life. There's always friction or hot always flows cold. So I actually use these two laws I have to teach anyway. And I do a five minute kind of quasi evangelism to my class using the first two laws. And I'll try to explain what I mean by that. When I finished teaching them, it's a Friday by that point, the students were getting kind of like daydreamy anyway, they're kind of bored this Friday, they're thinking about the weekend and the football game. It's okay. you all seem bored to me, like, I shake it up and get philosophical for a minute? And they always lay up like, yeah, yeah, get philosophical, please, like, what's up, professor? And so I say, okay, well, let's think about this more big picture, not just fluid mechanics. um If the second law means that you're always increasing in disorder and the hot is always flowing into cold, what does that tell you about the sun? What can we know about the sun? And they think for a minute and then one person always answers, well, that means that the sun can't last forever because eventually by second law, all the heat would spread everywhere and the sun would burn out. And I say, exactly. And so if the sun can't last forever, what does that tell you about the age of our solar system or the universe? And they pause and they think, and then they say, well, that means that it couldn't have lasted forever. Like the universe uh is a finite amount of years old. And I say, that's exactly right. By second law, we know that we do not have some static infinite universe if we have low entropy suns that have all the heat still mostly together. That means that this is a young universe that was created um billions of years ago, but is certainly not infinitely old. And to a son, uh millions or billions of years can actually be quite young. um And so, okay, so we know the universe had a beginning. um Now, what did first law teach us? Well, first law teaches us that you can't get something from nothing. And I say, And what does every cosmologist agree ah is what happened when the Big Bang occurred? Something came from nothing, right? So the Big Bang is not telling you how the something happened. The Big Bang is simply telling you that there was nothing. There was no space. There was no energy. There was no matter. There was probably not any laws prior to the Big Bang. So there was like a literal nothingness. And then all of a sudden there was something. There was energy. There was mass. There was space. There was time. There were laws. And so that basically violates first law that you get something from nothing, but second law is telling you we had to get something from nothing to get this all started in the first place. So I put their mind in a pretzel and say, okay, well, then no matter what, we can't take life for granted. Life is not boring. There are only two possibilities and both of them are on the face of it pretty crazy and pretty wild, right? Possibility one is that nature had to break itself to make itself before it was even in existence. Okay, well that's crazy. So nature had to break its own laws to make itself before it even existed. That's certifiable. That's crazy. uh Or there has to be something beyond nature itself, beyond the universe space-time continuum that is not subject to those laws and uh is able to then create both nature and the laws that operate on nature. And we call that something supernatural, super meaning outside of or bigger than nature. And many of us call that God. And so, I basically pose there is no simple, obvious scientific answer for how this all came to be. There's only two kind of crazy choices that nature broke itself to make itself or that you have something beyond nature. And, you know, I think that kind of gives a level of plausibility where, It's not that crazy to believe that there's something outside of nature if the only alternative is something even crazier, that nature had to break its own laws to make itself when there was nothing to make itself from in the first place. It's kind of implying, well, that's probably an even bigger stretch than believing in a supernatural being. Well, we'll pause right there and stay tuned for next week for part two of our interview with Jonathan. Listeners, if you're a Christian professor, have you considered how you might creatively introduce spiritual things into your lectures in a way that would open the door for students to come to you if they wanted to talk more, especially about Jesus? I'd encourage you to think about that. And college students, if you'd be interested in submitting a question to Christian professors here, we would love that. And the best way to do that is if you find us on Instagram and send us a DM with your question for the professor and let us know your name and what school you're at as well. And lastly, if you would like to give financially to this outreach, I'm on staff with Cru, the Faculty Commons ministry. We would love to have you a part of our team. So if you're interested, you could give online at give.cru.org, that's C-R-U dot O-R-G / 0 42 43 44. So thanks for listening, for being a part of this with us. And until next time, we hope this encourages you to have a Christ-centered conversation on your college campus.