MTP 61: Jonathan Boreyko Pt 2, How to Reject War Mindset, Worship in Fog Harvesting & God's Tenure

In this second episode, Dr. Jonathan Boreyko, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, shares how he integrates his Christian faith into his teaching, collaborates with ministries through the Bradley Study Center, and encourages bold yet peaceful Christian witness on campus. He discusses student doubts, research on fog harvesting and synthetic trees, and what it means to be a scientist and a Christian without falling into the trap of culture war thinking. His testimony of leading discussions on books by John Lennox and seeing students return to faith is both inspiring and practical for professors and students.

Read more about Jonathan Boreyko online:
 https://meettheprof.com/view/professors/entry/jonathan-boreyko/

Email: boreyko@vt.edu

Main Takeaways:

• Faith can be introduced into classroom discussions respectfully and meaningfully.
• Students often respond positively to professors who are both bold and genuine in sharing their Christian worldview.
• Study centers like the Bradley Study Center foster collaboration between faculty and student ministries.
• Professors can avoid culture war mentalities and instead build communities centered on truth and grace.
• Research can reflect God’s creative design and lead to worship through discovery.

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Transcript

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My name is Paxton. I'm a sophomore here at UNCW. I study Nursing. And my question for professors is how do you partner with campus ministries to reach students with the gospel? Hey everybody, welcome to Meet the Prof. If this is your first time here, Spence and I are so excited that you've joined us. My name is Shane Hartley and we take questions from college students, just like you heard from Paxton, and we ask them to Christian professors. And our goal is to encourage Christ-centered conversations on the college campus. So you can find out more about our professors on meettheprof.com. And you're about to hear part two of our interview with Jonathan Boreyko Jonathan is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech. And if you haven't heard part one, go back and hear that. I think you'll be very encouraged by the way he thinks and the way he ministers on campus. So, well, let's jump in. Here is part two of our interview with Jonathan. 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. And so that's one way that I use the actual course curriculum to inject a sense of curiosity and respectability with the theistic way of looking at the world and be a scientist at the same time. And I love how you introduced that with asking permission. Can we get philosophical for a minute? I think any faculty member could do that in whatever class they're in because you're making that bridge by asking permission. Do you have any stories of students who have really interacted with you after a conversation like that and maybe rethought their worldview? I do, I do. So the funny thing is whenever you're bold like that for Christ, you tend to get afraid the first time, but then you realize like actually people like when you're genuine, people like when you say interesting and bold things. And so the first year I did this in my class, my heart was pounding. I was like, am I going to get fired? Am I going to get in trouble? Is this too far? Like am I proselytizing? And the funny thing is I've been doing it now for 10 years. I've had that little first and second law philosophy pitch for 10 years now. And no student has ever complained or has ever said anything negative about it on the end of year anonymous evaluation. Like it's never come up. So people either just like, are like, okay, like back, back to the weekend when the class is over, or I think in some cases it kind of makes them think, oh, okay, like, I guess you can be a scientist and a Christian and have those be, you know, compatible after all. And so some students will after class come to me and kind of like thank me for like encouraging them. that they don't have to see their faith life and their science life as an opposition. So I've had some thank yous and some curiosities and follow-ons, but I've never had any complaints or criticisms about it. I think people like when you're open about stuff like that if you're not pushy, right? People just don't like being told what they have to believe, but I think people do like when someone's genuine and congruent in sharing how they kind of view some fun ideas or how they view the world. I think that can be okay. I think I also had some really nice examples in the Bradley Studies Center. Besides the Abolition of Man book group that I led, I also volunteered to guide some talks on science, faith, intersectionality books, mostly by John Lennox. For those in the audience who are Christians and scientists, Pick Up Cosmic Chemistry by John Lennox. It's a fantastic book for how to approach science from a Christian perspective and see them as compatible. Anyway, but when I teach that book, just two small stories of like the impact that can have. There was one student in the book group who was raised by more conservative, fundamentalist type Christians, where she was told, if you don't believe that humans rode the backs of dinosaurs, you can't be a Christian. So she was like given a very narrow, very rigid framework for what it meant to be a Christian, right? And then she went to college and took classes in geology and biology. And she came to the conviction, as is also my conviction, that Earth is millions of years old and that... well, billions for the earth, but millions for life. Not that every Christian has to believe that, but she does as do I. And so, you know, that led to, well then dinosaurs did predate humans, according to, you know, her way of looking at science. And then she renounced her faith because she thought that was the only way to be a Christian. There couldn't be more than one way to interpret that passage. And so through this book group, we were able to kind of... show her that there's a plurality of views Christians have on the edge of the earth and on dinosaurs. Yes, there certainly are many Christian believers who believe in the young earth approach, but there's also many Christians who are both Bible believers and who believe the earth is, that life is millions of years old and that dinosaurs predated humans. And that's okay too. Like, and so just kind of giving her a bigger picture of the different kinds of ways to look at science as a Christian. then made it possible again for her to consider her Christian faith and not just become an atheist. So that was super encouraging to see. And then there was another person who just had a very skeptical, very scientific type mind where he felt God calling on him, but he was just so afraid of it being like emotions. He was just such a careful, cautious thinker that he didn't wanna think it was just like an emotional experience he was having. And then after this book group we had, it gave him enough trust that there was a scientifically plausible way for God to exist, that he then got baptized after the book study and then invited me to like get to meet some of his friends and so like after his baptism. So anyway just really incredible stories of just the impact you can have when you take away a sense of fear or a narrowness of what it means to be a Christian and a scientist and kind of open that up to actually It's okay to have a diversity of interpretations for the first few lines of Genesis. And it's okay to be a scientist and to be a Christian. So just kind of opening up faith to be perhaps bigger than what some people were raised to believe it had to be. Kind of taking it out of these narrow boxes and showing the boxes can actually be manyfold and it can be quite large. You've given such a great illustration too of how some of the fruit that we want to see in our lives and outreach really only come when we take bold steps of faith. that's been sort of a common theme that comes up in some of these interviews. I appreciate your example with that, how you've taken these bold steps and seen God work. So Jonathan, we have some questions from college students that they record ahead of time, so take a listen to this question. My name is Paxton. I'm a sophomore here at UNCW. I study Nursing. And my question for professors is how do you partner with campus ministries to reach students with the gospel? Yeah, great. Thank you, Paxton. I talked already about the Bradley Studies Center. And there's actually many universities now that have these Christian Studies Centers where faculty and students can interface together in really encouraging ways. So that's one way. And then other ministries like Cru or RUF, among others, have also interfaced with this Bradley Studies Center to have jointly sponsored events, for example. So we'll have like events that have hundreds, sometimes thousands of people show up. That can be anything from, did a stage play of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters, and that sold out, the Performing Arts Center on our campus. I think over a thousand people came to that, which was amazing. We'll have big ticket speakers on things like science, faith, intersectionality. or just general conversations about what it means to be a Christian and to be like an astrophysicist or things of that nature. But again, like Cru or RUF will co-sponsor and help kind of funnel students toward those events. So yeah, it's just basically working together in a synergistic way with those ministries to get as many students and faculty and staff to be asking questions and go into these performances or debates or conversations. to try to wrestle out together, like, what does it really mean to be a Christian and to be a scholar at a secular university? Like, how do you put that together and actually have your faith play an integral role in how you do research, teach, interact with your lab mates? So yeah, it's been great. Have you ever been invited by the individual student groups to come to their meeting share with the students like on a Thursday night? Yeah, I would love to do that. actually haven't yet. I've been doing things mostly so far through the Bradley Center. But if any ministry is listening and would like to invite me to that, I would always be happy to get to meet their meetings and to play a part in that if it was ever helpful. That's great. And what are the student groups like at Virginia Tech? You mentioned a couple. What have you learned about how active they are at Virginia Tech? Yeah, so I think there's just different niches for the more classical student ministries in the Bradley Center. So the classical ones like Campus Crusade for Christ or RUF are more about having weekly worship together, getting to have close Christian friends and communities and perhaps future spouses, building that network of community to support you. And through the sermons also at those worship events, deepening your faith. on a more personal level. So I think that's the niche those ministries fill so well. Whereas again, for the study center, it's more on a student and faculty and staff level, like everyone together, perhaps a little more academically, just what does it actually look like to play that out as a scientist in a laboratory or as a librarian researcher when all your coworkers are secular? any number of examples I can think of, you know, a who told you again, like you had to ride dinosaurs or not be a believer and now you're taking biology. So it's kind of a little more academic, but still geared around understanding and growing your faith. But it's more directly tied to how that faith plays out in your professional development and your academic endeavors, if that makes sense. So that's like the subtle contextual difference between a Christian study center and the classical Christian ministries. And I think both approaches are distinct and both are complimentary and important. my second year here at Virginia Tech, I had to go to some training workshops that were run by some activist administrators. And they were telling me things that were very troubling to me as a Christian. I'll just give one example. They were saying things like, there is no absolute truth or objective, true or false, or wrong. And they were basically implicitly saying, and you better get on board with that if you're going to be part of Virginia Tech. So it was like a very, very postmodern, secular, relativist way of looking at the world. And I was very surprised and disturbed that they were just saying like basically everyone was expected to kind of have that framework or it was basically implied you weren't really doing the right thing or you're not even welcome necessarily, right? And so I was kind of at first wanting to like do the knee jerk reaction of like, okay, well then it's kind of like culture war. Like I got to get into some kind of Debate with these administrators and convince them that they're being narrow and actually blocking diversity of belief by saying these things and I tried that for a year and in hindsight was becoming very confrontational kind of self-righteous or like standoffish in my demeanor It wasn't having it wasn't bearing good fruit getting in talks with these administrators, right? And what the Bradley Studies Center did by putting both students and faculty together was we had a safe space to just talk these struggles out as a body, right? And it wasn't just me who was having these workshops, it was others too. And they were concerned too. And by talking it out together and wrestling together, we were able to transcend the temptation to just kind of go culture warrior, go confrontational, get aggressive and mean about it, make some big letter to send off to someone. kind of, somewhere along the way, transcended that. and had a deep peace come upon me when I realized these are just a few activist administrators. It is not Virginia Tech at large. And if I stop fixating on these one or two activist instigators and just focus on, how can I love the students I teach and mentor? And how can I enjoy the faculty and students at the study center and at Cru and at RUF? And how can we just kind of live life together? And until they fire us, we go about believing in right and wrong, and we go about believing in truth, and we go about believing that diversity and freedom of belief and thought is important on campus. Not everyone has to be a relativist or a believer. We can believe what you actually want to believe because that's a basic freedom, you know, that is healthy and necessary for belief to matter. You can't impose belief, right? God can't force the gospel on someone against their will. And so somewhere along the way of interfacing with other students and faculty, I just kind of shed that culture warrior mindset or the me against them mindset and just kind of made it more about, well, I'm influencing the people in my sphere through the grace and love of Christ and no one's firing me. So I'll just ignore those people and kind of keep on loving those in my sphere. And I don't think I was mature enough at the time to have made that course correction. if I didn't have those students and faculty to wrestle through it with me and to encourage me and to find a better way together. I imagine that would help student groups also as they partner with the study center because it'd be easy for them to think the university administrators are they and then we, know, are the ones who are being persecuted whenever there are some strict rules or I can't put posters up from a meeting and all. And as they are rubbing shoulders and having these kinds of conversations with Christian faculty and staff, I would think this would help students to see You know, they're not alone and it's not an us versus them and the university is not evil in itself. So that's really cool. Yeah, I think that's right. And I love what you were saying about how, you know, that the university is not the enemy, right? I think now there's some kind of counter movements politically where there's these notions of professors themselves being the evil ones or even research itself being inherently politicized or evil. And so I think, you know, it's more important than ever for Christians to pursue careers in science, research, academia, so we can, you know, kind of fight the abolition of man tendency of these things accruing power. and instead make it back about, bring it back to making it about truth for its own sake and, or humanitarianism for its own sake. yeah, I think now we have to work together in a different way. How do we find a way as a body in a more moderate civics minded way of. you know, restoring people's trust in research and in science and in the university, where it's not just seen as this evil thing out to get you, right? I think that's also an important thing to think about now with just the way certain, you know, political tides are turning in the other direction. So, yeah, in general, I think we need spaces to wrestle through these things so we can stay a body, so we can put God ahead of, you know, power struggles or politics or ideology. we can keep a cool head in the face of trials from all directions and just kind of like keep on for Christ out of love and not just turn into a kind of bitter like culture warrior fighter kind of personality, right? If that makes sense. Spence and I want to ask you more about your research. We see on meettheprof.com you shared that your current research involves building synthetic trees, harvest fog. Can you tell us more about your research now? Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to. So about half the world is not having enough access to fresh water at least one month out of the year. So water scarcity is really impacting a lot of humans now. And so one thing I'm doing just to try to play one small piece of finding the solution to that is I'm a fog harvester. And so what that means is when you see a foggy day outside, know, some cloud low to the ground blowing around, I just put various obstacles in the way of that fog. and try to design those obstacles to catch as many of the microscopic water droplets that are in the fog to catch as many as possible, drain as many as possible, to then use that water for good use. And it could be anything from just fresh drinking water for the humans or their animals and crops. But it could even be things like, you know, if you can catch enough fog, you can restore clear vision to airport runways or to certain highway. bends that are very prone to foggy car accidents. So I'm also increasingly wanting to use this for safety to minimize airplane delays, airplane and helicopter crashes, vehicle crashes, things of that nature too. And the fun part about the fog harvesting research is all of the humans, the engineers rather, who were trying to work on this, they kept using the same basic design of a net, like a volleyball type net, because it was intuitive and everyone else is using it. But the problem with the nets is they clog. Like the holes clog really easy and then the fog doesn't blow through anymore once you clog it. And so I was inspired by God's design. There's various examples in nature like the coastal redwoods in California, where half the water the redwoods in California drink comes from catching a fog on their needle leaves and dripping the fog off the leaves into the soil. So it turns out that these trees are very, very good at catching and draining fog. And if you look at their leaves, they're not net-like at all. They're just like a parallel array of needles. Right? And so, okay, well, if I just go by God's design, he's better at this than we are apparently, it wouldn't look like a net. It would look more like a harp. And so I call it the fog harp. And it's just the vertical wires now. We kind of took out all the horizontal ones that were causing the clogging problems. And it turns out you can catch a lot more fog water when you take God's approach that he already is having in nature. you catch a lot more water that way than doing it through the volleyball net approach. That's amazing and so practical. And then you also mentioned trees, so I'm building trees. It doesn't look like what it sounds like. It doesn't look anything like a tree, but we're basically shamelessly copying just the water cycle. So if you look at like hundred foot tall tree or even a 300 foot tall tree, it can pump water against gravity all the way to the top, right, to stay hydrated. And this is amazing because many people don't know the tree is not squeezing any muscles or, you know, it doesn't have any kind of pump or musculature system to do that. It's doing it completely spontaneously, right? So no active pumping power required. It's basically doing it by surface tension. And so all I'm doing is taking a bunch of tubes and then connecting them at the top to some nanopores. And the tubes are kind of like the trunk of the tree and the nanopores are kind of like the tissue of the leaves at the very top. And when you put that together and just throw it away, you can use surface tension to pull water up against gravity without any pumps or any active power required. And so we're trying to use this now for anything from picture pumping water from deep underground without requiring any pumps to actually do it. We can desalinate seawater or separate oil and water to purify fresh water from an oily spill. One passion I have that we're this close to finally making work is we're trying to make a 70 foot tall artificial tree that can pump water so high that now you can drain it back down through a water turbine and get hydropower. So now we're trying to use it to generate electricity even. So yeah, so that's been a really fun amount of work to just kind of build trees to purify water, extract water, generate hydropower on demand, fun things like that. That's amazing. That is really cool. you've alluded to this some of the wonder and you wrote some about this, how does your research and these things help you worship God? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. I feel like it helps me worship God because his design for the world and the universe is so grand and so big and so small at the same time that even just a single person spending a single lifetime looking into things can discover five or even 10 or 15 brand new phenomena that nobody else in the history of the world has ever seen before. So it's like God's creation is so big that he's like hiding little treasures for anyone who wants to go looking that no one's even seen before. And we already have a beautiful, wonderful world, but when you go digging, it actually makes it even more beautiful because you find just these little nuggets, right? To give one example, when I was in grad school, I was very fortunate to have been put on a great project trying to figure out why these droplets are just mysteriously disappearing. And so I bought a high-speed camera in a side view microscope so I could look from the side at a very, very high frame rate. And I discovered for the first time ever that basically when you have very small droplets and they grow big enough that they come together. So just picture like a picture of a lotus leaf. And now picture you have two very small dew droplets that are growing gradually in the middle of a dew cycle. The dew droplets are growing bigger, but now those two droplets touch and they merge together. It turns out that on things like the lotus leaf at a small enough size, those dew droplets jump off of the leaf with a thousand G's acceleration. And so to give some context, that's like a hundred times more acceleration than a space shuttle, right? And so the amount of thrust you get just by surface tension and being a small enough droplet on a waterproof enough leaf. So basically to try to put it in a nutshell, I was the first person to discover that you can have surface tension be used to launch small things off of surfaces as they grow, right? But to be the first to see a droplets jump, I'm now often called the jumping droplets professor. That was how famous like, kind of famous it ended up being. But to see the droplets jump for the first time and then see your advisor smile and kind of like pat your shoulder. And then he realized like, like I just discovered something new, didn't I? That no one's before. He's like, yeah, like. No one's ever seen this before. This is going to be big. So just little moments like that. I didn't know droplets could jump. And frankly, now that I do, it's an even more beautiful world than before droplets could jump, right? And the droplets were always jumping. We just weren't yet in a place to be able to realize it. So it's just those little discovery moments. And now what makes me even happier is seeing my own students sprinting up to my office with a thumb drive. and showing me a video of something brand new that they've seen that no one's seen before. ah And that the lineage kind of has lived on for the jumping because now my students have discovered jumping bubbles and jumping ice crystals. So now all three phases of water now, my group collectively have discovered jumping spontaneously off their surface. Wow. it's a family learning event. You've inspired others. That is amazing. It's even kind of funny, isn't it, as a Christian, that you have the three phases of water all jumping, and then you have the three sides of the Trinity, right? So I've also kind of wondered, maybe God has sense of humor, and he's trying to tie my Christian faith into these three phases of water all jumping together in complementary ways, right? Well, I appreciate you leading our listeners and even Spence and me on that treasure hunt because you've unearthed a treasure I've never known was there about the leaping droplets. So this does this open any opportunities for collaboration with faculty from other fields like for any professors listening? Are there any opportunities that you can imagine there being for collaboration? Yeah, I think there's always room for more collaboration. For example, the fog harp, I didn't have any clear idea how to actually build a harp, right? And so I had to find a industrial design professor, Brook Kennedy, to collaborate with to be able to actually realize that in real life. So I could kind of think of the design, but I couldn't make it, right? And so likewise, collaborations in the future to help build bigger trees or help plug them into energy systems. There's all sorts of ways to collaborate. I have long-term visions of using the trees for all sorts of things, the fog for all sorts of things. If I want to really get serious about airplane safety, I should probably collaborate with somebody who knows more about all the various policies and nuances of the transportation industry, just to give one example. So yes, I think there's definitely room for more collaborations as I keep learning things in my work. That's great. That's pretty exciting. Well, Spence and I want to hop into the lightning round with you now. So here's a series of shorter answer questions. First, what advice would you have for other Christian faculty? Never forget that you already have tenure in a spiritual sense, right? You already have your security, not job security, but life security from Christ. And so even if you're on tenure track, have a level of boldness and a level of lightness that I think you wouldn't have if you didn't have that gospel security already in place. I have never heard it put that way. I know I love the fact he just tied salvation to tenure. That's gonna play. just listened to a Veritas forum podcast by Cullen Buie. He's a mechanical engineer at MIT. And he closed his talk with the whole, already have tenure from Christ, line. So please give him the credit for that one. I wanted to use it because I thought, that's a perfect analogy. Like we already have tenure, now go forth in peace, right? You just didn't have to publish 5,000 articles to do it. I mean, that's the difference. How about what's your best piece of advice for students trying to find a job that they love? If you're an undergraduate, my advice is find a research assistant opportunity from a professor that you find interesting on campus because you can learn so much from trying research and kind of trying to create knowledge, not just consume knowledge. It's an invaluable experience whether or not you want to go into grad school versus industry. So for undergrads, stop obsessing over grades and try out some research in a lab or an internship, real life opportunities where you're kind of putting yourself out there more. There's so much more to life than grades. Grades do not define you and they will not make or break your career. That's my advice to undergrads. My advice to grad students is it's really hard being a grad student in the modern academic environment. Make sure you have healthy boundaries. If you happen to have an advisor who's overly demanding or challenging to work with. And again, have a sense of curiosity and lightness as you go about research. Research is scary because every day you're going into the unknown and you never know if it's going to work or fail. But if you have Christ already, if you're already secure, then you can go into that uncertainty with a sense of hope and excitement as opposed to fear and anxiety. So that's my advice to grad students doing research is to go into the unknown of your laboratory experiment or simulation experiment with just a sense of peace because you're already saved and loved. and how much more valuable are you than sparrows? Mm-hmm. All right. What advice do you have for students, college students, who are struggling with doubts about God? I have also had doubts of various sorts over the course of my professional development in life. So it's normal. But my advice is wrestle with the doubts by bringing them to Christ and others. Don't isolate yourself and don't revel in the doubts. So the doubts are normal, but you can marinate in them, kind of in isolation and fear and pessimism, or you can bring them to others, to trusted community mentors, to resources like reasonable faith online, things of that nature. And if you really expose them and don't hide your doubts, there's a very good answer for almost all, if not all of the doubts I have had that were scientific or kind of like empirical in nature. What's the advice for parents getting ready to send their kids off to college for the first time? care more about shepherding them into having a good Christian ministry and community and experiences than just hovering over their grades and academics. Well, and lastly, a personal question. What do you think might be your next personal step of faith on campus? I think I want to get a little more bold with how I live out my faith with student interactions, both in and out of the classroom. The things I've been telling you, I still think were good, but I think I can make it a little bigger. I think now that my kids are sleeping at night and feeding themselves, I want to take more bandwidth to bring my students into my home for things, to be able to like have more hospitality, to be a little more vulnerable with just kind of sharing life with them. I think that would be a good start. Well, Jonathan, I just so appreciate how you have touched on so many different practical experiences you've had. I think the things you've shared will be helpful to other Christian faculty. I think they'll be helpful for students even who may not have ever heard some of these, the reasonings you've given. I really appreciate your challenge there to bring your doubts to God as well. So yeah, thank you for this. Spence, do you have anything else to add or any other questions? I it too. You have some of the most fascinating research I've heard too. I love the idea of your researching nature's application of these things too. That's a fascinating segment. If you copy nature, you don't have to be original. It's great. Yeah, I love that definition of R &D, which is just rob and duplicate, right? You're just robbing and duplicating from nature. Yeah. Well, Shane Spence, it was a pleasure to talk to you and thank you for having me on your show. I appreciate it. 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. 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. 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.