MIT prof finds no conflict between faith and science

Ultimately, Troy Van Voorhis, a theoretical chemist and professor at MIT, decided his pursuit of science presented no conflict with his “undeniable” experience with God.

Often, college professors counter pose God and science as if the two were irreconcilable. Faith in God damages unrestricted science, they say, and the pure scientist ought to withhold opinions on such doubtful subjects as the existence of God.

But Van Voorhis, who developed the first practical implementation of a Meta-GGA in Density Functional Theory, doesn’t subscribe to the academia-sustained divorce of faith and science.

“I was raised in a Christian household, but like many raised in the Christian faith, there came a time when I had to wrestle with my faith and answer the question if it was really relevant, and I decided it was not,” Van Voorhis says in a Veritas Forum video. “But when I was in graduate school I had an encounter with God that made me rethink my suppositions about how God operated in the world.”

Van Voorhis was raised a Presbyterian in Indianapolis. He earned a BA from Rice University, where he worked under Gus Scuseria to advance the science of Density Functional Theory, a computational quantum mechanical modeling method used in physics, chemistry and materials science to investigate the electronic structure. He continued his work at MIT and discovered applications that have been useful for solar panels.

After attaining notoriety for his work, he went on to UC Berkeley to get his PhD in 2001 in the field of theoretical chemistry.

While he stopped attending church in college, he restarted at Berkeley after he experienced God in an undeniable way.

God “called me to make a new decision about whether I wanted to follow what He had to say or to do other things, and I decided to follow Him,” Van Voorhis says. “I’m the unusual case that I didn’t have any Christian friends at the time and I was not going to church. I was just getting ready one morning, and I felt like God spoke to me.”

But it wasn’t just a “mystical” conversation with the Big Man upstairs, Van Voorhis says. God challenged him to give away “the vast majority of my possessions.”

And that’s how he learned that faith is not just thinking, it’s doing.

“Once you start doing things that reinforce the belief that you hold, that is actually quite important from an intellectual standpoint,” he says. “Things like the Christian faith are intellectual. There is intellectual content to it. But they are not meant to be confined solely to an intellectual discourse.” Read the rest of no conflict between science and faith.

He went from cooking dope to cooking up raps

His class clowning and trouble making were managed by parental discipline until his parents divorced when he was 10. Then Tyler Brasel went over the edge. He withdrew from his family, rebelled and started using drugs.

Enthralled with hip-hop music touting marijuana, Tyler took his first toke of cannabis after 9th grade, and it became his daily joy.

As the star quarterback on his football squad in Memphis, Tennessee, he did not ease off the drug use. When he got tired of weed, he turned to pills.

To pay for his growing habit, he sold tabs, Xanax bars, Ecstasy and hemp — just like his favorite rappers. He lived on top of the world, well-liked at school and on the team. Girls were crawling all over him, according to News Release Today.

But then he got arrested and his parents found out about his addictions. As he sat in a jail cell with felony charges leveled against him, he began to wonder about the Jesus he heard about as a child growing up in the Bible Belt.

“Is there really a God?” he asked. “Are angels and demons real? What is my purpose in life? What is the Jesus guy everyone always talks about? Why can’t we see God if he’s real? How did this beautiful creation originate?” One day, he genuinely cried out to God and experienced a supernatural encounter so profound it left him changed, even as he stumbled from time to time.

Ty went to Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) where he gained notoriety forming the bi-racial rap duo “Comftable Kidz,” which ratcheted up some critical acclaim with its recordings. Meanwhile, Ty was slipping back into alcohol and partying, and he got arrested four times in his freshman year in college.

As he sat in a jail cell, he reflected on his life’s direction. If I keep going down this path, I’m going to ruin my life, he remembered thinking, according to his website. I wanna thrive, I wanna live life, he concluded.

He knew that as a Christian he wasn’t supposed to be glorifying the things of this world, as he was doing in Comftabale Kids. There was a nagging inside that he was supposed to be using his gifts for God, and it kept growing until he dropped out of school, broke up the duo, and went back his mother’s house to work solo projects.

Lil T (or Young T) — as he calls himself on “Praying Hands” — had no money, no plans, no car — just Jesus.

There were plenty of detractors nay-saying his decision to leave school. But God began to bless him: first a good paying job, then he started a clothing line (Pure Clothes). Doors opened for him to record and perform live in Memphis. He started dropping songs in 2016 at a rapid clip and producing videos.

His current album is “Destined for Greatness,” a frank introspection into the things that tripped him up as a young man. Read the rest of Christian hip hop artist Tyler Brasel.