The Shocking Truth About Life's Origins with Dr. James Tour
InsideĀ This Episode
The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, but chemist and nanotechnologist Dr. James Tour believes the science behind these theories is largely false, and he continues to challenge top researchers to provide real evidence. Named one of the world's most influential scientific minds, Dr. James Tour often finds himself in the spotlight for his heated debates against secular scientists. In this interview, he explains why this topic is so important to him, how origin-of-life science has fallen short, and how a Jewish boy from New York fell in love with Jesus decades ago.Ā
Watch more videos from Dr. Tour: www.youtube.com/c/DrJamesTourĀ
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: The origin of life on earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, but today's guest believes the science behind these theories is largely false, and he continues to challenge top researchers to provide real evidence. Named one of the world's most influential scientific minds, Dr. James Tour often finds himself in the spotlight for his heated debates against secular scientists.
You get really passionate about this topic.
Dr. James Tour: Yeah, I get passionate. I mean, you get slapped around enough, you're going to get kind of passionate.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Dr. Tour is a chemist, a nanotechnologist, and a professor at Rice University here in Houston, Texas. Welcome, Dr. Tour.
Dr. James Tour: Thank you.
Eric Huffman: Thank you for being here.
Dr. James Tour: Thank you.
Eric Huffman: Let's just start by sharing a little bit about your expertise. In layman's terms, you're talking to a pastor here, right? So, I don't know a lot about what you do. What's your specific field of science? What do you focus on?
Dr. James Tour: Well, I'm trained as an organic chemist, and so, synthetic organic chemist, building molecules, both natural products, but mainly trained to do methodology, come up with new methods to build molecules. My own research has moved in that direction, partially.
We build molecules that will act as little molecular machines, drill into cells to kill them or to treat them. Then we have a whole area of materials, new materials, high performance materials that we make. And then we have another area where we work on energy and building new materials for that. And then also electronics, memory, electronic memory we've built.
Eric Huffman: Okay. Wow. Sounds like a lot. What's some of the most exciting advancements or things that are happening in your field today?
Dr. James Tour: In my field or in my lab?
Eric Huffman: Either.
Dr. James Tour: Okay. In my lab, you know, the most exciting... it's a little bit hard. It's like saying, which one of your four children do you love the most? You get that. So, these Nano machines, one of my students, Ciceron Ayala-Orozco, developed these molecular jackhammers that can really pound into cells. And that's going very well.
Another one of my students, Xuan Luong, he came up with a new method to make graphene, which is a single atomic sheets of graphite, very strong material. And that has been able to scale very well. So we started a company and they're up over a ton a day in the fabrication of that material.
We have a battery company that's really taken off and doing very well. We're separating a lot of metals from electronic waste and that company is doing very well. So we've been able to transition many of these advancements. It's always exciting to see.
Eric Huffman: Wow. In addition to all of that, you also find yourself diving into cultural conversations that are often somewhat controversial. Most recently, you've been in the spotlight around origin of life questions. I'm just curious why you would leverage your public platform for that particular area of science. Of everything out there there is to talk about, why that topic?
Dr. James Tour: It was really not by choice. I just fell into it. I was at a seminar overseas and I saw somebody give a talk on carbohydrates and the complexity of carbohydrates that are on every cell surface. I stepped outside and a friend of mine was there, David Berlinski, and he was saying, "You know, I just don't understand how these things could have come about all by themselves. I had never studied origin of life." And he says, "Jim, why don't you write an article and put it in the journal inference?" Because he was working with the journal at the time. And I said, "Okay, maybe I'll pull something together."
And so I started researching this. What are the ways that people have proposed that life came about? And it is organic chemist. So, so origin of life is before biology, before evolution could have taken hold, before any biology, it's strictly organic chemistry.
And so as I started looking into this. I started asking my colleagues, is there anything here? And they'd send me a couple of papers on it and I'd ask them, you know, how did these things come about? They said, well, suppose this reaction, this reaction.
So I started studying this and I thought, "This is nonsense. This is, this is not true. It could not have happened this way." So I wrote an article for the journal Inference and then the world exploded.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Dr. James Tour: Yeah. Yeah. So those who work in the area were very upset and they started contesting with me and I got a lot of very upset people saying, you know, I'm a religious fanatic and that's why I wrote it. I said nothing to do with my faith. This is just looking at the science.
So I wrote another article and another one. And I started putting it out there. It was actually during COVID because I had given a talk on origin of life and then I was kind of slammed by, by other people on the internet. And so during COVID, I couldn't travel. So I started making videos on this and started posting them up there first, just with friends of mine doing the editing and things like that, and it just exploded from there.
So it's not like I, I wanted this fight. In fact, I was blissfully unaware that if I just publish a scientific paper that things could explode around me.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. As a scientist committed to your craft and your discipline, did it bother you what you saw or maybe what you didn't see in terms of the research going on?
Dr. James Tour: Oh yeah. It bothered me because I knew all it was showing is that life could not have formed that way for multiple reasons. And I'd point these things out and nobody would contest with me on the science. They'd never say, No, no, no, no, no. You've got the science wrong. If they did that, I'd have been very happy because that's the way science normally moves. You propose something and people push back on it and they show you the rationale, the scientific rationale. But none of what was coming back at me was science. There was no science in this.
Eric Huffman: So what was it? If it wasn't science, what did you see?
Dr. James Tour: It was accusations that this is a religious guy trying to say that God of the gaps. And I said, "I never mentioned God." I never said "because we don't know, therefore God." And so I was being accused of things that I never said. But in science, if nobody pushes back with science, it was ad hominem attack. And then they would double down and say that their results are sound. They would say things like, most of the paradoxes on origin of life have already been solved. Like zero of them have been solved. None of them. Tell me what do you think that is solved here? And they would never give me an answer. They would just go on another YouTube channel and say it again or make comments about me.
And so then I knew that there's some other agenda here that these guys must have because for 40 years they've been working on their careers and trying to advance this and making many, many claims. Which they'll make a claim in their papers that goes way beyond what their data showed. And then the press takes it from there and ramps it up much more. And then that gets into textbooks so that the textbooks, you look at origin of life in textbook, it can't have happened that way.
Eric Huffman: But it's in textbooks being taught like it happened. And if like they say, if a lie gets told enough times by the right people, then it becomes the truth in people's minds.
Dr. James Tour: I've heard that.
Eric Huffman: I can understand. That's probably what bothered you the most. I mean, not even as a theologian, as a scientist, like that's just bad science.
Dr. James Tour: It was just bad science. And then I had other people coming up to me saying, "I agree with you. I agree with you. You got this right."
Eric Huffman: Behind the scenes?
Dr. James Tour: Oh yeah. But don't use my name because they didn't want to go through what I was going through. I had several colleagues at Rice, synthetic chemist colleagues, tell me that they agree with me. I had several people over the internet contact me and say, "I don't want to be known for this." Because any chemist sees, everybody sees what I see.
I've even said to the guys in origin of life, I said, you know, you see exactly what I see and they won't contest with that. They'll just stay quiet.
Eric Huffman: It's too much of a threat to their narrative.
Dr. James Tour: But I can understand that. Iif you have for 30 or 40 years worked in an area and made all sorts of claims and then somebody says, you know, the emperor has no clothes, you don't want to end your career like that.
Eric Huffman: I can understand it too, but it's also very scary, as a layman, to think about the scientific community wielding such power.
Dr. James Tour: But COVID opened things up. COVID exposed all of this. Even for me. I mean, I wasn't an anti-vaxxer. I was entrusted these things. And then you start finding out that there's something wrong here. You told us, don't even bother wearing a mask. Okay. Well, that's not going to... and then, no, wear a mask, wear two masks. Science is not like this. Real science is not like this.
And then as a scientist, you start looking at this virus and the structure of this thing and how you have multiple cationic centers next to each other. Nature doesn't do this. I mean, this thing was made to bind to humans. This was interesting.
Eric Huffman: It was engineered, right? So if you said that you were... there was a time when you were a bigot or canceled for saying that.
Dr. James Tour: Yeah. And then these things start coming out, and it don't say it was ever engineered. I mean, this came from a bat in a market. When all of science starts falling apart around you, scientists used to have a lot of street cred. All you had to do was say "scientists say", and everybody would give attention. Okay. So now "scientists say", it's like, therefore I don't believe you at all. And justifiably so.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. James Tour: Because I've seen it with origin of life and then I lived through it with COVID. And now I'm far more circumspect when I hear something.
Eric Huffman: Right. I mean, generally, what do you attribute this phenomenon to? If you see it across disciplines, you see it in origin of life, you see it in COVID, there's plenty of other examples, I'm sure from different fields of science where some other pressure is applied to what's being discovered and unscientific facts are being injected into scientific findings to fit a narrative. What's the force there? Is it simply greed? Is it there's a anti-faith secularist strain in our society? What do you attribute that to?
Dr. James Tour: There's a word that as a pastor you might've heard of. Sin.
Eric Huffman: The biggest word in the human language. I've heard that word. Yeah.
Dr. James Tour: People thought scientists were somehow different But we're no different. We want to allay our fears. We want to look good to other people. We're just like everybody else. Sin creeps in. I saw this with origin of life. There was this mindset and you couldn't argue against it or else somehow you're attacked. And this is not good.
I was living this now with origin of life. And now I'm seeing this with COVID as well. And the attacks that come from people that really know almost nothing about chemistry are contesting with me. And I'll point something out to them and they say, no, no. It's like, have you ever taken a course on this? You don't understand anything. You don't understand anything.
You're making these claims, you're parroting what other people have said, but it makes no sense. And then the community is not standing behind me. They're not coming forward because they're afraid the same things, the criticisms that I'm getting are going to come at them. And I understand. Look, I'd ever studied origin of life, I didn't care. And then when I started studying this, this is where it was all exposed.
Scientists are very busy. You get, you get 300 emails a day. You got to address and then you got to write for grant money. You go hat in hand all over begging for money to keep your program funded. And then once you get funding, you have to maintain it because you've built a group up to that level. So you have to now maintain that.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. James Tour: It's a lot of work. And the last thing you need is to have the community against you for something that has nothing to do with the particular field that you're studying. So why go ahead and stand behind Jim Tour publicly. Why do that?
There's a professor from Princeton who's just retired. And now that he's retired, he says, "Hey, let's write a paper together on this.
Eric Huffman: Because he's got his pension. He's set. Oh man. I'm laughing, but I'm also crying on the inside. I just think it's important to point out for anybody watching and listening right now. I think there is a, I don't know, unspoken belief that you have delved into this topic of origin of life because of your Christian worldview and you want to prove something is right about Christianity or about the Bible that flies in the face of the science, in this case. But I think there's more to it than that for you. And forgive me if I'm reading too much into it. I see incredible value in just fighting for the purity of science itself.
Science in our culture is like an institution that is one of the underpinnings of our wellbeing. It's just like the family or like the church or the government. Like we need these things to be of integrity. And once the integrity of your institutions is comes into question, I mean, that's a slow, steady descent for our civilization. I think if people stop trusting what the scientists say, where does that leave us, you know? And so I think religion aside, this is a topic that's worth fighting for just because of what you saw when you looked in.
Let's talk about that. What you saw when you looked into the research? Without getting too deep into the weeds and losing everybody who doesn't know the big words, what did you see was missing in the scientist's explanations of the origins of life and the assertions they were making?
Dr. James Tour: What I saw was everything was messed up when you look at these molecules. So there's four classes of compounds that were built out of, four main classes of compounds. You have the carbohydrates, which are the sugars, polysaccharides. That's what they're called. Can be called polysaccharides sugars for carbohydrates.
You have the proteins, which are made up of amino acids. You have the nucleotides, which is the RNA and the DNA. So you take the nucleotides, you hook them together, you get the RNA and the DNA.
Then you have the lipids, which are the things that surround the cell membranes and heavily concentrated in fats as well.
So you have to have these four classes of compounds. I started looking at what are the origin of life proposals on how these were made? Because it's hard to make these. None of them was valid for how this would form on an early earth. None of them was valid.
So for carbohydrates, first of all, nobody knows how to make the carbohydrates. They talked about the foremost reaction. The foremost reaction, when you start looking at it is an utter mess. It makes gazillions of billions upon billions of structures.
When you have impurities, you can't do chemistry because those impurities come up the worst. Biology can handle impurities. So in other words, you can take a handful of supplements and your body knows what to do with each one of those. You've mixed them all together in your stomach and biology has enzymes that select these out. Chemistry does not have this.
And an OH group on this molecule will compete with the OH group on that molecule that you want to couple. It doesn't know the difference. So the foremost reaction would be invalid. It couldn't work. And people who have used the foremost reaction, they say, "Hey, we can see a little bit of it in there because we have instruments that can detect to a very fine level. But you could never use that. And so then they would buy that from a chemical manufacturer and use it in pure form. That's cheating. You'd never be able to do that on an early earth.
So then you have to take those carbohydrates and hook them together. That's the polymerization problem. The polymerizations are unfavored. There's something called the free energy and the free energy is positive. It means it's unfavored. It wants to go back to starting material. The free energy was positive.
Then it was the ability to hook these up. You get trillions of different arrangements you can get, but biology uses just one. How did it select that thing out? There were no enzymes around. So that didn't work.
Then you go to the next class of compounds, the same problems. The proteins from the amino acids. First of all, the amino acids, nature uses 20 amino acids. But if you just randomly make amino acids, say in a Miller-Urey experiment, you get thousands of amino acids. How do you just get the 20 you want? Won't these other ones compete? And they just go with alpha amino acids. What about the beta and the gamma amino acids? How come those aren't competing? Because those form two.
Then the whole element of chirality, meaning that everything in nature has a hand in this. You have a left hand and a right hand, just chooses one, not the other. And with the carbohydrates, it just chooses one. With the amino acids, it just chooses another. And so nobody knew how that was forming properly.
Then you have to hook the amino acids together to get the protein. Free energy is positive. It doesn't want to do this. The way nature does this is it has catalysts that drive this thing and pull the water away from this. When you're in an aqueous system, it goes the other way. So nobody solved it. They have these extra things hanging off that would compete, that stop the polymerization. So you can't make the amino acids. Okay.
So let's look at the nucleotides. Maybe life started with the nucleotides. You get to the whole RNA hypothesis of life. Same problem. To make a nucleotide, you first have to make a sugar. But remember, we couldn't solve the sugar problem. Then you have to hook a base onto it. And then you have to polymerize these. Guess what? Free energy is positive. It doesn't want to polymerize. And you get the wrong assignment because you have this free hydroxyl.
And then the stability. Even if you had RNA, it would want to go back the other way. It wouldn't want to stay there. It decomposes very quickly. Then every time you polymerize RNA, every time you polymerize a protein, every time you polymerize a sugar, there's a code there. There's code embedded. It's like taking letters and randomly hooking them together. It'd be unintelligible. That's what these are. They're unintelligible. Nature has a code. It has to be a prescribed code. Just a box of letters is no good. Just sticking the letters together randomly is no good. So you have to have these in a certain way. That's the code.
Nobody knows where the code came from. They'd say, well, one formed randomly. If one molecule form randomly, the chances are less than one in 10 to the 40th. Once you're less than one in 10 to the 40th, the universe does not have enough time to do this. Even if you give the universe 14 billion years, there's not enough time to solve something in one 10 to the 40th.
Let's just say one happened to form. It would decompose very quickly. It would decompose within minutes if it's RNA. It would decompose within a couple of days or probably hours it would racemize if it were a protein.
Eric Huffman: It would have to survive a long time.
Dr. James Tour: It would have to survive. Yeah. But people say, well, it had a long time. No. Time is actually your enemy because once this thing forms is going to decompose very rapidly. And then once it forms, it has to find all the substrates that it can work on. But those substrates could not have been there when it was forming or else they would have gummed up the works. So all of a sudden it formed and now it got away from all the other ones and it found all the substrates it needs to act upon. It's crazy.
There's one more class of comments. You want to cut me off here, but I'm telling you, you still got to deal with the lipids. People thought that lipids were easy. No, it's not easy. The two ends of glycerol are enantiotopic, which means you have to selectively take one and not the other. And then you often have double bonds in there that you wouldn't know how to arrange. You often have hydroxyl groups that you got to orient. So the lipids are also hard. So all four classes you cannot make using a prebiotic method. How are you going to even get started? You can't make the code.
Here's the other thing. We can take a cell. We can take a cell today, we can deconstruct it and put all the different components in bottles. So you already have the code there because I'm giving you the polymers. Now I say, just put it back together. Put Humpty Dumpty back together. Can you do that? In your modern laboratory with all the modern techniques that you have, can you do that? Nobody can do that.
We don't even know how to go about doing it. We don't even know how to put the things back together again. You have to construct at least 15 different large particular pieces and then have them assembled together and try to do that. Nobody knows how to even do that.
So even if you had all the pieces, how would an early earth under a rock in a tidal pool, how would they come together? Then you got the concentration effects. You have the racemization effects. So many things on top of that. Any one of these stops life. And there are thousands of these problems. Thousands.
Eric Huffman: So your point is that it's not just statistically unlikely, it's impossible.
Dr. James Tour: It's impossible. It's impossible. Statistics shows you impossibility. Once you head up to a certain number, and it doesn't have to be infinity, just a number, one in 10 to the 40th, the number of combinations of just protein-protein non-covalent interactions in a single yeast cell, which is a very simple cell, is one, the number of interactions is the possible is 10 to the 79 billion. 10 to the 79 billion is a one with 79 billion zeros after it. The number of elemental particles is 10 to the 90, one with 90 after it, 90 zeros. This is one with 79 billion zeros. The number of elemental particles in the universe is 10 to the 90, one with 90 zeros after it. So that becomes a statistical impossibility. So we can say impossible.
Now, you would think that these folks that work in the area of origin of life, you would think that they've got answers to this. Guess what? Crickets. They don't, because I've posed these problems to them. And if you're in a room with them, they'll just sit there and stare at you. If you're not in a room with them, they'll just criticize you. They say, well, you know, Tour is the god of the gaps. When people will not engage you, no answer is an answer in itself when there is no answer. So you're bursting to ask me some questions. Go ahead.
Eric Huffman: I have so many. I don't know where to start. But it seems like generally the ones accusing you of god of the gaps are doing the same thing, like without God, I guess, but with, you know, some findings.
Dr. James Tour: Time of the gaps, if we had enough time.
Eric Huffman: Time of the gaps.
Dr. James Tour: Time of the gaps.
Eric Huffman: That's what the argument is?
Dr. James Tour: Yes. Yes. If we had enough time, these things would come together and that's a time of the gaps argument. But these people who work in the area, not the low level people that send me nasty emails, but the people that work in the area, they see exactly what I see. So they don't send me emails criticizing me. They'll never pick out and say, well, Tour said this, that's wrong.
I did a nine part series. It's 10 hours, maybe 14 hours of teachings on this. You would think that if I got something wrong, they would jump all over it.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Dr. James Tour: Nothing. Crickets.
Eric Huffman: What kinds of claims do they make based on this once upon a time theory of theirs? What headlines were they making about their findings?
Dr. James Tour: That we've solved most of the paradoxes in origin of life. That we're able to make the RNA. And once the RNA could form, we could make proteins and the enzymes would then do the assembly. None of this is true. None of this.
And even if you had all the pieces, I'll give you all the pieces, how would it come together? And then when that was asked to Steven Benner, who has come with a lot of grand claims, I was in a seminar when he was asked, okay, if you have all the components of a cell, why don't you just put it together if you can make all these things? You know what he said? He said, well, a career is about four score years. I'm three and a half scores into this. I'll leave this part for the other guys. Why be so dishonest? Why not just say you would have no idea how to do it. That's what I'm talking about. Because when confronted, they'll just wiggle with some silly little comment.
I have never, never heard such an explanation in any other area of science. But in somehow in this area of science, these great chemists, like Steven Benner, think that this is somehow acceptable. It's unacceptable.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it seems to me that it's religious. That's what it feels like is that there's a religious movement going on in this field of science that wants to, for whatever reasons, my gut instinct is that they want to counter the theist narrative, the Christian narrative, Judeo-Christian narrative of a creator, which raises questions about even if they could do all of this in a lab, for me, it may... help me if I'm wrong, but even if they could create what you're talking about in a lab, they still would have created it. Am I missing something?
Dr. James Tour: No, no, you're not missing. First of all, they can't make life. Nobody's ever made it. But even if they could, it doesn't explain how it happened on an early earth. They're what's called pre-biotically relevant experiments.
You would have to show that each one of those things that you did in your lab with modern experimentation that could have been done when there were no instruments around, when there weren't these large chemicals around. So not only can they not do it with all of their expertise, they can't do it in an origin of life, which is a much harder scenario.
You know, you make proposals, you don't have to show those proposals. And then you make proposals and then you try to show it. But I've asked them, what is just your proposal? I'm not asking you to do... just take me through the sequence of things on how life could have originated. What's your proposal on how these molecules could have come together on how this would have happened on an early earth. You know what they say? Crickets. Nothing. Nothing.
You were getting at something else. You were saying this sounds religious. And it does sound religious. What happens when people attack your religion and you don't have an answer? Well, what happens all over the world, and we've seen this throughout human history, you kill them. There's wars over this stuff. Don't pick on my religion.
And this is why in Christianity, we're trying to come with, with, with trained apologists, so we can give an answer. That we don't have to say, well, you're picking on me too. No, we come with answers because answers are hard. It's much easier to just become violent and punch the guy in the face because he said something about my religion that I couldn't answer. It's hard to answer questions. And what people traditionally have done with religion, they've killed over this stuff.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. James Tour: And this is what you see. This has become like a religion where they want to go after the individual rather than after the science. Become a scientific apologist. Become the one who gives an answer based on science. Just do that. You do that with every other field. Why not do it with this field?
Eric Huffman: One of my favorite things you've done publicly is you're laying down the gauntlet in a YouTube video a little over a year ago, where you called out Dr. Benner and others in the field by name, 10 of them, and you said if any of them could offer a satisfactory answer to any of the big five questions...
Dr. James Tour: These weren't just big five, these were easy five. Easy five, not big five.
Eric Huffman: ...or origin of life questions, that you would delete all your videos on the topic and you would go away.
Dr. James Tour: And never talk about it again, publicly. So, first of all, this is completely idiotic. Nucleotide polymerization has been demonstrated on montmorillonite clay for decades. Yes, yes, with 30 to 70% 2-5. I asked you for 3-5, which is what you need to have life.
Eric Huffman: What happened?
Dr. James Tour: None of them contacted me. None of them had an answer. The only one that contacted me was Lee Cronin to say, I think your questions are not relevant. With no explanations for why they were not relevant. But none of them would address this. Well, what does that tell you? And remember, who was gonna check their answers? Do you remember who I said to check?
Eric Huffman: I think you said your audience, like the public.
Dr. James Tour: I said, Three of these ten. I chose three.
Eric Huffman: Oh, that's right. You did choose three of the 10.
Dr. James Tour: I said three of you 10 will check for the others. And if you propose an answer, then the other two will check yours. So I even let the students grade their own exams.
Eric Huffman: That's right.
Dr. James Tour: And they couldn't do it because they couldn't mess around now. Because if they said, Hey, this solves it, oh, the scientific community would look at that.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Dr. James Tour: And I knew they couldn't solve it. And you know, my friends were very worried that I was gonna be taken off the internet, that I would be shut down.
Eric Huffman: Sure, you have to follow through.
Dr. James Tour: I said, "Trust me, trust me, I'm an organic chemist. I know how to write an exam that cannot be solved. I know how to do this. This cannot be solved.
Eric Huffman: So the answer that Cronin gave, that they're irrelevant questions, how does he justify that?
Dr. James Tour: He has something called assembly theory. But assembly theory doesn't tell us how life originated. It doesn't even work with real molecules. He put pictures of molecules in his nature paper, and this is what I challenged him at Harvard. When we had that Harvard debate, I said, look, you put these molecules, what's the chemistry that hooks these together? These are not Velcro balls that just stick together. There's chemistry here. Then he got up, he says, well, I wasn't referring to these amino acids. This is a general concept. His general concept has no relevance in the real world when it comes to origin of life. Maybe it'll solve something else. It's not gonna do anything for origin of life. Nothing.
And then this whole methodology of using mass spectrometry to break up molecules to tell you that's the route that we're gonna define complexity. You don't blow a molecule up and use that as a scheme for a synthetic direction for what it would take to make these. I mean, there's so much about what he's saying that doesn't work for origin of life.
The thing that I like about Lee, because I'm sure he's gonna be watching this, first of all, I think Lee is a very smart guy. He's not an idiot.Ā No way. Lee is very smart. Number two, I really appreciate him coming out to Harvard and having this discussion with me when nobody else would dare come forward.
Number three, I think he's beginning to see precisely what I see. Remember, he's the guy that said in 2011 that he would make life in his lab in two years. Now he's backtracked off of that and he's confessed, yes, that was a little ambitious here.
But he is seeing exactly what I see. He is seeing when you see these complex molecules, what his assembly theory is giving him is that if you just have one of these complex molecules, that doesn't mean anything because some molecules may have formed in a blast or something. But if you have multiples of them, that says that it had some purpose, there was some purposefulness behind it.
What's the word that he used? He says it had some causal history. He won't say designer because he's picked too much on the intelligent designers. It has a causal history. So you see, this is just a change of words. So it had a causal history. He won't say what the cause was. He won't say what this cause was. But it had a causal history.
I don't need his assembly theory to do this. I can look at a molecule and you give me four copies of them, I can tell you that had a causal history, that had a causal. You don't need this. Now, he'll put a number on this. I could give a general number from one to 10 on complexity. I could. But he's built something that he argues gives him a more quantitative number. Fine. But that doesn't tell me anything. It doesn't tell me anything, how these molecules came together. Nothing.
And he's seeing what I'm seeing. He sees, Lee Cronin, and if he disagrees with me, he can challenge me. He sees exactly what I'm seeing. He has seen the problems with the origin of life area because he has said things about origin of life area that he's asked me not to quote him anymore on. So I agreed not to quote him on. But he's made some strong claims about origin of life that are not very flattering. He says, people make a molecule and they make another molecule. Now what?
You haven't made a cell and you trace the information. The information came from another cell. But if you try to trace that information back, he himself said it goes back to LUCA which is the last common ancestor molecule. So it must have come from there and that must have come from somewhere outside the cell. He says, this is extraordinary. You think this is what I've been saying, it's extraordinary, and this information must have come from outside the cell.
So you see, his pondering the assembly theory is taking him right back to what I've been saying. He's seeing exactly what I see. He's seeing the complexity of this that his world of little things isn't gonna solve this thing. It's just that he's published enough papers and said enough things, it's not easy for him to backtrack. But I think eventually he's gonna be forced to say, yeah, there's a lot more to this than I had considered. Because he is the one who says, yeah, I was a bit overambitious when I said we'd have this in two years. But other people have said this sort of thing.
Jack Szostak, Nobel Prize winner, was at Harvard, now at University of Chicago. He said within three to five years, and this was like in 2014 he said this, that we'll have life in our lab. Now he confesses he can't even make RNA in a pre-biotically relevant manner.
Dimitar Sasselov said the same thing. I mean, this is nonsense. You know what? It's just like when people propose when the Lord is gonna return. They're always wrong on their dates. These guys are always wrong on their dates. So I think they're gonna stop saying it now.
Eric Huffman: Well, yeah, we can all relate to that human side of it. We've all been in a situation where we've gotten out over our skis and been wrong for whatever length of time about something that we were adamant about. And seeing the truth about that is one thing, but saying it is another.
That's much harder to do, coming out publicly and saying, I was wrong and so many years of my life were spent on these false assumptions. And I feel like that's what's needed here. I mean, if what's going on, if what you're saying is what's really going on, that's what's needed is sort of a coming clean. Like you, I probably don't see it coming. I don't see it happening because there's so much pride and profit involved in this work.
I will say one thing that kind of troubles me from the Christian side of this as an observer from the outside is that it feels a little bit like, in this particular conversation about origin of life, like Christians are being set up to root against the science. Like Christians are cheering you on and any other Christian voices that are taking on this false science and saying, ha ha, they're wrong and we're right. They'll never know the answer. I just never want to be in that position as a Christian where I'm hoping they don't find the answers they're looking for. Would it be that bad of a thing for Christians if they were to find the origin of life and prove it somehow?
Dr. James Tour: So, first of all, I have never said that they will not discover this. I presume one day we'll understand how to make life. I just presume. I don't know for sure. Because even if we put everything in place, you know, you just take a dead cell, take a dead cell, it just died. So everything's about bring it back to life. We've never been able to do that. Because you would think a resurrection is easier than an ab initio synthesis because everything's pretty much in place.
Eric Huffman: Sure. You've got the stuff already. Yeah, you've got the stuff already. And even describing what it is we just lost when that cell just died is a very hard thing to figure out. We're not talking about a human being where there's so much complexity, just a single cell. When a single cell just dies, what is it we just lost? I mean, there's so much there. There's so much machinery there. So even defining it is hard. But I presume one day we'll be able to bring a cell back to life and maybe even build life.
So I've never said we can't do it. That totally blows away God-of-the-gaps arguments. But we're very far from that day. We're very far from that day. I don't know how we would do it, but it's nowhere close. But in 500 years, I mean, a lot happens. If you asked a man 500 years ago, will we ever get to the moon and walk around on it and come back, they'd be like, we can't even fly, let alone space flight, let alone to the... He would have had no concept of how to deal with that, how to process that. That's where we are with origin of life. We have no idea how to begin to pull this thing together.
Eric Huffman: You had another question, I forgot what it was.
Eric Huffman: Well, I just want Christians to have a posture of generally being pro-science, pro-discovery, pro-knowledge. I think God loves science. I think He made it possible. And so I just want us to not be in an antagonistic position or posture towards science.
Dr. James Tour: Yeah, yeah. But you can understand Christians because they've been kind of picked on a lot. Sure. Oh, you think God created all of this? Ha, ha, ha. We've kind of shown how life could have formed. You haven't. You haven't. So they've been singled out a lot too, and so there's a reaction. So it kind of goes both ways.
But also philosophically, if someone can say, well, there's nothing fancy, but we can make life, we can make life and we can cause life to evolve to higher order. You don't need God for all of this. So is there a problem here? Is there a problem where people are somehow trying to dismiss God because they're such sophisticated scientists and they can dismiss this because we know how this happens.
What would be the motivation for that? What would be the motivation to somehow dismiss God and make these claims that religion has retarded people, has held them back, the folks like Dawkins and the four musketeers and the claims that they make. When people hit you enough times, I mean, you're gonna react back to them and you get the schadenfreude, you kind of rejoice when they can't solve this thing. And so I can certainly understand this.
And then what is their motivation for trying to dismiss God? Has God made science? Has God stopped science? In fact, so many people historically were Christians who loved God and made great scientific discoveries. What is it that they want to dismiss God? Is it because then they can do whatever they want and get away with it, that they don't have to feel convicted of their sin because they're just a bunch of material things and DNA made them do it? I mean, what is the motivation here for them being so antagonistic against God? I think for many people, it might be, I don't know, they can answer this themselves.
Is it so that they can use their genitals as much as they'd like to use it without feeling any conviction? What is it here that they want to dismiss all of God? So I can understand where Christians might be upset.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. I was thinking as you were talking, I think probably 20, 30 years ago, it would have been fair to say that there was significant anti-science bias within much of the American church or the Western church. Today, at least I think I hear you saying that there could be a pretty significant measure of anti-Christian bias in the scientific community in the West, is that?
Dr. James Tour: Yes, I think that that's certainly true. You know, I come from a Jewish home. I believe Jesus is the Messiah, that He's risen from the dead.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Dr. James Tour: You know, if I say to somebody, you know, we get to talk and I say, I'm Jewish, they think I'm really smart. If I say I'm an evangelical Christian, they think I'm an idiot.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Dr. James Tour: Yeah, yeah. And so, yes, there is this mindset, there is this perception. I certainly think that there is. hat is the last word that you can call somebody in sciences that won't get you canceled? It's the creationist. Jim Tour is a creationist. Well, fundamentally, yeah, I believe God made the heavens and the earth and everything in them in six days. And what the length of those days is, I'm not sure about. But He made everything.
And so, yeah, I'm a creationist in that sense, but I've never used creationist arguments in my science. Take on the science. But they'll say he's a creationist and therefore we don't need to deal with him. We can just dismiss him.
Eric Huffman: It's like a slur.
Dr. James Tour: It's a slur that's still allowed in the academy. He's a creationist. Oh, he's one of those. We don't have to address his scientific problems with this because he's a creationist.
Eric Huffman: I'm guessing you feel like that's behind a lot of the attacks you've faced is other scientists' knowledge that you are an outspoken Christian?
Dr. James Tour: No, that's the excuse they use for not engaging me. The reason they don't engage me is because they have not the arguments. That's the reason. Because they see exactly what I see. What I'm seeing is not magical. What I'm seeing is not difficult. Just remember, I mean, you tell any scientist, six glucose molecules, six glucose molecules can hook together in over one trillion ways, but they only hook together in one way to make this carbohydrate that you need. How did that happen on an early earth? Pre-enzymes, how did that happen? Go figure that one out.
I mean, they see exactly what I see and they don't answer. So that's the problem. They'll use the creationist as a rationale, but it's a false rationale. They don't want to address the science. And I call them out. I call them out right now. I'll call them out right now. Step forward and answer the science. You're so cool, you're so sophisticated. Go ahead and answer the science. I'm just calling you forth, I'm challenging you, everything. I put five questions up there. Go ahead, answer those. How did those come forward? I put the five questions and they dealt with the different classes of the compounds, the polymerization, the code, where'd the code come from? And how would you do the assembly? Just answer it.
Eric Huffman: Right. You get really passionate about this topic.
Dr. James Tour: Yeah, I get passionate. I mean, you get slapped around enough, you're gonna get kind of passionate. People say, why do you get so passionate? I mean, look, look, I'm locked and loaded. I mean, people have come at me and I didn't always be this way. But you slapped me around enough and I'm gonna like... come on.
Eric Huffman: To what extent though would you say your faith or your belief in the Bible and especially around creation fueled your initial sort of foray into this?
Dr. James Tour: There was zero. There was zero. I'm telling you, I saw this seminar. This was not a Christian conference. I saw this seminar and he said, How did this happen? How did this assemble like this? Then I asked my colleagues, how did these things go together? I bought into the mantra. I thought people in the area of origin of life had so much of this figured out. And then you look at it and it's a house of cards. And it's strictly the science that makes... because... this gets back to one of your earlier questions. So what if we find out we can make life? What if we find out how the origin of life happened? That doesn't negate God, not at all.
You know, prior to the 1950s, the mid 1950s, we didn't know why when two parents are tall, their child is tall. We didn't know why. It was observed, but why? We didn't understand that the informational code was stored in the DNA that was passed on from the parents' children. We didn't know where that code.
So then in the 1950s, Watson and Crick, they defined this and this is the informational code. And then others showed that then this transfers to RNA and RNA to the proteins, the enzymes that are the little constructors of us. So they got their prescription, the things that construct us, the machines that construct us, the Nano machines got their code from the DNA. Now we understand. Does this make God less in my eyes? No, it makes him all the more magnanimous. Oh, that's how you do it. That's how you do it, Lord. It actually elevates Him in my eyes in the sense that, wow, you are extraordinary.
I mean, this is amazing that you thought of it because just a few decades earlier, it was thought that the cell was a bunch of protoplasm, just a goo in there that worked. How? Well, I don't know. It's just a bunch of protoplasm. And you find out this level of sophistication that every year, the problem of making a cell, it gets harder because we learn more about what the cell can do. And you're like, Oh, to solve making a cell, I'm gonna have to do that too. And then I have to do that too. And the next year, I'm gonna have to do that too. And so it actually gives you a better appreciation.
I know how photosynthesis works, how trees grow. I know. The man, the woman on the street doesn't know. I look at a leaf, I know that there's a magnesium atom sitting in a porphyrin, a photon of light hits that, it ejects an electron and that's what starts the photosynthesis process to convert CO2 into oxygen and take that carbon to build a tree. I know that. The person on the street doesn't know that. Does that mean that God is less in my eyes? No, that means He's more, more, because I get to see the glory of His creation that nobody else understands, the glory of his creation.
And I get to see at a level in my mind's eye what's happening, every time I look at a leaf, what's happening. When I speak to you, you know what happens when I speak to you? I'm looking in your eyes, I know what's happening. And in your brain, you're hearing these words. Sound is nothing, it's just the pushing of airwaves. And then those airwaves then bounce off these little devices in your ears and start vibrating them. This is transferred to an electrical signal and this electrical signal, then you perceive sound.
When a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? The answer's no. The sound is in our own brain. It's in here. There's no sound out there. All it does is it pushes airwaves.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Dr. James Tour: The sound is from in here. The man on the street doesn't know this, I know this. You see how much greater it is for me because I know something about this? This makes God all the greater. So if we find out, okay, when He spoke life into existence, here's what happened. You'd be like, wow. Because God, He gives us the book of Genesis, but He didn't give us the details here. He just kind of spoke it forth. And I'm like, Lord, come on, how'd you do this?
Like Paul says, he says, you ask about with what kind of body are they raised, you fool. I'm like, I actually thought that was a good question. What kind of body are they raised? Just tell me a little bit more, Lord. I mean, how does this happen? Because I want to know. And this is what our forefathers used to say, this is the book of nature. He gives us the Bible, He defines it, but then there's the book of nature and He allows us to explore, to find out.
Eric Huffman: That's the beauty of it. That I love and that's why I want Christians to as much as possible be pro-scientific pursuit because I think God wants to be known and He gave us these tools for that purpose. I think when we discover things that are true, I think he rejoices with the angels. He wants us to know things.
I've been amazed by the rapid development or growth of your YouTube channel. I mean, I think that speaks to the hunger that's out there for real debate, real conversations and knowledge among the people. It's taken off. I mean, you do a great job with it. Do you ever make the mistake of reading the comment section?
Dr. James Tour: Okay, first of all, I don't know which YouTube channel you're looking at. I only have like 160,000 subscribers.
Eric Huffman: Well, I see lots of views. Subscribers in the YouTube world are whatever, and 160,000 is not nothing.
Dr. James Tour: It's not like Kim Kardashian or something.
Eric Huffman: Well, we don't want to do Kim K, yeah.
Dr. James Tour: But for a science person, for a real scientist, it's pretty good. I mean, Brian Keating, he's a real scientist. He has a bigger YouTube channel, so there might be a few others. But for science, it's pretty good. And it's a mixture of science and faith. I used to look at the comments. I don't anymore.
Eric Huffman: Why? Because they're too disruptive. I mean, you want to shake some of these people and say, This obviously is wrong. So I have a friend of mine, a former student of mine who studied... he's a young apologist, and so he's answering a lot of the spiritual questions for me. And he doesn't say, I'm Jim Tour. He says, This is Jim Tour assistant, Zach. So we can get some of those answered when people really ponder things.
And then my producer will read some of the questions and when there are sincere questions, I will try to answer those in new YouTube videos. Now, somebody's going to get upset with me. I've asked this question five times. Well, there's a lot of comments out there and so we can't get to them all. But I plan on doing more sit-downs where my producer just feeds me questions and I just answer them and do this for 15 minutes at a time, once a week or something like that and get more of these answered. But they can be really quite mean.
Eric Huffman: Yes, that's what I was asking about is, you know, like any comment section, you just got to proceed with caution because it can get pretty nasty. A lot of the attacks against you are what I would call ad hominem attacks because they don't go after what you say. They go after who they see that you are or who they think you are. And a lot of it is anti-Christian. You know, you're just a preacher. You're a preacher more than you're a scientist. And you've sort of addressed that critique in our interview already. But sometimes people will go after your passion and your temperament, I guess, since you took on this whole-
Dr. James Tour: Hey, I'm Jewish, man, from New York. I mean, is that not enough?
Eric Huffman: I don't know. I mean, do you get concerned at all that your passion could be perceived as a valid reason to dismiss the Christian-
Dr. James Tour: No, it's a reason. There's a reason they want to dismiss me. That's fine. You know, you've heard of Dana White.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. James Tour: The guy who made the UFC so huge. The guy's amazing. So I'm just gonna quote Dana White here. It's always the losers, the losers that do the attacking. Now, I'm quoting Dana White. I'm not saying this myself because as a Christian, I don't want to call you a loser, a personal loser, because they've been made in the image of God.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. James Tour: But it's those generally that haven't accomplished very much that are criticizing. You know, if you look at the body of the work that I've done, the publications that I've done, the areas that I've just laid out, these areas of science, how many of those people have laid out a single area? Zero. How many of those people have published scientific papers that show they're scientists? Zero. So they're really nothing. They have nothing. They have no standing in this. In a court of law, the judge would say, no standing, dismissed. So there's no standing.
Those are the people who are commenting. The people who understand nothing are the people who are commenting. The people who are very poor public speakers are the people who are commenting. You want to talk about my public speaking? I mean, let's go toe to toe, one against the other. No, they'll sit anonymously and comment. So why should I read this?
All the people who are accomplished people, they don't have time to write these comments and criticize others like this. And they look at my accomplishments and they say, I mean, I can't touch this guy. I can't address him. So they're not people that are worth my taking time to respond to. I did this early on. You know, I try to respond to all the-
Eric Huffman: Well, you never make them happy.
Dr. James Tour: You never make them happy. And then they'll just come with one thing after another, after another. So, yeah, so I just-
Eric Huffman: In your heart of hearts, do you have, as you look back on the debates and things, you have any second thoughts or regrets?
Dr. James Tour: Regrets? Yes, a ton of them.
Eric Huffman: Really?
Dr. James Tour: Oh, yeah. I mean, so many times when things have been asked of me, I just... and there's an very easy answer that if I had been on a one-on-one conversation with this guy sitting in a normal conversation, I would just point it out. Okay, show me here. Show me how this thing is done. So, yeah. Oh, yeah, I have tons of them. My life is a life of regret. Sometimes I want to walk around with a sign that says, I'm sorry, because I'm sure I'm gonna do something to get you upset with me. And I've just apologized in advance.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, I know what that's like.
Dr. James Tour: I mean, when the Holy Spirit gets hold of your heart and you see that you're a sinner saved totally by the grace of God, you have a lot of apologizing to do in life. You know, that I spoke to you the way I spoke to you. I'm sorry about that. You didn't deserve that. It makes me a different individual in the context in which I run. But yeah, that's who I am. I've apologized to students. I've apologized to classes. I've apologized to my research group. I've apologized to my wife like daily. All the time. So, this is my life. I mean, yeah, I blow it all the time.
Eric Huffman: It's really part of being in the public eye as well, especially-
Dr. James Tour: Private people have to apologize a lot too, but they don't.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, yeah. You know, you don't want to back off the claims you're making. They are important enough to get passionate about. So, you don't want to be dispassionate about these points and this topic. It's too important. But at the same time, we're always trying to find where that line is and apologize when we cross it.
Dr. James Tour: And you know, when I hear a talk, I'd like to hear some passion. I have Israelis and Italians that have come and said, You were perfect. All those times you lost your temper, it was perfect.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, they want more of that.
Dr. James Tour: Yeah, they want more.
Eric Huffman: Because it's sincere.
Dr. James Tour: The Israelis love it. The Italians love it. Right. And I guess the Swiss don't like it.
Eric Huffman: Most people like it if you're saying things they agree with. And if you're not, then they think you're a jerk.
Dr. James Tour: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: That's how it works.
Dr. James Tour: But I have learned that if you start shouting, it never comes across well.
Eric Huffman: Sure. Yeah. It's a tough lesson to learn sometimes if you like shouting.
Dr. James Tour: It's a tough lesson to learn. And I'm not sure that I've learned it yet. Yeah. I can't say that, okay, I'm good. I know now.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Dr. James Tour: It's only, you know, this deep that I've learned it and somebody can get me riled up again. And anyway, yeah.
Eric Huffman: Well, there's about 20,000 questions I want to ask you, but we're going to wrap up pretty quickly here. You've got other things to get to. But I want to make sure we have an opportunity for you to talk specifically outside of origin of life, outside of the science that you do about your faith. And I've heard you talk about Jesus publicly. You make no bones about your faith in Him, even though that I'm sure has cost you all kinds of opportunities and accolades in your field. But just generally, personally, who is Jesus to you?
Dr. James Tour: Jesus is the best in every way. This is God come down to earth. God wants to have a relationship with people, but how can He do that? Because no man can approach God and live, the Bible says. He is so amazing. And that makes sense. Anybody who can create the universe, who could even approach Him? Who could even approach Him and live? But He wants to have relationship with us.
And so what He says is, "I will become one of them. I will become a person. I will become just like them. And then I'll explain to them what God is like." But even if I come as a man, they'll be afraid of me. So I'll be born among them. Because if one is born among us, we don't fear them.
You know, there were these guys in college, and we were talking about this once on my YouTube channel, they had tropical fish. And tropical fish are very hard to take care of, but they're beautiful. But every time they'd go to feed the fish, the fish would swim behind the rocks. They could never get close to the fish tank without the fish... And the guy said, "I wish I could become a fish. I would go and tell them, I mean them no harm." Look, watch, you can come out.
God wants to do this. He wants to have a relationship with us so we don't just cower away in fear. So He comes as a man. That's who Jesus is. And He explained to us what God is like. He explained to us, and we learned from His life what God is like. And He's beautiful, He's wonderful. And then He says, oh, by the way, that death that you deserve to die because of your sin, I'll take it. I'll take it.
The Bible says that He took on flesh and blood because His children are flesh and blood. You've seen parents, their child is undergoing chemotherapy, the child loses his hair or her hair. And then the mother or the father or both will shave their head in solidarity with that child. We're in this together. That's why Jesus took on flesh, because we bear flesh. I mean, what a God.
Eric Huffman: What a God. He is amazing. I love Him more than anything in the world. I love Him. I'd gladly give my life for him. I'd gladly give my career. I'd gladly give a few of these worldly accolades for my love for Him. He's the best in every way.
Eric Huffman: How does a New York Jewish boy with no access or experience with church growing up, with the mind of a genius, world-famous scientist in the making, how does he become acquainted with Jesus? How'd that happen?
Dr. James Tour: Well, first of all, I'm not a genius, not at all. I was always kind of a middle of the road student. God just blessed me. I only know one thing and that's chemistry. 18 years old, I go to college. I start talking with a young man in the laundry room, August of my freshman year. First load of laundry I ever did, figuring this thing out. My mother always did it for me at home.
And he was a sophomore, I was a freshman. He was on the football team. I asked him if he was gonna play ball when he graduated. He said, I'm not good enough for that. I said, what are you gonna do? He says, lay ministry or something. I said, "What's lay ministry? I don't know what that is." He says, "A missionary. missionary? How would you want to be a missionary? You don't have to be a missionary. We got TV. You can just beam it in."
He said, "Do you mind if I give you an illustration of the gospel?" I didn't even know what he meant. He was an art student. So illustration, I figured he'd draw me a picture. What do you mean? Yeah, go ahead. I mean, I'm a freshman, I'm trying to make friends.
And he starts drawing a picture. He draws a man on one side of a chasm, God on the other, there's chasms. Man separated from God by sin. He has me read a verse, opens up his Bible. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." I said, "I'm not a sinner." I said, "I haven't killed anybody. I haven't robbed a bank. How could I be a sinner?" Modern secular Jews never discuss sin. It's never a topic for us. And little things aren't sin.
Then he turned to Matthew 5, 28. Jesus said, "I say to you that anyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." I was addicted to pornography from the age of 14. I was working in a gas station just outside New York City and men would throw away their magazines and I'd pick them up. From 14 to 18, I was just engrossed in pornography. Nobody knew.
And I felt deeply convicted because when Jesus is getting hold of your heart, His words have this enormous power. And He says, if you look at a woman with lust for her, I could not look at a woman any other way. That's all I knew. I look at any woman, I was undressing her in a nanosecond in my mind. And says, you've committed adultery with her already in your heart. I was enough of a Jew to know adultery was wrong. But how can I do it in my heart? Adultery is a physical thing and Jesus is always getting it in my heart. So this young man had my attention.
And then he took me through Ephesians 2:8 and 9. You know, there's nothing I can do in myself. There's only by the grace of God and how Jesus gave of Himself for me. And I couldn't stop thinking about this. And I couldn't stop thinking about my sin. For two months, I was thinking about this.
Then I was in my room one night and I was all alone, the door was shut and I was still carrying this burden of sin, being an adulterer. And I got down on my knees. I said, "Lord, forgive me. Forgive me because I am a sinner." And I'm not even sure why I got down on my knees. Jews stand when we pray. Christians I had seen were sitting.
And all of a sudden I felt this amazing peace of God start coming in the room. And just off to my right, Jesus is standing. It wasn't an optical thing. Just the presence was so strong. I was already on my knees and I put my face to the ground, just weeping. It was just love pouring, pouring over me. I never felt like this before, love and forgiveness. I don't even know how long He was there. And He wasn't going away. He was just loving me. And I didn't want to move because it was so wonderful.
He showed up in my room. And I remember getting up and wiping my eyes. I couldn't stop thinking about Jesus. I couldn't stop. And I'm just thinking about Him all the time. I was dreaming in my dreams about Jesus. I was dreaming about telling people about Jesus in my dreams. I didn't know that was a prophetic dream. That's what my life was gonna be. I was telling people about Jesus in my dreams.
And I never told anybody this thing had happened to me because I didn't know what it meant. The guy who had shared with me, this football player, he lived on the floor. Two weeks later, he saw me. He says, "Jim, have you received Jesus in your heart?" I said, "I think I have. Why do you ask?" He said, "You haven't stopped smiling for weeks. Something's different." I said, "How can I keep this?" He said, "If you read your Bible every day, you'll stay close to God. If you don't, you won't." 47 years, I've read the scriptures every day.
Eric Huffman: Every day.
Dr. James Tour: Every day. When I had COVID, when I had the flu, when I had operations, every day for 47 years.
Eric Huffman: Wow. Amazing. And here you are.
Dr. James Tour: Here I am.
Eric Huffman: Continuing to share the truth, whether it's in work or in your church or with us today. Dr. Tour, I'm so grateful for you. I'm so honored that you would take time out of the end of a semester to come and share with us and to put your heart on the line by sharing your testimony with us.
Dr. James Tour: Can I share one thing before you wrap up?
Eric Huffman: Of course.
Dr. James Tour: If anybody, if anybody does not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, if you do not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, you send me an email to [email protected], [email protected], and we will set up a conversation and I will meet with you by Zoom one-on-one and you will walk out of that conversation after one hour believing in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ and you will walk out a different person that day.
Eric Huffman: That's right.
Dr. James Tour: Just send me an email and you say, do I really do this? I really do this. But this is not for Christians. If you believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus, this is not for you. This is for those who don't believe. This I will do.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Dr. James Tour: I know a lot of people that would say they're Christians but they don't believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus, which is a shame. I've been there. I know what that's like. And the faith in the resurrection of Jesus, people don't understand this, is the first domino to fall.
Dr. James Tour: It has to be.
Eric Huffman: And once you figure that out, the floodgates open and everything changes.
Dr. James Tour: Because the Bible says you have to confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that He's risen from the dead and you will be saved.
Eric Huffman: That's right.
Dr. James Tour: That's the requirement.
Eric Huffman: That's right.
Dr. James Tour: It's not the virgin birth. It's not Noah's Ark. It's not crossing of the Red Sea. It is the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that's why I focus right there. It says you gotta have that to be saved.
Eric Huffman: Well, you've heard it here, folks. If you're watching and you have doubts about the physical resurrection of Jesus, you've got an offer from one of the world's most preeminent scientists to have a one-on-one Zoom discussion with him about that. So the email address is [email protected]. All right. I hope somebody will take you up on that offer. Thank you all for watching. Dr. Tour, thanks so much for being with us today.
Dr. James Tour: Thank you.