When I was just starting out my career in America, I ordered dozens of audio lectures featuring Christian scholars defending the Christian worldview on the university campus. These lectures were recorded on audio cassettes. And they came to my house in a box. I would put them into my tape player and listen to them, then rewind the tapes and listen again. And these lectures are still going on.
Today I wanted to blog about a recent lecture given by a famous chemistry professor named James Tour. You might have heard of Dr. Tour. He has a stellar career doing research in nano technology at Rice University.
Here’s his biography. I can only excerpt a little, because it’s very, very long:
James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Syracuse University, his Ph.D. in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue University, and postdoctoral training in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University. After spending 11 years on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in 1999 where he is presently the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering. Tour has about 650 research publications and over 200 patents.
I figured that the average senior scientist doing research at a university has about 40 peer-reviewed publications, and Grok agreed with that, citing a survey from Nature from 2018, which found that senior scientists (15+ years post-PhD) average 20–50 peer-reviewed publications. So, 650 is a TON of publications! And what’s exciting is that his research is actually solving problems in the private sector.
Anyway, here is an article from the Harvard Sentinel, about his recent lecture at Harvard University, on the topic of the existence of God:
On April 1st, Rice University chemistry professor James Tour visited Harvard to deliver a guest lecture on the existence of God. During his lecture, which was hosted by Christian student group Harvard Undergraduate Faith and Action (HUFA), Tour presented what he called a scientific challenge to the current explanations for life’s origin, and he discussed the myriad of unanswerable dilemmas within the presumed scientific consensus.
Tour, who was raised in a secular Jewish home but converted to Christianity, began by introducing his religious background and his ongoing nanotechnology research. He then overviewed the current state of research on the origin of life.
Here is the very important point. He made sure to say that he is not arguing from a current gap in naturalistic scenarios for the origin of life. He is arguing that the more our knowledge increases, the less plausible naturalistic scenarios for the origin of life are. In other words, it’s the progress of science that is making things harder for the naturalist / materialist. And Dr. Tour ought to know, since he’s one of the scientists making the progress.
But wait, there’s more – a minimal facts case for the resurrection:
With this, Tour transitioned to the historical evidence for the Bible being true. According to Tour, there are three claims concerning the Bible upon which most academic religious scholars agree: first, Jesus died by crucifixion; second, the disciples of Jesus asserted that Jesus rose from the dead, and they were willing to die for that assertion; and third, there were individuals who previously did not follow Jesus but converted after asserting that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them. They, too, died for that assertion. None of the disciples, in any record—including in their recorded thoughts—recanted before being killed.
“No man dies for what he knows to be a lie,” Tour stated.
It’s great to see a professional scientist arguing for an inference based on the facts that “most academic religious scholars” agree on. And why do they agree on them? They agree on them because these facts pass the standard historical criteria for ancient biographies. These facts are recorded early. They appear in multiple sources. Many of them are supported by enemies, or outside the Bible. Many of them are embarassing to the authors of these biographies.
Here’s the full lecture:
And I noticed that he’s speaking at another famous university on April 15th: Cornell University. And he’s apparently on a speaking tour, because his previous stops at Princeton and Dartmouth and Yale.
And I thought this 1 minute interaction with an agnostic professor at one of these talks was really a good window into what Christianity is really about. It’s about taking up God’s priorities in the little opportunities that you have.
He also has a weekly podcast! Find out all about him here.
