Dr. Mark Turman sits down with world-renowned scientist Dr. James Tour for a conversation that bridges faith and science in remarkable ways. Dr. Tour shares his story of coming to faith in Jesus—how a secular Jewish student became a passionate follower of Christ—and what that journey has taught him about truth, reason, and grace.
Together, they talk about the mysteries of life’s origin, the promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence, and how Christian hospitality can open hearts to the gospel. Dr. Tour also reflects on his pioneering work in nanotechnology at Rice University and offers wisdom for students and parents seeking to hold onto faith in the world of higher education.
It’s a thoughtful, hope-filled dialogue about what it means to follow Jesus with both mind and heart.
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Topics
- (01:28): Introducing Dr. James Tour
- (09:40): Daily devotion and Scripture engagement
- (10:51): Faith on college campuses
- (13:21): The power of Christian hospitality
- (15:10): Dr. Tour’s scientific work and achievements
- (16:20): The wonders of photosynthesis
- (19:29): Exciting scientific discoveries
- (22:55): Medical innovations with nano machines
- (25:25): Exploring the origin of life
- (28:16): Challenges in evolutionary theory
- (29:52): The role of AI in scientific research
- (33:03): Impact of AI on education and employment
- (39:38): Choosing the right university for Christian students
- (46:12): Dr. Tour’s online resources
- (47:50): Closing remarks and prayer
Resources
- Ask Us Anything: [email protected]
- How has Denison Forum impacted your faith?
- https://jesusandscience.org
- Personal Website: https://jmtour.com
- Dr. James Tour – YouTube
- Dr James Tour- Facebook
- Dr James Tour (@drjamestour) • Instagram photos and videos
- Dr James Tour (@DrJamesTour) / X
- Dr James Tour : Discord
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
- Dr. Tour’s weekly email newsletter
About Dr. James Tour
Professor James Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Professor Tour has over 800 research publications, over 140 granted patents, and over 100 pending patents. His h-index is 178, with total citations over 150,000. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research group works in materials science, energy, medicine, electronics, and single-molecule nanomachines. He founded 17 companies based on his academic research, three of which are now public companies.
In addition to this, he has an active social media presence, @drjamestour, spanning YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Rumble, Facebook, and X. In 2024, on YouTube alone, there were 24 million views of his content for over 2 million viewed hours, which spans topics on science, faith, and the origin of life. For 10 years, Professor Tour led weekly Bible studies in the living units of maximum-security prisons.
He has been teaching a weekly Bible study to college students for the past 26 years, and he and his wife, Shireen, have served about 75 meals to students per week in their home for that entire time. They also distribute dozens of weekly meals to local cancer patients residing in church facilities and elderly shut-ins in Houston.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of the Faith & Clarity podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.
Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.
Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.
Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, the Faith & Clarity podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Faith and Clarity Podcast, a podcast of Denison Forum. I’m Dr. Mark Turman. Glad to have you along with us as we look to and through some of the headlines of our culture, and help you to live by faith, not by fear. One of our mottos at Faith and Clarity is we want to help you think critically.
We wanna help you live faithfully for Christ and serve intentionally to bring about flourishing for you for others. And for all that we can until Jesus comes again. You will probably recognize some of you will. The familiar words of Psalm 19. The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse proclaims the work of his hands.
Day after day, they pour out speech. Night after night, they communicate knowledge. The seventh verse of that same psalm says, the instruction of the Lord is perfect, renewing one’s life. The testimony of the Lord is trustworthy. Making the inexperienced wise, and so we want to just [00:01:00] read a little bit from God’s two primary books, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Creation.
My pastor taught me years ago when I first became a believer. That God reveals himself through both the telescope and the microscope, if you’re willing in humble faith to look and to learn. And we’re gonna have a conversation about that today with a person that I became a fan of probably five or six years ago when somebody recommended that I read a book.
I want to introduce to you this morning Dr. James Tour, and there is a lot that I could say about him from his resume. I think the thing he would most want me to tell you first and foremost is that Dr. Tour is a worshiper of Jesus. He is also a diligent worker and a compelling witness for the glory of God, for the person of Jesus, and for the opportunity of salvation by grace.
I’ll have more to say about his accomplishments a little bit later in the podcast, but let me [00:02:00] just introduce him as a brother in Christ. As a scientist who teaches at Rice University in Houston, Texas. So Dr. Tour, we’re glad to have you along with us. Welcome to the Faith and Clarity Podcast.
Dr. James Tour: Thank you so much, mark.
It’s my pleasure to be here.
Dr. Mark Turman: It’s a joy to have you. I have longed for this opportunity for a while, since I became a person in the podcast world. But I just wanted to talk about faith from a very foundational level for a few minutes and how. Faith has become a part of your story. Can you give us the background of where you’re from, a little bit of your family of origin and how you came to be a follower of Christ?
Dr. James Tour: I come from a secular Jewish home. I was born in New York City. In fact, I was born in Manhattan. I came to know the Lord when I was. 18 as a freshman in college and I met a young man was with the navigator’s campus ministry. He asked if he could gimme an illustration of the gospel, and I [00:03:00] didn’t even quite know what he meant.
He gave me the bridge illustration of the gospel, and the first verse we, that we read together was for all of sin and fall short of the glory of God. And I said to him, I’m not a sinner. I didn’t feel like a sinner, modern secular Jew by secular Jew. I, it means that ethnically I was, I’m Jewish, but I would Sony in a synagogue.
Once or twice a year. So I was non-practicing. We never discussed sin in my home. We never discussed God. That was never a topic of, of our conversations. And so the, the modern secular Jewish perspective is that little things aren’t sin. I mean, and I told him I never robbed a bank. I never killed anybody.
How could I be a sinner? And so then he turned to, to Matthew 5 28. And it says, Jesus said, I, I tell you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. I was addicted to pornography from the age of 14. I was working in a gas station along the highway, just outside New York City at the age of 14, and I started finding these magazines [00:04:00] that, that men would throw out on their way home from work.
And I became addicted. And so here I was 18 years old. Deeply addicted to pornography, and I didn’t think anybody knew. Back in those days, we didn’t tell people our struggles. Now, if you have a struggle, you start a podcast and you make that the topic of your podcast, right? Everybody with that struggle just just comes into and they all talk about it.
I was deeply convicted when I read that verse. Jesus said, if you, if you look at a woman with lust for her, and that’s the only thing I knew. Hmm. That’s the only way I knew how to look at a woman. I wouldn’t, I was enough of a Jew to know adultery was wrong. That was one of the 10 commandments, and, and but how could I do it?
In my heart, adultery is a physical thing, so I didn’t understand it. The amazing thing, mark, is that, is that when Jesus is getting hold of your heart, his words have enormous power over you, and it shook me. It’s the first moment that I realized that I was a sinner. Then he took me other verses in Ephesians two, eight, and nine, that it’s, it’s by grace that were saved.
It’s, it’s an undeserved gift. It’s [00:05:00] by grace. It’s not by works that Jesus gave him of himself on the cross. He gave, he demonstrated his love for me. We went to Romans 10, nine that says, if you confess with your mouth, Jesus’ Lord, believe in your heart, he’s risen from the dead. You’ll be saved. I didn’t give my life to the Lord at that time.
He might have been able to close the deal if he knew a little better how to do this. Two and a half months after that, I was all alone in my room. I got down on my knees and I said, Lord, forgive me because I’m a sinner. I was carrying that weight of sin for for those several months, and I felt this amazing peace to start come over me.
Amazing peace and forgiveness. Then just off to my right, Jesus was standing just three feet away, one meter away from me. Jesus is standing and it, as I reflect back now, you know it. It wasn’t a clear optical image. His presence was so strong, and it was [00:06:00] as if his hands were just, just palms up extended toward me.
Hmm. I was amazed and I turned toward him. I put my face on the ground, I was already on my knees, and I’m just weeping it. It was like liquid love pouring over me. I mean, just so real was his love, and I felt zero judgment. There was no judgment. There was no condemnation. It was just love. It was just acceptance.
And he wasn’t there just for a moment. He, he was just staying there. I was just enjoying his presence and I was just weeping. I never had a day like that before in my life. I never, I’ve never had a day like that afterward. That was November 7th, 1977, and then. I remember just getting up and wiping my eyes and, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus.
I was thinking about Jesus all through that day. The next day, the next day I would dream about Jesus at night. I dream a very specific dream over and over again that I’m [00:07:00] telling people about Jesus. So here’s this Jewish kid in his dreams telling people about Jesus, saying, you gotta meet Jesus. You have to meet Jesus.
And I didn’t know Mark that that was, that was a prophetic dream. He was showing me what my life was gonna become.
Dr. Mark Turman: Wow.
Dr. James Tour: But I didn’t tell anything to anybody who’s gonna believe it anyway? It’s a very strange thing. Who would believe it? And the one guy who had shared with me, he saw me a couple weeks later, he said, Jim, have you received Jesus in your heart?
I said, I think I have. Why do you ask? He said, you, you haven’t stopped smiling for weeks. I mean, something’s happened to you. I said, how can I stay close to God? I’ve never felt like this before. He said, if you read your Bible every day, you’ll stay close to God. If you don’t, you won’t.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. James Tour: And he handed me, he gave me a little Gideon’s, new Testament.
He gave it to me. And that’s all I had was a New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. James Tour: And not long after that, I started reading the Bible every day. And I’ve read the Bible every day for 47 years, and so I still do it every day. [00:08:00] That’s, that’s my story.
Dr. Mark Turman: Just an amazing, amazing testimony of how God uses not only his people, but also his word encounters us and brings us into that awareness and into that place of faith.
Just a, a beautiful story. Tell us a little bit, you’re married, father, grandfather, correct?
Dr. James Tour: I’ve been married. To the same woman for 43 years. We have four children. We have two grandchildren.
Dr. Mark Turman: Fantastic. Dr. Tour, I just was wondering, in your journey toward faith, were there any particular obstacles? You mentioned pornography, were there other challenges relative to difficult doctrines or things that you really struggled with?
I know you focus often on the physical resurrection of Christ. Can you talk about. Those things for a moment.
Dr. James Tour: I probably had the same struggles that many people had, but the whole pornography thing was actually broken that day that Jesus came in my room. I never had trouble with pornography after that.
Now, I had a whole lot of other sins in my life that I struggled [00:09:00] with, that I still struggle with, but that one. Was actually broken. That one I, I never had problems with again. And that’s unusual. Shortly after that, I got involved in a local church and it was Indians Asian Indians at this church and I loved it.
I was discipled there. I was discipled by Indians. Hmm. These are serious folks. Yeah. They don’t mess around.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It sounds like right from the very start, God led you into a place where. The importance of worship, of Bible study and of fellowship with other believers all became very, very important and very catalytic in the formation of your faith in an, in an early way.
I just wonder you talk about being engaged in scripture every day. Do you have a recommended plan? Do you have a particular method that you recommend to other people about how to engage scripture daily?
Dr. James Tour: If it’s your first time reading the Bible, I would encourage people to start in John chapter one.
Mm-hmm. The gospel, according to John chapter one, and, and just [00:10:00] even 15 minutes in the morning. I, you know, I just tell people, if you wanna start, start with 15 minutes, but it has to be in the morning. We want you to start your day with this thing, because that’s the precedent that we have. It says in Isaiah speaking about prophetically, about the life of the Messiah, Jesus.
It says, he awakens me morning by morning. He awakens my ear to listen. The di a disciple in Mark chapter one. It said he would go off early in the morning to a lonely place to pray. So in the morning you get the word of God. If you, if you wanna wash up first and have a cup of coffee, fine, but, but you do this before you get go about your day start and before you start reading, pray, Lord, speak to me.
Speak to me. ’cause the Bible says in James chapter four, we do not receive because we do not ask. So the main reason why we don’t receive answers to prayer is because we never prayed. So we pray.
Dr. Mark Turman: Dr. Tor, I wonder if you would comment a little bit on the, the mission field where you spend a great deal of your time, which is on the college campus, not [00:11:00] only at Rice, but other places among college students and among other scientists, other academics.
How would you describe these days? The atmosphere at Rice and other universities with regard to faith?
Dr. James Tour: I’ve been on a college campus for. Almost 50 years. You know, in every generation people will complain about students. You know, they, they’re this, they’re that. I, I see every generation, there’s people coming to the Lord.
People coming into the Lord in every generation you see some people excited about the Lord. You see some people that aren’t, you see some people willing to gather and study the Bible and pray and other people don’t. It was the same when I was an undergraduate, so I, I think there, it’s sort of like Solomon said, there’s really nothing new under the sun.
The people are kind of the same. What I am thankful for is that, is that the, the administration at Rice University gives me total freedom to speak my mind to, to talk to people, [00:12:00] and I share with students all the time. I mean, this is just my life and what I do. I try to be sensitive not to, not to have a differential of power.
I never want them to feel like they have to accept these things because, because I’m a professor, so I’m very careful if they’re in a class with me. I don’t openly share with them unless they ask after the class, after the grades are in. Then sometimes they’ll say, you know, I, I, I, I got something to share with you, or I’ll invite them to, to look at my YouTube channel.
That way, I’m not there in front of them. Now, if they’re working for me, if they show an interest, if they start asking me. That’s the open door. If they come over to my home, we have lunches in our home. My wife will serve 60 to 70, sometimes often more people in our home every week for lunch. And so we have a lot of people come through our home.
If they’re in my home, I share with them. If they show up to one of my Bible studies. I’ve, I’ve taught a Bible study at a [00:13:00] church right by campus here. This is the 26th year that I’m teaching this Bible study. So I’ve, I’ve had students that have gone through that Bible study when they were students.
They’ve gone out, gotten married, and their kids are coming into the Bible study as students. So I I’ve, I’ve seen, I’ve seen it all.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. It just, it seems to be consistent over time for sure. I did wanna ask you to just unpack for a moment, a little bit more of what you just mentioned about the practice that you and your wife have.
Hospitality. A pastor friend of mine Glenn EU out in California recently said that perhaps the most profound thing that Christians have done for 2000 years is to open up the table and welcome people in. We live in a society that sociologists tell us are more and more isolated all the time.
Talk about the practice of Christian hospitality feeding kids. Seems like there’s so many videos I’ve seen of you. You just have people around the table. Help us understand why that is so powerful of a way [00:14:00] to not only share the gospel, but to grow people in faith as well.
Dr. James Tour: This is something that was demonstrated to us by Jesus.
Jesus did not wanna send away the masses hungry. He used food. I learned this from my pastor when I was an undergraduate pastor Te Kohi. You know, I learned from brother Boxing, which is a, a great Indian pastor and teacher. He used to talk about this, how we have these, these meals of fellowship. So it, it was taught to me, you know, my wife is special.
She, she, she can have 60 to 80 people in the home per week and she loves it.
Dr. Mark Turman: It’s a great opportunity for all Christians on any scale. It could be one or two people, or like you said, it can be 10 or 15 at a time. Whatever God may lead you to, that’s an opportunity for us to just do something that really is reachable for any believer in so many ways.
We’re gonna take a short break now and let everybody catch their breath, and then we’re gonna come back and talk about some of the scientific work that Dr Tour is doing and how [00:15:00] that integrates with his life of faith as well. We’ll be right back.
All right, we’re back talking with Dr. James tour. Lemme tell you a little bit more about his professional background. He is a professor of chemistry, computer science, material science, and nanoengineering at Rice. He has more than 800 research publications, including 140 granted patents and more than 100 pending patents.
His work has been instrumental and catalytic in the founding of 17 different companies in different areas of research. Three of those companies to date are public companies. He has also very much developed a very substantial social media awareness on YouTube and other platforms. There have been 24 million views of his content totaling more than 2 million hours of viewed [00:16:00] content.
And in addition to that, in the hospitality that he and his wife practice, they also serve in their church and they do a number of other ministries to help people in a lot of ways. Dr. Tour. I wanted to get some sense of your work as a scientist, but I’m gonna make this a very low entry point for all of our listeners, which is.
I heard you talk about what you see when you look at a tree. What do you see when you see leaves? A lot of us just see beautiful majestic creations of God and different colors We’re headed into the fall. People will be heading to different parts of the country to see the changing of colors. When you look at leaves.
What do you see?
Dr. James Tour: I’m, I’m colorblind, so I don’t see colors as vividly as other people see, but what I see is what’s going on in my mind’s eye. In my mind’s eye. I know that in that leaf, what you have is you, you have a magnesium atom. Sitting in the middle of a [00:17:00] porphyrin, a porphyrin, sort of like a bracelet.
It’s got these four nitrogen atoms that are poking inward that are binding to that magnesium atom. And what happens is, in my mind’s eye, I see that light comes in and it’s actually funneled the light photons, the photons of light from the sun are funneled to hit that magnesium atom. And then what that magnesium a does.
Is it then ejects an electron and when it, it ejects an electron that goes down a, a, a, a a cascade and it starts the photosynthesis process, which is taking carbon dioxide and converting it into carbon compounds. That that. Tree is going to use to build itself. So it’s, it’s reducing it and it’s going to carbohydrates and in the process it, it’s making oxygen.
And that’s how oxygen comes from, from the making of, of, [00:18:00] from, from the photosynthesis process in trees. So that’s, that’s what I, that’s what I see. So I, I, I see this, I see lots of different things. I mean, even, even when I’m speaking to you, I, I, I look in your eyes and I, I know. What’s happening is as I’m speaking, there are these electrical signalings going on in your brain.
There’s this electrical signaling and that then is. Then becoming protein synthesis. If you think about these things for a long time, and particularly when you, when you sleep at night, that’s gonna go into hardwired interconnects and become memories for you.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. James Tour: And you’re gonna be remembering this. So initially it’s, it’s electrical, then it goes into protein synthesis, then it goes.
More into a hardwired system that that becomes a longer term memory for you. And so I think about these sort of things, every photon that’s hitting your eyes, it’s, it’s causing these, these molecules that look like Rodin, they’re vitamin A derivatives, and they, they, they change their configuration. [00:19:00] That change of configuration will then signal something through your, through your eye, through your optic nerve into your brain.
And that’s, that’s how you’re seeing the images that you’re seeing. So I, I think a lot about the chemistry that goes on behind the scenes that, that most people would never notice. It, it gives me actually a greater appreciation for the, for the beauties of God.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. I was gonna ask, are, are there two or three of your favorites or even just one of.
Of a discovery that you’ve had in your work that has just taken your breath away as to the, the magnitude, the beauty, the creativity of God. When you, when you discover something, have there been one or two that have just caused you to stop in awe,
Dr. James Tour: you know, that’s not a fair question. The reason it’s not fair, that is like asking me which one of my four children do I love the most?
You know, I mean, the thing that interests me most is, [00:20:00] is the thing that I’m looking at, at that moment. At I, I mean, I just love it. All it is is like I feel like a kid in a candy store. Hmm. I I have so much in front of me. That, that is enjoyable. We, we have these, these little molecular machines that can drill into cells and either kill them if it’s a cancer cell, or we can activate them through calcium channel activation to get them to, to, to fire so that you could.
For example, cardiomyocytes, which are heart cells, you can get them firing at certain times just by shining a light at certain pulses. And, and so I find this fascinating. Our little cars drive nanocar, driving across surfaces is fascinating to me, but our recent work in, in being able to take waste electronic waste and extract all these rare earth metals and all these critical metals that the nation really needs. Being able to get our hands on these things figuring out how to do that is just so exciting to me. We have new synthesis of [00:21:00] ammonia and hydrogen. These compounds that society needs so much of, and we have the, these new ways of making them, which is just, is really an exciting thing for me.
And then all of these carbon compounds and new ways we have to, to make compounds. So I, I really love the scientific process. I love learning about science. I love discovering new things that you do, things every day. That no one’s ever done before.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. James Tour: No one has ever known these things before. And we get to do these things and we get to see them.
So to me it, it’s, it’s super exciting and, and yeah, this has led to, to now 17 companies. Some of the companies have merged, some of the companies are no more, but some of them take off and really start going well. And we try to get them translated into in ways that, that are gonna help society and, and help us do things and, and.
We have pharmaceutical type [00:22:00] companies and, and materials companies and electronics companies. And we try to go across a, a number of different areas. So it’s an exciting thing. And then I get to work with the people who are doing this. And behind all of these discoveries, there’s, there’s students, there’s people that are in the lab doing it.
I’m not in the lab doing it. So they, they get to see it first, and that’s part of the joy of working in a laboratory. And then they, they come and tell me about it, and then I’m like, wow. It did that. Wow. And you get to see the beauties of, of natural systems that, that God has done this it it’s just extraordinary.
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: And some of the, some of the things I’ve heard you talk about, lecture about are just amazing. Particularly bring it, bring this down to like the medical level. We all are aware of medicine. We’re all aware, I think every human being fears the word cancer. I heard you recently talk about some of the.
Medical science that you’re working on with nano machines that you [00:23:00] mentioned a moment ago that you said, you know, it, I think the World Health Health Organization recently said it’s not if we’re gonna have another pandemic, it’s when we’re gonna have another pandemic. I heard you made a comment that, you know, if, if we don’t get better at chasing medicine, that COVID will be like a walk in the park compared to what we may be facing down the road.
How do things like nano machines help us in that and address some of those things?
Dr. James Tour: So what I was specifically talking about with super bacteria, this is bacteria. So COVID was a virus. This is a bacteria that already upon us, but these little bacteria are, are. Getting very good at evading the drugs that we have.
And so sub bacteria are bacteria that, that have really evaded many of the drugs that we have. And we might have only one drug that that knocks those things out, and sometimes they don’t even knock it out very well. You may have heard of MRS. Many people die of [00:24:00] this in hospitals because they have open wounds and, and this bacteria gets in, in, and it can become really devastating.
What, what these little nano machines do is they drill into these. Super bacteria, and they just blow ’em right open. So the cell has this outer, outer membrane in the case of a bacterium, it is, it is a cell wall. It’s a double layer membrane, usually with a some other peptide layer. You, you can have peptides, you can have even carbohydrate layers between these, and it makes it very hard to get into these, these bacteria, but we just drill right through it with these little molecular machines and you, you expose them to these tiny little molecular machines that are tiny, even compared to a cell. Then we shine a light, and that light activates the machine that either it starts rotating or it starts stretching like a jackhammer.
Hmm. And this breaks open the cell wall and these sub bacteria die. So these are the types of things that we’re doing that we’re [00:25:00] looking at.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, just a amazing work. So many different examples. You’ll find if you go to Dr. James tour dot com, you’ll find on the internet stories and examples of like I love the story of the rat that had his spine reconnected by some of the work that you’re doing.
You, if we go and spend some time on your YouTube page. It’s not very far. Before we run into a lot of conversation around this issue of origin of life, and we could spend the next number of hours talking about this, but tell me if I’m getting this right, about 25 years ago. God kind of opened a door and just kinda let you tumble into some of the conversation around the origin of life and the the chemistry issues around that.
And it’s really become a big part of your ministry these days. Take us through a kind of a basic layman’s understanding of what’s going on in this conversation. About the origin of life? Does it or does it not [00:26:00] impact or relate to people’s common understanding of Darwinian evolution? What’s, what work are you doing in this area and why is it significant for believers?
Dr. James Tour: It was about eight years ago that I started studying Origin of Life and. After these eight years of study, what I say is that we just don’t know how life came about scientifically. The Bible gives us a perspective, but the Bible does not give us details. We know that God created certain things, but it doesn’t tell us how these molecules got together.
It doesn’t, and you say God commanded them together. Okay, well God, God did a lot of things, but he doesn’t give us a lot of details. So this is what science does. It tries to fill in a lot of these, these details. And as far as Origin of Life, what it looks like to me in all of these experiments in Origin of Life, that that actually.
The experiments themselves cry out that we have no idea that it didn’t [00:27:00] happen that way. These origin of life experiments are usually so low yielding that it could not have happened that way. There’s, there’s several classes of compounds that we have to solve. There’s four major classes of compounds.
There’s the lipids. There’s the carbohydrates, there’s the, the polypeptides, which are proteins, and then there’s the, the, the, the nucleotides, the polynucleotides, which is DNA and RNA. You have to be able to make those four classes of compounds. We don’t know how to build the small molecules to build those up.
And then even if we had the small molecules, we don’t know how to polymerize them to give what is needed in a pre biotically relevant manner, meaning that. Using what would be available on an early Earth. We didn’t have modern tools back then, but even with our modern tools, we do not know how to make life thinking of how life could have been made on an early earth.
That’s a much harder problem. We have no idea how that was [00:28:00] done. And so I started coming out and, and talking about how the very experiments that people are doing in the origin of life realm. Are crying out, life could not have formed this way. I think that, you know, I’ve gotten certainly some pushback from that, from the people doing those experiments.
Dr. Mark Turman: Dr. Stewart, how does that, does it relate at all to the common idea of evolution and does it in any way address the common understanding of evolution?
Dr. James Tour: Origin of life comes before evolution. Origin of life is taking non-living things and making something living, and that’s something is usually. What people consider a a cell, the basic unit of what you need for a multicellular organism, say like us.
So how did you make that first cell? That’s what origin of life comes with evolution. Says, okay, from that first cell, now, how do you get the diversity of life that we see? Hmm. That, that’s, that’s where evolution comes in. And evolution [00:29:00] has has its own sets of problems. Again, many steps in evolution. We just don’t know this Darwinian model that you have in your mind of slow mutations.
Mutations in populations that are slow and natural selection, the weak getting eaten, and the strong surviving, for example, that has already been disproven, that’s been disproven long ago. The fossil record doesn’t speak of that. The fossil record does not speak of a gradual progression. It speaks of rapid change.
And then things stay the same and then rapid change again. Hmm. So it, it’s much more in line with that. Plus there’s many steps in macro evolution. The changing of a body plan, going from an invertebrate to a vertebrate. Nobody really understands this. And, and biological mechanisms are, are handwaving.
In regard to this.
Dr. Mark Turman: That’s, that’s helpful. Wanted to ask also to, you know, that artificial intelligence is much in the news and on the minds of many people. We’re seeing [00:30:00] technological companies that are emerging and growing very fast. We’re concerned about the power of the potential of ai. Is AI helping, in your research, in your lab, is it accelerating things, harming things?
What? What is your perspective on where we’re headed relative to ai?
Dr. James Tour: It’s helping us a lot. We’ve written several papers on the use of, of machine learning packages, which is a subset of AI to help us to tune our machines. Tune all the different parameters. When you have a, a parameter space of say, 10 different parameters that you can change, it’s very hard to know how to have an optimal response.
You know, you change this knob does that mean I changed this one in the other direction? It’s very hard, you know, if it, if it’s just one knob, it’s not that hard. If it’s two knobs, we can kind of figure it out. But when you have 10 knobs to change, it gets really hard. So it, it helps us to configure our instruments in that way.[00:31:00]
The other thing is we do a lot of predictive predicting molecular structure, how it’s gonna help to kill these, these bacteria that we have. So we look again at machine learning packages. We, we flooded with the, with the data that we have, and it would look at different parts of the molecule and decide.
These are again, machine learning packages, but just recently. I told the student to pit the machine learning packages, which are made for doing the types of things that we’re doing and put them right into large language models like chat, GPT, and GR things that deal on language and see if they, those large language models can figure it out.
Not only did the large language models fi figure it out, in many cases they. Did better than the machine learning packages that are a subset of AI that were designed to do this type of thing. And so then you said back, wow, this this thing is, is really doing these in in a way that’s really hard to fathom how it did it so well.
So I [00:32:00] am, I am constantly amazed by. The ability of AI to do things. And I certainly use chat GPT more than I use Google now. Hmm. It helps me to find things, helps me to really summarize areas. We use it for proofing our papers. So the manuscripts that I get from students now do not raise my blood pressure like they formerly did because the the, the English.
Was so bad and there were so many grammatical errors. AI takes care of that. It really, you know, and by and large it takes care of that. So students can write a manuscript and they, they, they fix it, but there’s, there’s other things that, it makes it more challenging actually to teach classes. It used to be, in the old days, I would go to the library and grab the latest issues of a journal and take problems from that and put it.
Put it on, on homework sets for, for students to work on. But now, and, and this has been around a long time, so for the last 20 years, you can, [00:33:00] you can find all these instantly so they can just type it in. But now I sometimes would give them p. Writing assignments, you know, chat, GPT can write so well.
Dr. Mark Turman: Mm-hmm.
Dr. James Tour: Now it’s not the best writer, but what it’s always gonna give you, it’s gonna give you, it’s gonna give you the average if you could train it on the best writers, and it’s gonna give you the average of the best writers, even with invention. You know, I, I have this class that I teach and I. I ask students to come up with an invention every week.
I want you to invent something to to train their mind, to come up with invention. So this is the type of thing I would ask students to do. Now I can ask chat, GPT. Gimme a new invention for a bicycle. Gimme a few new possible inventions that you could put on a bicycle. Something that’s never been done before.
No, I mean, boom. It’ll gimme five things that could be built into a bicycle that’s never been done before. And any one of those that I read, I would’ve given the student full credit for. So it, it’s changing the way I can educate because I can’t challenge, the only way I can [00:34:00] challenge students now is to challenge them on an in-class exam.
Hmm. During class, you, you don’t have access to these tools. Now, now you gotta show me you can do this. But these, these grueling problem sets that you, we used to use, that I learned on, you know, staying up late at night working. And that’s really where I would learn this stuff. It’s, it’s hard to do that now.
You can say I don’t want you students to use it. I find that hard to do because some might use it anyway, and then all of a sudden somebody’s got an unfair advantage.
So I want them to learn how to use those tools now. Very well. Very well. But they’ve gotta learn the topic. ’cause if they don’t, I’m gonna get ’em on the exam.
On the exam, they’re gonna, they’re, they’re gonna get nailed right there. So they’ve still gotta learn it. So it just changes the way we have to teach. But, you know, I, I, we, we are using it as a help to us, even in our research where we’ll ask large language models, Hey, what do you think of this? Has anyone ever done anything like [00:35:00] this?
And, and if not, you know, how might, might we modify it? Hmm. And, and it’s surprisingly. Good. Now, the problem is that everyone now thinks they’re a scientists. So people write to me and they’re like, oh you know, you may, you mentioned this on Origin of Life and Chat, GPT. You said that this is a problem and it solved that problem.
And it shows, and I look at it, I said, this doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t solve the problem at all. Now, everybody’s a scientist. You really have to know science to be able to critique what it gives you.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. James Tour: Or, or else you, you know, they, they talk about, they, they, they talk about where the, these AI packages can hallucinate mm-hmm.
Where they come up with things that, that, that aren’t real, but they do come up with ideas and, and then implementing these ideas is a whole nother level. How would you implement this idea? What exactly would you build into this? But yeah, everybody’s a scientist now and they critique the science that I say in my talks and they say, oh, chat GPT has [00:36:00] solved this, grok has solved this, and I’m gonna look at it.
This is not a solution. This is not a solution at all. And so it, it is good to know science so you can critique the use of the tool, but I find it extraordinary and it is definitely going to change things. And you asked me in the beginning about students, one of the things that worries students today.
Is I’m, am I gonna have a job when I graduate?
So for example, AI was written by coders, people that write computer code, right? It was written by coders. So AI does computer coding about better than it does anything else. ’cause it was written by coders,
Dr. Mark Turman: right?
Dr. James Tour: And so there’s a lot of coders that are now having trouble finding a job.
Because a lot of the coding is being done by these large language models and it’s good coding, right? And so you could have one coder in your company and he or she could be doing the work of, of five or 10 coders because the code is being written by these. So that, that’s kind of scary to people.[00:37:00]
Now working in the lab, they still can’t get in the lab and do things. But the robotics are getting pretty good just to be able to, to touch, you know, you know these little cups you have when you get water from like a, the old fashioned water cooler, they’re like they’re, they’re just paper cups and they’re sort of, sort of like in a right cone shape.
It’s very hard to hold one of those, you know, you’re trying to hold it without crushing it and you’re trying to fill it up with water. These robots, their dexterity is getting so good, they can even hold one of those, you know, it used to be the, you know, they would just crush the thing and now, now they’re getting so good.
So when you combine that with the ability to do this AI and you turn these loose in the lab to do things, I think is gonna be amazing. I mean, people talk about how nursing is gonna be one of the slowest things to be taken over because you have this, this human touch and it’s, it can, if you can have a robot that can do that human touch and can, can pick you up and lift the elderly person off the [00:38:00] bed without hurting their back and blowing out their back like nurses do all the time and scoot the person up and, and be there at their beck and call and just stand in the room.
This is gonna change a lot of things. So I think. I think the world is gonna undergo a lot of changes. I don’t know how it’s gonna work. I think radiology and medicine is gonna be taken over the first thing in medicine very quickly. It’s already taking over.
And, and the ones that, that, that need the human touch are going to be taken over more slowly.
But there, there’s, there’s some big changes coming when you have full self-driving and you do away with truck drivers. You know how many people are employed driving trucks? No. And this is a, this is a big part of our society, so I, I don’t know what the future holds. This is this, this is uncharted territory for all of us.
But on the comforting side, mark, I’ve read to the end of the book. I’ve read That’s
Dr. Mark Turman: right,
Dr. James Tour: and I know. How the world is going to end. And I know how it’s not going to end because I’ve read about it. But you know, when [00:39:00] computers first came in and people really worried it was gonna take away all our jobs and it led to more jobs,
Dr. Mark Turman: right?
Dr. James Tour: And then when the ability to do things virtually. Came online and people could, didn’t have to travel anymore. They came to, it became virtual. You could do all these meetings virtually. They said, oh, it’s gonna do away with the airline companies. And the airline companies said, look, we’re building planes as fast as we can.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. James Tour: It, it, it just led led to more, more movement of people. So every time we predict a demise people kind of think of other things to do. So I, I, I think that’s probably what would happen.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Just a, a moment or two for maybe a couple other questions if we can. I heard you recently say that you used to think that if Christian parents brought up their children consistently in the faith and in the word.
That they would be fine to send them to basically almost any university. But maybe you don’t feel that way anymore. Can you explain that? Why? What would you say to a, an 18-year-old or to their parents [00:40:00] about how to choose a university if they feel called to continue their education in a college?
Dr. James Tour: Yeah. You know, I, I know there’s talk sometimes to people now saying, you don’t have to go to college. You can just learn on your own. And let me tell you something there. If, if you’re talking about the STEM fields, science, technology, engineering, you can’t do this on your own. You can’t learn this on your own.
You have to be around a big infrastructure to teach you the methods, to teach you the instruments you need, hands-on instrument use. You can’t get this by reading this in a book. Just like you can’t learn surgery just by reading a book on surgery. You have to get in there and do it over and over and over again.
So there’s things you, you, you’re gonna have to go to school. Yeah, I used to say that that. That you train your children well at home, they’ll, they’ll be fine in the university. And I don’t say that anymore because I saw what happened to my own children. Hmm. And, and I, we had morning devotions [00:41:00] every day of their lives, every day of their lives.
We had morning devotions. Monday through Friday, we had morning devotions. Sunday we were in church together, and I’d take ’em through the word of God from beginning to end and and we’d discuss it. We’d memorize it together. And I saw what the universities can do. You know, I think you need to pray.
You need to pray, Lord, how do I handle this now? Now there are, you could say I’ll send them to a Christian university, and I’m all for Christian universities. The problem with Christian universities is sometimes it, it, it’s hard to hire Christians, people that love the Lord, and that can also. Be really good in their field of science and engineering.
It’s, it’s hard and I, and I feel for the Christian universities because they’re trying to get people with a strong Christian ethic. And, and and if you want people that can really do research as well and write grant proposals as well, the, it’s Slim Pickens. I mean, there’s not many Christians out there to choose from.
And so you end up with [00:42:00] people that they could be teaching that are, are. Are lethargic in their Christian walk or just nominal in their Christian walk. So then your, your, your children are seeing someone who claims to be a Christian and they really don’t sound like it.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. James Tour: And, and so that’s the struggle that, that the Christian universities have, right.
In the secular university. It’s the, is that. Professors have a certain viewpoint and they can project that viewpoint. Now in the science classes, we don’t generally deal with these, these sorts of issues. I’ve, I’ve heard of biology professors trying to. Torture people in their faith if they were Christians.
I’ve heard of that. I don’t think that that’s common in chemistry. I’ve never heard of chemists trying to obliterate a Christian’s faith through chemistry. I’ve never heard of it. Uh uh, I don’t think in engineering it happens. I mean, engineers don’t care. They just don’t, you just give them you, you know, you just give [00:43:00] ’em some integrals and then they’re happy.
They, they’re not trying to, to. Obliterate anybody’s faith. But in the, in, in, in the social sciences and in the humanities, it can be very different. And that’s, that’s where, where the, the, the struggling points come. And then there’s these, it’s in those classes in particular. And because of the well-rounded education that we’d like our students to have in the university, remember university means, means unity and diversity.
That we have all of these different topics, and unlike other countries, even though you may be studying engineering, you are required to take some courses in the humanities. Mm-hmm. You’re required to take some classes in the social sciences because traditionally we’ve said it makes you a more well-rounded student.
You know, maybe you never knew you liked these areas and now you’re exposed to it. At least you understand what these people do. And people in these humanities have to take some science classes. Now sometimes they call it the quote unquote [00:44:00] football class or whatever it is. Now, I’ve known football players takes take really hard classes, so it’s really a misnomer, but, but there are science classes that are a little bit.
On the easier side and the humanities people have to take those classes. ’cause we want well-balanced people. They, you have to have cer a certain level of math competence, right? You have to do this. Our people in engineering have to have a certain level of language competence. You have to learn how to write in English.
You have to learn how to speak a foreign language. So we force people to go into these areas, and then you might get exposed to things that are outside of stem and, and professors can have a big impact. So parents just need to need to really pray. What, what is God gonna do? What is, what is the best way to lead people in this?
And it, it’s not easy, but. You know, Christian schools can be very good, certainly at the undergraduate level, but if you really wanna go on strongly, you’ve gotta have grad. If you, if you wanna be a chemist [00:45:00] or you want to be a biologist and you want to excel in that, or a physicist, you’ve got to go to graduate school.
And I think in graduate school, if you’re studying in the sciences of graduate school, you don’t have to take anything on the humanities side and then you’re okay. It’s getting through those undergraduate years. And it’s gonna take a lot of prayer. Now some students thrive in it, some people come in, they’re not excited about the Lord and they leave passionate about the Lord.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. James Tour: Then you see the flip side people that came in excited about the Lord and after four years they have very different views, not just very different political views, but I mean very different social views and very different religious and faith views as well. They’ve fastened onto something that, that even a singular professor can get them going in one direction or another.
We, professors have an enormous amount of, of, of power, and I don’t, I don’t think most professors go in thinking, how many students can I mess up today and bring around? To my view, I, I don’t think there’s a lot of us, certainly not in the STEM [00:46:00] that we do this, these things happen organically in, if I could use that word.
Dr. Mark Turman: That’s a lot for us to think about and a lot for us to pray about as well. I would love to continue our conversation, but we don’t want to keep you too long. Tell us Dr. Tour, where can people find you on social media and learn more about you and your work?
Dr. James Tour: Okay, so on social media I’m at Dr.
James tour. Dr. For Dr. James DR James, TOUR. That’s on YouTube. It’s on Rumble, it’s on TikTok, it’s on Facebook. And I think I have a. A similar page on LinkedIn, but if they wanna see my professional work, they can go to JM tour, JM tour.com, and that is my professional website. And there I also have a lot of audio files that they can listen to.
Before I started doing YouTube, I’D from. 2005 to onward. I was just doing everything, audio, all my teachings, audio files. I have whole [00:47:00] things, cover the entire chronological life of Jesus, which covers all four gospels. It took me four and a half years to teach that through weekly Bible studies with the college students.
And all of that is an audio form. So it’s 183 messages. Each one is about 35 minutes and, and it’s all audio. And then it, it wasn’t until the last year and a half that I started. Taking all those and, and doing it video as well. So you can find, but, but it’ll keep you reading. You’ll, you’ll see a lot about our research, our publications and things there, so it’ll keep you busy for a while.
Dr. Mark Turman: All right. We thank you for all of the ministry that you’re doing, including spending some time with us here on Faith and Clarity and wanna remind people to check out Dr. Tour in all of those opportunities, both on the faith and the scientific side. A wonderful integration of those two things together.
The other thing I wanted to do, Dr. Tour is a passionate. Person of prayer. And he’s agreed to close us in prayer today. So I hope you’ll join us. Keep [00:48:00] your eyes open if you’re driving or riding a bike. But Dr. Tour, would you close us in prayer today?
Dr. James Tour: I’ll close us in prayer. And let me just mention if any of your listeners do not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, you send me an email to [email protected] and I will get together with you.
You’ll come out believing after one hour. But that’s not to believers ’cause they just don’t have time for all the believers that wanna hear. I just wanna hear how you do it.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah,
Dr. James Tour: I, I just, I just can’t meet with you. I just don’t have the time. This is for unbelievers, so let’s let reserve that time for them.
Let me pray. Lord, thank you so much for this time that I’ve had on this podcast. Lord, I pray for the listeners here that you would draw them closer to Jesus. That they would come with a greater love for our precious Lord Jesus as a result of this. That they would be daily, daily in the word of God and thereby see their lives change.
Father, I commit them to you, [00:49:00] and Lord I commit to you these, these parents that wanna send their kids to the university, but are wondering about these things that you would give them wisdom. And Lord, I pray for these young people that you would give them a real desire to be firm in their faith and to lock in with other Christians on campus and to go on in that way.
Father, I pray for your blessing and your grace to abound on these fine people, Lord, protect them, the covering of the blood of Jesus over them. I pray for the glory of Jesus and in his name. Amen.
Dr. Mark Turman: Amen. Thank you, Dr. Tour. Blessings on you and I also wanna thank our audience. Thanks for tuning in to Faith and Clarity.
If you’d like to know more about our ministry, you can find [email protected]. We pray that God will bless you and we’ll see you next time on Faith and Clarity.
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