This is the first episode: 0 – Reasons for this Series:
In this compelling series of lectures on abiogenesis, James Tour’s riposte slices through both hype and myths using science to critique “science”, demonstrating how experts in the field truly remain clueless on the origin of life.
Twelve more episodes to go.
Professor Tour is the founder and principal of NanoJtech Consultants, LLC, performing technology assessments for the prospective investor. Tour’s intellectual property has been the seed for the formation of several other companies including Weebit (silicon oxide electronic memory), Dotz (graphene quantum), Zeta Energy (batteries), NeuroCords (spinal cord repair), Xerient (treatment of pancreas cancer), LIGC Application Ltd. (laser-induced graphene), Nanorobotics (molecular nanomachines in medicine) Universal Matter Ltd. (US) and Universal Matter Inc. (Canada) (flash graphene synthesis), Roswell Biotechnologies (molecular electronic DNA sequencing) and Rust Patrol (corrosion inhibitors).
Citations
All 109646
Since 2016 43767
h-index 152 99
i10-index 679 491
We recommend that inveterate yay-hoos find someone else to attack.
Oh Goody, not only did ‘Professor Dave’, (a former high school teacher, turned ‘Youtuber’, who only has a masters degree in Chemistry), state ‘numerous gross scientific inaccuracies’ in response to Dr. Tour, (who’s scientific shoelaces ‘Professor Dave’ is not even worthy to tie’), but ‘Professor Dave’ also attacks Dr. Tour’s for his belief in Christianity,,,
Professor Dave stated, “He (Dr. Tour, besides rejecting abiogenesis,) is even more emphatic about something else,” (he then quotes Dr. Tour stating his faith in Jesus Christ), then “Professor Dave’ condescending states, “that should give you a better picture of the headspace he (Dr. Tour) is coming from”.
I guess ‘Professor Dave’s’ reasoning is that if someone can be so gullible as to believe that Jesus Christ actually did rise from the dead then any further thoughts that Dr. Tour might have on whether nature, all by its lonesome, is capable of producing life can be safely dismissed.
Apparently, ‘Professor Dave’ feels so confident that it is self-evidently true that Jesus did not rise from the dead that ‘Professor Dave’ can’t be bothered with stating his exact reasoning for not believing Jesus rose from the dead and so he can just dismiss the entire idea with smug condescension.
But be that as it may, it might interest ‘Professor Dave’ to know that the ‘headspace’ of Christianity, (not the ‘headspace’ of any other worldview), was the necessary ‘headspace’ that was needed for the founding of modern science in the first place,
In fact, the ‘headspace’ of ‘Professor Dave’s very own worldview, atheistic naturalism, besides not being the worldview that brought modern science Into existence, is also the ‘headspace’ that ends up driving modern science itself into catastrophic epistemological failure.
Although the Darwinian atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science, (in his appeal, even demand, for naturalistic explanations), the fact of the matter is that Darwinian atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to:
Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist, such as ‘Professor Dave’, may firmly believe that he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for naturalistic explanations over and above God as a viable explanation), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists themselves are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
It also appears that ‘Professor Dave’ did not learn much history when he got his masters degree in Chemistry.
Louis Pasteur, who, among many other notable achievements in his lifetime, was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation. (which ‘Professor Dave apparently still believes in to some extent),
Apparently unbeknownst to ‘Professor Dave’, Louis Pasteur himself, who disproved the doctrine of spontaneous generation, was a Christian who held that “Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers.”
Perhaps ‘Professor Dave’ may someday have the honesty within himself to take a good hard look at his own ‘headspace’ of atheistic naturalism and realize that it is his own ‘headspace’ of atheistic naturalism, not Christianity, that should be condescendingly mocked and dismissed as self-evidently false.
I hope that ‘Professor Dave also has the honesty within himself to watch Dr. Tour’s 12 part response to him and see exactly why his position is so untenable.
Moreover, I would also hope that Professor Dave also has enough honesty to further investigate the claims of Christianity, with an open mind, and to see if they are true, instead of just smugly dismissing them before he even has a chance to weigh the evidence for himself.
For instance, what about the ‘Shroud of Turin’ Professor Dave?
Basically, we have a clothe with a photographic negative image on it that was made well before photography was even invented. Moreover, the photographic negative image has a 3-Dimensional holographic nature to its image that was somehow encoded within the photographic negative well before holography was even known about. Moreover, even with our present day technology, we still cannot replicated the image in all its detail.?My question to atheists is this, if you truly believe some mad genius forger in the middle ages made this image, then please pray tell why did this mad genius save all his genius for this supposed forgery alone and not for, say, inventing photography itself since he surely would have required mastery of photography to pull off the forgery? Not to mention mastery of laser holography? Moreover, why did this hypothetical mad super-genius destroy all of his scientific instruments that he would have had to invent in order to make the image? Leonardo da Vinci would not have been worthy to tie the shoe laces of such a hypothetical mad genius!
Verse:
Romans 1:20
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that He made.
prologue episod starts at 7 PM central time
Episode 0/13: Reasons // A Course on Abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71dqAFUb-v0&feature=youtu.be
In this prologue episode, Dr. James Tour explains why he is addressing abiogenesis and common misconceptions in this series of lectures. After providing the outline for the course, Dr. Tour provides a sneak peek of the upcoming critique.
Thanks, Bornagain77. Great quote by Pasteur!
I can’t even imagine a lightweight like “Professor Dave” denigrating James Tour’s knowledge of biochemistry. This is insane! But I know that Tour would graciously offer Dave a conversation where he just would ask Dave a serious of humble questions. I’d imagine that eventually Dave would simply resort to an empty response of “it musta happened naturalistically somehow” to which Dr. Tour would just say “Show me how.” And Dave would say “I’m absolutely convinced someone will eventually find a way.” This exposes “Professor Dave’s” commitment to an ideology that cannot be supported by science.
In my opinion, it would be far more rational to simply say that scientifically we have no idea and all our evidence points to the impossibility of abiogenesis.
-Q
I have just two questions for Professor Dave, as well as anyone who wishes to discount anyone who disagrees with them as being beneath them. Since energy cannot be created by man or nature and energy cannot be destroyed by man or nature, does that mean energy does not exist? If energy exists, which we know it does, how did it come about if it cannot be created?
No problem Querius.
Given ‘Professor Dave’s’ severely misplaced confidence that science will someday, (in a completely naturalistic fashion), explain exactly where life came from, (and how it subsequently developed), one wonders if Critical Theory, which is currently being widely taught in colleges across America, (and which “breaks down your belief in pretty much everything you were raised with”), will ever make into the lecture halls of Darwinists.
Given the dominance of atheistic naturalism on college campuses, I’m sure that many professors pushing Critical Theory on college campuses today are keen to attack Christian students in particular in an effort to “break down their belief in pretty much everything they were raised with”.
And indeed, on these very pages of UD, many times Atheists have tried to link Christianity to “a lot that is broken in the world”,
,,,but in their attack on Christianity, it seems that the atheists here on UD never quite get around to critically analyzing their own Darwinian worldview to see if their worldview is, in fact, the main cause for “a lot that is broken in the world”.
Take racial relations.
Critical Race Theory is widely taught on college Campuses today, (and even taught in public schools and in large companies), and has been traced out as to root cause of much of the racial unrest in America today.
Critical Race Theory, with its emphasis on highlighting what is wrong with our racial history (slavery, Joe Crow laws, etc..), and its neglecting of what we got right in our history (the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, etc..), ends up generating more racial unrest than it ever ends up healing.
But what has been the main source for the healing of racial inequality in America? I’m pretty sure Critical Race Theory never gets around to honestly addressing this question.
Well the source for the racial healing certainly has NOT been the Darwinian worldview.
In fact, Darwin’s theory is inherently racist in its theoretical construct and has been the main source of much racial inequality in the modern world.
In fact, the subtitle of Darwin’s first book ‘Origin of Species’ is “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
And Darwin’s second book “Descent of Man” spells out the racism inherent in his theory far more explicitly than his first book did.
Darwinists today try to distance Darwin’s theory from racism, but racism is not just some extra accessory to Darwin’s theory that can be easily discarded, but racism is indeed integral and crucial to Darwin’s theory. As Professor Richard Weikart explains, racism is a “Not a Bug but a Feature” of Darwin’s theory.
Darwinists, and atheists in general, simply have no basis within their Darwinian worldview for regarding men as equal. Whereas Christians hold it as ‘self evidently true’ that all men are created equal by God.
And indeed, it was men of great Christian faith, (i.e. William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, etc..) that ended slavery and brought forth the Civil rights movement. It was certainly not Darwinists who brought forth these good and nobel changes in America.
In fact, Darwin’s theory severely hampered, and set back, the efforts of Christian reformers to bring about racial equality in the world. As the following article states, “Christian reformers had spent decades in the early 19th century teaching Britain to view non-European races as their equals before God. In a matter of years, Darwin swept not only God off the table, but also the value of people of every race with him.”
Moreover, the Darwinian presupposition that radical genetic differences would be found that separate races from one another is now known to be, scientifically speaking, ‘not even wrong’.
In fact, Humans are now, ‘surprisingly’, found to be far more genetically distinct from one another than races are genetically distinct from one another. As the following article states, “over half of all genes in an individual, around 9,000 of 17,500, occur uniquely in that one person – and (we) are therefore individual in the truest sense of the word.”
Scientifically speaking, these findings are simply devastating to Darwin’s theory, as the article goes on to state, “”We need to fundamentally rethink the view of genes that every schoolchild has learned since Gregor Mendel’s time.”,,,
i.e. So much for Richard Dawkins entire ‘selfish gene’ concept!
Besides Darwin’s theory being so wrong in its presuppositions about genetics and race, and besides Darwin’s theory severely setting back the efforts of Christian reformers to bring about racial equality, It is also hard to put into words, (because of the sheer scope of atrocities committed by Darwinists), just how horrid the consequences have been for human society in general because of Darwin’s theory.
In his book “Origin of Species” Charles Darwin himself stated that,
That statement should send shudders down the spine of anyone who is not a complete psychopath.
And please note how closely Darwin’s ‘general law’ of letting “the strongest live and the weakest die” mirrored Hitler’s own views.
Specifically Hitler stated that, “A stronger race will oust that which has grown weak; for the vital urge, in its ultimate form, will burst asunder all the absurd chains of this so-called humane consideration for the individual and will replace it with the humanity of Nature, which wipes out what is weak in order to give place to the strong.”
In fact, Hitler once stated that “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.”
And indeed, as Sir Arthur Keith noted in 1947, shortly after WWII had ended, “the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.”
I have seen Darwinian atheists fight tooth and nail against the notion that Darwinian evolution was behind the genocides that Hitler orchestrated, but, as historian Richard Weikart has thoroughly documented, the fact of matter is that, “The historical evidence is overwhelming that human evolution was an integral part of Nazi racial ideology.”
Besides Darwin’s theory being behind the Nazi’s racial ideology, Darwin’s theory also provided the supposed ‘scientific’ basis of all the other Marxist, Socialist, and/or Communist ideologies of the last century.
In 1848 Friedrich Engels co-authored ‘The Communist Manifesto’ with Karl Marx. Upon reading Darwin’s book ‘Origin of Species’ in 1860, Marx wrote to Engels that “This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.” And in another letter to another ‘comrade’ Marx further wrote that “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”
In fact, Vladimir Lenin himself kept a little statue of an ape staring at a human skull on his desk. As you can see, the ape is sitting on a pile of books which includes Darwin’s book, “Origin of Species”.
Likewise Joseph Stalin, while a student at a seminary school of all places, was also heavily influenced by Darwinism. Specifically Stalin, while at seminary told a friend, ‘You know, they are fooling us, there is no God’,,, ‘I’ll lend you a book to read’,,, ‘Darwin. You must read it,’
As well Chairman Mao, who outdid Hitler and Stalin in the monstrous evil that he committed,,,
, Chairman Mao was also deeply influenced by Darwin’s theory. In fact, as the following article states, Chairman Mao is known to have regarded Darwin and his disciple Huxley as his two favourite authors.
The unmitigated horror unleashed on the world by these men, (who all found strong support for their socialistic/marxist ideologies in Darwin’s theory), would be hard to exaggerate. Here’s is a conservative estimate of the deaths that were inflicted upon mankind by these Godless men when they took control of their respective countries:
This is, in reality, probably just a drop in the bucket. Who knows how many undocumented murders there actually were. And that figure also doesn’t count all the millions of abortions from around the world that have resulted from the undermining of the sanctity of human life when Darwin’s theory burst onto the scene.
Thus in conclusion, although ‘Professor Dave’ is especially critical of Dr. Tour’s faith in Jesus Christ, it might greatly behoove ‘Professor Dave’ to apply some of that same withering criticism to his own Darwinian worldview and ask himself how he could have possibly been so wrong for so long in his foundational beliefs about the world? Or does the criticism of ‘Critical Theory’, where the criticism “breaks down your belief in pretty much everything you were raised with”, only work one way in ‘Critical Theory’, i.e. against Christianity and not against Darwinism?
It seems apparent to me that Christianity fairs far better from such withering criticism than Darwin’s theory ever does.
Just a modicum of honest criticism brings the entire Darwinian house of cards tumbling down.
So again, does ‘Professor Dave’ have the honesty within himself to honestly criticize his own worldview and see how it stacks up against Christianity?
Thanks for the additional quotes and comments, Bornagain77.
“Professor Dave” reminds me of some of my more opinionated and dismissive college professors. It’s truly sad how they seem to get satisfaction from destroying young lives, making them as miserable as they. It’s like a wicked elementary school teacher making a first grader cry from their describing how every one of them will die and how life is completely pointless. Or politicizing them with selected distortions submitted in their authority as “facts.”
I remember asking a biology professor about Darwin’s theory regarding racism and was assured that the human races had nothing to do with evolution and it was a mistake to misinterpret Darwin this way. But if evolution is true, then all random changes in the human genome tend toward the advancement of the genome, with the latest drift being the result of survival of the fittest. This is inescapable as eugenists and Marxists historically found obvious.
As a Christian, I find these conclusions abhorrent. Fortunately, it turns out to be bad science and bad politics (“but that wasn’t true socialism”).
-Q
At the 24 minute mark of his video Dr. Tour quotes Dr. Brian Miller.
To emphasize, “No system without assistance ever moves both toward lower entropy and higher energy which is required for the formation of a cell.”
So exactly how does ‘nature’ move toward lower entropy and higher energy in order to form a cell?
Well. it is by an Intelligence imparting (positional) information into ‘nature’.
As the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment demonstrated, it is knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position that converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
In short, it is immaterial information that is imparted by an Intelligence into nature that allows life to operate in a state that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. that allows life to move toward “both toward lower entropy and higher energy” at the same time.
As Andy McIntosh, professor of thermodynamics and combustion theory at the University of Leeds, stated, “Information has its definition outside the matter and energy on which it sits, and furthermore constrains it (the polymers of life) to operate in a highly non-equilibrium thermodynamic environment. This proposal resolves the thermodynamic issues and invokes the correct paradigm for understanding the vital area of thermodynamic/organisational interactions,”
Moreover, classical sequential information, (such as is encoded on DNA), is shown to be a subset of quantum, (i.e. positional), information by the following method.
In the following 2011 paper, “researchers ,,, show that when the bits (in a computer) to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that (in quantum information theory) an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”
As well, and as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
These experiments go to the heart of the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design debate and completely blow the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, (presuppositions about immaterial information being merely ’emergent’ from some material basis), out of the water.
In other words, directly contrary to Darwinian presuppositions, immaterial information, particularly ‘positional quantum information’, is now experimentally shown to be its own distinct physical entity that is a product of an ‘observer who describes the system’. And although it can interact with matter and energy, (interact in a ‘top-down’ manner; see George Ellis ‘Recognizing Top Down Causation’), it is still shown to be its own independent entity that is separate from matter and energy and that has a quote unquote ‘thermodynamic content’ that can be physically measured.
In other words, Intelligent Design, and a semi-direct inference to Intelligence that is necessary in order to explain why life is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, has, for all intents and purposes, achieved experimental confirmation via these recent experimental realizations of the Maxwell demon thought experiment.
Just how much information is required to be imparted into ‘nature’, via an Intelligence, in order to explain a living cell is touched upon in the following article.
The information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
Thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells within the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within all the books contained in all the largest libraries in the world.
Needless to say, that is a massive amount of immaterial information that is present within our physical bodies.
As the following article states, the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
As should be obvious to even the most metaphysically blinded Darwinist, it is impossible for the sequential information on DNA to account for this massive amount of ‘positional information’ that is somehow coming into a developing embryo and building ‘a human infant, atom by atom’.
As Doug Axe states in the following video, “there are a quadrillion neural connections in the human brain, that’s vastly more neural connections in the human brain than there are bits (of information) in the human genome. So,,, there’s got to be something else going on that makes us what we are.”
And at about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Jonathan Wells, (who specializes in embryology), using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, ‘positional information’ must somehow be coming into the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method, in order to explain the transdifferentiation of cells into their multiple different states during embryological development.
As well, the preceding finding that information must be coming into a developing embryo for the ‘outside’, fits, hand in glove, with William Dembski’s and Robert Marks’ previous work establishing the principle of ‘conservation of information’
In order to establish that the Intelligent Designer who created, and sustains, life must be God, it is first necessary to point out that “quantum information” is now found to be ubiquitous within life:
What is interesting about finding quantum information to be ubiquitous within life (and finding sequential information to be a subset of quantum information), is that quantum correlations are a ‘non-local’, i.e. beyond space and time, affair that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its effect.
As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
As well, it is also important to realize that quantum information, unlike classical sequential information, is ‘physically’ conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
I have a question for ‘Professor Dave’ who so condescendingly mocked Dr. Tour’s Christianity,
It is also very interesting to note how all of the preceding evidence fits, hand and glove, with John 1:1-4 in the New Testament:
That John 1:1-4 should fit, hand and glove, with what was only recently discovered via our most advanced science, (i.e. via our advances in quantum information theory and quantum biology), is nothing short of completely amazing.
To further drive the point home I offer this following quote,
In a world where Christianity would be given a fair hearing from most scientists, since Christianity did indeed give us modern science in the first place, (instead of Christianity being unfairly dismissed out of hand as supposedly being ‘unscientific’ as ‘Professor Dave’ did in his mocking of Dr. Tour’s belief in Christ), this ‘prediction’ of John 1:1-4 about ‘information’ being foundational to life should count as a rather dramatic ‘scientific’ confirmation for the truth of Christianity.
Namely that only Jesus, as demonstrated by His resurrection from the dead by God the Father, truly has life, (and more particularly the gift of ‘eternal life’), contained within Himself.
Supplemental note:
The next lecture by Dr. Tour starts in 50 minutes
Episode 1/13: Introduction to Abiogenesis // A Course on Abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqoVxwdWWpg