Dr. James Tour is an American chemist and nanotechnologist. He is a Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and Nanoengineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  He has received several prestigious awards for his outstanding contributions to science.

Tour is a Christian, and he does not hesitate to profess his faith. This has brought him into conflict with the materialists – those who are convinced that there is a naturalistic explanation for everything. For these naturalists, their beliefs have become a virtual religion, and any scientist who steps outside of what they consider “scientific orthodoxy” is subject to scathing attacks, sometime leading to expulsion from academia.

Tour came under fire when he questioned prevailing origin of life theories. For decades most scientific textbooks have postulated that life, in the form of a primitive living cell, was first formed by natural processes in some primordial swamp; and after that the Darwinian evolutionary cycle began. Tour had the temerity to point out that, despite decades of trying, no scientist had come close to producing a single living cell; and the more they try, the more difficult it appears to become. Nevertheless, the textbooks have not changed.

As Tour and others note, the greatest mystery of all is the primitive living cell from which the materialists believe the tree of life began.  Each of these incredibly small cells is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world. The likelihood of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids is almost unimaginable, and a functioning protein is only part of a living cell.  How did that remarkable original cell come to be? Decades of trial and error by hundreds of scientists have come nowhere close to answering that question, and human experimental manipulation does not appear to help.

Furthermore, beyond the single cell, from whence came the code that fills the living cells in a multicellular organism?  This code, the genome, is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions, and each genome contains all the information needed to build that organism and allow it to grow and develop. In humans, a copy of the entire genome, more than 3 billion DNA base pairs, is contained in every cell that has a nucleus.  Our bodies contain billions upon billions of cells, each containing the incredibly complex code that determines the shape of our nose, the color of our eyes, etc, etc.   It’s like a recipe book for the body.

Who developed the recipe?? 

Who wrote the code?

Dr. James Tour points out that no one can answer these questions.

The scientific establishment forbids that anyone, even a person with Tour’s credentials, suggest that God had anthing to do with it. Therefore, instead of an open and frank discussion of these issues, the scientific naturalists prefer to attack the man.

Scientific inquiry is not meant to be theology. A scientist attempts to discover a logical and natural explanation for how things come to be. However, when a scientist discover phenomena that appear beyond any logical explanation he should admit his ignorance; and if he denies the possibilty of a creative intelligence he is exhibiting a closed mind.