Jesus Christ & Nanotechnology: James Tour (Transcript)

They said that they would hope that it would cure upon re-entry when it would heat up. And that was really the way that they were going to think about doing this.

We’ve got another area that we call laser-induced graphene, and this is a new area for us. And so we’ve done a lot with graphene, but here we can take something called polyimide. This is just inexpensive commercial plastic films. And we just take these films and we hit it with a laser, the same lasers that are used to write patterns, to cut out patterns in metal. You just turn down the power and as soon as it hits the polyimide film, it will turn into graphene.

Now, graphene is a very important material recently, and these are single atomic layers of graphite. So you have a single atomic layer, though, and we can get these graphene. I think this is going to be licensed very soon and turn over into a way to make commercial devices really inexpensively.

We have another area where we work with carbon nanotubes, and what we’ve done is we’ve taken carbon nanotubes, which are these long cylindrical structures, and we can intercalate compounds that will cause the tubes to split. It’s very much like when a water pipe splits because it’s frozen, it will always split longitudinally rather than horizontally. And it will split longitudinally because the pressures are relieved in that dimension. And when it does that, what you get is you get graphene nanoribbons. So this is a way to make graphene, but in a ribbon shape.

You say, well, who cares about that? Well, there’s a lot of people that care because it affects materials. So this, in fact, has been licensed by a chemical company and it’s being scaled right now. We use it in gas barrier composites. We use it for strengthening epoxies. We use it in other things.

So for example, one of the things we’ve applied it to is we can put this on glass and it will be transparent, but we can heat the glass electrically and melt ice off the glass. So I don’t know if we have the resolution to see it, but there’s water that’s dripping off this glass piece right now, and that’s in the minus 20 degrees C box. And that is dripping off even at minus 20 degrees C. And if you’ve ever lived in a cold environment, so Texas isn’t the place to really live for this, but if you’ve ever had to de-ice your window, you can de-ice the back window really rapidly because there’s little wires in there that you can resistively heat.

But you can’t de-ice the front window that rapidly because you have to wait for the car to warm up and get the blowers. But now we can begin to do that. And so you see now below this piece of glass is just a thermocouple taped to the back side of it. And so we can do de-icing now. So this is being transitioned for that application. And it’s also RF transparent.

The biggest building material that’s being used, if you look at any skyscraper, it’s not bricks and sticks and mortar. What you see is you see glass. Glass is the major building material. And what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to be able to de-fog, de-ice glass, but you also want it to be transparent to RF so that you can still use your cell phone inside that building, for example, which is really an important thing to be able to do.

So we can begin to do that now because these are RF transparent. These are also going on radome arrays. In fact, these radome arrays that are in Alaska is one of the first targets that we’re targeting. We work a lot on other types of graphene. This is a picture right here of a leg of a roach, a little cockroach, on top of a piece of copper. We heat that up to 1,000 degrees, and that roach leg turns into graphene, that single sheet material.

And the reason we did that to show that any carbon source at 1,000 degrees is going to go to the most thermodynamically stable form of carbon, which is graphene. We did this with Girl Scout cookies. If you buy a box of Girl Scout cookies for $4, a box of Girl Scout cookies, and if you take all of the carbon in those Girl Scout cookies in that one box and convert it to graphene, you would be able to sell that graphene as two centimeter squares, as it’s sold today, for a price of $15 billion.

And that shows that the price of a material is not an element, but a price of a material is in the arrangement of the atoms. That’s what gives it the cost. That’s what gives it the value.

And I’ll give you another example. Take a human being.

What is the value of a human being?

You want to put a price on a human being. And actually, actuators and insurance companies put a value on human beings. But if you take that person, and now the person dies, you cremate them, it turns into CO2 in water.

What is the value of that CO2 in water? Less than a penny.

What is the value of this amazing structure of a human being? And so it shows you that the value of something, just from a mechanical material standpoint, is in the arrangement of the atoms and not so much in the cost of the atoms itself.

You say, well, gold is more expensive than carbon. Yes, but that difference is in the noise compared to the value of something based on the structure.

We have other projects where we’re able to capture CO2 now from gas wells. So natural gas wells come up with CO2. That CO2 is vented to the air. We’ve made porous carbon materials over 3,000 meters squared per gram very easily now. We make this from asphalt. Yes, the material that’s used to coat roads, we heat that material up to 600 degrees in the presence of potassium hydroxide, and we form a porous material that traps CO2 in over 100 weight percent, and it’s reversible. It’s a pressure swing adsorption process. This has all been licensed by Apache Corporation, which is a very large oil company.

We make these plastic films, and we make these into supercapacitors. These supercapacitors have been licensed by a company that makes electric vehicles, and what people want is they want to have a big engine, like a Mercedes engine, so they can accelerate quickly. But the vast majority of the time, over 95 percent of the time, you’re driving that car just like you were driving a Toyota Corolla, just at a normal rate of speed, but you pay a huge amount of money to be able to accelerate quickly. That’s what you pay for.

So what they’re going to do is start putting supercapacitors in with the electric vehicles to give you a big boost of energy, and this has been licensed by an auto manufacturer to be able to do that. So we’ve had many of these things transplanted into the industry. This is a vial of carbon quantum dots.

Quantum dots, unlike organic fluorophores, you can shine a light on them, and they will emit light at a different frequency, but they don’t photo bleach. What does that mean? It means that if you wash your clothes in Tide, they’ll put organic fluorophores in that so that the clothes look bright. Light hits it, it emits light at a different frequency, and you say, wow, bright clothes.

You go into a club with a white shirt, there’s a fluorescent light there, and your white shirt seems to be glowing. That is because there are organic fluorophores in there. Those will photo bleach over time so they aren’t as bright anymore, but quantum dots never photo bleach. They just keep on emitting.

Quantum dots cost $1 million per kilogram, so generally people don’t use quantum dots for two reasons: price and toxicity.

Carbon quantum dots have the advantage of they’re non-toxic, but they’re also a million dollars a kilogram if you go to buy them on the internet. We have found a way how to make these in one step using nitric and sulfuric acid from coal. Coal is less than $100 per ton, $100 per ton to a million dollars per kilogram in one step. You don’t have to be an economics major to see that there’s value in this.

Then you can start putting it in lots of things like upholstery and carpets. You can make it look much brighter and it will never photo bleach and extend to other applications as well.

One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve made these graphene nanotube hybrids. This has been licensed by a company. It’s being translated now into cell phone batteries, into the electrodes for cell phone batteries because you get 2,500 meters squared per gram surface area from a conductive material where the nanotubes reach right out into the matrix of the anode and give you this highly conductive material. You get a high surface area so it allows for very fast charging.

Do you need all day charging? Do you need to carry around a battery that will last all day or two days or whatever you want? Do you need that if you can charge your cell phone in three seconds? If you can charge very quickly, so you go to use a restroom, boom, you plug in, take out, you’re done. I mean it’s charged in three seconds. Then you don’t have to carry as much capacity in the battery. That’s the idea.

If you can charge very quickly, then you get charging all over the place. Unless you’re wandering around in the woods somewhere, it’s not an issue if you can charge quickly.

We’ve developed a material, this is graphene oxide, so we have a new process for making graphene oxide. This has been licensed by EMD Merck, a division of the big pharmaceutical company Merck, but their materials division. This is very good for removing radioactive elements from water. We pass water through these filters that have the graphene oxide and the radioactive elements are trapped very quickly. Here it is, here’s the scale bar and how well it’s trapped versus what’s used on the market today.

It works really very well. This has been licensed by a company in Houston for scale up and application. First application area will be in Fukushima where they had the nuclear plant disasters during the tsunami.

We’ve made transparent memory, memory for a computer that’s transparent and flexible. This has been translated to a company as well as also licensed this.

We work in an area of nanomedicine, two different areas, traumatic brain injury and stroke. That’s one particular area. Another is drug delivery for cancer delivery. This is one area, but this area of traumatic brain injury, we can take a traumatic brain injured animal and so normally the animal would lose a portion of the brain due to traumatic brain injury and here we can move it back to something like this as if it almost had no brain injury at all. This is reacting with the superoxide.

This has been licensed by a drug company now and hopefully will begin to be extrapolated and go into phase one clinical trials. At that stage it’s just testing toxicity.

The final area that I’ll mention is we work in this area of nano cars. These are cars that are very small. They have four wheels. They have fully rotating axles and they even have motors and you shine a light on that motor and it rotates unidirectionally and so it will act like a paddle wheel to push it across the surface. You can park about 30,000 of these across the diameter of a human hair. They’re very, very small and we don’t just build one at a time. We build about a billion, billion of them at a time because we use chemical methods.

That’s the idea, to learn how to control motion at the nano level on surfaces and then once we can control motion like that, what we’d like to do is to eventually see if we can start to do construction, much like enzymes, the nano machines that God has made to build structures like us, like trees, like the things that are around us, all biological systems where this is why you eat a bagel today in this morning and by this afternoon it’s a part of your ear. How does that happen?

There are enzymes that break this up and then take these and apply it in different places. This is nano machines. There’s nothing magical about this, but we’re not very good at doing that and applying it to our structures that we know today because enzymes don’t work that well out of their host system.

But can we build machines so that in 100 years or 200 years from now we would not build buildings the way we’ve been building them for the last 5,000 years, but what we would do is just bring in raw materials, use programmed assembly, so you’d use voltage pulses to control massive numbers of cars because you make these moles at a time, 10 to the 23rd at a time, and just have them do the construction from the bottom up, so the building assembles.

You say, this is science fiction, that could never happen. That’s true today, it can’t happen, but there’s nothing thermodynamically violated in having that happen. And if you look at trees, that’s how trees are made, you say, well, trees grow slowly. Well, there’s some strains of grass that can grow two feet tall in a single day and what the complexity in that blade of grass is more than the structural complexity in this building.

And so things can build very quickly using small machines and that’s what we’re trying to do, to learn how to build from the bottom up these small sorts of structures. And we can even see this under an STM microscope, you can see these four wheels of this nanocar and it’s moving along and here we’re tracking it. We track the first nanocar collision, it was right there.

These are the types of areas that we work in, where as a chemist we’ve moved into these areas of nanotechnology. We do a lot with the oil and gas industry, like we’ve made things that are little nanocapsules that we can send down hole to begin to tell us how much oil is down there and where in the formation the oil is, give us information like that.

And so this gives you an overview of some of the areas that we’re working on. This is my current chemistry family, this is my research group and these are the ones who actually do the work. I don’t go in the lab that much anymore and these are the ones who go in the lab and do the hard work and to me it really is like a family because I spend many, many hours with them. I have several group meetings a week and I look eyeball to eyeball with every group member each week where they have to present to me their work, hand me a report for the week, put it up on the screen and we discuss it.

And so there’s a relationship that’s built, there’s a mentoring relationship that’s built over a number of years and I really love these people. These are the folks that work really hard in the lab and I tell them, you know, you guys do all the work, you get your name on the paper but put my name on there along with you and I appreciate that. And these are the things that they do, this is the work that they do and I get to be a part of it with them and I get to see them mature and grow.

And as a faculty member, this is a career that I really love, to be able to take a young student and to train them into being an aggressive researcher, to be able to go in a laboratory and get something done. And it’s a career that I really love. I never would have imagined that I’d really like my career as much as I do and I just love it because I hear people complain all the time that they’ve got to go to work.

If I didn’t get tired and hungry, I don’t think I’d go home. It’s just that, you know, after a while, I come to my office, I leave my home at 6 in the morning, I get to my office at 6.15 and around 6 o’clock in the evening, I’m tired and I’m hungry and then I think, oh, it’s time to go home. Because I love what I do.

People say, do you like to take vacations? No, if I want to see something, I look on the internet. I just like being in my office. These are things that I like to do and it’s a strange life but if you enjoy what you do, that’s where you like to go.

I want to tell you how I became interested in chemistry. How did this happen? Was I born this way? No, I wasn’t born this way.

I wanted to be a New York State Trooper. That’s what I had my eye on becoming, was a New York State Trooper. So how are you going to go from New York State Trooper to professor of chemistry?

Here’s how it happened. I was colorblind. I couldn’t get into the academy and back in those days, if you were colorblind, you weren’t allowed into the academy. I think you can be a paraplegic today and become a New York State Trooper. Back then, you could not even be colorblind.

I thought I’d go into forensic science, work in a crime lab somewhere and then my father gave me some advice. The amazing thing to me is that I was 17 years old and I took my father’s advice. That’s a miracle.

My father said, ‘Why don’t you just get a general chemistry degree and then after you get your bachelor’s degree in chemistry, then you can focus in more on forensic science?’

I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.’

Then I took organic synthesis, organic chemistry, and it was like, wow, this is heaven. Organic chemistry was so amazing. What I used to do is I used to get alone on Friday nights.

Now just look at the schools that I went to. I went to Syracuse, Purdue, Wisconsin, Stanford. My first 11 years as a professor were at the University of South Carolina. Remember those school names. I never went to a collegiate sporting event until I went to Rice University. What was I doing when they had all these games and everything? I was in the library.

I loved the library during the football games because nobody else was there. I could sit anywhere and it was just quiet. What I would do every Friday night is I would take my organic chemistry textbook and the professor would assign certain problems in the textbook and I would do those. I would get alone and I would do all the problems that weren’t assigned, every problem in the book.

Then as an undergraduate, I took every graduate course in organic chemistry that I could take, every one that I could take. I ended up at the top of every one of those classes because I just loved it so much. This to me was so exciting, to be able to build molecular structure. The reason I’m underscoring this is it’s going to affect what I talk about in the second half of this talk.

I see molecular structure in everything. In everything I see molecular structure. Sometimes it’s even to the point of being a nuisance because what happens is I’m speaking to somebody and I’m looking right into their eyes and I’m thinking of the actual type of the rhodopsin type switching that’s occurring when the photons are hitting this bond and it’s going cis. Then an enzyme comes and then brings it back trans again and in that event, it jets an electron and that goes in and hits this receptor and then boom, they’re seeing.

Then I go right past their eye, in my own mind’s eye, and I’m thinking about the protein synthesis that’s going on as I’m speaking to them because the first thing that happens when I speak to them, there’s an electrical event that occurs that gives them their instant memory effect. That is quickly translated into protein synthesis.

Then what happens is when they go home that night and they go to sleep, you are actually getting hardwired interconnect patterns are forming in their brain as a result of what I was telling them that afternoon. I’m changing the formation of their brain when I’m speaking to them.

This is what I’m thinking about. Everything is molecular structure. I see molecular structure in everything. I know why it is you can walk across a carpet and these fibers just spring down and come right back up. You can pull out a carpet fiber. This thing is thinner than a human hair. You can have that carpet fiber stand up this high and not fall over. Try that with a rubber band. It falls over. You can have a rubber band fall over and that carpet fiber just sticks straight up.

Why is it? Because there are interactions between the different polymer strands in there that are polar interactions. They may be hydrogen bonding. They may be dipolar interactions. Collectively, they’re Van der Waals forces. I think about that.

I know why it is you run your car into a tree and the tree just, it’s like nothing happened to it and the car is just destroyed. What is it about wood that gives it this amazing property? So I see molecular structure in everything. I know why this podium has the structure that it has, why it has the properties that it has because I know the molecular structure.

When you know the molecular structure, it makes sense why things have the properties that they do. So if you’re interested in material science, if you know the chemistry well, it really helps because you can really understand at the molecular level. This will become important later on in the talk.

So I was born in a Jewish home in New York City and when I went to college, I was in the laundry room. It was August of my freshman year. So very early on in my freshman year and I was in there and I was talking with a young man who was on the Syracuse University football team and I asked him if he wanted to play pro ball when he were to graduate and he said, he said, no, I’m not good enough for that.

I said, ‘What do you want to do?’

He said, ‘Well, maybe lay ministry.’

I thought, ‘Lay ministry, what’s that?’ I had no idea what lay ministry meant. I came from a Jewish home, what am I going to know about lay ministry?

And he said, ‘Well, like a missionary.’

And I’m thinking, ‘Missionary?’ Missionary?

You know, this is 1977. We don’t need missionaries. We’ve got TV. TV can tell people everything you want to tell them, why go to those places, just use a TV set.

And he said, he’d like to give me an illustration of the gospel. And I didn’t know what he meant and he drew out a picture for me. And I’m going to give you exactly the picture that he gave me. This is what I was told when I was 18 years old, Jewish kid from New York City.

This is what I heard. He said, ‘You have people on one side, God on another side, and a chasm in between. People are on one side and this sin separates us.’ That’s what he told me. And he had me read a verse from the Bible. He opened up a Bible and he had me read a verse. This is the first verse that I read.

‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’

And I looked at him, and I said, ‘I’m not a sinner.’

He looked at me so oddly. You know, in modern secular Judaism, you don’t worry about sin. Not at all. I just never worried about sin. You can go to the synagogue one day a year. The rabbi takes care of that. You are good for the entire year. You don’t worry about it. It’s taken care of.

And he was a bit taken back by my comment that I’m not a sinner. And so he had me read another verse from the Bible.

‘But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’

Not only was I 18, but at the time I was addicted to pornography. From the age of 14, I started working in a gas station along the highway that goes into and out of New York City going north. And there was a gas station on either side of the road and I worked both sides, same owner. And the salesman would throw away their magazines on Friday nights on their way home, throw them away in the parking lots, and I’d clean the parking lots and I’d see in the trash cans magazines.

And I would grab those magazines and by the time I was 18, I was well addicted to pornography. And if you’ve ever been addicted to pornography, you then understand what I’m talking about, how compelling this can be in a young life.

And when I read this verse, when I read these words that were said by a man named Jesus Christ 2,000 years earlier, it was as if I had been punched right in the chest. I was just, wow. I had never been confronted with the fact that I was a sinner.

And I looked at this and I said, ‘If that’s the definition of sin, then I’m a sinner.’ I didn’t think anybody knew about my problem with pornography. I didn’t think anybody. How would they know? I didn’t tell anybody. I was just new at college. Nobody knew. But this Man knew. Jesus knew. And it just hit me.

He had me read another verse.

‘For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.’

And he told me, he said, you know, there’s many people who try to do good works, but the good works just keep falling short. You cannot get to God through good works.

This is unlike all other religions. We can’t do good works to get to God. And he told me this. I can’t just be good and somehow get to God.

Then he said, ‘Jesus Christ bridges the way for us.’

And he had me read this verse: ‘that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is the Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.’

I thought, this is so strange. How can any thinking human being, any thinking man or woman, believe in a resurrection from the dead? He’s been raised from the dead? How can you believe that?

How can anyone believe that?

Well, the reason we can believe it is because God has given us evidence, and He witnesses that to the hearts of men and women.

And I started to meet Christians that at the time were called born-again Christians. Jimmy Carter had been present, and you heard a lot about this born-again Christian thing. I started to think about this, and I started meeting Christians. I started to meet Christians, and I was really impressed by their lives.

And during the next few months, I signed up for a Bible study on my floor, and I remember they were reading through the Gospel of John, and I didn’t say much, I just listened. But then, something happened.

We can get to God this way, but it was something similar to this verse. It says, ‘Therefore, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed the day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.’

This says God has furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. I did not research all of this out at that time. I have subsequently researched the resurrection of the dead, and I am utterly convinced of the fact that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. But without that, even without that deep research, I was convinced that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, because God witnesses it to the hearts. This is exactly what he says he does.

He says God has overlooked the times of ignorance, He’s declaring to all men and all people everywhere. I don’t care what your background is, I don’t care if you have the same sexual struggles that I had, or similar sexual struggles, He’s declaring to all of us, everywhere, that all men need to repent. All men need to return. Everyone needs to return from what they were doing to God. Everyone needs to repent.

And I don’t, it’s not a matter of the world saying, no, no, what you do is okay. It’s not okay. The Scriptures clearly say that all people have to repent, everyone, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness. He will judge the world, not Jim Torr. I’m not judging anybody. I’m not troubled just keeping track of my own stuff and my own problems.

He will judge the world through a Man whom He has appointed. And this very man is furnished proof through the raising of the dead.

On November 7th, 1977, I was all alone in that room, room 1812 of the Lawrenson Dormitory, in that room. It’s the room I was in. And I was — my roommate wasn’t there, and the door was shut. And I got down on my knees, and I don’t know what prompted me to do this. I don’t know. To this day, I don’t know what prompted me to do this, because Jews normally stand when they pray, Christians normally sit when they pray. That’s at least what I had seen. And I got down on my knees, and I asked God to forgive me.

And I said, Lord, forgive me, because I had been carrying this burden since he had shared with me about my lust problem, when Jesus hit me with those words. And I asked God to forgive me, and to come into my life. Jesus Christ is Lord, and He has risen from the dead.

And at that moment, I felt this wave of forgiveness come over me, and this burden that I had been carrying for these last several months just lifted off of me. And then all of a sudden, somebody was in my room with me. And I opened my eyes to see who it was, and I didn’t see anybody. But in my room, somebody was standing there.

This man, Jesus Christ, was in my room, and just showering forgiveness upon me. And I was just weeping like a baby, something that was totally out of the ordinary for me. And I didn’t want to get up, because the presence was so sweet, and so good. I wasn’t scared. I was just enjoying the presence of this one in my room. Something happened to me at that moment. I didn’t tell anybody.

What’s this kid from New York City going to do? This Jewish kid. What are you going to say? I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t tell anybody, but I certainly felt different.

Two weeks later, that young man that had shared with me saw me walking right there on the 18th floor. He lived on that floor, too. And he asked me, he says, ‘Jim, have you received Jesus Christ in your heart?’

I said, ‘I think I have. Why do you ask?’

He said, ‘You haven’t stopped smiling for weeks.’ That was — my life was different.

The other thing that was amazing, this is miraculous. If you’ve ever been addicted to pornography, you will understand how miraculous that is. From that day, I was never drawn to pornography again. All my magazines, I got rid of them, and I never have been drawn to pornography again.

Now, I had a lot of other struggles that I had to work through over a period of years, and some that I’m still working through. But that one, that God used to convict me of my sin, He showed me His power by delivering me from this. And I wanted so much to stay close to God. I even said to this young man, I said, ‘This sense that I have, that Jesus is with me, how can I keep this sense?’

He said, ‘I’ve talked to a lot of people that are Christians, some that make no substantive difference in their lives, but there’s very little change, others that go on deeply and keep getting excited about the Lord all the days of their life.’

And I’ve asked them, ‘Do you read your Bible every day?’

‘The ones that are excited about the Lord read it every day. The ones that don’t read it every day are not excited.’

And I thought, this is easy, this is digital, I know it, I got it. You read your Bible every day, you’ll stay close to the Lord. You don’t, you won’t.

I started reading the Bible every day of my life. From right around that time, I started reading the Bible, and I started reading from Genesis chapter 1, and I would pick off where I left off the day before, and I would read over to Revelation chapter 22, and when I’m done, I’d start again. And I’ve had the same pattern for 37 years, just reading through the Bible. And I say, ‘Lord, speak to me through the Scriptures. Speak to me.’

If you believe it, if you believe His words, He will speak to you. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Whoever comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of those who seek Him.

Believe it. If you believe it, you take hold of it. If you call yourself a Christian, if you call yourself a follower of Jesus Christ and the teaching of His apostles, then believe His word. His word says it.

The Scriptures say, ‘Oh, how I love Your law. It is my meditation all the day. Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever mine. I have more insight than all my teachers, for Your testimonies are my meditation, and I understand more than the age, because I have observed Your precepts.’

If you make the word of God your meditation day and night, He tells you exactly the way He’s going to bring you up. He says He will bring you up past all of your teachers, and He doesn’t say just Bible teachers. You believe it, you get it. You don’t, you won’t. There are things that are acquired by faith.

He told — Moses told Joshua, God instructed Joshua, He said, ‘This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that’s written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.’

If you make this word of God your daily meditation, God will bring you up, and that’s what I started to do. That became the pattern of my life.

The results of the decision that I made to follow Jesus are this: I started striving to overcome sin. I wanted to overcome sin. Before that, I didn’t care about sin. It wasn’t a non-issue to me. From that day, I started striving to overcome sin. I started reading the Bible daily. I started seeking like-minded friends. I joined a church where I was mentored by godly men. The first church that I was in was Dr. T.E. Kosh, who was the evangelical chaplain of Syracuse University. He taught me a lot, and his friend, Bakht Singh, from India.

And then when I was in graduate school, [Delmar Brosma], an entomologist at Purdue University, entomology professor, and then he was also the pastor of the church. I learned a lot from him. And then later on, Buck Hatch — James Buck Hatch, who was at Columbia International University. I mean, men poured their lives into me. And this is why I spent so much of my life pouring into the lives of young men. If they want to learn the things of God, I’m going to teach them. Because men poured their lives into me.

I started praying that God would provide the wife that he had for me. I didn’t want to leave this up to chance. I had seen a lot of mess in the world, and I didn’t want to leave this up to my own devices. Because I’ll tell you, there’s a chemical reason for this.

A man can look at a woman and just, boom, just… I mean, he just grasps, just grasps. I mean, it’s just amazing. And there are reasons for this. It’s all small molecules that do this. Really, there are reasons that this happens. And you can think you’re hearing God, but it’s all just a small molecule talking to you. I didn’t want to get this thing wrong.

And I prayed that God would provide the wife that He had for me. And I started actively praying for God’s blessing upon my studies. When I was a freshman in college, I was struggling in freshman chemistry. Struggling. I said, ‘Come on, I don’t believe it.’

Believe it. This is true. I was struggling because I was a chemistry major. Some professor who was assigned to me to be an advisor. Now being a professor, you get assigned as an advisor because you don’t know how to say no. Not because you know about all the things that people should be in. And he just said, oh, you’re a chemistry major? You should go into honors chemistry. I shouldn’t have been in honors chemistry. I needed to be in with the masses.

The honors chemistry class had people in the class that had been studying chemistry since kindergarten. And I was just a regular guy. And I was struggling in this class. And I ended up in that class with a B plus at the end of that semester, which was the grace of God. Remember, I came to the Lord on November 7th.

And then I just started to just excel right after that, because I started praying over my work. And I did. I remember all through graduate school, I would fall on my knees and just pray, God bless me. Lord, speak to me. Teach me this.

And I pray to this day. I take proposals, and I bring them to the chapel on campus, and I put them right down on the ground. And I fall on my knees. I say, Lord, I pray you bless us. Before I write the proposal, I said, ‘Lord, give me wisdom. Give me insight. Give me the hands of a ready writer.’

And I pray for wisdom in my work. The Bible says that darkness and light are the same to God. Darkness and light are the same to God. So I say, ‘Lord, when I don’t see, You see. Lord, give me clarity. Lord, speak to me.’ If you’re a believer, you can take hold of this. Take hold of it.

It was the admonition to change my words and my actions.

Proverbs 3:3-4 says, ‘Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good repute in the sight of God and man.’

It started to change the very way I would speak. I said, Lord, change the way I speak to people. I’m not perfect. Not at all. I still battle with the flesh, but I memorize these verses and say, Lord, get hold of my speech. Let me be kind. Let me be truthful. And it changed the words that I would use with people. And it changed the things that I did.

And I’ll give you one example, because this touches many of you. Remember, when I was an assistant professor, I got a brand new Mac computer. It was the first personal computer I ever had. It was 1988, and I got a Mac SE. It had one megabyte of RAM. What are you going to do with all that memory? It was an amazing computer, just an amazing computer.

So I had all of this memory to work with and this beautiful computer. And then the next year, I got a Mac SE30, 30 megabytes of RAM. And I put that in the lab for the students and bought another set of software for that. And then God was blessing my research program, got another computer, put that in the lab, bought another set of software.

My colleague said, ‘What are you doing?’ Back in those days, computers didn’t talk to each other. You could buy one set of software and load it on all the computers. He said, ‘What are you doing buying all this software again?’

I said, ‘Well, because I have a different computer.’

He says, ‘Just load it from this computer onto that, you dummy.’

I said, ‘Oh, no, no. I called up ChemDraw and I called up Microsoft. And they said that one computer, one set of software, one computer, that’s all we’re allowed to do.’

He looked at me like, ‘You’re an idiot.’

I said, no. I have to be honest in my dealings. Don’t let kindness and truth leave you. You know what would happen? At the end of a budget year, I would have program managers from the federal agencies call me and say, ‘Hey, Jim, we have some extra money. Can you use it?’

Easy. No problem. Got lots of software I’ve got to buy. God would bless me over and over again. I will not keep music on my iPhone that I don’t own. I don’t want software on my computer that is not mine, that I don’t own. Because I have to walk in kindness and truth. And God sees everything. And if I want His blessing, I’ve got to obey His word.

If that touches the hearts of some people here, obey it. And watch God’s blessing flow. Get rid of things that you don’t own.

Admonition to value my family. I grew up, and I didn’t have any real teaching in this. It says, ‘Let your fountain be blessed and rejoice in the wife of your youth.’

Now, I have great parents. And I didn’t come from a dysfunctional home. I came from a functional home. And my parents are alive and married to this day. But it wasn’t a Christian home. And it wasn’t flowing with a lot of things that it could have been flowing with.

And God started to instruct me to love the wife of my youth. When my mother came to the Lord, when my mother came to the Lord at the age of 70, and we had prayed for her for years, when she came to the Lord, she called me. She told me she had come to the Lord, and she was so excited. And we speak every Sunday. And the next week, she called me. And she said, ‘Jimmy, you know, you can find any damn thing in the Bible.’

I said, ‘What is it, Mom, that you found?’ You have to understand.

Here’s a woman who’s 70 years. She didn’t grow up in a Christian home. I said, ‘Well, what did you find?’

She said, it says that husbands should rejoice in the wife of their youth.

I said, ‘Yeah, the Bible does say that.’ I said, ‘You ought to tell that to Dad.’

She said, ‘I did.’

I said, ‘Well, what did he say?’

She said, ‘Oh, he just said, I know all that already.’

But just to see the instruction that I got through the church, through the body of Christ, through the word of God on how to bring up a family, ‘train up a child in the way he should go, even when he’s old, and not depart from it.’

So we started having daily family prayer times. My father-in-law, my wife grew up in a wonderful Christian home. My father-in-law said, you know, you’re so busy. You got all these things. You ought to have a daily family prayer time. I started waking up the kids at 5.30 every morning. And my daughter was only two years old, and we started doing this thing. And then with all our kids, from the time they’d come home from the hospital, pick them right up out of the crib, 5.30 in the morning, we were having family devotions.

We do to this day, family devotions. And now all my kids are gone, but my wife and I get together in the morning, and at 6 o’clock, I’m out of the house. But from 5.30 to 6, we had family devotions. That time was a rich time. I’ve asked both of my daughters independently. I had four children, but when both my daughters left the home, I said, ‘What’s the thing you’re going to remember most?’

They said, ‘Our family devotions together in the morning.’ Because there’s no phone. Nobody’s calling. Nobody’s contacting them. There’s no sporting events. There’s nothing in the way. And we could really focus in as a family. We would go through [Herobot’s] story in the Bible, and we’d read this, and then we’d practice our scripture memorization together. And then we’d all get down on our knees and pray for each other. That is the richness of the family.

I learned all this through the word of God. Hard work, but I implored God to help me to raise my children, because parenting, I think, is the hardest task I’ve ever gone through. The hardest task.

And my colleagues used to ask me, ‘How do you do it? How do you have a wife that loves you so much and kids that love you?’

And I can say as an adult, one of the proudest things that I can talk about is that my adult children enjoy being around me. There’s not a lot of adults that can say that. And that makes me really proud, what God has done in my family.

This is Rick Smalley, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He’s the one who recruited me to Rice 16 years ago. And he used to ask me, ‘Jim, how do you do it?’

Rick came to the Lord in the last two years of his life. He died of leukemia in 2005, October 2005. In the last two years of his life, he came to the Lord and really started to see a difference. He was a man, greatly talented man in science. Discovered Buckminster Fuller and really many people credit him with the beginnings of really nanotechnology. And he had gone through three wives and multiple broken homes.

And an interesting thing he did when he went to get his Nobel Prize, he invited all his ex-wives to the Nobel ceremony. They said to him, ‘Rick, what are you doing?’

He says, ‘Well, I’m working on the Nobel Peace Prize.’

You know, God sets them only in families. This is my family. These are my two sons up here. Many of you know my son, Ben. You see some of his friends here. And these are my two daughters, Sabrina and Ambreen. This is my son-in-law. We’re sitting down because my son-in-law ruins every picture because he’s six foot five. So we just sit down now. And here’s my two grandchildren. And here’s my wife, who’s here today.

And God has blessed me so much. The richness that can come, the testimony of a family that walks with God. It’s just a beautiful thing. People say, ‘Do you ever have any trouble with any of your kids?’

No. I mean, never. I never had any trouble. I think the worst thing is once Josiah was wising off to some teacher, and she called me in. And I mean, that’s it. I mean, I never had, never drugged. It just never came up. There was never any of this. So I mean, we’ve had the talking back a little bit. That’s just regular stuff.

OK, there was the admonition to fear God and keep His commandments.

It says in Ecclesiastes chapter 12, verse 13, the conclusion when all that’s been heard is, ‘fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person.’

Jesus said, ‘If you love Me, you’ll keep My commandments.’ Jesus said, ‘If you keep My commandments, you’ll abide in My love.’

We must keep the commandments of God. If you call yourself a Christian, you keep the commandments of God. If you don’t call yourself a Christian, do whatever’s right in your own eyes or whatever your book says to do. But for the Christian, this is what I was called to. I wanted to obey Him.

There was the application of the Scriptures in my life.

I’ll give you a couple examples of the way the Lord has spoken to me through the Scriptures in my career, what He’s done.

1993, September 3rd, I was speaking at Purdue University. I had been invited back to speak to Purdue University. I was an assistant professor in 1988 at the University of South Carolina. After three years, I got tenure. God really just, my career just took off. Blessing, blessing, blessings. But I worked hard. I went to work at six, came home at six, had dinner with the kids, and then put the kids to bed from the youngest all the way on up to the oldest.

Then as they got older, they put me to bed. And I worked, always worked on Saturdays, and Sunday was a day of church for us and family time. But I worked six days a week, 12 hours a day. And so I worked hard, so I know what that is. But I was staying at Purdue Memorial Union, and I always pray in the morning before I give them a chemistry lecture. Yes, a chemistry lecture that God would bless.

And as I was praying that morning, I read this verse. I was reading through the Scriptures, and I read this verse, where it says, ‘Truly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done in the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, be taken up and cast into the sea, it will happen.’

And I said, Lord, you’re really raising my faith today. I pray that my lecture today, I was invited back to speak there at Purdue University. That’s where I got my PhD. I said, I pray my lecture would be the best lecture ever, ever at the university. And God really started raising my faith.

And then I said, ‘Well, Lord, how am I going to know it’s the best?’ The department’s 100 years old. Who’s going to gauge whether it’s the best? How are you really going to know?

So I said, Lord, okay, so this was my advisor, H. Negishi. He won the Nobel Prize in 2010 for the palladium catalyzed cross-coupling reaction. But, so he was my mentor. When I was a graduate student, no matter how good anything I did that I brought to him, because of his Japanese training, he would always put down his students with the hope that the strong ones would rise up. So he would say, pretty good for your level. And I never got past the guy’s waist, never.

And I prayed, I said, Lord, I pray that if it’s really the best seminar ever, that he says that it was a super seminar. Word that he didn’t normally use, but I prayed that he would say that it was a super seminar.

But when I got done giving that seminar, I knew God really blessed and really anointed. He was sitting right on the front row, right on the end, and he stood up, and he raised his hand, and he said, super, super!

You know, does God answer prayer? Go figure, God answers prayer, He does.

Then I came down off the podium there, and I walked over, sitting right behind Negishi was this man, H.C. Brown. H.C. Brown had won the 1979 Nobel Prize for the hydroboration reaction. Many of you who’ve taken undergraduate organic chemistry may remember the hydroboration reaction. That was developed by H.C. Brown.

This was in 1993, so Negishi had not yet had his Nobel Prize, but he was still a pretty big cheese, and Brown had already had the Nobel. So he was sitting there in the chair, in the seat, and I shook his hand, I said, ‘Thank you for coming to the seminar today.’

He said, ‘I want you to know something.’ And he held onto my hand, he was in his 80s at the time. He said, ‘That was the best seminar I’ve ever seen in my life.’

And I said, ‘That’s very kind of you to say that, sir.’

And in typical Nobel Prize winning fashion, he said, ‘I’m not saying it to be kind, I really mean it.’ So God confirms His word, He really does.

There was another occasion, again, application of the Scripture.

The instance was, God put me in a department, and I was working with another assistant professor, and I was a year ahead of him. We were each working toward our own tenure track slot. He came in one day after being there for about a year, and he looked at me, he says, ‘I’ll get tenure before you ever do.’

And I had already been there a year before him, and many of you don’t understand what that means, but that’s a very ugly thing to say. That is like walking up to somebody and saying, ‘I am better looking than you.’

Now, even if it were true, it’s an ugly thing to say. And my career just took off like a rocket, and he was just a regular career. Struggling to get his first grant. So I went from having a little student desk to having a carpeted office, and a big desk, and a secretary front room, and he still had a little student desk across the hall. His career was just a regular assistant professor career, struggling along.

And then one day, an undergraduate came into my office, and she said, ‘I really like you, but that professor across the hall, he’s always saying bad stuff about you.’

I got really upset. The worst thing you can do is tell an undergraduate something, because then it’s like fire, and phew. It’s in the school newspaper. Now it’s just on Twitter, or Yakyak, or whatever it is that you use. I don’t know what you use here. And it’s just boom, it’s everywhere.

And so I went, and I knocked on his door. I was really going to give it to him. And he wasn’t in. And as I stood at his door, God began to speak to me through a passage that I was reading and memorizing with my children. We were memorizing all of Luke chapter 6, but it was these verses in particular.

‘But I say to you here, “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you.”’

And I was confronted with God speaking to me through the Scriptures, through something that I was memorizing. And I said, ‘Okay, Lord, I will pray for him. I will pray for him every day.’

Now I break every midday, and I either shut the door to my office and pray, or I go to the chapel more — Most of my career, I just go to the chapel. Most of the time, I just go to the chapel where nobody bothers me. I fall on my knees and pray at midday.

And I was at the University of South Carolina at the time. There’s Rutledge Chapel. And I would go right up there, right at the front of the steps, and I’d fall on my knees. And it was always like this. There was nobody in there except me and the Lord. And I would pray. And I started to pray for him every midday, that Lord would bless his career, cause him to get his NIH grant, which he was not getting, and Lord would bless his career.

So when I started to pray for him, his career just took off. He got his NIH grant, and after a year and a half, two years, he was going so well. He got an offer from another university. He took the offer, and he left. And I was so happy. He was gone.

And all of us have problems in life. We want the problems to go away. But the problems so much are our own hearts. And once God got a hold of my heart, was able to release me, and I could pray for this man every day, God could just take him off the scene. I didn’t need that challenge anymore in my life.

God has taken the word of faith, the Bible, and influenced my career tremendously through the words that are in the Bible.

All right, now let me change gears and just talk about this.

How does a cell operate chemically?

So this is a cell. It is just an amazing structure, just amazing structure. This is a machine. It is a factory. It is not a blob of protoplasm. It is a factory. There is so much that goes on in a cell.

So if you go in a factory, you see stuff being transported on belts from one end to another. This happens in a cell. There are these tubules that form. How do you get material from here to here in a cell? These tubes form, and things move along this, and then as soon as the material’s done, all those tubules just go away. They break back apart, and they’ll reassemble somewhere else where the factory, and you say, well, why didn’t they leave it there? Because then the cell would get too many of these things, and it wouldn’t be able to function, wouldn’t be able to move at all, and it doesn’t have enough matter in it to build these all over the place, so it deconstructs and reconstructs.

It is amazing what happens in a cell. So though I don’t understand the vast chemical mechanisms in a cell, it clearly does operate.

So it’s not improper to ask the question: by what chemical mechanism does it function? The very question spawns further investigation. 0There is no scientist that will say, no, we don’t have to investigate cells anymore. We understand it. It’s all defined. No use in further investigation. Don’t have to do it.

No, no scientist would say that. Well, the question that’s often asked of me as students is what do you think about evolution?

Well, all of my colleagues are Darwinists, and I love them as people, and I deeply respect them as scientists, and I hope that they feel the same about me.

But here, let me define a Darwinist as someone that holds that random mutation and natural selection account for the complexity of life. That’s what we’ll define a Darwinist here as, is random mutation and natural selection account for the complexity of life.

So I just ask them to explain to me macroevolution. Not the origin of first life, that’s even harder. But from a chemical perspective, how does the chemistry work in macroevolution? How do you get evolution of a complex system? Explain that to me.

And I’ve written about this on my website. This is from my website. This has been up for more than 10 years. Some are disconcerted or even angered that I signed a statement back in 2001, along with 700 other scientists. We are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged. That’s it.

So we say, we’re skeptical, we need more research. This has become the touchstone of the argument. They say, ‘Because you signed this statement, we don’t want you in our societies.’ Oh, scientists would never do that. It’s not true.

All this statement says is, ‘I’m skeptical, let’s do more research.’ But not in this area, you can’t touch it.

So this is what I’ve written on my website. I simply do not understand chemically how macroevolution could have happened. Hence, am I not free to join the ranks of the skeptical and assign such a statement without reprisals from those that disagree with me. Furthermore, when I, a nonconformist, ask proponents for clarification, they get flustered in public and confessional in private, wherein they sheepishly confess that they really don’t understand either.

Well, that’s all I’m saying, I don’t understand. But I’m saying it publicly as opposed to privately. Does anyone understand the chemical details behind macroevolution? If so, I’d like to sit with that person and be taught. So I invite them to meet with me. Lunch will be my treat. Until then, I will maintain that no chemist understands. Hence, we are collectively bewildered. And I’ve not even addressed the origin of first life issues. For me, that’s even more scientifically mysterious than evolution.

10 years, this has been up on my website. The Atheist Society said, they’ll buy lunch. I said, no problem, I’ll buy lunch. Nobody’s come forward. You know how many chemical engineers there are in Houston? None have come forward.

You know how many chemists, you’d think they’d say, come on, just go talk to that chemist. Why doesn’t one of my colleagues in evolutionary biology put his arm around my shoulder and said, let’s go for lunch? I’ll explain it to you. None of them have come.

When I sit with chemists in my office, let me tell you what happens in the back room. I’ve sat with Nobel Prize winners, National Academy members. Do you understand the chemical details of evolution of a complex system? Can you explain this to me? How do molecules do this? How do you get a cell membrane without DNA?

How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? How do you hook nucleotides together without enzymes? Where’d the enzyme come from if you don’t have DNA? How do these molecules do this?

Every one of them has said that they don’t understand it. Every chemist in my office has said they don’t understand. But when they’re outside, they would never say such a thing.

I once had a Nobel Prize winner and a National Academy member sitting in an office with them and I asked them if they understood. You know what they said? Nothing. Because each other was there. They didn’t want to, so they said nothing.

But do you know that no answer is an answer in itself? I was in the Weissman Institute in Israel talking to a biophysicist. He was talking about the modulus of a bar in the ear that shakes back and forth. The modulus changes as you go along it and that’s how we can hear all these different tones. I asked him, how does something like this evolve?

‘Oh, Jim, typical Jewish. Oh, Jim. We all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.’

This is what happens in the back room. Just last week, I was at a national laboratory and I was sitting with two theorists and they were talking about this little, simple little thing of crystallization of calcium carbonate, trying to model this. This is just scale on your faucet. That’s what it is. How does it crystallize?

I said, ‘Do you guys understand evolution of a complex system? You guys are trying to figure out how calcium carbonate crystallizes. How about pulling together a complex system like an eye?’

They’re like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I mean, we’re not even close to that.’

This is what happens. So all I’m saying is I don’t understand this publicly and it infuriates people. I can’t disprove Darwinism, nor do I want to. I am merely skeptical of its claims because I can’t fathom a chemical pathway to evolution from a complex system and neither can any other chemist that I’ve asked.

If you’re a biologist, you fly over 30,000 feet. Oh, you look down. Okay, there’s a city. You see it functioning? But you get into that city and you see the complexity of it and the wires and cables and the underground. That’s the details. That’s what you have to do in chemistry. You have to pull this thing together. You want to fly over 30,000 feet? You can, well, that enzyme does that.

Okay, and how exactly does it do that? And how did it fold that way? And how did the enzyme that helped it to fold that way make it fold that way? Oh, come on, come on. 30,000 feet, it’s easy. You try to deal in chemistry. It is very, very difficult.

And one is not obliged to have an alternative before skepticism and questioning can ensue. Some people say you should keep your mouth shut until you know a better way. I don’t know the better way. I don’t know how it came about.

Scientifically, I can’t say it’s intelligent design. How can I bring that into my classroom? I hold my colleagues to the same thing I hold myself to. I say, use chemical tools, show me. I don’t have any chemical tools for it. I don’t have an answer. That doesn’t mean you can’t be skeptical of something that’s out there.

But here’s the hope that I see. Science is self-correcting. If Darwinian theory is correct, the chemical description will become evident. As of today, there is little such evidence, so further investigation is warranted. That’s all I’m saying. Further investigation is warranted. Or you want to cut it off. No, you accept it.

We know enough. No, it’s warranted. Keep investigating. Maybe you’ll figure the thing out. Maybe in 100 years we’ll know. We don’t know now.

I suppose more than 99% of scientists never think about confronting anyone on these issues. But there is a small number that have propagated personal attacks on nonconformists like me. Why? Why is that? Why do they want to shut this thing up? Because it’s like a religion.

Religion you don’t have answers for. You want people to shut up, quit asking you questions and saying, God’s going to smite you dead if you keep asking like that.

What’s wrong with asking the question? What’s wrong? What are they afraid of? What are they afraid of coming forward? I just spoke at Mississippi State. They tried to find somebody on campus to go counterpoint with me, to get up there and give the explanation. Nobody would come. The whole campus, nobody would come. What’s going on here? And they want to keep me out of their societies because of this.

So I’ve gotten to the point like Groucho Marx, I don’t want to be a member of any society that would have me. The younger generation has a deeper sense of social fairness and justice and they’re less impressed with conformal academic fluff. That’s the hope that I see. That the younger generation is going to come forth and say, hey, we don’t understand this either. Explain it to us. You can’t explain it. Why are you excluding people from your societies when they won’t embrace this? Why don’t you look at the record as it stands? What are you afraid of? Young people aren’t afraid to say that.

I’m going to close with this. This is my last slide.

‘For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age. Looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds.’

In every other religion, you do good deeds to get saved. In Christianity, you get saved to do good deeds. You first get saved. This is the gospel encompassed in this one sentence.

For the grace of God has appeared and it is bringing salvation to all men. I don’t discriminate against anyone. Nobody, all men, everyone has to come to God. Salvation to all men is being offered. But all men, it speaks to deny ungodliness and to worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age. That we’re looking for Jesus because He’s risen from the dead and He purifies us and then He cleans us up and He makes us zealous for good deeds.

There are some here who your hearts were touched. As believers, your hearts were touched that you need to be reading the Scriptures more and taking on in faith that which God has for you. There’s others here who are not believers in Jesus Christ, who are sensing a call to come to Him. And what I’m saying is, come, tonight, come to Him. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. Don’t let it pass you by.

There is so much goodness here, so much life here. The Scriptures will just teach you and instruct you and Jesus Himself will teach you through the Scriptures. And I know that this is not traditionally done in Veritas forums, but I’m going to break the tradition. As a scientist, I will pray for you.

Let’s pray.

Abba Father, I pray that You come now upon these fine people and that You come and move upon their hearts. You know every struggle in here, every pain, every joy, every yearning of each heart. Draw them to Jesus, I pray, because there is salvation in no other name. There is no other name under heaven by which a man may be saved. And Lord, I pray for the believers here who need to recommit their lives to reading the Scriptures and obeying Your word and following through on it. Draw them to Jesus.

Father, for those in struggling homes, Father, I pray that they would have the joy in marriage that I have and that You would draw their marriage into union with Jesus Christ. Lord, I pray that You would reunite men and women in their marriages. Father, I pray for those young people here who have gone astray and separated themselves from their parents. Father, I pray that You would reunite them, that they would humble themselves and be reunited with their parents, that there would be forgiveness where forgiveness needs to flow. Because as Your word says, ‘if you do not forgive others, your heavenly Father will not forgive you.’

And Father, I pray for those here who don’t know You, that they would repeat this with me. Father, forgive me because I am a sinner. Come into my life. I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and that He’s risen from the dead. Come into my life and fill me by Your Holy Spirit. Save their souls this day, I pray. Lord, Your mercies and grace abound for Your glory. Amen.

I will open it up for questions. I think there’s two microphones here. Come on up and you can ask me questions about my faith, questions about nanotechnology, questions about evolution.

MALE AUDIENCE: I guess my question is, obviously there’s no doubt you’re a scientist because of the accomplishments and the dreams you’ve had. But it’s also clear from your talk that you’re a Christian, sold out to Jesus. So when you engage other scientists on the issue of evolution and your skepticism, I guess the first response would be, it’s obvious you’re a Christian, so you’re simply trying to disprove evolution because of your Christian perspective. That may be true, that may not be true.

But because it’s obvious you’re a scientist and you reason scientifically, how do you respond to them trying to draw the line between the fact that although you’re a Christian, even your scientific mind cannot rationalize some of the things that’s been put forth? How do you respond to that usually?

JAMES TOUR: Okay, so that’s a good question, so thank you. Most scientists I don’t have this conversation with. But there’s some when I get them alone because I don’t want to embarrass them in public. And so when I’m alone, I may ask them a very simple thing. They’ll be explaining, how do you rationalize this? If they confront me, that’s something else. But nobody ever confronts me because they know that I’ve got a howitzer in my back pocket. I mean, they just know that they’re going to be obliterated.

And so you’d think that all these people would be running to my office to confront me. They stay away from me, they stay away. If you speak up a little bit, they’ll attack you. But if you speak out, I mean, they don’t want to come near you, they think you’re crazy. I mean, but when I engage in these conversations, none of them will argue with me. Even the ones that go criticizing Christians and saying, oh, Christians are this and Christians. I know these people and I consider them friends. And when I am in their presence, they don’t say anything about this.

And so when I talk with them about this, they immediately, chemists, and this is what I’m talking about, chemists will say, I don’t understand it. I have never had a chemist say to me that they understood this because they know the next question would be, okay, show me. And they know they can’t just talk fluff with me. They’ve got to show me.

I’ve even said on my website, I will ask no questions at the lunch. I will not confront you at the lunch at all. All I will do is ask questions when I stop understanding. Nobody’s come forward. One day, a student from Berkeley said I, he was speaking on a blog. I don’t read blogs, but somebody sent me portions of a blog said you got to read this. He said that he would come to Houston and talk with me if he had a ticket. Well, somebody else from the blog said I’ll buy you, on the blog said I’ll buy you the ticket.

So then I, and I told him, you know, we’re not recording this. This is just you and me. You’re going to explain it to me. And he says, oh, well, if we’re not recording and filming it, I’m not going to waste my time. I’m not coming. I’m like, come on, man. You just told me you were going to come. And then we finally, I got him on the phone because he had written something, some stuff about me on the internet. And people had sent this to me and I finally got him on the phone.

And he said, have you ever read anything on the chemical description of evolution of a complex system? I said, oh no, I haven’t. He says, well, you ought to go and read about that and then come back and talk to me. I said, you know, I’m not good at finding papers. Why don’t you find the papers and send them to me? He said, okay, I’ll find it. I said, but only send me two or three. Because at my age, I’m like a graduate student that can plow through 50 papers. Two or three, and I’ll really study them. On evolution of a complex system.

I said, but it has to have chemistry in it. Has to show molecules. So yeah, it’s there. After six months, I still didn’t have the papers. I finally called him again. I said, I’m still waiting. He says, you know, I’ve been really busy. It’s now been over a year, I still don’t have them.

I met with Francis Collins, who worked on the human genome, you know, the big human genome, and now he’s head of the NIH. And he’s a theistic evolutionist. So he believes in evolution that God, but he’s a Christian, but he believes God set the thing in motion. I said, Francis, I don’t understand it. I don’t see a chemical perspective. Now, he’s a biologist, he’s not a chemist. He says, Jim, this is well understood. He says, well understood? He says, yeah, yeah, I’ll send you some papers. I said, okay.

In the papers, there’s not a single molecule. There’s just a bunch of fish heads. There’s no chemical description, none. So nobody’s coming to me. I bring it up in passing because I’m not there to corral them and catch them because I don’t know anybody’s that’s going to come to faith based on this. And my main motivation is to reflect the love of Christ. Things that draw people to faith are like Rick Smalley. When they see how a family flows together and the power of God in a person’s life, that’s what draws them, not this nonsense about evolution or not. Did that sort of answer?

Okay.

MALE AUDIENCE: What’s your response to theologians who are into theistic evolution? Because that, as a geology student, I get discouraged by that a lot. Anyway.

JAMES TOUR: So theistic evolution is that you believe that God, that you believe that evolution has occurred. You believe that evolution has occurred, that God set this thing in motion and God set it up this way for this to occur. And I say that you believe that it occurred because you need to believe that it occurred because you don’t have a chemical mechanistic model.

Now, for theologians that believe that, there’s no construct in which I can frame the argument because I have to show them the molecular structure. I have to understand the molecules. And chemists, I’ve got them. Chemists, I’ve got them because they don’t have any chemical model for this. But once a person is outside the domain of chemistry, they don’t understand how difficult a thing this is to even fathom how this can occur.

So to a theologian who’s into theistic evolution, I just say, as a chemist, I just can’t understand it And I leave it at that. It’s not a huge deal for me. The reason I’m bringing this up, and last year, I came out of the closet on this one year ago at the Trotter Talk right here. And the reason I did is because I was being attacked so much from my quiet little perspective on this. And I figure, okay, if you guys are going to come at me like this, I’m coming out of the closet. I mean, both guns blazing. Take me off. And nobody’s coming forward.

So for the last year, I’ve been giving these sorts of talks and just coming right out with it, and they’re not coming forward because there is no chemical model. Now, I’m not against them. That’s why I say I love my colleagues. I love my evolutionary biology colleagues. And I think, what do you teach in school? I think you teach evolutionary biology, but you teach the problems with it as well. And you teach it as a theory for what it is. And here’s the problems with it.

I don’t think you can teach intelligent design because I don’t know how to teach that using my chemical tools. It’s going to be a very short lecture. Okay, you find the watch in the desert. You know that an intelligent being must have made that. Okay. Now, what else do I say for the rest of the lecture? And what’s the chemical tools there that I’m going to show? Do you see what I mean?

So, I just don’t know how to bring that into my classroom. But I think there’s been so much done in evolutionary biology that helps us to understand living systems that this can be taught. But when you’re talking about it, you talk about it as a theory for what it is. And I can’t disprove Darwinism. I’m just saying it is terribly incomplete from a mechanistic standpoint, and it warrants further investigation and just get off my back about attacking me on this thing because you know it. And I’m just the only one out there saying that the emperor has no clothes.

MALE AUDIENCE: I really appreciate your honest perspective not removing unfounded opinions on the subject of evolution and creation, of course, because there are a great many unfounded opinions and they tend to distract the truth behind the argument. But I do have a question, historically speaking. When did you first notice the contention between the biblical perspective on this and the leading, the predominant theory?

JAMES TOUR: Okay, so let me say that as a Christian who believes the word of God, I believe that God created a man named Adam and a woman named Eve. I believe that. I cannot prove that chemically. That’s something I believe. That’s faith, right? So that is faith. And I confess that that is faith. I believe that to be true.

When I came to know Jesus, when I accepted Jesus, I didn’t believe that to be true. It doesn’t say that you have to believe in Adam and Eve. It doesn’t even say you have to believe in the virgin birth. It says you have to believe, confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe that He’s risen from the dead to be saved. Boom, that’s it. That’s all we’ve gotta pick in order to be saved. And that’s what happened to me that day.

It’s as I was reading the Scriptures that I became more and more understanding that I started to take this more by faith. But as a scientist, as a scientist, I never — I confess that Adam’s based purely on faith. I have no scientific model for that. I wasn’t there. As far as I know, none of us were there. So we don’t know.

This started becoming a problem probably shortly after 2001, after the signing of this statement. That’s when it started becoming a problem where people will argue with me or people are using that statement to teach creationism in school. And I say, well, what they use the statement for, I don’t know, but look at the statement, what it says. It just says more study is warranted. People use cars to rob banks, so let’s outlaw all cars. People use things for other things than they were intended for.

So it started to happen there because when I started as a faculty member 27 years ago, I never remembered this being a problem. I put a Scripture verse on the top of every exam. From the time I was an assistant professor at a secular university. And I still do it. And now I’ve noticed that students write Scripture verses back to me. The most common one being: ‘Blessed are the merciful.’

So I’ve always been really bold with my witness, but it started to become a problem, I would say around 2000. And that’s when there are few men in particular, a few men, not women, a few men in particular, and they were born right around the time of World War II, shortly before, shortly after. Most of them were of British origin and they have taken it up as their task in life to come against people like me, but they will never take me on face to face.

In a discussion, I can’t speak theologian talk. I’m not an apologist, but you wanna talk molecular structure, come on, let’s do it. And I don’t have to have one-upmanship movie cameras there. I want you and me, just explain it to me. And if I see it, I’ll go with it. So I would say that it really started around 2000, 2001.

MALE AUDIENCE: You mentioned that you had done some deep research on the resurrection of Jesus. I know in the Bible, it talks about the fact that He appeared to 500 people or so, but imagining that there’s no construct within which somebody may accept the things that are written in the Bible, what extra biblical things have stuck out to you over the years? Maybe one or two things speaking to the resurrection of Jesus that have been significant.

JAMES TOUR: So there are certainly writers of that time that talk much about this, that talk about it is said He has risen from the dead, not that they themselves thought, it is said that He has risen from the dead, or that people believe that He has risen from the dead, but it’s not just what the Scriptures say, which is a huge amount and really good for historians.

Historians say, this is really so, but just when you look at what the apostles did. So you have these apostles who you and I believe, I believe in the resurrection, I believe the resurrection has occurred. I believe it and I’m willing to die for that belief. Lots of people die for what they believe. The apostles did not die for what they believed in the resurrection, they did not. They all died — well, John was banished to the island of Patmos, but all the others died. Some of them were crucified, some of them, and this is all from extra biblical references. Some of them were flayed alive. That means you’re tied down and they skin, they cut off your skin while you’re living. They were flayed alive. They didn’t die for their faith in the resurrection. They died because they knew it to be true.

Nobody dies for a lie. If this were an April Fool’s joke, okay, you ready to play me? Okay, guys, April Fool’s, let me show you where the body is. No, they died for what they knew to be true. Nobody dies for a lie. Lots of people died for what they believed to be true, but each one of those men died for what they knew to be true. They had seen the resurrected Lord. They had touched Him. They had walked with Him for 40 days here on this earth. They saw Him. This, to me, is really compelling, and it is extra biblical sources that talk about, for them, most of their deaths, the resurrection.

MALE AUDIENCE: But this issue that you’re at the middle of, this skepticism, is very discouraging to me because isn’t that the history of scientific investigation? Where would we be if somebody didn’t say, I don’t think you’re right, and I’m going to go find out. I’m going to try something different. We’d be thinking of the molecule as boring if it weren’t for somebody who said, I’m skeptical about that, and that, to me, that says something about where science is headed, and it’s discouraging.

But the other thing that’s frustrating and discouraging, you started out by showing us some amazing things, some astounding breakthroughs, technology. Where is it? I mean, you can go to TED Talks and hear people talking about wonderful things, graphene-covered glass that has magical properties, but I don’t see it coming to fruition in any kind of, is there something holding us back as we got a problem there?

JAMES TOUR: Okay, so let me get to your first thing. I agree with you. I mean, where would science be if we didn’t allow investigation? And so it’s a sad state of affairs, and that’s why I say it’s become like a religion, because this is what we’re dealing with them. It’s become like a religion. And so this is why I’m coming out with it, and I’ve never had a scientist, and I’m sure there’s many scientists in this room, and no scientist is going to stand up in here and say, no, we shouldn’t investigate it. No, we just shouldn’t do it. You know, so that’s where we are.

The other point is, for nanotechnology, remember, most inventions, most inventions have taken over 20 years, and many of them more than 20 years to go from a laboratory to product. Talk about radar. From the time the phenomenon was first noticed to the time it started being used. So we are still very much in this maturation period, still very much in this. Graphene was rediscovered in 2004, I believe it was, 2004 by Geim and Novoselov. So we’re only 11 years into this. It’s generally more than 20 years for any one of these inventions.

Now we had seven of our technologies, seven of them licensed last year, in the year 2014, to seven different companies. One of them is already on the market selling some material, but the other six are not yet. Well, you can buy the material, but the applications are still very small. It’s little niche areas. But this is well within the period.

So this idea that, and part of this is the press. The press will call me and they say, oh, you had this great discovery. When are we going to see it? Ah, 20 years? Oh, no, no, no, come on. I mean, 20 years doesn’t work well for the press. But this is what it is. Intel has told me, from the time something is working reasonably well in their laboratory, till the time they’re selling it, on average is eight years. This is within a company that controls the industry, and it’s all within mainline silicon technology. It takes eight years. All within one industry.

So when something is taking 20 years, just chill, all right? We are in this development period, and it is coming. I mean, there’s things that graphene oxide does that picks up radioactive waste, and this is being deployed, but it’s still very niche. And if you have problems that you’re not hearing about it, give me a call. I can tell you where it’s being deployed, because I know it. So there are things coming.

There’s battery technology that is clearly there. Things that are being deployed in battery technology from the nanometer scale. There is, if you talk about mainline electronics and making nanometer-sized gates, we are there. This is happening, and this is in this computer right now. I mean, where you have layers now that are three atoms thick. So this is nanotechnology. This is upon us.

MALE AUDIENCE: Another question. The answer to this question could be very lengthy, but if, for your sake, you can keep it brief. How would you say, you know, you hear about people, and you see all the time people are workaholics. I would not say you are one.

JAMES TOUR: My wife might disagree with me.

MALE AUDIENCE: Yeah. And so I ask, out of seriousness, but also half in jest, I suppose, how in the world did you get your wife to agree with six days a week, 12 hours a day, and at the same time, like, I know you did the family prayer thing in the morning every day. That’s awesome, but.

JAMES TOUR: And I was home for dinner.

MALE AUDIENCE: Yeah. How did you do all that?

JAMES TOUR: And I took the kids to bed.

MALE AUDIENCE: Put it together. How did you do all that and become, oh yeah, I’m like the best scientist in the world, kind of thing? That wasn’t quoted, by the way. So, I mean, I don’t know how you briefly answer that.

JAMES TOUR: No, no, you’re not the only one to ask me how I do all that I do. You know, I wake up at 3:40 in the morning. Okay, so I have a few extra hours before, and I spend time in the word of God and in prayer. And I set my life into ordering that. And one of the ways to deal with my wife issues is that what I would do is at 5 a.m. I would bring her a hot cup of tea, which she likes, with spiced Indian tea. And I would bring her Bible to her bedside, and I’d leave that for her. And you know, that goes a long way with a woman.

And then at 5.30, we’d have our family devotions. And my wife is the type of woman that just loved taking care of children. And so for all the years that the kids were at home and growing up, she loved doing that. And she knew that I was going to be home for dinner, and that I was going to play with the kids and put them to bed and help in that way.

And, you know, we’ve had our times, but it was never, well, sometimes it was bigger issues than other times, but things would come up. But now I think she feels that if I were home too much, she’d think I’m sick or something. She expects me to be gone, and she’s learned how to thrive enough of herself. She has her own friends, and she does her own things. And I come home, and she’s like, I’m going out. Where are you going? I’m going out with my friends.

So she goes out, and I’m like, what a bummer. I mean, I come home, no kids left, and she’s going out with her friends. I’ll tell you, when I gave the Trotter Talk last year, it was the NBA Finals. It was right around this time last year. She didn’t even wait till the end of my talk. She went right back to the hotel to watch this thing. I was giving another lecture, and she loves Peyton Manning. Peyton Manning was speaking that night. I say, reserve the seat. I said, reserve the seat for my wife. She’s going to sit right in the front. She never showed up. She was there to do hobnobbing with the snobs in the beginning, but then she was gone. I mean, she was back at the hotel watching Peyton Manning. So she’s learned how to survive. She doesn’t need me around her all the time to feel like a fulfilled woman. How’s that?

MALE AUDIENCE: I asked not to, I didn’t ask not to manipulate my wife. For those of you that know me. But when you see wisdom, man, you go get that stuff. So thank you very much.

JAMES TOUR: Well, my wife’s right down here, so you can talk with her. She’ll tell you how it was.

MALE AUDIENCE: Has your research, has the science you’ve been looking into, has that kind of motivated your faith? And maybe in the reverse, has your faith made you a better researcher? And so for, I guess for someone thinking about entering research as a Christian, and there’s a lot of work, as we talked about, involved in that, how do those kind of work together? And how does that balance work out?

JAMES TOUR: So science has never weakened my faith. It’s only strengthened it. I mean, when I see the scientific world, I’m like, God, you are amazing. We were building a molecular computer once, and we were just trying to build very simple systems, AND gates, OR gates, very simple little systems that, based on molecular arrays, where we didn’t know the exact structure in there, but we were programming it, giving voltage pulses from the side, and so we’re working really hard on this. We called it the Synthetic Brain Project, until DARPA made us not call it the Synthetic Brain, because they were afraid of what it would do, and then a decade later, they had the Synthetic Brain Project, but we said –

and then at this time, my son was like four years old, and he was running to me, and I thought, God, how do you do this? I’m trying to make an AND gate, which is about as simple as you can make, and this kid’s coming running to me, and they’re speaking, and they’re talking, and they’re functioning, and I said, where is it? He says, I putted it over here. I said, what’d you, I putted it over here. His brain made that extrapolation. In English, the language is messed up, so that past tense, future tense, I put, I will put, I did put, it’s all the same. So the language is messed up, we don’t say put it, but the kid’s mind figured out that he should be saying put it. He was right, the language is messed up. The brain was doing exactly what it should do.

I see a mosquito, and I watch this mosquito, and he just flies around and around, and he lands, and he sings, and then what happens is he starts emitting these small molecules, which is called other mosquitoes. There’s meat here, come. How in that little brain, tiny little thing, there’s all this controlled motion, and they’re able to sense that I’m there. They’re able to detect the molecules that are there. It’s amazing.

So what happens is, science drives me to appreciate my God all the more for what He’s done. Lord, you are amazing, just amazing. I get my kids sometimes to try to appreciate what I do. Oh, dad, you just don’t, and they don’t appreciate. I’m like, you know, there’s some people that appreciate. But I appreciate God more than other people do, because I know the scientific realm of all that He’s created, and it’s just scratching the surface. I’m like, God, you’re utterly amazing. So that’s the way it impacts me. You see what I mean? My faith makes me love God so much more for the greatness in creation.

MALE AUDIENCE: I was wondering, I noticed in one of your kind of defenses for Christianity is that the apostles all died for their faith, and you thought that it was significant that they all died in what they believe in.

JAMES TOUR: They died for what they knew to be true. When we die for our faith, they died for what they know to be true. That was the argument.

MALE AUDIENCE: Gotcha. I was wondering if you hear of Islam terrorists sometimes dying for their faith, if you thought that was kind of a difference.

JAMES TOUR: Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. People die for their faith all the time. That’s why I’m saying the apostles were not dying for their faith. They died for what they knew to be true. You see the difference? I died for my faith, you’ll die for your faith. Muslims will die for their faith. Happens all the time. People, though, don’t die for something they know not to be true. That was the model that I was putting before you. I’m sorry, you might have missed my point.

MALE AUDIENCE: Oh, I just paused for a bit, but thank you for explaining that.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: I had a question because I have been, this has kind of been going around in my mind lately, and I know you said you’re not a philosopher or a theologian, but it’s really been intriguing me lately because I’m taking a chemistry class right now, and I’ve experienced a lot of the same emotions that I think that you do, kind of the wonder, and just, of course, mine’s much more basic of an awe. But, and I’ve been thinking about it lately because I also have a love for literature and poetry and those sorts of things, and I have struggled with fitting the Bible into that paradigm because there’s truths in the Bible, you know, you talked about a lot of them that you use in your life, but there are truths that you discover in your scientific research and that I discover from my chemistry textbook that are not necessarily explicitly in the Bible, but they are truths.

You know, how do you, I’m just wondering, I struggle with that about wondering, there’s a Bible that’s truth, but then there’s also science that’s truth, and sometimes they intersect and sometimes one of them just doesn’t fit, and I just wonder how you fit the Bible into your paradigm of truth.

JAMES TOUR: That’s a good question. I’ve never seen discord between the two. So there’s truth in both, and they’re talking about different issues. The Bible is trying to draw us to God, and this is this love letter from God to us, written over 1,500 years with over 40 different authors, and you see prophecies, prophecies that are just so clear, and you say, well, that was written after the fact. Couldn’t have been because we found the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1930s, which predate the life of Jesus. They were written, we have documented they were written before Jesus was ever born, which have the Isaiah prophecies, which have all the books of the Bible except the book of Esther is in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then it talks about the life that Jesus would have, and then the other things that were going to be coming in the kingdoms that would come.

So it’s such a beautiful document, but it is not the encompassing of all truth. We see other things around us. So it’s all beautiful, but I’ve never seen anything contrary. People say that the Bible is contrary. The biggest thing that they’ll say the Bible is contrary to science because science has proved evolution, and that’s why I say science hasn’t proved evolution, and so we can take that thing away.

So I’ve never seen, so it’s not a problem for me because yeah, there’s new truth that God reveals to us through science, which is amazing, and so we see that our God is so big and so grand, and it’s not just in science. I mean, other people work in other fields, and they see this, and they’re like, wow, and they discover things that, you know, people say an astrophysicist, I mean, they know so much more about the universe than I do, and it’s like, wow, I wish I knew what you know. No, you know, sometimes I do this. I wish I knew what you knew. I would appreciate God all the more. There’s so much out there, and so much that God has laid before us, but nothing is, there’s no incongruency.

MALE AUDIENCE: You’re taking a kind of open-minded perspective from the scientific side. You know, you’re saying you’re obviously willing to accept any evidence that’s given in favor of evolution. Say, hypothetically, that evolution were proven tomorrow to be true, all the scientific evidence, chemical evidence is presented, and it’s convincing. What effect, if any, would that have on your faith?

JAMES TOUR: Yeah, it wouldn’t shake my faith a bit, because my faith is based on Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection. What it would begin to do is to make me try to reinterpret the book of Genesis, and I say that, and you know, the way we read Genesis in the Western world is different than the way it’s read in the East.

My son-in-law is Israeli, and he is a student of the Bible at Hebrew University, and he is really intrigued that Americans will read the book of Genesis and try to somehow fit that into a scientific domain, and because he sees this in Hebrew as this beautiful poetry, and so there’s this allegory that God is communicating with people, and he doesn’t try to match it up with things, and that’s probably what I would then do, you know, if I were convinced that the evolutionary model is there, but it wouldn’t shake my faith.

And I will mention that, you know, there’s this idea of young Earth and old Earth creationists. In other words, some believe that the Earth is sub-10,000 years old, and some believe that the universe is 14 billion years old, and the Earth is billions of years old, and we have this model for this much longer Earth, and I’ll tell you, there’s an interesting article by a man named Gerald Schroeder. If you were to Google Gerald Schroeder, it doesn’t matter how you spell it, Google will find it.

You Google Gerald Schroeder, Age of the Universe, and he’s written a book on this, too, but there’s like a three-page document that’s just amazing, so he talks about the expanding universe, so we know scientifically that today will be a longer day than yesterday, that we have an expanding universe, slightly longer, and because our universe is expanding, days are increasing, and if you march this thing back to the origin when the Earth was initially, when the universe was beginning to expand, something that looked like a short day then, as we look back on it, is a very long period because of the relativity of time, and it’s an amazing argument, and he’s a physicist, a Jewish physicist. He actually works out of Jerusalem now, but it’s an amazing document because when you read that, it makes everybody right, meaning that the young Earth creationists are right, the old Earth creationists are right. It just depends on what time frame you’re looking at it from because of the relativity of time.

We know that there are bipedal creatures, bipedal creatures that go back a long way, but people just scientifically, as we know them, people as we know them where they had art, history, where they had religion, where they had culture, where they buried their dead, where they had musical instruments, that is sub-100,000 years. That may well be sub-50,000 years scientifically. 50,000 years and 10,000 years is all the same when we’re talking about geological type time frames.

So I’m not sure that there’s actually even as much discord as there really is, that the old Earth creationists and young Earth creationists might all be right. It’s depending on what time frame you’re looking at in the continuum of the relativity of time, but it wouldn’t shake my faith.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: I was just wondering if you could, well, I wonder why we don’t see, say, like nanocar type structures that God created, for instance. And then sort of a piggyback question to that is, do you think in the future we’ll be able to create things even more complex than what we have biologically speaking? And if so, is that kind of like we’re outdoing God?

JAMES TOUR: Okay, okay, no, we’re not outdoing God. I mean, I don’t know when we’re about to create a universe. So I don’t think there’s any, no time soon will we outdo Him, okay? But so God has nanocars, really elegant things. He doesn’t use wheels to drive along. This is all human mind construct. But He has, for example, these proteins, these kinase-type proteins, and they just walk along these. And they’re walking proteins, they just walk. It’s just amazing. He’s already got these.

Talk to any biologist, he’ll show you, any biochemist, we know these things, we can watch them. They move along this gradient, and they just move along. It’s really amazing. So God already has all these nanomachines. It’s called biology, it’s called enzymes, and it does this. And what we’re trying to do is do this ex vivo, a biological system, outside a living system, we’re trying to be able to do this. And I think one day we’ll be able to do it.

Now, can we make systems better than God? In some ways, we have. I mean, you look at how fast a computer can compute things. They will beat a person hands down in certain operations. Now, people will still beat them in certain operations. With computers, in many operations, we’ll beat people hands down. But that doesn’t shake my faith at all. God has made us a certain way for certain functions, but what He’s done is He’s given us the creativity to make these computers with billions and billions of chips on them.

Now, there are things that people do, and computers use a lot more energy in doing this than what a human brain does. You know, a human brain is just a few watts. I mean, this is just very little in comparison. And you talk about how much energy has this laptop used just to give this talk. I mean, it’s a huge amount compared to what a person will burn up. And so we’re extremely efficient systems in that way. But we’re going to get better with this thing. But it doesn’t surprise me at all that God has given us this ability to do this, but we’ve already outdone the human structure. But remember, humans are way, way below what God is.

So there’s no indication that we’re the ultimate structure that God could have made. No, we just, I mean, it was just a boom, just like that. Boom, let’s create man, boom, okay, it’s done. I mean, this is the thought of God, and it’s done. So, did that answer your question?

For Further Reading:

James Tour: The Mystery of the Origin of Life (Transcript)

John Lennox: 7 Days That Divide the World (Transcript)

Cometh the Horsemen: Pandemic, Famine, War: Michael Yon (Transcript)

The Natural Order of Money: Roy Sebag (Transcript)

[/read]

Related Posts

• The Art of Reading Minds: Oz Pearlman (Transcript)
• Transcript: India’s NSA Ajit Doval’s Speech on Regime Changes
• Inside India’s Astonishing Solar Revolution: Kanika Chawla (Transcript)
• Is The AI Bubble Going To Burst? – Henrik Zeberg (Transcript)
• Why Writing Is the Ultimate Rehearsal for Public Speaking