Dr. James Tour’s Challenge to Biologists
Dr. James Tour is a world-renowned chemist who possibly knows more about the chemistry of cells and life than any other person on the planet. In his recent YouTube lecture, Rice Professor Demands Transparency on Design of Life Chemistry [1], he offered an invitation/challenge to all origin of life scientists to discuss the chemistry of life and their claims that they can create life in a test tube.
The lecture presents the amazing complexity of the chemistry of life. Tour thoroughly debunks the claims of the small army of origin of life scientists who are currently claiming they see a viable path to creating life in a test tube. The objective of his challenge, is to open a productive scientific dialog that addresses the true complexity of organic systems, of cells, of DNA, of life.
Why are origin of life scientists so hostile to intelligent design?
When asked why origin of life scientists are hostile to intelligent design, Dr. Tour answered it is because of their Scientific Materialist Worldview. Origin of life scientists, like most other modern scientists, totally dismiss the concept of God as a myth, a fairy tale, something that is totally beneath anyone with their lofty intellect and enlightened worldview. With this atheistic worldview, they cannot tolerate any “scientific” discussion that even suggests that there appears to be any intent/intelligence required to create the complex designs we are discovering within our bodies.
Consequently, they view Dr. Tour’s advocacy of the necessity of intelligent design in the chemistry of life as religious propaganda. So, instead of engaging him in a meaningful scientific dialog, they just ignore his arguments, ridicule his faith, and attempt to censor his beliefs. Then they make ridiculous claims about how they are on the verge of creating life in a bottle.
Dr. Tour is correct in attributing this hostility toward intelligent design to origin of life scientist’s compulsive adherence to the atheism of their scientific materialist worldview. However, it is only partially correct, there is a much more sinister dimension to this clash of ideas, theories, beliefs, and worldviews.
The Political Motivation Behind the War on Intelligent Design
There is a monumental clash of political worldviews ravaging the western world today. The age-old progressive utopian dream that there is a better way to more equitably distribute wealth has captured most of academia and through them has created a new generation of devotees to big government socialism controlling all aspects of our lives. This has led to the intellectual leaders of their movement embracing many of the radical tactics espoused by Socialist/Marxist strategists and a morality based not on integrity but on the belief that “the ends justify the means”.
To usher forth their new utopia, these radicals must displace or destroy the current economy and system of government. To do that they must attack the foundational beliefs and replace them with the belief that a compassionate all-powerful big government making all the decisions is the best path forward for America.
Religion becomes their enemy because they do not want their citizens to believe there is a “higher authority” than their all-powerful government. They must have complete control of the economy, the laws, the morals, the lives, and the aspirations of their subjects if their authoritarian rule is to succeed in creating their imagined utopian paradise on Earth. So, they make atheism the state religion, taught in every public school and most universities.
They just cannot have rogue scientists out there saying that science appears to have proven that life had to be intelligently and purposefully designed. And it is really embarrassing for them when a scientist of the stature of Dr. Tour is the one challenging their enforced atheism.
For those who read our history, there is an understanding that the radical left’s war on religion is politically motivated and has been going on for hundreds of years. However, most scientists are blissfully unaware of this sinister force actively fostering atheism in every way that it can. To the average scientist, their beliefs and worldview are all based on solid scientific reasoning. However, they were educated in a system that preached atheism and belittled anyone naive enough to believe in silly concepts like purpose, meaning, design, or free will. They are like the frog in the slowly boiling pot. They have been cooked and don’t know it.
To appreciate the radical utopian’s problem just imagine if an individual believed that reality is a purposeful design and consciousness and free will are magnificent meaningful gifts designed into each of us. Such a delusional citizen might start to believe that life has a purpose and is meant to be a beautiful adventure. Then he would start to think his pathetic life is significant and start to value meaningless things like freedom, integrity, opportunity, love, and family. He would start to believe these things are meaningful and important, even more important than blindly obeying Big Government dictates about what he should believe and what he is allowed to do.
If you think the above rant is simplistic nonsense, go read Alinsky’s, Rules for Radicals, read Marx, read BLM’s charter, read any socialist strategist you choose. They all promote cultural warfare with attacks on religion, morality, the family, and personal freedom as a means to undermine and overturn the existing society and install their imagined utopia.
However, it is more insidious than that. They advocate isolating the individual and crushing his belief in a meaningful life, as a means to create compliant subjects for the tyranny that they must install to create their utopia.
Atheism is a political tool used by the radical left to facilitate revolutionary change in a society. Most people following the radical left today are doing so for a wide variety of seemingly innocent reasons. There are even many very religious people in the radical left camp, including one of my daughters. All these well-intentioned souls are basically useful pawns unaware of the history of our ongoing political battle and how the progressive utopians are using science as a tool to preach that life is just a meaningless accident.
The Science of Intelligent Design
The purpose of science is to create theories to explain how reality is designed and how it behaves. Then science should examine all evidence that could challenge those theories to continuously refine our understanding of reality. Nothing in our current scientific theories comes close to explaining the amazing complexity of a cell (any cell) that Dr. Tour and others have examined. And no one can begin to explain how random DNA mutations coupled with “natural selection” could have possibly programmed our DNA.
The amazing complexity of life we have discovered in the last 60 years has forced evolutionists to drop their “random accident” defense and now are forced to cling to their totally unexamined, unbelievable belief that “natural selection” was the guiding force behind the evolution of the complexity of life.
The belief that natural selection can guide evolution toward better and better (more survivable designs) seems logical enough until you examine the math. “Natural selection” advocates maintain that by capturing beneficial design features as they happen, natural selection can then use these captured designs (DNA subroutines) to design more and more complex systems (more complex total DNA programs). The problem arises when you realize you still need a random DNA mutation to facilitate any opportunity for “natural selection” to recognize that the new mutated DNA subroutine is better than the last one.
Consequently, modern biology’s claim that “natural selection” solves the “random design” problem of evolution is nonsense. At best, it removes a few orders of magnitude from the probability calculations. However, that is simply not enough when you are facing numbers smaller than one chance in 102000 of randomly writing human DNA code [2].
Dr. Tour says this same thing when he tells the origin of life scientists that he could give them all the thousands of chemicals found in life (all the required chemistry subroutines) to start with and it would still be mathematically impossible to accidentally assemble these molecules to create even the simplest living cell. However, he still faces constant attacks from origin of life scientists falsely claiming they are on the verge of creating life in a test tube and from evolutionists falsely claiming “natural selection” could have guided evolution to achieve these unbelievably complex and sophisticated designs.
At this point this is no longer a scientific debate, scientific evidence is not even considered. The scientific materialists (virtually all mainstream scientists) are blinded by their faith in atheism. While the progressive utopians are politically motivated by the power that they will gain by suppressing or destroying religion. It has become a battle of worldviews.
Summary
Unfortunately, the arguments over origin of life science and evolution left the realm of scientific debate decades ago. Today, it is purely a power struggle between competing worldviews.
On one side there are people like Dr. Tour and Dr. Stephen Meyer [3] saying let’s look at the scientific evidence of the complexity of life and the mathematical analysis of how these incredibly complex systems could have happened.
On the other side you have mainstream science committed to defending their atheistic scientific materialism and refusing to even consider what the complexity of life has to say about their atheistic worldview.
Left to an honest debate these two opposing arguments would eventually have to resolve the issues involved by a truly “scientific/mathematical” analysis of all the evidence. However, there is a third force, a third worldview, in this debate that does not want that to happen.
For the progressive utopians, it really has nothing to do with scientific evidence. They have a much more sinister reason to be in this battle of worldviews. It is all about their political power struggle. For them the weaker the religious culture of their subjects, the stronger their position is to install their Big Government utopian paradise that their intellectual leaders have imagined for centuries.
So, today Dr. Tour and a few others are fighting a heroic battle against two opposing worldviews, unfortunately, neither scientific materialism nor progressive utopianism is interested in an honest scientific debate about all the current evidence supporting intelligent design. The progressive utopians are using the scientific materialists as pawns in their continuing war on all things that hint at religion to achieve their political ends.
The vast majority of people are blissfully unaware of all of the dimensions of this ongoing struggle between atheism and intelligent design advocates. However, the reality is that the struggle over whether or not reality was intelligently, purposefully designed has devolved into a sinister politically motivated power struggle and all that is at stake is the soul of humanity and the future of mankind.
Ken Pedersen retired as a Vice President of Raytheon managing Advanced Systems a research and development organization. He has a doctorate in electrical engineering with a background in system engineering, information processing, mathematics, and physics. He is the author of two books, Jenny’s Universe, (O, Books 2002) was published in English, German, and Polish and Modern Science Proves Intelligent Design, (Archway Press, 2019). Both discussed what science has discovered about the design of the universe and life. He has published numerous technical and inspirational articles. Ken lives with his wife, Anne, at Canyon Lake in the Texas Hill Country.
