The Eric Metaxas Show - James Tour (Encore)
Episode Date: June 11, 2025James Tour, the brilliant synthetic organic chemist and genius in the field of nanoscience, is in the bunker to talk about science, faith, reason — and the origins of life itself. ...
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Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. We'll get you from point A to point B. But if you're looking for point C, well, buddy, you're on your own.
but if you'll wait right here, in just about the two minutes, the bus to point C will be coming right by.
And now here's your Ralph Cramden of the Airways, Eric Mat, Texas.
Boy, have I got a show for you?
I get to talk to someone I think now of as a friend.
His name is Dr. James Tour.
He lets me call him Dr. Tour.
That's not true.
He lets me call him Jim.
He is at Rice University.
he is what is known as a nanoscientist,
nano, of course, being the prefix for billions.
And here he is.
James Tour, welcome to the program.
Hi, Eric.
It's good to be back here again.
Well, listen, you've been on the show,
but you have not been on the video version of the show.
And I really want my audience to get to know you for many reasons.
Let's just start with your,
professional credentials. Tell us, you did a short video the other day that I watched where you went on
and on about your credentials and then you said, but the most important thing was you're a Jew who
believes Jesus is the Messiah. So what are some of those credentials? And I'll fill in the ones that
you're ashamed to mention. Well, the only reason I went into those credentials is because I was
asked to just like this. So I have a PhD in the field of organic chemistry.
and I've been teaching as a professor for 32 years,
and I work specifically in the area of nanotechnology,
and we work in areas ranging from electronics.
I have a computer memory company that's based on some of our work to medicine.
I have a couple of things that we're doing in medicine,
and one company already on that and another one starting.
And then we do a lot in the area of materials,
new space age materials, graphene in particular.
And so I have several companies that are based on that sort of product.
So we work across electronics, medicine, and materials.
But, okay, Jim, so look, I can go on and on about you because you're humble, and I hate that about you.
You should be more, you should brag more because God has really done some extraordinary things with you.
You have been listed as one of the top scientists of the decade.
You have done things with nanotechnology that are just unbelievable.
Talk for a second, just so my audience understands about what you do.
You create molecules in the lab.
I mean, the idea that you're manipulating atoms to create molecules, tell us about the nanocars.
Well, those are single molecule cars that have four wheels and a little motor in it.
And so what we do is we just shine a light and that motor begins to spin at about 3 million
rotations per second.
And we take known pieces.
I mean, these sorts of motors were known.
We just built them into a car.
And now what we've done.
Look, look, what you're saying sounds semi-normal to you.
To anyone else, it sounds like you've lost your mind.
You just said that you make cars that are a single molecule.
Anyone who remembers what a molecule is,
the idea that you have built these things that are one molecule,
a single molecule that has axles and wheels
and what you call a motor and a chassis,
it is completely unbelievable, except I know you're not lying.
So just to be clear, these cars with wheels,
actually roll over a surface. What kind of a surface are we talking about? So we've used several different
surfaces, but we've used gold, we've used silver, and we've used glass. And so we drive it over this.
And we build very large wheels on it so that it can go up one step high, one atom high steps.
These are the monster trucks of the molecular world. That's what you're telling us.
Yeah, yeah, and they work very well, and you can shine a light and you can get them to move.
You can't see them with your visible eye, but there are instruments where we can see them.
But what's neater is that more recently what we've done is we've been able to take these same motors,
and then we hook a short peptide, a short protein to it,
and then we have those associate with certain cells that we don't like.
like particularly cancer cells, say, or bacteria, and they'll latch on.
And then we turn on the motor, and the motor drills into the cell and kills it.
And so that's a great way to kill cells.
So we've just started a company around that.
Cancer killing monster trucks on a molecular level.
I'm afraid that your great learning has made you mad.
In all seriousness, this is so wonderful, Jim.
It's such a joy to talk to you about this.
and I love the fact that you try to make it understandable to those of us who don't have PhDs in any field,
much less science or nanotechnology.
Now, are you a nanoscientist, a nanobiologist, a nanochemist, or all three?
Well, I'm a chemist, but I work in all those areas.
So, but I'm saying you'd be described as a nanochemist or a nanobiologist or a nanoscientist.
I'd be described as probably a nanoscientist.
Yeah, yeah.
And if you were a woman, would your grandkids call you Nana or Nano?
That's a joke.
Okay, listen, Jim, you're creating molecules in the lab.
Just to pay no attention to the stupid jokes.
You're creating molecules in the lab.
And part of the reason I want to talk to you about that is because I want to get to talk to you about the origin of life.
and then I want to talk to you about where you're coming from in terms of your life philosophy and spirituality.
But let's just talk for a moment about the origin of life.
I remember when I was, you know, in the 70s, in my textbook, there was this famous thing called the Miller-Urie Experiment,
which was conducted in 1952, published in 1953, which purported to show how life came into being from non-life about
four billion years ago.
So what has happened since 1952?
Nothing.
Nothing has happened.
So the Miller-Uri experiment, what it did is they took some very simple compounds like
hydrogen, cyanide, formaldehyde, carbon dioxide, things that, ammonia, things that were
believed to be on an early earth.
And they subjected it to a high voltage where they had it.
They had the molecules going up through high voltage to simulate the flashes of lightning hitting some pond or something.
And they were able to generate small molecules called amino acids.
All the amino acids, so almost all amino acids have a mirror image relationship,
meaning that you might just have the left-handed amino acid and not the right-handed.
That's what you find in nature, just the left-handed.
but what they got in their experiment was the mixture of the two.
Nonetheless, they were able to make a series of amino acids that way.
And so that was reported to be, hey, this is going to be the beginning of the origin of life.
We will be able to show how life is started from this.
Okay, so there are several steps, and this is why I find the whole thing ultimately funny,
because once you really understand how complicated it is, it's hilarious.
So you're telling me that in 1952, they use very, very controlled situation, and they create amino acids.
And then, of course, the leap is, hey, amino acids are the building blocks of protein,
proteins, building blocks of life.
Next thing you know, fish are going to be jumping out of the pond.
And what you're telling me is that even the Miller-URI experiment is flawed.
In other words, forget about moving beyond amino acids together.
get two amino acids in the way that they suggested, we now know, or you now know, because this is
what you do in your lab, you create molecules, you're saying it is effectively impossible given
billions of years. Well, as a scientist, I can never say something's impossible, but what I can say
is that we are absolutely clueless. So we spent the last 68 years trying to do this, trying to go
from the Millie Uri experiment.
And we're not getting closer to a solution.
We're getting further to the solution because what you have to do in abiogenesis experiments
is you have to say, how do you get basic chemicals to assemble into first life?
And that first life being a cell, any cell.
It could be a bacterium.
Jim, forgive me.
I'm going to cut you off.
We're going to pick up that sentence when we come back from the break.
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Eric.
It's a burning thing.
Hey folks, welcome back to the next to the show.
I'm talking to Dr. James Tour of Rice University.
He's a nanoscientist, and we're talking about the origin of life.
So, Jim, continue what you were saying about how life is supposed to have come into existence.
So it is presumed that you can take small molecules.
It small molecules came together and assembled, and they more and more came together
until you eventually have to have a cell.
You can't have evolution until you have first life.
You can't have first life without first having a cell.
And a cell could be something that's like a human cell
or it could be something like a bacterium.
Either way, they're highly complex.
And so you have to do that first.
The problem is we've been trying for 68 years
since the Miller-Uri experiment to do this,
thinking that in 1952 that, oh, we were just on the verge of being able to solve this.
But what's happened is the target has gotten further away because the cell every year,
we see the complexity, the greater complexity of it.
So every year, the target moves further away, the goalposts move further because we see it's
more and more complex.
So what happens is we are not getting closer to this.
we're actually losing ground with every consecutive year because the cell is crazy, difficult to think
about constructing, even if we had all the pieces, even if we were to take all the pieces and give
them to the greatest scientists in the world, in the greatest laboratories, not under a rock somewhere,
but it, and all the molecules, they wouldn't know how to assemble it into a cell.
but somehow you've got to figure out how to do this.
So I can never say it couldn't be done,
but as of today, we are utterly clueless on how this could be done.
So that just tells us and that it's getting further away,
the target's getting further away.
It's going to be a long time before we would ever know.
I mean, even when you say utterly clueless,
it sounds like you're speaking metaphorically or hyperbolicly.
I mean, what you mean, genuinely is that since 19,
52, 53, when it was published, we have learned not only nothing, but less than nothing.
In other words, it's as if when you say the targets move farther away, we ought to have progressed
a millimeter, an inch in the direction of learning more, but the more we learn, the less we know
about the thing we wanted to know. Let's just go backwards for a second. I mean, the infinite
complexity of the cell, it is almost laughable. I was looking it up this week doing my own research
just to write about it. It's hilarious. Like the level of complexity is insane. So forget about
cells. Let's just go backwards to the prebiotic soup. You have, they postulated four simple
chemicals, right? Four simple molecules. And they said, what, methane, ammonia, I don't remember
water, what was the other one? There's like four.
Formaldehyde.
Formaldehyde. So four very simple, in terms of complexity, simple molecules.
So they're pretty sure these things existed. And they're saying, well, we know you can't have
life with them. In order to have life, you need what? You need amino acids and proteins, I guess.
You need four classes of compounds. You have amino acids which build up to be protein.
You have the lipids which generally make the the spherical part around the cell.
You have the nucleic acids, which are your DNA and your RNA.
And then then you have to have the carbohydrates, which are the sugars or the saccharides,
which are exceedingly complex, especially when you hook those things together.
I mean, those are so complex, so much more information can be stored in a carbohydrate
than in DNA and RNA.
That's what I said.
I had no idea of that.
And let's talk about information, right?
Let's talk about DNA and RNA.
The idea that you could have four simple molecules, very simple molecules,
somehow randomly become RNA or DNA.
What are the levels we're talking about, levels of complexity?
You know, is it to tend to the third power?
What is the difference between a molecule of formaldehyde or methane and RNA or DNA?
Let's put it this way, that nobody knows how to take those simple molecules and build up an RNA or DNA chain.
And even if you use modern synthetic techniques, you could change those and you could modify those.
Nobody knows how that would be done in a prebiotic environment.
You have to use all sorts of reactions that have been developed over the years by scientists to do that.
It would be a hammer-in-tongs synthesis, but you wouldn't even know how to structure it.
In other words, just hooking nucleic acids together to make, does not give you RNA,
just like taking a bunch of letters and throwing it down on a table does not give you a book.
you have to have some order to this.
Nobody knows where that order came from.
And the letters don't just assemble themselves
when you throw them down on a table.
It's the same thing with molecules.
They don't just assemble themselves
into the words that you need.
They don't even just assemble themselves into gibberish
because they don't know how to hook on to each other.
So there's a lot of chemistry.
Everything is a mess.
So they don't even assemble themselves, period,
much less into something that has highly complex order.
but I still want to help my audience understand the level of complexity we're talking about.
In other words, when we're talking about RNA or DNA, people have said, people making the case for this abogenesis and then for evolution, that given enough time, anything can happen.
So whatever the complexity is, at some point, you get that complexity.
And we go back to the old thing that, you know, if you have some vast amount of monkeys typing forever and ever,
eventually somebody will produce the works of Shakespeare.
That's sort of not true, but that's been said over and over.
Is that what we're talking about with regard to the complexity of RNA and DNA?
Yeah, it's like having that room full of monkeys, and the monkeys then die.
They die.
And that's exactly what happens to molecule.
So if all of a sudden you got a nucleic acid and you got a saccharide and you want to make now a nucleotide,
You want to hook those two together.
They have to find each other, number one.
Number two, they're constantly undergoing decomposition reactions
because the very reactions that were used to make them will go further
because they're not what's called the thermodynamic product.
They're not the most stable product.
They're at a state where if left alone, and I'm not talking about billions of years,
I'm talking about a matter of weeks, they end up decomposing.
What is this called?
It's actually the enemy. Time is the enemy. Is this called a zizamer reaction or caramelization,
or what are we talking about? Oh, you're thinking of the Kenizara reaction and the caramelization reaction.
So exactly. That's exactly it. You are absolutely right. You read it. And so what happens with Sacherides.
I may have just randomly intuited it. You know what I'm saying? Over enough time, producing enough words.
But those two things you mentioned, see, the reason I'm bringing this up is because you're the expert on how to create molecules in the lab.
And you know that let's say you do create a molecule.
If you don't act instantly to do the next thing, what you've just created decomposes, goes backwards.
And you referred to this in something, the caramelization and then the kizmer reaction.
In other words, you know what happens.
happens. In 1952, 53, and in the year since, they didn't know. So they could postulate all they
wanted. The problem now is we can no longer postulate because guys like you know what happens.
Well, in 1952, they knew about, they certainly knew about caramelization. And I think the
Karnasara reaction may have already been known, but they were really hopeful. But you see what
happens is there are these, all these standard chemistries that take place. Right. So what we do is we
make a molecule in the lab, and right away you have to stop the reaction before it decomposes.
So you watch it increase, and as it's just before it starts to decrease, you stop the
reaction. You isolate it, and you purify it, and you get it away from all those chemicals
that were used to make it, because if you don't, it will go on to something else. And so
this is what scientists do in the lab. They say that they are simulating prebiotic earth,
but they stopped the reactions.
They stop the reactions.
They stop it before those undergo further decomposition,
as did Miller and Yuri.
You stopped the reaction.
So you're going in and you're playing with it.
And even with all you're playing with it,
you can't make it work.
So, again, I find this funny
because you're telling me in 68 years,
we have not moved a micrometer
in the direction of figuring out
the most basic thing,
how life arose on planet Earth,
not how or whether life evolved.
Forget about that.
We're just talking about how we got any life to begin with,
that the universe of scientists has not been able to figure this out.
And on the contrary, because of folks like you,
we have figured out one thing for sure.
We don't know.
We're going to be right back.
I'm talking to Dr. James Tour, don't go away.
Folks, I'm talking to Dr.
Dr. James Tour of Rice University.
He's a nanoscientist.
We're talking about the origin of life, how it happened.
And the answer is, now we don't know.
We used to think we knew, but the more we know, the more we know that we don't know.
This sounds like Mark's brother's routine.
Jim Tour, tell us what do people who say that they believe life came from non-life?
knowing what we know, is there anybody out there who's willing to face what you have been saying,
or do they still bat away what we know because they don't want to know this bad news?
They want to keep thinking that we're on the verge of something.
Well, very few of those who work in the area of origin of life will meet to have the discussion with me.
recently I did have the discussion with a with a kind gentleman Lee Cronin and what we ultimately came out with is that Lee says yeah we don't we don't know where life came from he's trying to figure out something that isn't life by any definition that we have of life he'd like to think of something much simpler and redefine life and maybe go after that and but I have to commend him for coming on and speaking with me but most people won't and I think it's becoming more and more clear now
One thing you did say, we said, we haven't even preceded a micrometer.
We proceeded a micrometer, but the target has gone another million miles away.
So the target's becoming harder.
So, yeah, that's, but I think it's going to become more clear as days go on because I'll
continue to push this thing and show, and it's very easy.
It's not like it's complex.
It's not hard for me to do this.
It's not like I have to have to find some way to, to,
stab at this thing. No, it's really easy. Like everything is hard to imagine on a prebiotic earth.
Every part of it, because even when you have it all in your hand, you can't assemble a cell.
Nowhere close. Well, I was going to say that's, you know, again, when we're talking about cells,
the reason, part of the reason the target has gotten farther away, as you said earlier,
is it's like before I thought, you know, all I need to do is assemble,
a tank a toy. And then I realized, no, actually, I have to create a 2020 Mercedes-Benz. I don't know
that I'm up to that. I don't know how a carburetor gets put together. I don't know how to create a
piston. I don't know anything. And you're telling me, we're talking about multiple levels of
complexity beyond that. And so it is getting farther and farther away. But I guess I want to go back
to the idea that you, because you're doing this in the lab, you have the particular ability
to see that this is not possible. Would it be fair to say that there aren't other people doing
what you are doing on the level that you're doing it, that you stand out in this because of the
work you've been doing over the last 20 years? So, just so that I understand your question,
that I'm doing nanotechnology work or that I'm speaking of the origin of life.
No, the kind of nanotechnology work that you're doing that gives you particular insight into the
difficulty of molecules randomly assembling themselves because you are assembling them non-randomely.
Okay, I understand.
So I think any organic chemist, when they are confronted with this and somebody points out to them the problems,
they go, oh yeah, I can understand that.
But then the other part of it is exactly what you're saying.
It's the assembly of those molecules into a system.
And that's what nanoscientists do.
We don't just make the molecules.
We try to assemble them into some higher order system.
And that then, again, shows the difficulty that's involved in doing that.
And so that adds the second level of complexity to an already astronomically complex problem.
and the numbers are just crazy big, just the interactomes, just trying to assemble the non-covalent,
the non-bonded interactions between the molecules in a cell.
We have no idea how that's done.
Just the protein-protein interactions themselves in a single yeast cell, which is a simple cell,
it's 10 to the 79 billion power.
Now, that is a crazy big number.
What?
I literally don't think in my lifetime in reading books I've ever heard a number like what you just said.
You've never heard a number like what I just said.
10 to the 79 billion.
10 to the 90, 10 to the 90 is all the elemental particles in the universe.
The ways that these could be assembled, the protein, just the protein protein protein interactions in the cell are 10 to the 79 billion.
So it's a crazy big number.
That is a one with 79 billion zeros after it, as opposed to a one with 90 zeros after it is all the elemental particles in the universe.
That's just the protein protein, protein, nucleic acid, you don't have protein nucleic acid, nucleic acid.
So these numbers are crazy, and we have no idea how to assemble this.
And the poor folks who work in this area, my heart goes out to them because they're not doing anything that's helping us along because we're just we just don't know.
what we're doing in this area. So anyway, that's that.
Again, I find this just delightfully entertaining.
You talk about the prebiotic soup, right? That itself, we now know, again, because the answers
are proving infinitely more elusive. Even when you start with a prebiotic soup,
the whole thing's basically impossible. We now know,
that we probably didn't even have a prebiotic soup to start with.
So that creates all kinds of other problems.
When we come back, folks, I'm going to continue my conversation with Dr. James Tour of Rice University.
We're talking about the origin of life.
Don't go away.
Hey, folks, it's the Erkman Taxis show.
I'm talking to my scientist friend from Rice University, Dr. James Tor, nanoscientist.
Jim, what I find comical about all of this is that, you know, you're, you're, you're
one of the top scientists on the planet.
And at some point early in life, you found faith really dramatically.
And most people who know anything about how science works today knows that typically
people of serious faith are dismissed or somehow ostracized because it makes people
with a scientific, materialistic world view very uncomfortable.
And I would think that you, being at the level you are, would make people.
particularly uncomfortable. You're their worst nightmare. Well, yeah, I'm certainly an anomaly in the
academy. I love Jesus more than anything. Boy, I just love Jesus. This one who hung on the cross
for me. This one who rose from the dead is the son of God. And when I got saved at the age of 18,
he really changed my life.
He really changed me.
And I love him so much.
And I just want to spend my life talking about him and how good he is.
And what I found in the academy is that if you speak a little bit about Jesus,
they'll give you trouble.
But if you speak a lot, they leave you alone.
I mean, they just don't even want to get you started.
I just will not quit.
I just love Jesus more than anything.
I'll take out full-page ads in the school newspaper and just talk about Jesus and how wonderful he is.
And nobody will say a word.
And I just love him.
And I will testify of him.
And I try to bring as many people to Jesus as I can.
If I go a week without bringing somebody to the Lord and getting them from no faith to faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, risen from the dead,
and involved in a Bible study.
If I don't do that at least once a week,
I feel like it's been a wasted week for me.
I really love Jesus.
How do you, evidently you do, sir.
Let me ask you, how do you do that?
In other words, being a very, very busy academic and a researcher,
you've got all these companies you've started that are doing,
we haven't even touched on that.
You're doing truly spectacular, miraculous, in quotes,
things with technology, saving lives, you know, bringing, having the lame, be able to walk.
I mean, we can talk about that another time, but you're doing really amazing things.
How, given your busy schedule, do you interact with people such that you're able to do that?
I make this a focus.
If I see somebody, if I perceive somebody might be open to the Lord, I will stop what I am doing,
and I will meet with them, and I will take them through it.
I don't use any grand apologetics arguments.
I don't use scientific arguments.
I use the simple gospel.
That message works across all cultures.
In the past, I had done prison ministry.
Now all I do is I speak to academics.
And I will see undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, mainly in the sciences, professors.
Just last week, there was one undergraduate came to the Lord,
and one professor in chemical engineering came to the Lord.
This happens over and over again, and I'm telling you it is the simple gospel.
Everybody wants to be the grand apologist.
That's not what I use.
What I use is that we have all sin and fallen short of the glory of God.
And I tell my testimony about how I was confronted with my sin by reading the statement of Jesus
that if you look at a woman to lust after her, you've committed adultery with her already in your heart.
And I confront people with this verse to show them that they are sinners because there's
nobody that can read that and not be convicted. And then I show them how God demonstrated his own
love toward us, and while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, and take them right over to
Romans chapter 10, verse 9, that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and
believe in your heart that he's risen from the dead, you will be saved. And I say, have you ever
seen a resurrection? They say, no, I've never seen a resurrection. I said, neither have I. How is it? How is
that I have this conversation in 10 or 15 minutes with people every week, all of them educated.
And they go from not believing in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ to believing
in the physical resurrection in a 10-minute conversation.
How do you think that happens?
I believe it's the power of the Holy Spirit because there is nothing natural that can explain
that leap.
Exactly.
And I tell them because the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is already in your heart.
It would be too incredible and too.
hard of a thing for God to have set that as the barrier for salvation. He told us in that verse,
this is what you have to do to be saved, that to believe Jesus is Lord, and to confess
Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart. That means really believe it that Jesus Christ has risen
from the dead. The truth of the resurrection is already there. And all I'm asking you to do is to
confess that the truth is already there because Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead for you.
And I see students, graduate students, professors, all young physicians from the medical center every week,
bowing to that message and saying, yes, yes, and confess that right there.
And I would say almost every one of them will get involved immediately in a Bible study.
I said, look, I've given you this 15 minutes.
Now you owe me 13 hours.
13 hours.
That's 13 weeks of Bible study, one hour a week, going through great.
growing in Christ by the Navigator's campus ministry, and I get them set up with somebody,
and I do this week after week after week.
That's what means more to me than origin of life.
That's what means more to me than nanochemistry.
It's Jesus.
It's him who gave himself for me on the cross.
I love Jesus more than anything.
Can you bring this back to polysaccharides?
Jesus, it's amazing what he did with polysaccharides.
It is so big. If you take six nucleic acids, all of them the same, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, there's only one way to put those together. That's all the six the same. If you just had six Dmanosis, just six carbohydrates, standard carbohydrates, you can hook those together in over one trillion different ways. Imagine the information that's stored in sugar. I mean, God is amazing. He stored all this information in sugar. People are so enamored by DNA and RNA and how much
information can be stored. And he just put before us sugars. He says, what do you think of this?
Just think of the miracle. The miracle of a jelly bean. Consider the jelly bean. Listen, you are so funny.
I can crack a dumb joke about polysaccharides. You answer it seriously. This is why I love you.
That's one of the reasons. We're going to be right back. I'm talking to Dr. James Tour of Rice University.
Hey, folks, welcome back. As you can tell you.
I'm in my home studio because there's something going around.
I don't know what they call it, some kind of pandemic thing.
You have to read about it in the news because I don't have a lot of details.
But you know we're living in strange times, but I thought,
what a better thing to do than talk to my friend Jim Tour about the origin of life,
about Jesus, about all these things.
Jim, do you have hope that the scientific community at this late stage,
you know, in culture, in history, that they might eventually more than not be willing to see
some of the things that you see with regard to the limits of science?
Yeah, I think we're seeing the limits of science in the sense that the more we uncover,
the more questions there are.
And so every time you lift up some stone and you look underneath, and you figure something out,
there's all these other questions.
So science is really rich and exciting.
But, you know, for me, I don't see many people coming to the Lord through science, you know,
just staring at science.
Some people do.
Most of the time it hits them directly in the heart.
Most of the time it just nails them in the heart is what happens.
And that's what I've seen is that this ability to, that the gospel breaks through.
It is the simple.
gospel message that Jesus Christ died for our sins because we were sinners. There's nothing that we can do to
get ourselves to God. He gets us there because he demonstrated that and he rose from the dead and he is
Lord of all. And that's what breaks through to people. So there are some people that look at science and
come to the Lord through this, but that simple gospel message works 90% of the time. And I just
the only thing is I was going to say that there are people, of course, that when you say to them,
you know, for example, it says, Jesus says, you know, to look on a woman at a lot of it, they would say,
who cares what it says? That's written by somebody a million years ago. It has no relevance to my life.
I don't see why I should feel guilty because it says that. I mean, of course, many people would have that response.
You know that. Yeah. So I've got, I've got a whole other section of verses that I bring them through.
It's all on my smartphone, and I just take them right through it, and it just lists out what a sinner is and the lake of fire that awaits them.
So generally, I don't have to go there.
There's about 10% of the time I have to go there where people either don't believe that they're sinners, or if they're sinners, they're just not so bad.
And I just take them through a few scripture verses, and by the end of that, most of them would say,
you got me. You got me. There is something about the scriptures that we try to speak around and
quoting all these philosophers. I would rather use one sentence from the scriptures than quote
all the great philosophers. The word of God, this is God's words. He has given this to us for an
absolute reason. And you present this to people and boom, they're confronted with their sins.
Not by the words of men, but by the words of God. They're confronted with their sins.
and I have seen it time and time again.
They go, you got me.
You got me.
I think, I mean, look, to be fair, I think it has something to do with God's particular
anointing on you and on the way he made you because you're a very, very compelling
speaker.
You know, when you speak, you have great passion.
Not everyone has that.
And I'm glad you do, frankly.
We're just about out of time.
Jim, we have to have you back.
There is so much else I want to ask you about polysaccharides, for example.
No, seriously, about everything.
Thank you, my friend, for being my guest to be continued.
