James Tour and Lee Cronin on the Origin of Life

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Darwin skeptic Dr. James Tour has been in the news related to Intelligent Design lately, quite probably because he is a brilliant scientist and outspoken Christian. He issued a challenge to ten origin-of-life researchers, but not one rose to accept it.

A few months back, he had a debate with atheopath Dave Farina. It did not go well. Farina is abusive and irrational, and Dr. Tour also got excited but was not offensive. Something similar happened with Drs. Tour and Cronin.

My Pond-Full-o-Algae photo modified at PhotoFunia
In a pair of articles by Casey Luskin, we learn that Dr. Lee Cronin agreed to have a public discussion with Dr. Tour. Apparently Cronin was civil, he still managed to say things that were untrue about Tour, and he spent a quite a bit of time focusing on his opponent rather than dealing with the science. James talked about origin-of-life science and its tremendous problems, but Lee seems to have avoided the subject for the most part.

There was a recent exchange at The Question Evolution Project on Facebook where commenters and I agreed that atheists have boilerplate questions and responses, showing little original thought. I had my own run-in with Farina. It included abusive ad hominems, appeal to motive, straw man, and other fallacies — followed by bravado. Basically, he is just like any other feral online atheist tweaking boilerplate reactions. It seems that Dr. Cronin used similar distraction tactics against Dr. Tour that Farina used, but with far less venom.

It has been said that a good way to make people dislike you is to be unkind. Dave Farina even alienated fellow atheists with his antics at that debate. On the other hand, people who present themselves well can appear to win debates or have the upper hand in discussions. Indeed, back with the first Ken Ham and Bill Nye the Propaganda Guy debate, someone commented that Nye scored points on presentation but not on logic.

Secularists make promises and write drafts on the bank of the future, saying that yee haw boy howdy, we sure are close to breakthroughs. It never happens. Frankly, (mind if I call you Frank?) they never will. The origin of life cannot come from abiogenesis, it only happened by the will of the omnipotent Creator, who is described in the Bible.

If you have a notion to read the two articles that inspired this post: