When I was just starting out my career in America, I ordered dozens of audio lectures featuring Christian scholars defending the Christian worldview on the university campus. These lectures were recorded on audio cassettes. And they came to my house in a box. I would put them into my tape player and listen to them, then rewind the tapes and listen again. And these lectures are still going on.

Today I wanted to blog about a recent lecture given by a famous chemistry professor named James Tour. You might have heard of Dr. Tour. He has a stellar career doing research in nano technology at Rice University.

Here’s his biography. I can only excerpt a little, because it’s very, very long:

James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Syracuse University, his Ph.D. in synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry from Purdue University, and postdoctoral training in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University. After spending 11 years on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in 1999 where he is presently the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering. Tour has about 650 research publications and over 200 patents.

I figured that the average senior scientist doing research at a university has about 40 peer-reviewed publications, and Grok agreed with that, citing a survey from Nature from 2018, which found that senior scientists (15+ years post-PhD) average 20–50 peer-reviewed publications. So, 650 is a TON of publications! And what’s exciting is that his research is actually solving problems in the private sector.

Anyway, here is an article from the Harvard Sentinel, about his recent lecture at Harvard University, on the topic of the existence of God:

On April 1^st, Rice University chemistry professor James Tour visited Harvard to deliver a guest lecture on the existence of God. During his lecture, which was hosted by Christian student group Harvard Undergraduate Faith and Action (HUFA), Tour presented what he called a scientific challenge to the current explanations for life’s origin, and he discussed the myriad of unanswerable dilemmas within the presumed scientific consensus.

Tour, who was raised in a secular Jewish home but converted to Christianity, began by introducing his religious background and his ongoing nanotechnology research. He then overviewed the current state of research on the origin of life.

Here is the very important point. He made sure to say that he is not arguing from a current gap in naturalistic scenarios for the origin of life. He is arguing that the more our knowledge increases, the less plausible naturalistic scenarios for the origin of life are. In other words, it’s the progress of science that is making things harder for the naturalist / materialist. And Dr. Tour ought to know, since he’s one of the scientists making the progress.

But wait, there’s more – a minimal facts case for the resurrection:

With this, Tour transitioned to the historical evidence for the Bible being true. According to Tour, there are three claims concerning the Bible upon which most academic religious scholars agree: first, Jesus died by crucifixion; second, the disciples of Jesus asserted that Jesus rose from the dead, and they were willing to die for that assertion; and third, there were individuals who previously did not follow Jesus but converted after asserting that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them. They, too, died for that assertion. None of the disciples, in any record—including in their recorded thoughts—recanted before being killed.

“No man dies for what he knows to be a lie,” Tour stated.

It’s great to see a professional scientist arguing for an inference based on the facts that “most academic religious scholars” agree on. And why do they agree on them? They agree on them because these facts pass the standard historical criteria for ancient biographies. These facts are recorded early. They appear in multiple sources. Many of them are supported by enemies, or outside the Bible. Many of them are embarassing to the authors of these biographies.

Here’s the full lecture:

And I noticed that he’s speaking at another famous university on April 15th: Cornell University. And he’s apparently on a speaking tour, because his previous stops at Princeton and Dartmouth and Yale.

And I thought this 1 minute interaction with an agnostic professor at one of these talks was really a good window into what Christianity is really about. It’s about taking up God’s priorities in the little opportunities that you have.

He also has a weekly podcast! Find out all about him here.

I’m hoping that more and more Christians are seeing how big government can thwart our ability to carry out Christian life plans. Bad government does this in several ways. They mismanage foreign policy, which causes expensive wars and commerce disruptions. They mismanage fiscal policy, which makes us all poor. And they mismanage social policy, which disrupts marriage and family.

The UK has been under the control of the secular left for some time. They have an open borders policy, massive government spending on wasteful government monopolies and welfare programs, and massive attacks on the human rights of taxpayers. And the more they squeeze taxpayers, the less the taxpayers can afford to run their own life plans, including the choices to marry and have kids.

Here’s an example of how the government discourages marriage and family, by attacking parents who try to raise their children right.

This is from LBC UK:

History teacher Vanessa Brown, 50, spent seven-and-a-half hours in a custody cell on March 26 this year, following a claim she had stolen two iPads which were traced to her mother’s house in Cobham, Surrey.

Yet it transpired that the two devices belonged to her daughters, and Ms Brown had merely confiscated them to encourage them to focus on their schoolwork, a fact Surrey Police has now acknowledged.

“I find it quite traumatic even talking about this now,” Ms Brown recalled.

“At no point did they [the officers] think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction for a moment, confiscating temporarily her iPads and popping over to her mum’s to have a coffee’. It was just a complete overreaction.

The UK nanny state doesn’t like when parents make children “sad” by enforcing discipline.

In the United States, parents would be able to use the courts to deflect government overreach into how they parent their kids. Or they could move to a red state like Tennessee, Oklahoma or Florida. But in the UK, all the courts are opposed to parental rights, as well as free speech and freedom of religion. So, government just goes wild in trampling the rights of the taxpayers who pay their salaries:

Ms Brown was taken to Staines station, where she was searched, and had fingerprints and custody shots taken before being placed in a police cell for several hours.

Surrey Police also sent officers to her children’s school, pulling her daughter out of class in the process.

Her ordeal was compounded, however, when she learned of the conditions of her bail, which would have prevented her from seeing her children on Mother’s Day.

It wasn’t until half-past midnight that Ms Brown was returned to her mother’s house – nearly twelve hours after officers first arrived.

She told LBC she suffered a sleepless night and was left in a “catatonic state” by the experience.

In the UK, they have opened up their borders to Middle Eastern men, and many of those Middle Eastern men get involved in sex-trafficking white girls. When British citizens – i.e. – the parents – complain to the police about this, the British police ignore them. That’s because the British police are more aggressive against the taxpayers than the criminals:

It comes amid increasing concern about how officers are using their time after a couple from Borehamwood were arrested by Hertfordshire Police following their criticism of a local school on a parents’ Whatsapp chat.

It’s a concern that Ms Brown echoed following her arrest.

“They were able to send a police car with police officers to my children’s school, they were able to send another police car or two to arrest me… I know people are making reports of thefts, of assaults and very violent crimes in and around our neighbourhood – and they’re not getting a response for days.

And if the parents take to social media to complain about the immigration policies, then the police will go straight to their homes to arrest them.

The UK Times reported on this:

The police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive posts on social media and other platforms.

Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.

Custody data obtained by The Times shows that officers are making about 12,000 arrests a year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

[…]Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023, the equivalent of about 33 per day. This marks an almost 58 per cent rise in arrests since before the pandemic. In 2019, forces logged 7,734 detentions.

The statistics have provoked criticism from civil liberties groups that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech using “vague” communications laws.

You might remember that the London Chief of Police had actually threatened to extradite Americans to prosecute them if they commented on the state of affairs (rioting, arson, knife crime, sex-trafficking children, etc.) in the UK. That’s how crazy secular left totalitarianism is in the UK. They don’t even realize that there is anything wrong with running a police state against taxpayers, using the money they take from the taxpayers. Don’t let it happen here! Vote smart. Vote against the secular left. Vote against Stalinism.

These days, many people are raised to think that religion is not about describing reality as it is, especially in religions that are closely tied to race, region or nationality. But Christianity is different. People are expected to become Christians because Christianity makes claims that are testable, and can be investigated with science, logic and history. Let’s see an example.

This is from Christian Post:

Archaeologists have discovered new evidence backing up the biblical account of the Battle of Megiddo.

The battle is recorded in both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles and is given as the cause of death for King Josiah, who was noted for being a pious king and is also recorded in the New Testament as an ancestor of Jesus.

Josiah is praised in the biblical text for his zeal in turning Israel away from idolatry and toward worship of the Lord. He is also noted for encouraging the people to observe the Passover, with 2 Kings 23:22 going so far as to say: “Surely there was not holden such a passover from the days of the judges that judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah.”

However, it was not to last. The Old Testament accounts say that Pharaoh Necho of Egypt came with an army “to fight against Charchemish by Euphrates: and Josiah went out against him.”

[…]Now archaeologists have found pottery fragments in the area suggesting that there was indeed an Egyptian presence around the time of the battle in 609 BC.

Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University and the lead author of a study describing the finds, told Live Science that as well as Egyptian pottery, the remains of Greek pottery were also found, likely due to the Egyptian practice of hiring Greek mercenaries at the time.

Let’s review some of the other major archaeological confirmations of the Bible in the rest of this post.

Consider this article from Be Thinking by UK apologist Peter S. Williams. It has a lot of examples, so let’s just se a few.

Here’s a good one:

Jerusalem and The Pool of Bethesda

John 5:1-15 describes a pool in Jerusalem, near the Sheep Gate, called Bethesda, surrounded by five covered colonnades. Until the 19^th century, there was no evidence outside of John for the existence of this pool and John’s unusual description “caused bible scholars to doubt the reliability of John’s account, but the pool was duly uncovered in the 1930s – with four colonnades around its edges and one across its middle.”[38] Ian Wilson reports: “Exhaustive excavations by Israeli archaeologist Professor Joachim Jeremias have brought to light precisely such a building, still including two huge, deep-cut cisterns, in the environs of Jerusalem’s Crusader Church of St Anne.”[39]

And this one:

Jerusalem and The Pool of Siloam

In the 400s AD, a church was built above a pool attached to Hezekiah’s water tunnel to commemorate the healing of a blind man reported in John 9:1-7. Until recently, this was considered to be the Pool of Siloam from the time of Christ. However, during sewerage works in June 2004 engineers stumbled upon a 1^stcentury ritual pool when they uncovered some ancient steps during pipe maintenance near the mouth of Hezekiah’s tunnel. By the summer of 2005, archaeologists had revealed what was “without doubt the missing pool of Siloam.”[40] Mark D. Roberts reports that: “In the plaster of this pool were found coins that establish the date of the pool to the years before and after Jesus. There is little question that this is in fact the pool of Siloam, to which Jesus sent the blind man in John 9.”[41]

I just read this one because I am working my way through John. In case you haven’t read John, you really should it’s my favorite gospel.

Here’s another one:

Herod the Great

We have a bronze coin minted by Herod the Great. On the obverse side (i.e. the bottom) is a tripod and ceremonial bowl with the inscription ‘Herod king’ and the year the coin was struck, ‘year 3’ (of Herod’s reign), or 37 BC.

In 1996 Israeli Professor of Archaeology Ehud Netzer discovered in Masada a piece of broken pottery with an inscription, called an ostracon. This piece had Herod’s name on it and was part of an amphora used for transportation (probably wine), dated to c. 19 BC. The inscription is in Latin and reads, “Herod the Great King of the Jews (or Judea)”, the first such that mentions the full title of King Herod.

Herodium is a man-made mountain in the Judean wilderness rising over 2,475 feet above sea level. In 23 BC Herod the Great built a palace fortress here on top of a natural hill. Seven stories of living rooms, storage areas, cisterns, a bathhouse, and a courtyard filled with bushes and flowering plants were constructed. The whole complex was surrounded and partly buried by a sloping fill of earth and gravel. Herod’s tomb and sarcophagus were discovered at the base of Herodium by archaeologist Ehud Netzer in 2007.

And one more:

The ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus’ Ossuary

James, the brother of Jesus, was martyred in AD 62. A mid-1st century AD chalk ossuary discovered in 2002 bears the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” ( ‘Ya’akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua’). Historian Paul L. Maier states that“there is strong (though not absolutely conclusive) evidence that, yes, the ossuary and its inscription are not only authentic, but that the inscribed names are the New Testament personalities.“[68] New Testament scholar Ben Witherington states that:“If, as seems probable, the ossuary found in the vicinity of Jerusalem and dated to about AD 63 is indeed the burial box of James, the brother of Jesus, this inscription is the most important extra-biblical evidence of its kind.”[69] According to Hershel Shanks, editor in chief of the Biblical Archaeological Review: “this box is [more] likely the ossuary of James, the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, than not. In my opinion … it is likely that this inscription does mention the James and Joseph and Jesus of the New Testament.”

And finally one short one:

Tiberius Caesar

The Denarius coin, 14-37 AD, is commonly referred to as the ‘Tribute Penny’ from the Bible. The coin shows a portrait of Tiberius Caesar. Craig L. Blomberg comments: “Jesus’ famous saying about giving to Caesar what was his and to God what his (Mark 12:17 and parallels) makes even more sense when one discovers that most of the Roman coins in use at the time had images of Caesar on them.”[48]

This is a good article to bookmark in case you are ever looking for a quick, searchable reference on archaeology and the Bible. There are many more examples in that post.

Now some people might be wondering why archaeology doesn’t confirm every detail in the New Testament. And here’s what J. Warner Wallace has to say about that:

But what are we to say to those who argue the Biblical archeological record is incomplete? The answer is best delivered by another expert witness in the field, Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, historian and Professor Emeritus at Miami University. Yamauchi wrote a book entitled, The Stones and the Scripture, where he rightly noted that archaeological evidence is a matter of “fractions”:

Only a fraction of the world’s archaeological evidence still survives in the ground.

Only a fraction of the possible archaeological sites have been discovered.

Only a fraction have been excavated, and those only partially.

Only a fraction of those partial excavations have been thoroughly examined and published.

Only a fraction of what has been examined and published has anything to do with the claims of the Bible!

See the problem? In spite of these limits, we still have a robust collection of archaeological evidences confirming the narratives of the New Testament (both in the gospel accounts and in the Book of Acts). We shouldn’t hesitate to use what we do know archaeologically in combination with other lines of evidence. Archaeology may not be able to tell us everything, but it can help us fill in the circumstantial case as we corroborate the gospel record.

I think you can form an opinion about the whole New Testament based on the record of confirmations. The verdict is in: the New Testament should be presumed trustworthy.